Sermon for Christmas Eve 2023

by Jeffrey Spencer | Dec 25, 2023 | Sermons

Sermon for Christmas Eve 2023

Luke 2:1-20

Dear friends, grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.

What are you getting for Christmas? When you are young, this seems like the most important question in the world this time of year. Will you be thrilled? Will you be disappointed? This week I heard someone on a podcast talking about a Christmas back in the 1980s, when he was ten years old. He thought for sure that those small, rectangle-shaped presents under the tree were the Nintendo game cartridges he so desperately wanted. He tore them open on Christmas morning only to find that they were different sets of flash cards. Math flash cards. Forty years later, you can still hear the disappointment in his voice.

What are you getting for Christmas? When you’re an adult the question is almost taboo. You’re not supposed to care. The most virtuous thing you can say is, “Oh, I don’t need anything. Don’t make a fuss. Oh, you shouldn’t have.” By and large, this reflects a maturity of sorts. It shows that you are no longer seeking happiness in products or possessions. You have come to see that the true joy of Christmas is not found in the material things you might get. And that is good.

But you have to admit it – when you see a gift and there’s a tag with your name on it, it’s a pretty great feeling! It gives you a little thrill, right? And it isn’t really so much the thing inside – whatever it may be. It is simply the fact that someone gave something to you. It is that you have been thought of. It is that someone cared enough about you to wrap something up and put your name on it.

It doesn’t even have to be a gift with wrapping and a bow – even going to the mailbox and seeing your name on an envelope containing a Christmas card instead of yet another bill is a wonderful thing. It is sheer grace. Instead of asking for something from you, it simply regards you. It blesses you. It is a gesture of goodwill towards you, for you.

It isn’t necessarily greed or narcissism that makes all this such a thrill. It can be those things, for sure, but it can also simply be our human longing for connection, our longing to be known, our longing to be loved.

What are you getting for Christmas? There is a gift being given tonight. It is a gift from God. It is the gift of God. And it has your name on it.

After Jesus was born in Bethlehem, the city of David, the birth announcement went out. This birth announcement did not go out to kings and queens, to those with power and prestige. This birth announcement did not go out to the wealthy, to those who were the most prominent and respected. This birth announcement did not go out to the priests in the temple, to those who were the most spiritual or religious or devout. The birth announcement went out to shepherds. It went out to shepherds while they were at work, while they were putting in their shift in the fields, watching over their flocks by night.

This birth announcement came as a gift, and it had their name on it. This gift was for them! The angel giving this birth announcement said, “Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.”

We don’t even know the shepherds’ names. They were nobody in particular. And so they represent everybody! The shepherds represent you. As you hear this birth announcement, the gift is given to you. The angel said this was good news of great joy for all people, and so this gift has your name on it.

What are you getting for Christmas? “To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior.” A savior is one who saves. The gift is the gift of salvation. The gift is the gift of God’s grace – for he has regarded you, he has seen you, he knows you, and he has come to you in the infant flesh of his Son to save you, to make you his own.

“Do not be afraid,” the angel said to the shepherds. You don’t need to be afraid either. You don’t need to be afraid of this birth announcement from God, this message. God has not come to intimidate you. God has not come to frighten you into obedience. God has come to you in the most non-threatening way possible – as an infant. God has come to you as a baby so that instead of being afraid you would look upon him with love and with joy and with awe.

You don’t need to be afraid of this baby. In fact, because of this baby, you don’t need to be afraid about anything anymore! You don’t need to be afraid of your past, your sins, your failures, your regrets – for in him all is forgiven. That’s exactly what this savior has come to do, to forgive you! Yes, even for that. The daily anxieties about life that we all wrestle with dissolve away when we remember to lay them at his manger, remembering that because of this child, this Savior, we have God walking with us through everything that life can throw at us, giving us strength, giving us peace, giving us hope.

Because of this baby you don’t even need to be afraid of death, for he has come to defeat even our greatest fear. He has overcome death so that we might live with him forever.

“Do not be afraid,” the angel said. This is part of the gift. We don’t have to be afraid about anything anymore. He’s got us. He is God with us.

What are you getting for Christmas? God has remembered you. God has regarded you. God has blessed you with a gift. This gift from God is the gift of God. With the birth of Jesus God has given you himself, so that you would know the love of God in your life. God has cleared away every barrier to a relationship with him, a relationship where you are known completely and loved eternally. There is absolutely nothing standing in the way of this relationship. It comes as a gift, and make no mistake about it – the tag has your name on it.

This season brings with it a lot of hopes, a lot of expectations, a lot of longings, a lot of pressures, a lot of emotions, a lot of disappointments. But as we sang earlier in our service in O Little Town of Bethlehem: “the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.” The “thee” there, of course, is Jesus, the Christ child, Emmanuel, God with us. His birth is good news of great joy for all people.

You may not think you need anything for Christmas this year, but God has seen your need for healing and for hope. God has seen your need for forgiveness. God has seen your need to be known and loved. God has seen the fears from which you need to be delivered.

And so for Christmas this year, God gives you the gift of a Savior, the gift of his Son – born for you.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Rev. Jeffrey R. Spencer
Oak Harbor Lutheran Church

Sermon for the Second Sunday of Advent – December 10, 2023

by Jeffrey Spencer | Dec 12, 2023 | Sermons

CLICK HERE for a sermon video for December 10

Sermon for the Second Sunday of Advent – December 10, 2023

Mark 1:1-8

Dear friends, grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.

Preparing for Christmas gets more and more sentimental for me every year. We pull out the bins with all the Christmas stuff the day after Thanksgiving and begin to unpack the special things we’ve been storing all year. There is the ornament I made for Amy our first Christmas together, crafted from driftwood from the beach where we got engaged. There are the holiday recipes in my mother’s handwriting. There are the Santa pictures from back when our three boys were little and sweet instead of tall and sarcastic. With every passing year, these things become more and more precious to me. As the bins are unpacked and each item finds its place in preparation for Christmas, our house is transformed into a den of warmth and peace and comfort.

In our gospel reading for today we are invited to prepare for Christmas, but in a radically different way. Instead of bringing out what is precious to us, we are called to bring out the things that trouble us, the things we are ashamed of, the sins we’d rather leave packed away. Instead of warm sentimentality, we are splashed with the cold waters of John’s call to repentance. We will get to comfort, so stay with me, but to get there we must first be made uncomfortable.

We will be spending much of the liturgical year ahead in the gospel of Mark. Today we find ourselves at the very beginning of his gospel: chapter one, verse one. St. Mark begins his account the life of Jesus not with angels and shepherds and a baby in a manger, like St. Luke. He doesn’t begin with wise men visiting the Christ child, like St. Matthew. He doesn’t begin with profound theological statements about the Word becoming flesh, like St. John. Mark begins his gospel at the Jordan river. He begins with a call to repent, a call to confess our sins, bringing them out into the open, putting them on full display.

Mark begins with John the Baptist – or as he is more accurately described in Mark’s gospel, John the baptizer. After all, this is not about denominational affiliation. John the Baptist isn’t like Jeff the Lutheran or Doug the Presbyterian. John was a baptizer. John’s job was, in part, to prepare the way of the Lord with a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. This was not yet Christan baptism, as John himself says. It was, rather, a ritual of repentance. It was a ritual signifying a confession of sin and a return to God, a return to faithfulness. It was a ritual that was also used for Gentile converts who came to faith in the God of Israel. And now, at this moment, it was a ritual of preparation for the coming of the Lord.

People from the whole Judean countryside and all of Jerusalem were going out to the river Jordan to confess their sins. They went out to the river not with their precious treasures; they went with their dirty laundry. They went to the river with the things that troubled them, the things they were ashamed of, the sins that they would rather have kept packed away. They brought their sins to John the baptizer.

John was dressed in camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist. He ate locusts and wild honey. In both his diet and his dress he was conjuring up the prophet Elijah. He was like one of those people who go to Comicon conventions dressed as their favorite character. Only John wasn’t engaging in cosplay. He wasn’t just playing dress-up. John was indeed an actual prophet. He was the last and the greatest of the prophets, because he had one foot in the old covenant and one foot in the new kingdom. He straddled the end of the old world and the beginning of the new. He embodied the prophets of the past while being the herald of the age that was now dawning. John announced the coming of everything the prophets before him had promised. He dressed in the clothing of a prophet to announce the arrival the One the prophets said would come – the Messiah, the Savior, the Lord.

John prepared the way of the Lord by calling people to repent, to receive his baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sin, and the people prepared the way of the Lord by confessing their sin. They confessed their idolatry, all the ways they put their trust in something other than God. They confessed the ways they had lived as though they were their own gods, making themselves their highest authority and their highest good. They confessed their need for control and their lack of faith. They confessed their negligence in honoring God with lives that were holy, lives that were set apart for his service and lived in obedience to his will. They confessed the ways they had failed to love God with their whole heart and mind and strength, and their neighbors as themselves. The people prepared the way of the Lord by bringing this all out into the open, confessing their sin.

As we hear this gospel reading, this is what we’re invited to do too. This is what we’re invited to do every Sunday of course, but we are especially invited to repent, to confess, as we prepare to celebrate the coming of our Lord. This is uncomfortable, perhaps. It pushes us to look at the ways we have sinned. It pushes us to confess the ways we have turned to other gods, especially the god of the self. It pushes us to confess the ways we have grasped for control rather than living by faith, the ways we have been negligent in holiness, the ways we have failed to love God and one another. This isn’t warm, fun stuff. It makes us vulnerable. But it is how we prepare.

I went to see a dermatologist this week. We have a history of skin cancer in my family, with my sister having battled melanoma twice now, so I try to stay on top of it. It had been a couple years since I’ve had a full screening, but recently my barber noticed some things she thought I should have looked at, so it was time to go in. And when you go in for a skin cancer exam, you have to show them everything. I had to strip down to my skivvies and put on a hospital gown, which he then pulled back as needed in order to examine pretty much every square inch of my body, pointing out spots to his assistant along the way so she could get a look and make notes. It was not warm. It was not pleasant. It was uncomfortable.

Now imagine that I had refused. Imagine that I said, “No, I’m going to keep covered up,” or “No, I’m not showing you that.” How in the world would he then be able to help me? It was uncomfortable, but it was only by showing him everything that he can do his job of diagnosing me and making me well.

Confessing our sin puts us in a similarly vulnerable position. It isn’t comfortable. But we can do so because we know that this Lord of whom John speaks is coming to help us. He is coming to be our savior! We prepare for his coming by confessing our sin, especially by showing him our trouble spots, so that he can do the job he has come to do in making us well. This Lord is bringing a forgiveness even greater than John’s. This Lord is bringing a baptism not of water alone, but of water and Word and Spirit. This Lord comes to make us well by restoring us to God forever.

Soon we will celebrate this Lord’s birth. We prepare ourselves spiritually by repenting, by turning away from everything in our lives that is not godly. We prepare ourselves by confessing our sin, bringing it out so that he can cure it with his grace, which is what he is coming to do. This is precisely why he was born. He was born for you. He was born to be your savior. He was born so that all would be well for you in your relationship with God.

Listen to how Isaiah describes the coming of the Lord:

“Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, tell her that her penalty has been paid….Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain made low…then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed…Lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up and do not fear…See, the Lord comes…he will feed his flock like a shepherd….he will gather the lambs in his arms and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep.”

St. Mark, sacrificing prose for brevity, puts it far more simply when he writes: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”

“Comfort, comfort my people,” says our God. There is a comfort that is far deeper than anything we pull out of Christmas bins, as precious as those things can be to us. There is a warmth that is warmer than sentimentality and nostalgia. Even with the splash of cold water we get from John the baptizer this morning, this comfort and warmth is ours as we see that the coming of the Lord is good news. You see, God in Christ has made a pathway straight to you, so that you would know his forgiveness, his mercy, his love. The Lord comes to feed his flock like a shepherd, to gather us in his arms and carry us in his bosom. He comes with a forgiveness and a baptism far greater than John’s, as John himself was quick to note.

And so today we are empowered to confess our sin. Today we are empowered to repent. Today we are empowered to show our trouble spots to this Lord of ours, who comes to us even now to heal us with his forgiveness, to comfort us with his grace, to wrap us in the warmth of his great love. Today we are empowered to show him everything, trusting that through his saving work, he will make us well.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Rev. Jeffrey R. Spencer

Oak Harbor Lutheran Church