Sermon preached at St. Alban’s, Spirit Lake, on December 24, 2006
(Year C, Christmas I, BCP Lectionary)
by the Rev. Carl D. Mann

Texts:   Isaiah 9:2-4,6-7
Psalm 96:1-4,11-12
Titus 2:11-14
Luke 2:1-20

At last! I can finally say Merry Christmas and mean it! MERRY CHRISTMAS! Advent is over, and Christmas is upon us. I can put my Grinch suit away for another year and enjoy the Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ for twelve whole days. But why are there twelve days of Christmas? No one else gets twelve days to celebrate their birthday. Well, as most things are in Christianity, the answer is simple and practicable. There are twelve days of Christmas because that’s how many days there are between Christmas Day and the Epiphany.

We in the western Church, celebrate three Masses for Christmas: of the night, of the dawn, and of the day symbolizing the threefold birth of Christ; eternally in the bosom of the Father, physically from the womb of the Virgin Mary, and mystically in the souls of the faithful. How Trinitarian! Eternally of the Father, physically as the Son, and mystically by the power of the Holy Spirit!

You know, the more that I study the Church: the history and the doctrines, the more amazed I am that God became incarnate. As God, He could have done it any way that He chose to do but He chose to come to us in the simplest form, that of a child, born of a mother, just like you and me. True, it was a special conception. One that some have a hard time in believing but it shouldn’t be hard because it is God that is behind it and as we heard from this morning’s Gospel, nothing is impossible with God!

I like how C.S. Lewis puts it. He talks about how God, through His natural order, conceives of every child, between a man and a woman, indeed nothing is born without Him. “But once, for a special purpose, He dispensed with that long line which is His instrument: once His life-giving finger touched a woman without passing through the ages of interlocked events. Once the great glove of Nature was taken off His hand. His naked hand touched her. There was, of course, a unique reason for it. That time He was not creating simply a man but the Man who was to be Himself.” That is so powerful! Almighty God, who creates everything on a daily basis with His tools of Nature, at this one precise point in history, takes off the gloves and with His finger directly touches the womb of a Virgin so as to conceive of the one man who is also God! And yet, that Man still comes to us as one of us, in the form of an infant!

Now for me, this is the amazing part. God Almighty, the Creator of the universe, all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful, places Himself in the most vulnerable condition known to man: a totally helpless, completely dependent baby who has to be held, nursed, burped, and have his swaddling clothes changed when they are soiled. He gave up His eternal majesty for that! Between His birth and His ministry, any number of things could have happened to Him. By my own personal standards, that means He would have had at least one concussion before the age of three, stitches before the age of four, and major surgery by the ripe old age of eight!

But let’s go back to the Gospel of Luke. Twice it mentions that He is wrapped in bands of cloth and laid in a manger. In the AV, it says wrapped in swaddling clothes, and this is the sign by which the shepherds will recognize that He is Christ the Lord! I looked up swaddling clothes and found that they consisted of a large square cloth with a long bandage-like strip coming diagonally off of one corner. The baby is wrapped in the large cloth and then the long strip is wrapped around and around, binding him up snugly. Some sources say that this binding up includes the arms so as to protect the baby from flailing his arms and scratching his face. Sort of like a papoose. So God not only humbles Himself in the form of a helpless child but also for one time, allows Himself to be bound. What a contrast that is from the previous image of God taking off His glove and exposing His naked finger to really let His power shine forth. What a contrast that is from the future image of a crucified Christ nailed to a cross. On the one hand, it would appear that He was safer when He allowed us to bind Him up. But on the other hand, it is when He is at His most vulnerable, hanging from a tree with His arms outstretched, ready to embrace the entire human race that we are finally aware of how much God loves us. He loves us so much that He gave Himself for us in the form of His only begotten Son. And the paradox or the mystery, if you will, is that when Jesus, God the Son, is stripped naked and hanging on the cross, in atonement for our sins, this is when the raw creative power of God is revealed to the world because it is at this moment that we are given the opportunity to be recreated anew if only we believe! If only we believe!

Tonight we celebrate the Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ. What’s not to love about the birth of a baby? What’s not to love about a sweet, innocent child? It is fitting on this night that we discover God’s love for us through the infant Jesus, and for a season, it’s alright to bind Him in swaddling clothes. But remember that the love of God cannot be held back. Not by being bound by strips of cloth; not by being nailed to a tree; not by being buried in a tomb; and especially not by anything that we might conceive or do in this world. His love is the greatest thing that has ever happened to us and may be surpassed only by His coming again in Great Glory. But tonight we celebrate the anniversary of His first coming, and all we have to do is believe. And to that I say Merry Christmas to one and all!

Gloria Patri