A Great Christmas Story!

Today’s Gospel from Matthew is a great Christmas story.

It is not as well known, nor well liked as Luke’s story.

It doesn’t have all the niceties of Luke’s story.

There is no angel chorus, no manger, no sheep, and no shepherds.

Instead it has a political tyrant out to kill Jesus.

It has Mary and Joseph fleeing Bethlehem for Egypt.

It has the killing of innocent children.

Why is this a Christmas story?

Because it is more like the world we know.

We know the story of political tyrants who set out to hurt innocent people.

We know that this world is not what it should be.

Consider the family that our congregation set out to help a couple of years ago.

They were refugees from Bhutan.

In 1985 the government of Bhutan made a law where everyone had to prove that they had been living in Bhutan before 1958.

The ruling government was trying to rid the country of immigrants that came there from Nepal 27 years earlier.

Then in 1998 more discriminatory measures were introduced, including a national ethnic dress code, an official state language.

Eventually people began fleeing Bhutan back into Nepal.

However, Nepal didn’t want them either.

They ended up in refugee camps.

Some estimates say that over 100,000- southern Bhutanese of Nepalese ethnicity have been made refugees.

I only know this story because of our relationship with that family.

It is not something that gets reported on the news.

In fact, at the end of this year what we seem to think is really important to report on is that Carrie Fisher, Debbie Reynolds, and George Michael died.

And this story of our Bhutanese friends is repeated many times over around the world.

It is estimated that 33,972 people per day are forced to flee their homes became of war, civil conflict, or human rights abuses.

Millions of people whose stories we never hear and whose names we never know are without a country or home.

Now why should we care?

We should care because Jesus began his life as a refugee fleeing from tyranny.

Jesus is helpless in this story.

He can’t defend himself.

He is only a baby.

Except he has a couple of things going for him, he has God, and he has faithful parents.

And that is what makes this a great Christmas story, because Christmas is about the incarnation.

It is about God being with us even in the worse and most horrible of times.

It is about God becoming human.

It is about God becoming human so we can become children of God.

Jesus comes to show us the way.

The way is through love and faithfulness.

That is how we deal with the powers of the world, through faithfulness to God.

To care for people who are displaced, and forgotten.

That is why our congregation reached out to help a refugee family here in Concord, because we felt called by God to help.

We heard the angel whisper in our ear and tell us to love and care for others.

We follow Jesus into the unknown.

Matthew’s Christmas story is filled with unknowns.

Should Joseph take Mary as his wife after she is found to be with child?

Should the Wise men follow the star?

Should they tell Herod about what they found?

Where should Jesus and his family live?

And it is filled with surprises.

The King is a poor child, with poor parents.

Herod is out to kill this child, not worship him.

Mary’s baby is Immanuel “God with us”.

Mary and Joseph need to flee into Egypt a dangerous and unknown country.

That is how life is when we follow God.

It is full of surprises.

Not all of them good.

This week I did an overnight at the synagogue for Family Promise.

The person who was the other volunteer was telling me her life story.

It was a story not unlike others I have heard.

It had twist and turns, joys and triumphs.

And she said, “You know life is surprising.”

Yes it is.

Because we don’t know what will come next.

We don’t know what this New Year will bring?

What we do have is a Christmas story that tells us what is always true of life no matter the year.

The world is filled with sin.

It has tyrants who want to start wars, kill people, keep power, and pass unjust laws.

Into that world God has come to dwell with us.

And because of that we know that we will not be alone.

We also know to follow in his footsteps to care for the refugee, the lost and forgotten, and the ones who get screwed by those in power.

In them we find Christ, and our purpose.

I want to end today with a poem written by the German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonheoffer.

“In me there is darkness,
But with You there is light;
I am lonely, but You do not leave me;
I am feeble in heart, but with You there is help;
I am restless, but with You there is peace.
In me there is bitterness, but with You there is patience;
I do not understand Your ways,
But You know the way for me.”

“Lord Jesus Christ,
You were poor
And in distress, a captive and forsaken as I am.
You know all man’s troubles;
You abide with me
When all men fail me;
You remember and seek me;
It is Your will that I should know You
And turn to You.
Lord, I hear Your call and follow;
Help me.”

He wrote that while in prison waiting to be executed by the Nazis for trying to kill Hitler.

It is not just the call of Bonheoffer but all of our call to follow Jesus.

Lord we ask in this New Year for your help as we hear your call and follow you!

Be with us!

Amen

Do Not Be Afraid to Love!

How many of you believe that Joseph loved Mary?

I do.

But we notice that in the Christmas story after hearing of Mary’s pregnancy his first reaction is “do away with her quietly”.

You can’t blame him.

He is doing what the law requires.

According to Deuteronomy a women who lies with another man should be stoned to death.

Actually what Joseph is doing is more honorable and merciful by not having Mary publicly stoned to death.

Joseph is following the customs and traditions of his day.

Even more he is following his religious teachings.

He is doing the right thing.

He is following the law and being merciful.

He is doing what a good religious person would do.

It is not love that stops Joseph from divorcing Mary.

It is an angel of the Lord.

I have talked about love a lot from this pulpit.

I have used it many times in sermons in my years as a pastor.

I use it so much that I once challenged myself not to use the word love in a sermon for a whole month.

Love is the essence of God.

It is hard to talk about God without talking about love.

It is hard to talk about the birth of Jesus without talking about love.

We are told that the purpose of God’s son coming in human form was because of God’s love for us.

“For God so loved the world….”

Love is everything.

But it is not that simple is it?

Love is harder than we think or know.

We fall in love.

We fall out of love.

We love our new car.

We hate our car.

We love our family.

Our family drives us crazy.

The Beatles told us, “Love is all we need”.

They broke up by the way, couldn’t stand each other after a while.

The band Heart reminded us, “Sometimes Love Ain’t Enough”

If everyone knew the love of God, if everyone lived it out fully with all those they met or came into contact with I would be out of a job.

There would be no need for me to get up here every week and tell you that God loves you, and you to share that love with others.

But if it is so simple why don’t we do it?

Why does Joseph need the angel to tell him what to do?

Why didn’t love carry the day?

Why doesn’t love win the day now?

Here is something we are not told enough.

Love takes work.

Lots of work.

Love takes discipline.

Love is hard.

Love is messy.

It is not just a wishy-mushy emotion that we feel; it is a spiritual discipline that takes every ounce of us to muster.

It takes us looking beyond what we see, what rules we know, what things we have been taught.

I was saying in adult forum last week that I can understand why Christians are/were against homosexuality.

It is not because they are bad people; it is because for years the Church taught that homosexuality was a sin.

Then one day it wasn’t.

I can see why that is hard to accept.

I believe it changed because of love.

Because enough people have someone they know and love who is gay, and they began to question what was taught to them.

They looked beyond the teaching and tradition to love.

I was in the NH legislature when they were debating same sex marriages.

One pastor stood up and said, “This is all nice, but my God is a God of truth.”

I wanted to say, “Yes and the truth is that God is love.”

Who are we asked to love?

What does love help us do?

I would like to believe that Joseph decided to keep Mary as his wife partly out of love.

I believe that the angel told him what he really wanted to do all along.

That he was relieved that he didn’t have to part ways from Mary.

Joseph’s act of love would not be easy for him.

It probably brought ridicule, and people wondering if he lost his mind.

But it was the right thing to do.

We often talk of Mary accepting her role in this incredible story, but we forget that Joseph too had an important part to play.

That he too had to make a difficult choice.

He heard the angel, and in faith and in love acted.

We forget sometimes that we are called to do the same.

We are asked to love even when it is hard, messy, and inconvenient.

This week our whole family was sick at some point.

For me it was Wednesday night and Thursday.

My wife was tired and sick, but I got up and threw up.

I didn’t make it to the bathroom.

She probably wanted to be in bed, but she got up to help me clean up.

That is what love looks like.

Love is in the middle of the night helping someone clean up their puke.

Love is hard.

It is messy.

It is inconvenient.

It is ugly.

But it is God’s way.

It is the only way.

We can’t rule our way through life.

We can’t follow tradition and ceremony our way through life.

All we can do is love.

Not to love is to miss the angel’s message.

“Do not be afraid…..”

Take this chance on this person because of love.

Do this thing that seems crazy because of love.

Break this tradition or this rule because of love.

Risk this ridicule, people staring for love.

Be disciplined and strong for love, and do not be afraid.

In this Christmas season I hope you experience the call to love.

You will miss the angel’s invitation to take a risk for love.

Do not be afraid to love.

Vicki’s uncle Angelo had his 93^rd birthday a couple of weeks ago.

At his party he gave a speech and told us, “don’t be afraid to tell someone you love them.”

That is my message to all of you today.

Don’t be afraid to tell someone you love them.

God’s not afraid to tell you how much he loves you.

That is why Jesus came to show us God’s love and gives us the strength to love each other.

Amen

The Long Game

We are a playing a short game, and God is playing the long game.

We are running a 5k, God is running a Marathon.

We see finitely, God sees infinitely.

This is why we are so impatient.

We don’t have the time to wait around for things to happen.

We only have so much time, so many years to give.

Things have to happen quickly for us.

I was struck by this truth this week at the Family Promise one year event.

I have been working on getting Family Promise to come to Concord for about five years before it got up and running.

And I can tell you it felt longer than that.

Sometimes it felt like I was working on it forever.

And there were many times when I wasn’t sure it would happen.

But there we were in that house attached to the Capital Center.

There was a really good size crowd maybe 60 or so people.

People smiling, people happy to be there, proud of what we have all done together.

It made me feel so good.

It was a labor of love for me.

I can’t tell you how many people told me it was a bad idea.

That this wasn’t what Concord needed.

That I didn’t understand.

I had some hard moments.

And I wasn’t sure we would get to the moment we had on Thursday.

I wish you could have been there.

I wish you could have heard Bow’s story.

Bow, who has three young daughters.

Bow, who was in prison, was on drugs.

Bow who told us that Family Promise was more than a program for him.

He had been in programs before, but this was family, this was about doing.

Bow who told us he got a job that day with tears in his eyes.

All those years, all those people that told me this wasn’t going to happen or this was a bad idea, I did it all for Bow, although I had no idea at the time.

We run the sprint, God the marathon.

We see in moments in front of us, God sees in grandeur time.

After I went up to Bow, and I told him that it was a great speech.

He reminded me that we had met before, that his wife and he come to me for help.

We helped, but not like this.

I didn’t know when he came last time that we would be together 6 years later at this event.

Bow told us he believed in God and that God lead him to this moment.

I believe that too.

God for a long time, longer than any of us can imagine, has been trying to get our attention.

God has been trying to remind us of the infinite.

God has been trying to tell us that life is about more than what we see right in front of us.

And we always fail to listen.

We always only can’t imagine beyond what we want, what we need in this moment.

But it is so much more.

John the Baptists was one of those people God sent us to remind us, to point the way beyond the here and now.

John came telling us to repent, because the time was right, because the time is infinite, and there is God at the end of time.

John was one of the many prophets God sent.

And yet we don’t listen, we don’t understand.

John will be arrested and killed just like the other prophets.

Just like God’s son.

Just like the Messiah.

Surely we will listen to God’s son.

No…Not even that.

Today’s theme is patience.

And I am amazed at God’s patience with us.

God is infinitely patience.

God gives us chance after chance.

God is giving us time to understand to repent.

And we are too busy, too impatience to want to understand.

But now in this time we take great comfort in infinite nature of God.

I take comfort not knowing what the future holds, what everything means, and how it all ties together.
A colleague told me this week that she was disappointed about the election because she believed the Church was making “progress”.

That the world was turning for good.

I want to believe that.

But the truth is I don’t know how it all comes together, where everything goes.

I only know a very limited piece of it.

I know this part that I play.

And I know that it always doesn’t move in some progression.

Just like our individual lives don’t always move in some forward progression, neither does our corporate lives.

The women who started Family Promise, Karin Olson, was also there on Thursday.

She shared with us her journey of how and why she started Family Promise.

And that story is not a straight line either.

She thought she was going to be a nurse, and then a business person.

Her story was filled with starts and stops.

She wasn’t even sure where it all would lead.

She had no idea to know that it would lead to over 200 affiliates across the country.

She didn’t know the impact it would have.

It is no wonder that we don’t have much patience.

We can only see what is in front of us.

We can only see the moment with all of its complications, and twist and turns.

And that is why this morning I don’t want us to think about us becoming more patience.

I am not sure that is our roll in this life.

We don’t have enough time here to be patience with things.

Instead I want us to see God’s patience.

Yesterday at Planet Fitness I ran into someone who told that Advent is not about us trying to get God to see us, but about us seeing God.

That is true.

We are trying to work on seeing God so that when God shows up in a manger, in a little backward town, with shepherds.

When God shows up as a poor baby we won’t miss it.

We won’t overlook the significance.

And today we look and see God’s patience with us.

That again and again God sends people to remind us of who we can be, who we are supposed to be.

That God reminds us of who God is to us.

God sends prophets, preachers, and teachers, and most important God sends God’s Son.

Can we see?

Can we hear?

Again and again we miss it, but God is patiently waiting for us.

God is playing the long game.

God is hoping that we will come around.

God is waiting for people like Bow to see how much it means for him to be a good father, waiting for Karin to see that her life was leading to helping homeless families, waiting for you this day to see God in your brother or sister in need.

Waiting.

We are impatient, we only see right now.

God is patient and sees forever.

Today I hope we give thanks to God for being patient with us.

And I pray to God that we too can play the long game.

Amen