A Christmas Season

“Love sought is good, but given unsought better.” – Olivia, Act 3, Scene 1, Twelfth Night

That line is from Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night, otherwise known as Epiphany. You might have been forced to read it usually as a sophomore.  The play has two themes that play on Epiphany.  The first is wisdom and foolishness, or what is wise and what is foolish.  The second – like most of Shakespeare’s comedies – is about the true nature of love.  Olivia thinks she is being wise playing a “courtly love” game which ends with her foolishness of falling in love with a woman dressed as a man.  And it is all played as a farce. Shakespeare’s comedies have all kinds of troubles today.

I guess I blame Reformed Protestantism.  If you followed Calvin or Zwingli, they more or less ditched the church year.  Every Sunday was the Lord’s Day.  Elevating any day as a Holy Day was Judaizing (using Paul’s term from Galatians.) And while they have a point, every Sunday is a little Easter, life is not quite that flat.  Romans 14: 5-6 should have solved that.  But the United States was largely a Reformed Protestant project, so we get Christmas Day and grudgingly Easter (although that is disappearing into Spring Breaks not always around Holy Week), but we’ve lost the seasons.

The season of Christmas is twelve days, Dec 25th – Jan 5th.  The carol The Twelve Days of Christmas is an echo of that.  It might also be a Roman Catholic crypto-polemic against the Reformed erasing.  And the entire 12 days were often something of boozy hazy time ending with a big party on Twelfth Night when gifts were exchanged.  After all, it was the coming of the Magi that brought the gifts.  Hispanic Cultures still maintain a bit of this as Tres Reyes.  The Protestant Work ethic couldn’t imagine 12 boozy days, so we pack up the tree the day after.

But that’s enough dissembling, or maybe I’m just in a Christmas Season mood and can’t think straight. Olivia’s middle of the play statement captures something about the Christ child and the love of God.  It is good that we love God.  For God has sought our love.  But the better is that he has loved us unsought. When we were lost in darkness, God sent His light.  Whether that light is the fuller light of prophetic revelation, like “out of Egypt I have called my son” which ties the entire story of Israel to this Israel reduced to one, or a light given in a star to a bunch of foolish astrologers, God sought us out wise and foolish, while were all in the dark.  He gave us His love unsought.  When we were still sinners, Christ loved us.

The church built in a season, and then a fuller Epiphany season, to absorb the immensity of that truth.  She can proclaim the reality in an hour.  Your head can hear the message.  But the heart doesn’t always work on the same timetable. And lots of wisdom and foolishness happens as love moves from head to heart.

A Great and Mighty Wonder

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Biblical Text: Hebrews 1:1-12

The assigned reading for Christmas Day from Hebrews is an interesting one. It is the start of an argument why Jesus is greater than the angels. The background of the argument is that angels took on an outsized role in the popular piety of the intertestamental period. You could almost say that the angels had been turned into idols. The writer of Hebrews was concerned to make an argument to compare the surpassing worth of the Son to the angels. It is an argument for the right ordering of our loves and right worship. The sermon attempts to get us to contemplate what we have placed where the 1st century Jews had placed angels. And how we worship aright.

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Christmas Eve 2022 (Light of Grace)

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The service itself was a very traditional lessons and carols. This sermon didn’t really focus on any one of those texts but upon the themes they present as what the light could mean. The sermon speaks for itself I think more than any summary I could give it here.

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Desire of Nations

“Sages leave your contemplations, brighter visions beam afar; seek the great desire of nations, ye have seen his natal star…(LSB 367, Angels from the Realms of Glory St. 3)”

“O Come, Desire of Nations bind in one the hearts of all mankind…(LSB 357 O Come, O Come, Immanuel St 7)”

This is not pulpit worthy, at least not yet. First because it is more an intuition than something well discerned. And second because there are so many ways it can go wrong.  But desire is something fundamentally bound to Christmas.

When we are younger that desire is stoked by the wonders of the season.  All the lights.  The decorations coming out.  A tree in the house!  Cookies and just the pace of life.  Before you even get to presents and Santa, a two-year old is attuned to the desire of the season.  They are sad to see everything packed away.  As we get older that desire moves on to: “What am I going to get?”  It might be here that we start to understand something about desire.  Whatever physical thing you get, the satisfaction doesn’t last that long.  As soon as you get the Toy of the Year, it breaks.  As soon as you open the X-box, desire moves to having the next game.  

Desires of adults around the season might even be more complicated.  Christmas might be the first time parents meet the new boyfriend/girlfriend.  And the strange mix of desires all of that stirs up in both parents and children.  Desires to give the children a “good Christmas” which gets harder each year, until it really is impossible.  Desires for a gathering of the clan and a nostalgia for when everything was together.  And it is not that any of these desires are necessarily bad.  They might be appropriate in their seasons. And there are better and worse satisfactions of them.  But if you pay close attention to the desires of season, they all tend to increase the restlessness. We place our hopes on things that can’t bear the weight, even if they are good things.  Which if we are honest they often aren’t.  Our desires are often that our wills would override the wills of others. That the world would stop and satisfy me.

What Christmas does is start to train our desires, in the words of a great prayer so that we “pass through things temporal that we lose not the things eternal.”  It is not the fact of desire that is our problem; it is often the type of satisfaction we expect from what our hearts desire.  We often place eternal desires on temporal things which can’t do anything but buckle under the weight. 

The hymnwriters get this.  Even if one is a sage and supposedly trained their desires for higher things, even those ideologies and deep desires are not the proper object.  Brighter visions beam afar.  All earthly desires should point us to our great desire.  To know our creator and be known by Him.   Christmas is that creator coming to us in order to be known.  Christmas is that creator not just knowing us, but loving us.

Everything else we place our desires upon ultimately fails.  It is only God who is an infinite source of satisfaction. As Augustine said, “we are restless, until we find our rest in thee.” So much of life is about training ourselves to have the right desires.  To binding our hearts to those things which do bring peace.  When the manger orders our desires, when we come and worship the Christ the newborn King, we allow Him to satisfy our deepest desires setting our hearts at peace so that we might rightly receive all the rest of the gifts of his providence.  When we receive first the eternal, the temporal adorns it like so many perfect ornaments.  Even the broken ones which speak of a day of mending.

Brother’s Return

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Biblical Text: Micah 5:2-5a

Our final midweek for 2022 Advent. The passage from Micah recalls two big OT themes that will be brought to fulfillment or fruition at the advent of the messiah. The First is God’s choosing the least. The second the return or the ingathering of those who have been let go. This homily attempts to place those before us so that we might have faith in the claims of the eternal peace also brought by the messiah.

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Two Smoldering Stumps

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Biblical Text: Isaiah 7:10-17

Matthew asserts that the Virgin birth of Jesus is the fulfillment of this passage in Isaiah. Now, when a New Testament author points at an Old Testament text, he’s pointing at the larger story. The larger story that this sermon tries to preach is the story of three generations of Judah’s kings – Uzziah, Jotham and Ahaz. How do we get to the prophet Isaiah telling Ahaz to ask for a sign? The story has surprisingly deep resonance for our situation today. Ahaz’s abominations and his refusal to see the signs are very similar to ours.

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Behold and Rejoice

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Biblical Text: Zephaniah 3:14-20

The third week of Advent is often labeled Gaudete, Latin for Rejoice! It’s a command word. But commanding someone to rejoice is a non-starter. True Joy is pulled out of us. It is the natural reaction of the loved seeing the lover. This sermon reflects on these themes and how God coming from outside of us brings for that Rejoicing.

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Are You The One?

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Biblical Text: Matthew 11:2-15

The second and third Sundays in Advent are always John the Baptist Sundays. The third one in year A – Matthew’s year – is one of my favorite texts to preach from. Why you ask? Because I think it is a text that gets emotionally to the core of what many Christians feel, but we are usually scared to read it that way. We are too protective of the saintliness of biblical characters. And beyond getting to the core of what we feel, Jesus’ answers are profound in two ways. Jesus does give us the promise, but that promise comes in the very specific form of the crucified one. We get no other messiah. The text is a challenge to the hearers, both to the faithful like John who might not understand, and the crowds who might be pondering the message.

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The Right Time

Lesson Basis: James 5:7-11

It amuses me what bits stick in our minds and which ones fly away almost as soon as they are placed in them.  For example, Luther’s Small Catechism explanations are highly memorable and spiritually invaluable, yet to get confirmands to memorize them is a chore.  Yet, I’d bet that 80% of Lutherans immediately remember that Luther once called the Epistle of James and “epistle of straw” or that Luther once said “sin boldly.” Now, “sin boldly” is actually a very deep reflection on the gospel and the reality of life in this world. Most of our choices are not black and white, and even black and white ones our personal motivations tend toward gray shades.  This is the reality of our fallen nature.  Luther’s “sin boldly” is more importantly have faith that God knows our frame and has covered all our sins in Jesus, so make the best choices you can in the moment and trust God.  “The epistle of straw” was one I bet that Luther wishes he had back.  Luther was a polemicist.  The vast majority of the things he wrote were engaged in conflict of some type.  And the problem, still present with us today, is that when we are being polemic, we tend toward hyperbole or outright “fake news.” It is easier to make your “enemies” and their sources unclean than it is to argue the ideas.  Hence the epistle of straw.  And while it is true that some scripture ends up being more impactful than others, the letters of Paul have always been the spine of the New Testament, setting Paul against James is not a good idea.  They need to be reconciled because they share the same faith.

And what makes Luther’s quip so tough is that the reconciliation is part of what he was complaining about.  Luther didn’t like James at the time he wrote because it didn’t pronounce the gospel as strongly as Paul.  James leans more on the law, and even beyond the law you could call James New Testament wisdom literature – the New Testament Proverbs.  And the Proverb that is placed before us today is on the virtue of patience.  “Be patient, therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient about it, until it receives the early and the late rains. You also, be patient.”

Being patient is not an American virtue.  We are the people of the fast food drive through.  We invented immediate gratification. Of course we could argue that it is these things taken to their fulfillment that are killing us.  Our entire food supply chain geared around what turns out to be unhealthy. Amazon Prime delivery promising us everything in two days, only to be depressed when whatever we ordered doesn’t bring us happiness. Patience is a virtue that we might need some lessons on.

But James on patience is keyed directly into the gospel.  “You have seen the purpose of the Lord, how the Lord is compassionate and merciful.”  You know what God is about and who He is.  Christ has revealed this to us.  He justifies sinners.  Does everything happen when we want it to happen? No.  It doesn’t in simple material matters.  Heck, even a slow line at McDonalds can get us frustrated.  Things spiritual don’t happen on our timelines either.  Things spiritual happen at the right time.  Things spiritual happen “after the early and later rains.” Things spiritual happen on God’s time.  Patience for James is waiting on God to be exactly who we know he is.  And Job is his example. Yes, waiting can be suffering, but long after this is gone in my flesh I shall see God (Job 19:26). It’s an Advent message.  God keeps his promises. Wait for that right time.

Behold…The Messenger

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Biblical Text: Malachi 3:1-7

This is the second midweek advent service following the theme of “Behold”. If week one the “behold” told us to look closely at the promise itself, this week’s text is more about how that promise is fulfilled. The Lord comes to his temple usually following a messenger. This homily attempts to “behold” those messengers in our day.

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