University Presbyterian Church - Chapel Hill, NC

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A Sermon by Robert E. Dunham

University Presbyterian Church

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Christmas Eve       December 24, 2009

            It was Christmas Eve in the congregation of the Hebrews, and the crowd had begun to assemble early.  The Preacher[1] walked through the sanctuary checking the candles, making certain everything was in place, speaking words of welcome to the gathering congregation.  Many of the faces were unfamiliar to him.  There were extended family members and others who had come to town for the Christmas celebration. There were people the Preacher had seen in the village but never before amid the congregation. But there were also a fair number of those he knew as his flock.

            There was Andrew, his face radiant with expectation, a new convert almost too full of his faith. Behind him, in contrast, was Simon, the teenaged son of one of the elders, his angry countenance demonstrating that he was there under protest. There was the cobbler Emil, whose wife had died suddenly just days earlier, his eyes moist and dark in the dim candlelight.  There were Hannah and her three children, all in a row, their eyes fixed straight ahead to avoid making eye contact with others in the congregation who may have heard the hurtful rumors about Hannah’s husband, now conspicuously absent. And so it went.  In every face he knew he saw some particular story, and with a good number of them the story included some peculiar anguish, some personal heartache, some individual sense of remorse.  The internal darkness was transparent on some of the faces, though others masked it well.  But the Preacher knew. He knew.

            As the liturgy began he could hear it in their shallow voices. Usually resonant and buoyant, this night those voices seemed weak, lacking in confidence. Was it a doubting of themselves or of God’s capacity to grace their lives?  Was it a weariness with the promises of Christmas? Was it skepticism?  Was it simply the residue of a very hard year… a fear, perhaps, that the darkness really had overcome the light?  He watched the ritual of the sacrifices they made, watched the listless way they wandered through the liturgy of the offering.  He watched them as their lips spoke the prayer of confession, yet their hearts seemed unswayed and unmoved. And as he watched, it began to dawn on him that the common thread that bound them together in their ambivalence was a sense of guilt… of unresolved, unrequited guilt.

            The Preacher knew he faced a challenge that night.  So he began, as Christmas Eve always begins, with the old and oft-rehearsed story of a promise made to a young girl by an angel, a promise that was kept in a stable in Bethlehem.  He told of the angels who spread the word to the shepherds, singing for joy to the glory of God. He told of Mary, pondering everything in her heart.  I imagine he told them of the inescapable connection between the manger and the cross, the powerful story of God who came among the people God loved so deeply, only to suffer and die for a life well lived. He told the congregation the whole story, from birth to death to resurrection, rehearsed it for them with a certain passion and a slight tremble in his voice.

            Then, more quietly, he began to lay out for them in theological terms the contrast between their recent practice of the faith and the true meaning of Christmas, the meaning of the Gospel.  He spoke of the seeming emptiness of their spirits, the lack of conviction in their prayers, the lack of passion in their voices.  He talked about the perfunctory way they went about presenting their sacrifices and offerings to the Lord.  He spoke of lives that were complicated by guilt and by some apparent need to measure up to standards that they obviously found oppressive. He spoke of the ministry of Christ and how His life and death were the keys to unlocking their guilt, the keys to unleashing their lives from such oppression.  And he began to drive home the central claim of his Christmas sermon, which for him was the same as the consistent claim of the Gospel.  His words resounded almost like an assurance of pardon, “In Jesus Christ, I tell you, you are forgiven.”[2]  “It is by God’s will,” he said, building to his finish…. “It is by God’s will that we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.”

            Not sanctified by their own best efforts.  Not sanctified by their sacrifices and offerings. Not sanctified by their good grades or their community standing or the Christmas cheer they struggled to convey.  Not sanctified even by their commitment to those in need.  Sanctified instead by Christ’s sacrifice…once and for all. 

In a way it was a strange sermon… particularly if he really preached it on Christmas Eve.  At least it sounds a bit odd to our ears.  It’s not the stuff of Christmas cards and Christmas pageants and Christmas carols.  And yet, it seems to me, it is a message of hope that far too few of us have fully claimed nearly two millennia later.

For walking into this sanctuary tonight, this preacher could see many of the same faces that that Preacher saw.  Not literally the same faces, of course, (though some of us are getting older!)… but the faces of hunger, and eagerness, of pain and grief, of anguish and sorrow, of anxiety and guilt.  The same faces.  Some of you are here this night because you simply would not miss the thrill of Christmas Eve, no matter where your lives have taken you since your childhood. There are still some who are here, I suspect, because they were made to come, or because they felt as though they should be here.  There are some whose presence is defined mostly by the absence of a dear one lost this year. There are some who have come fleeing the present anguish of their lives, hoping that the story of the child in the manger will be able to offer some peace for them, if only for an hour.  There are still others who have come trying to rid themselves of some deep-seated guilt that comes from… well, who knows where exactly?  And there are many who have stayed away for the very same reason. Far too many.

The sad thing is that the Preacher to the Hebrews offers a word that is particularly for them.  But they’re not here to hear it.  Since I cannot offer that word to them tonight, I ask you to take it with you, for surely you know them.  We all do.

I cannot tell you how many people I have met over the years whose primary experiences of the church have been negative, for whom the good news of Christmas and Easter somehow got lost amid a more exacting and demanding and damaging message that set a kind of unreachable standard. They found themselves at one time or another in the midst of congregations that apparently were told time after time that they did not measure up. And so these folks have become convinced that they will never measure up.[3] Not at Christmas.  Not even at Easter.  Listen to one woman’s description of how that message played out for her during a long childhood bout with depression:

The… Christianity of my childhood offered me no way out of my unhappiness.  Rather, with its emphasis on sin, on the thorough badness of all people…, it gave me an explanation of why I ought to be depressed. Sin was what religion was about.  If you had asked me in the fourth grade, “Why was Jesus born?” I would have been glad to answer, “It was because of sin….”  If you had pushed me about what it took to get our sins forgiven, I would have told you, “We have to repent of our sins.” If you had pushed me a little further to ask, “And what does it mean to repent?” I would have said, “To feel really, really bad about what a sinful person you are.”[4]

            That is not the message of the Gospel that I read and study.  But it is the message that many have heard over the years, and that many hear even today.  Even some of us who did not grow up under the power of such negativism have not escaped its hold completely. Biblical scholar Tom Long notes that many of us are still trying to absolve some deep-seated sense of guilt and inadequacy by bringing sacrifices to God:

Lord, didn’t I give of myself generously by teaching Sunday School?

            Lord, didn’t you hear me pray for the sick in church?

            Lord, didn’t you see how I stood up for minority hiring in my company?

            Lord, at least I come to church; many do not, you know.”

Lord, I know I’m not perfect, but I do the best I can.  Doesn’t it count, Lord?  Doesn’t it count?

“Over and over we make such offerings, but it does not work. It is never enough, never adequate; so we keep our distance from the [heart of the Gospel], leave with a guilty conscience, and come back next week with another basket of good intentions and deeds to place on the altar.”[5] Or do not come back at all.

Do you remember Larry the Sad Boy?  He was for me an unforgettable character in Garrison Keillor’s book, Leaving Home.  Keillor was remembering all those who had come back home to Lake Wobegon for Christmas one year, and he mentioned Larry Sorenson:

Larry the Sad Boy was there, who was saved twelve times in the Lutheran Church, an all-time record. Between 1953 and 1961 he threw himself weeping and contrite on God’s throne of grace on twelve separate occasions – and this is a Lutheran church that wasn’t evangelical, had no altar call, no organist playing, “Just As I Am Without One Plea” while a choir hummed and a guy with shiny hair took hold of your heartstrings and played you like a cheap guitar. This is the Lutheran Church… these are Scandinavians, and they repent in the same way that they sin: discreetly, tastefully, at the proper time, and they bring a Jell-O salad for afterward.  Larry Sorenson came forward weeping buckets and crumpled up at the communion rail, to the amazement of the minister, who had delivered a dry sermon about stewardship, and who now had to put his arm around this limp, soggy individual and pray with him and see if he had a ride home.  Twelve times….  Granted, we’re born in original sin … but twelve conversions are too many.  God didn’t mean us to feel guilt all our lives.  There comes a point where you should dry your tears and join the building committee and start grappling with the problems of the church furnace and the church roof and make church coffee and be of use, but Larry kept on repenting and repenting.[6]

As Tom Long says, over and over we make our attempts to show our repentance, to make our offerings, but it will not work. It will never be enough, never be adequate until we hear a different word.

So this Christmas Eve I offer to you a different word from the Preacher to the Hebrews: “It is by God’s will that we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.”  I tell you, in the name of Jesus Christ, your sins are forgiven. Not by anything you have accomplished, not by your sacrifices or your offerings, but by Christ at the cross, once and for all. 

            Sin and guilt are not the last words.  The last word is always grace. Singer/ songwriter Pierce Pettis says it this way:

            When you’re so ashamed that you could die, God believes in you.

            And you can’t do right even though you try, God believes in you.

            Blessed are the ones who grieve, the ones who mourn, the ones who bleed.

            In sorrow you sow, but in joy you’ll reap. God believes in you.[7]

The coming of love into the world that we celebrate this night is unique and all-encompassing: once and for all.[8] We need not be slaves to the past, nor captives of guilt.  The first word and the last word of this night are one and the same: grace. By the grace of God, announced by the angels at Bethlehem and confirmed by the centurion at the cross, we are free.  We are free. 

            “For unto you is born this night in the city of David a savior… who is Christ the Lord.”

            No demands this night.  Just good news of One who measures up for everyone… once and for all.  A blessed Christmas to you all.