Sermon for December 24th, 2021 - Christmas Eve - The Rev. Jeffrey W. Mello

To view a vide of the Reverend Jeffrey W. Mello’s sermon, click HERE

Isaiah 9:2-4, 6-7; Luke 2:1-14

In the name of the One who meets all our hopes and fears tonight.

Merry Christmas, St. Paul’s!

I wonder if you, like me, come to this Christmas Eve with a strange mix of emotions.  I am grateful that, this year, some of us can be in person for Christmas Eve.  And I am sorry that we cannot yet all be. 

I am filled with joy at the signs of tradition that remind me where I am and why we are here; the return of the great wreath, the poinsettias at the altar and our beautiful Nativity Set.  And I am grieving the loss of care-free gatherings. I am missing the faces of those we have lost since the last time we were together for Christmas Eve.

And yet, most of all, I am filled with hope this night.  A bit surprisingly, this year, this Christmas Eve, I find my heart being pulled toward what might lie ahead for each of us, for all of us.  I am longing in the worst kind of way.  Or maybe in the best kind of way.

Tonight, for you, is the Christmas you are celebrating a relic of the past, or is it a gateway to a future yet untold?

Some of you may have seen a recent post I made on social media about making a cheesecake.

Preparing to visit with my side of the family in RI, I set about making the cheesecake my mom would make each Christmas.  The title on the recipe card is simply, “Grandma’s famous cheesecake.”

I was surprised at how sad I became while making it.  But following the directions and immersing myself in my mom’s characteristically beautiful handwriting, tears began to flow.

And then a moment of laughter.  If you are a fan of the tv show that features the characters Moira, Johnny, Alexis and David Rose, the title of which doesn’t seem appropriate for a Christmas Eve sermon, you’ll know why the instruction to “fold in” an ingredient caused me to laugh.

As I thought about this moment with the cheesecake, I realized that it wasn’t just about missing my mom.  It was about longing.  It was about a desire to feel some of the things I felt whenever I would see that cheesecake set out on the buffet table.

I realized it was about a deep desire I have that my son will know the love I knew.  It was a hope that some day, many, many, many years from now, I pray, that that love will grow in him and that he will be able to look around at his life, like I can at mine, and see it filled with people who love, not just him, but each other.

Those tears weren’t just about a bygone past, but a furiously hoped for future.

I think that’s what happens when Jesus meets us in our longings.  They become suddenly possible hopes for a future where God’s dream for the world becomes the reality in which we will be living our everyday lives.

Everyone we meet in the story of Jesus’ birth are at a moment in which the achings of their hearts and the promises of God are met.  The terrifying circumstances under which they are living become the very ingredients that make possible the birth of God-with-us.  

The despair of the poor and outcast shepherd’s crack their hearts open to hear the promise that God has come to them, and their fear keeps them running right into the manger where Jesus lays, newly born and wriggling.

Those who were the first to know God in human form were not those who were comfortable with where their lives were.  

They were those who were grieving for what was not, and who were aching at their soul’s core for what yet might be.

And they knew, though they had little reason believe it, that the child that had been born, had been born for them.

They heard, as they stared at the infant in the hay, the words of the prophet Isaiah that they had been taught to hold on to when the world got too uncertain, too harsh, too unknown.

“A child has been born for us, a son given to us.”

Well, my friends, a child has been born for us, too.  This promise was not meant for just those people whose story we read in scripture.  That promise was for us.  For you.  For me.

God longs to meet us in our longings.  God is born for us that our fears of what is no longer or has never-been might be transformed into hope for what yet might be.

There are some who have no need of what Christmas is about.  To them, the world is a place filled only with loss, devoid of potential.

There are others who, bless their hearts, know only hope.  

The youngest among us will go to bed tonight dreaming only, I pray, of what might be waiting for them in the morning.

And most of us are somewhere in between.

Most of us come to this night carrying our own life’s worth of grief, of worry, of doubt and fear.  And we hold on to the hope that still somehow dwells within us, speaking to us from the pages of scripture or a old recipe card of future we long to inhabit.

And that, my friends, is just where Christ is born.  To you.  This night.

All our fears.  All our hopes.  Met perfectly in a baby who will, if given the chance, change us that we might change the world.

AMEN

© 2021 The Reverend Jeffrey W. Mello