Christmas Eve sermon 2010

The Reverend Melanie Dickson Lemburg
The Eve of Christ’s Nativity—Year A
December 24, 2010

“The people who walked in darkness
have seen a great light;
those who lived in a land of deep darkness—
on them light has shined.”

The darkness hangs
Like a shroud over the world.
In its depth and its silence
It numbs and paralyzes
Oppresses and subdues.

Until suddenly
The messengers of God appear
In the darkness
With a blinding, brilliant light
Throwing us ordinary mortals
Into chaos and fear.

“Do not be afraid!” they proclaim.
We bring you good news and joy—
Your savior is born this night,
And you will call him
“God with us.”
And even the stars sing with them in their glory.

And then we have a choice to make,
To stay in the dark
Which is no longer quite so comfortable for us
Now that we have been blinded
By light
And had a taste
Of glory.

Or to listen to these small stirrings of hope
In our hearts
And to search out and to seek
The source of the joy
The source of the glory
The source of the light.

And wonder of wonders,
We find it this night,
As they told us we would,
This baby who is
God with us,
This baby come with glory
Falling all around him,
Dripping of glory as if
The stars themselves had bathed him…

This baby who is
The reality of
God’s love for us,
The proof of God’s zeal,
The fruit of God’s desire
For us—
And the fulfillment of our deepest longings:
(To be loved and to love—
to be made lovely and to have our every day ordinary lives bathed in glory…)

Into the darkness and chaos of our lives
Comes a God who is wild and free
A God who does new things
A God whose love and zeal for us
Whose pursuit of us leads to
God becoming human, becoming vulnerable.
Such is the magnitude of God’s zeal
Such is the glory of God’s love…

And on this night we realize that
God’s love is a vulnerable love,
As vulnerable as a new born child.
As vulnerable as all love is vulnerable.

But even yet we cling to darkness….
As we see the Love of God
Swaddled and lying in straw.
And we are invited to choose Light.

We cling to darkness
As we see the Love of God
Hanging and dying
Arms open to embrace the world.
And we are invited to choose Light.

We cling to darkness
As we see an empty tomb.
And in the absence of light, in the silence of God
We hear the echo that
Love, this vulnerable love,
Is stronger than death.
And we are invited to choose Light.

As we see on this night
Our God with us,
Who leaps in joy
So that neither cross nor cradle
Can contain him,

Whose mystery bursts forth
From his bed and from his tomb
The mystery of birth, of life, and even death
(For even at his birth, his future is present)
The mystery of the power of his love
That shatters even the darkness of death…
We are being offered the light of the world, the one light that can truly lighten our darkness
And it is in this
That our hope is born.

From this night forward,
May we never be content to
Dwell again in the dark,
May our new hope spill over into everything
That we are
And that we do,
May we dance and sing with the stars and the angels,
Allowing our joy to shine forth,
And may we forever live
In this one moment,
On this one night,
When all of our deepest longings
Have been fulfilled.