Christmas Eve 2015

Christmas Eve 2015 There is a characteristic that runs throughout all of our readings for tonight, that I’ve always been intrigued by but never really understood. I’ve always wanted to preach on it, every year as Christmas Eve sermon time comes around, but I’ve never known what to preach. Well, my friends. The year has finally come for me to preach on this rare characteristic, and you all have my first-time viewing of the modern Christmas classic movie Elf to thank for it. Can you guess what the characteristic is? In the movie Elf, Buddy the Elf is actually a human who has been raised by an elf father –Papa Elf—at the North Pole. He learns the truth of his humanity and decides to go in search of his birth father who lives and works in that magical place of New York City, and Santa gives Buddy his blessing and a few tips for the journey. Buddy’s journey is characterized by all sorts of misadventures when he experiences the strangeness of New York with a sense of wonder and awe. At one point in the movie, Buddy is working at a New York department store, appropriately dressed as one of the elves in the Christmas section, and someone makes the announcement to the gathered shoppers that Santa will be arriving first thing in the morning. Buddy hears the announcement and then proceeds to scream: “Santa! Oh my God! Santa here! I know him! I know him!” Santa is someone that Buddy the elf gets to see every day of his life; and still, when he thinks he is going to encounter him in New York, he loses his mind with excitement. When I saw that scene, I finally knew what that elusive characteristic that I had always been curious about looked like. That, my friends, is zeal. We see zeal mentioned overtly in two of our readings for tonight, and it is hinted at in the other two. Titus talks about how the marks of a Christian can be found in our zealous deeds. The gospel reading for tonight shows us how the zeal of the angels in proclaiming the good news of Jesus’s birth is contagious and becomes the zeal of the shepherds to go and see this wondrous event that is unfolding right there before them. And part of the reason that Buddy the elf is so charming is because we as a people have lost this sense of zeal, I think. It’s actually a bad thing, now, to be a zealot. And Buddy shows us that zeal can be a marvelous mixture of hopeful joy mixed with a goodly portion of naiveté. Ok, I can hear you thinking, so we’re supposed to be zealous. How on earth do we accomplish this? We all know it’s not really something that comes naturally to many of us, nor is it something that we can add to our shopping list. And that is why we gather here tonight, my friends. To remember that zeal is not something that originates with us. Zeal originates with God. Even in the midst of all of our misunderstandings, fallings, and failures, God continues to love us with a joyfully optimistic and maybe even a bit naïve zeal. And at one point in history, God whispers to Godself, I know them. I know them. And God sends God’s self to be one of us, so that we might know a taste of God, God’s love, and God’s zeal. The good news this night is that the zeal does not begin with us. It is the zeal of God, that calls forth in us, if we allow it, a joyful, hopeful, naïve response. That is why we gather together tonight. To remember the zeal of God which has given the gift of God’s self, for us, to us, in the person of Jesus. That we might finally say in joyful hope, wonder and a bit naiveté: “I know him. I know him.”