Christmas Eve

“To you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is the Messiah, the Lord.”

Merry Christmas. May I just say, before we take a look at the scriptures for this great occasion, what a delight it is to be able to welcome you all here. This is especially so if you are a guest tonight; if you’re seeking truth, or getting reacquainted with God, or wondering if there is a God, even if somebody in your family dragged you to this service under protest, we’re glad you’re here. You may not know it yet, but you’ve come to the right place. Thank you for choosing Emmanuel on Christmas Eve. We’re having a festive reception right after the service, and I figure if you’re staying up late enough for Midnight Mass, what’s another half-hour or so? Please do join us.

“To you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is the Messiah, the Lord.”

We are singing and rejoicing and feasting tonight because to us is born someone who is Savior, Messiah, and Lord. May we just take a few minutes to look together at all three?...

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 First, Jesus is Savior. The word save, salvation, is the same word in the Bible as wholeness. If you happen to be here as a person who’s conscious that you in some sense are not whole and need saving, I congratulate you. You are more in touch with reality than is fashionable these days. I am not whole and I need saving, but it took me way longer than it should have to notice. The sooner any of us can figure out that we are broken and that no self-improvement project can ever truly ever un-break us, the sooner we will be able to appreciate what an astonishing act of mercy the Christian message announces.

When I say mercy, I don’t mean tolerance or niceness; I mean mercy. I mean love to the unlovable and tenderness to the guilty. Mercy is God’s determination to give us something we could never attain on our own. His perfection and beauty, his shattering holiness, unreachable and unattainable by us broken, self-centered people, reached down to us.  He stretched out his hand in Jesus to bridge the gap between our brokenness and his wholeness, our awkwardness and his beauty, our flaws and his perfection. His hand is still reaching out at every moment to save us. It’s heartbreaking how hard we work to avoid seeing our need to take it.

So Jesus is Savior tonight. Jesus is also Messiah tonight.  This is a term that comes from our Jewish heritage, and it refers to the way in which as Christians, we see this baby who is born as summing up in himself the character and the hopes and the mission which God spent centuries teaching his Chosen People.

We are, to borrow an image theologians have used, characters in the final act of a 5-act play that God is writing; there has been quite a bit of the story before us. When we talk about things like love, or justice, or indeed mercy, we use the words with the content that God poured into them over the previous 4 acts, as he gently told his people more and more about who he was and what kind of vision he had for creation. There’s not time tonight to go into detail, but if Jesus is Messiah that means that Jesus is everything the Old Testament taught us to hope for, which is why we need to read it so that we can understand him better.

So Jesus is Savior, the one whose hand is ever outstretched to draw us undeserving people into God’s life and present us before God’s perfection with confidence and joy. He is Messiah, the one who sets us within a storyline God has been telling with the universe since before there was a universe.

And finally, Jesus is Lord. This was, as far as we know, the first faith statement of Christians before there were any such things as creeds or catechisms. The one who is born tonight is Lord, or master, or boss; he is in charge. Whatever other authorities you may experience yourself as subject to in your life – political, professional, academic, family, the esteem of your peers, even your efforts to measure up to your own standards for yourself – they are not actually in charge. The final responsibility rests with Jesus, which means that your final vindication rests with Jesus.

And if that’s so, then your final vindication rests with someone who is merciful enough to have thrown away all his rights and privileges to come and save you. It rests with someone who is patient enough to have spent centuries preparing the world to understand who he was and what he was going to do. This Jesus who is Savior, the same one who is Messiah, is also Lord.

There are, of course, countless other titles for this baby who is born tonight. We call Jesus King, we call him the Lover of Souls, we call him Emmanuel. The Word, the Lamb of God, the Bread of Life, the Light of the World, the Good Shepherd, the Morning Star…. It just goes on and on. Human language cannot express everything that Jesus is to those who have been embraced by his mercy and his patience and his lordship and his love. We could not tell the half of it if we talked for a lifetime.

But tonight we can at least start. We can start where the angel started, with these three titles, announced on the very first Christmas to the very first people God favored with the news.

“To you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is the Messiah, the Lord.”

This news is true, and if you are sitting in this building tonight, you, too, have now become one of those who have been favored with it. Thanks be to God for his glorious Gospel.