Sermon for Christmas 2017

Preached at Canadochly and Grace on December 24, 2017
Preaching text: None

People may find this a bit ironic, but I’ve always had a bit of an ambivalent relationship with the Christmas holiday. As a teenager, I was surrounded by family on Christmas, but it always felt like the loneliest day of the year. Most of that back then was just your typical teenage angst, but as I’ve grown older, those feelings of ambivalence haven’t gone away; they’ve just changed in form. For me now, as a pastor, as a person called to proclaim the Gospel of Christ living, dead, and risen again, I continue to struggle. Because one of the worst impediments to that calling, I’ve found over the years, is that baby in the manger.

Yes, you heard me right. Baby Jesus as an impediment to the Gospel. Not because it’s supposed to be that way, but because for far too many Christians, that’s all Jesus ever is. He’s a bit like Peter Pan, the boy who never grows up. The baby who sits there silently, who never cries, who never says or really does anything at all. And as a result, he’s a tabula rasa, a blank slate, ready and able to take on whatever characteristics we choose to give him.

And therein lies the problem? The Christianity of Baby Jesus can be whatever we want it to be. There’s no challenge. No accountability. No standard of morality outside any that we choose to provide. No salvation outside of what we say it is. It’s a Gospel of our own making, one that agrees with everything we agree with, that demands no change or transformation or repentance from us. The most comfortable of religions. Probably too comfortable.

And you see the consequences of it at play all throughout history and throughout our society.

Rewind a thousand years. Muslim Turks and Arabs have occupied the Holy Land. And how does the Church respond? We will have a Crusade. God wills it. Deus vult! Death and destruction to thousands of people. Blood will flow. Baby Jesus says nothing about this. He makes no objection, which is just the way we like it. Adult Jesus, on the other hand, says much about this. He reminds us of the commandment not to murder. He says to instead love our enemies, to pray for our persecutors. He says to do good even to those who do evil. How inconvenient.

Move back to today and what do you find. Christians who will loudly and forcefully condemn anyone LGBT and yet often give a pass to those who harass women, who are divorced multiple times, and even abuse children. Baby Jesus doesn’t say anything about that. He doesn’t object. Adult Jesus does. He honors women and children. He gives them special teaching and honors them and makes them the first witnesses of his resurrection. He reminds us that we are to honor and respect our spouses. How inconvenient.

We don’t stop there. The last time I checked, the Bible is not subtitled “All the ways I am better than everyone else because I’m Christian.” But that’s how Baby Jesus Christians often behave. We lord in our sense of superiority over others. We made the saying of the perfectly-festive phrase “Happy Holidays” into a sin of the highest order. We snarl out “Merry Christmas” as if we’re saying “F___ you” to all those who celebrate this season in a different way, all because we believe we deserve special treatment. We stand in judgment over the poor and the sick. According to our version of Baby Jesus, people who suffer so deserve it. They’re lazy and worthless. What goes around comes around and all that. Why should we dare help? Adult Jesus has much to say about that. Saying as you do to the least of these, you do to him. Saying love your neighbor as yourself. How inconvenient.

At the heart of this Baby Jesus Christianity is the love of money and power. In many ways, these critiques I’ve just mentioned are really, at their core, about that. It’s why we give a pass to so many who align with themselves with us on matters of race, economics, or political policy. It’s why they believe salvation only comes to us based on their devotion and loyalty to the same. The best gift you could give to a Baby Jesus Christian on this festive holiday is not a cross or even a manger; the true symbols of faith. No, give instead a mirror because what we really worship: ourselves. Our virtues. Our money.  Our politics. Our race. Our nationality. Our social privilege.It’s all about us. And Baby Jesus lets us get away with it or so we’d like to think. Truth is, Baby Jesus is Adult Jesus. They are one and the same, whether we like it or not.

Yeah, “we.” I use that pronoun intentionally. How many of us are BJCs from time to time? How many of us would rather all this God stuff align with what we already believe about ourselves and the world? How many of us would rather glare at others in judgment while giving ourselves and those like us a pass? How many of us are just so blasted annoyed at all the things Adult Jesus teaches, because it’s not what we want to hear?

Now do you see why I am so often ambivalent about this holiday? We worship ourselves, not the true Christ. For far too many of us Christians, faith is something we wear when it’s convenient. We love only those that love us back. We show compassion only upon those who are like us in some way. We go on throughout our lives as if that baby in the manger never grows up.

That, my friends, is sin. It’s at the heart of each and every one of us. From the very beginning, we’ve wanted to make it all about us. Those early stories in Genesis, from eating the apple in the garden to Noah’s Ark to the Tower of Babel, whether you take them as literal fact or not, they all have the same theme. Us trying to throw God off his throne and put ourselves in his place. And we’re still doing it. Now we just mask it in Christmas cheer and Christian piety.

It is however a path that leads to death and suffering. Countless lives destroyed, nations crumbled, societies decimated because we Christians put ourselves in charge instead of the real Jesus. The Holocaust, the Crusades, slavery, the witch trials of Salem, many of the nightmares of history happened because we refused to listen to the Adult Jesus. The world is so screwed up today because we’ve turned our back on him so often. And this is what we’ve accomplished in this world with our own efforts and hubris, what about the next? Do we honestly think we’ll get that any less wrong?

We won’t. The truth is, for all of us, a religion of self is not enough. It cannot do what we need most. What we need instead is a savior who can save us from our own worst impulses. What we need instead is a savior who can overcome what we cannot. What we need instead is a savior that can save us from what we don’t even realize or want to acknowledge about ourselves. And that baby in the manger becomes that Savior. He’s the beginning of what God intends to bring us all out of darkness. The darkness of this world and the darkness of our own egos and delusions of self-superiority.

Because that baby does grow up. He grows up and teaches us a new way of life. A way of love instead of hate. Generosity instead of selfishness. Sacrifice instead of arrogance. Life instead of death. And that adult Jesus goes to the cross to demonstrate all that, giving his own life for the sake of you and me, people who so often have taken him for granted. He didn’t have to do that. He could have left us to our own miserable fates, but he didn’t. He loves us and when you love something or someone, who want what’s best for it.

That’s who that baby really is. The birth of hope, a real hope, for a lost human race that seems hellbent on destroying itself. Sure, it’s tempting and even easy to make that baby into whatever we want. But that’s not a savior. The real Jesus is. He’s the one who’s come to save the world and to save us. And that is far better. Amen.