the christmas sermon.

I'm preaching tomorrow. It's my first sermon. Where better to deliver one's first sermon, I suppose, than a one-room house church in western Thailand, on Christmas morning. In preparing for it, I wrote the sermon I had on my heart; word-for-word, rather than with notes that allowed me to improvise. I did this because I'm not using the prepared text; I'm now going to go through it and linguistically decimate it of english idioms so that I don't unnecessarily send my translator into utter frustration. But I really like it so far. So for you, my dear readers, and perhaps for my own posterity, I present the prepared notes that I will now veer away from:

We made it. All the preparations and planning and parties are done and now it’s time to celebrate. To be honest, though, all of this christmas business seems very odd. A baby was born, two thousand years ago. And now, every year, billions of people set aside not only a day, but countless preparations and parties and money in order to celebrate. For a long time this didn’t make sense to me. Even now I find some of the ways we celebrate christmas frustrating and illogical. But there has to be something there; there must surely be something different about this baby. I could spend several minutes telling you all some of the things I know about my own birth, and some of you might find it interesting, but I don’t think you’d tell your children and grandchildren about it, and I don’t think the world would be celebrating it in a few centuries. So what is it about this baby? When I was born, notable people did not show up at my crib and bow to me, angels didn’t announce it from the skies above. Certainly the story is a good one. But is that it? It’s a good story, and perhaps we want an excuse to throw a party? I’ve been searching for something deeper than that. This all started when I had a really difficult christmas a few years ago. Christmas was always a little hard for me to grasp because I come from a country where we take christmas very seriously. It actually becomes a source of stress for a lot of people. there are parties to plan, decorations to put up, places to go, and so many things to do, in order to have the “perfect christmas”. and I was sick of it. It was my first christmas away at college, and instead of coming home I made my own plans. I was going to go all the way across the world, to a country in Africa called Sudan, where I would be as far away from the american christmas as I could get. I wanted to get away from christmas because I just didn’t get it. God’s plans were different than my plans, though. I didn’t get my visa to Sudan and I didn’t get to go. instead I had to go home. While I was home I looked long and hard at this strange holiday that didn’t make sense to me. Christmas is about Jesus being born, I thought, so I didn’t understand why we make it so stressful and so much about presents and decorations and material things. But more than that, I didn’t understand why Christmas matters. And it was through that experience I had, of throwing out all of the ideas that I grew up thinking about christmas and going back to God’s heart in it, that I’ve come around to loving christmas again. I think that christmas is beautiful, and I think we have a reason today to rejoice and to celebrate. so here are a few thoughts I’ve had about a christmas worth celebrating.

To understand christmas is to understand the heart of God for us. And the bible itself is our story, the story of humanity. The bible is made of two parts, the old testament and the new testament. And each of these two parts has a beginning. so in order to understand this new book, we’re going to have to go back to the old one. And it started with God creating the world, and everything in it. His most special creation was a species that we call humanity. Humans are different from all of the other species he created because he created us special to be a reflection of who he is. He wanted a creature like him on earth, and to us he gave a special purpose: it was our job to take care of the earth. But then something happened. There was a problem. When God made us, he gave us a special power: We get to choose to follow him. He wanted it this way, because he wants us to love him. He wants to follow him out of joy and out of respect for him. That’s why he gave us minds. He didn’t want us to blindly follow him because he forced us to, he wanted our devotion. But when you give someone a choice, it means they can choose the other thing, the wrong thing. to ask someone to be obedient means that they get to be able to say no. And one day, in the paradise he created, his most special creations said no. You told me not to do something, but I’m going to do it anyway, God. I’m smart enough to make my own decisions, I’m smarter than you. Up until this point these two creations were innocent, like children. But then, through that disobedience, something got ruined. They had committed sin. It wasn’t that they ate a certain kind of fruit, what caused them to sin was that they disobeyed God. It cursed them, and even today that curse is still there among us. We are a species that chooses to be disobedient. We choose to trust ourselves instead of trusting God, which is to be disobedient to God. And this made God really angry, but it also made him very sad. Because he is a god that cares about justice, he knew there would be consequences about sin; that because of our disobedience to the one that gave us life, we would have to die. And the idea of creatures that he loved having to die made God sad. So God hatched a plan: He knew that because of the way he made men, there had to be death, and there would have to be despair and suffering. he would have to spend thousands of years working on it in order for it to work, but he knew what he needed to do: He had to come to earth himself, and enter the world just like we do. He had to live a life, like us, and show to the world that it can be done: humans can live right, loving god and loving their fellow men and not sinning. And then, in the climax of this whole epic story that God was forming, He himself was going to die as a sacrifice for their disobedience, so that these broken people could be fixed again.

God went to work. He found a good man, a man named abraham. He blessed abraham, and he spent the next few thousand years turning abraham’s descendants into a special people, and he gave them truth from heaven about how to live and how to be obedient to him even though they were broken. These people were stubborn, though, and they repeated a cycle of being obedient to god and then falling back into disobedience. Every time, when God could have given up and destroyed them, he pulled them back from the brink of destruction and he chose to give them a second chance. And then, through them, he decided to give all of humanity a second chance.

And this brings us to christmas. Lying in the heart of the story of christmas is something much deeper than a neat little story about a baby born in a barn in a far-off country. it’s our story. It’s the story of the time that God himself decided to do it the hard way. He, in his power, could have started the world over, erasing us and replacing us with people more robotic who would unthoughtfully do his every whim. He could have given us all pills that turn our brains off and make us follow him without being able to choose. He could have just killed us off and decided he was better off alone. But he didn’t do any of these things, because God loves us very much. He loves us so much that he sent us part of himself, made human. Even though we aren’t perfect, God is willing to trust us. He has done his part, and now he He knows that the best thing for us is to be obedient to him and to love each other, but he trusts us so much that he’s willing to say “You get to decide what you think is best for you.”

In my life, I’ve found this a hard thing to do. Left to my own devices, I’ve lived a very messy life, I’ve made a lot of mistakes, and often I’ve thought to myself “I know what’s best for me, so I’m going to do what I will do and if God doesn’t like it he can stop me.” But as I’ve grown older I’ve realized that God doesn’t work like that. God trusts you enough that he’s willing to let you make your own decisions, but as I’ve lived I cannot help but find that on my own, without his help, I’m not very good at running my own life. I don’t think this is an accident. As I’ve grown and learned, I’ve found that things are this way because God built me, and when he made me he made it so that I was designed to trust him, and to be obedient to him. When I told God that I would be a follower of him, he began to be able to tell me how I should live my life: a way that is both pleasing to him and in which I live with harmony and peace with those around me. And all of this he has accomplished through this baby, who grew up and lived his life as a demonstration of how we can live our lives in a way that gives us purpose and satisfaction. Through this child, God has given us a teaching about how we should live. But it is a teaching, and a teaching is something that we can choose to either follow or disobey. If we disobey, we will die. It’s not that God will kill us, it’s our actions that will result in our own death. Death is where we were headed, but one night, a long time ago, God sent us a savior. He said that if we trust this man with our lives, we would get salvation from death.

And so the message from God for us through christmas is this: We’re worth saving. To him, we’re worth the sacrifice. But there is another message for us through this child, even those of us who have already accepted the message of salvation. and it a lesson about how to live while we are still alive. The salvation that we received from Christ dying on the cross is what allows us to go to heaven when we die, but something else happened when God came to this earth and walked as a man: He lived a perfect life. He didn’t just do this to prove that it could be done, he did it as a lesson for us, about how to live well, and to have meaningful lives. He taught us to reject all the old ways of living life, and to instead live like he did: Humbly, unselfishly, and to love God and to love our neighbors. So friends, I have an encouragement for you all as we celebrate the birth of Jesus: Let us continue to strive to be like him. Let us look at the life that he lived while he walked among us, and let us do likewise. And what does it mean to live like him? It means many things, and our gospels are filled with suggestions. But the one thing more than anything else that Jesus did that made him different than the fallen men around him was that he went to the Lord in prayer. He had a relationship with the Lord. and he was obedient to the Lord, even to the point that he would die as an act of obedience. And this is what God wants for us, to have a relationship with him. He wants us to obey him again, to set things right again. God has given us a second chance, and that is a message for all the world. It is truly a reason to celebrate.