The last Sunday in Advent is always a hard one for me because it’s hard to find something fresh to say, which is why I bounced off of a passage from Philippians today. Here’s where it took me.
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I’m going to take a risk with you this morning: I’m going to start two sermons in a row talking about Christmas movies.
Okay, so it’s not that big a risk.
One of the consistent things at our house during the holidays is we watch Hallmark movies. For the most part, the plot is the same and the actors change. Someone has to go back home because of a crisis of some sort, or because the big corporation they work for wants to buy the town, and they meet up again with an old love. Then they have to choose between corporate and community, between power and love.
And—SPOILER ALERT—love wins.
One of the reasons the movies continue to be popular is that’s a good story line. It feels good when love wins, particularly when it doesn’t always feel that way in real life.
Another tale that we tell every Christmas is the story of our faith, which is also a story about love and the promise that love is stronger than life or death or power or whatever else love encounters, but it is not a plot line that fits neatly into a formula or ties up all the loose ends. Life and love both have lots of loose ends. One of the difficult things about telling the story again is it can feel predictable—like a Hallmark movie.
What I mean is we can, perhaps too easily, allow ourselves to think, “I know this story,” without letting it settle into our hearts and the tangle of loose ends our lives hold on this particular Christmas, both personally and collectively.
Perhaps the many layers of loose ends we see in our systems and institutions emphasize the reality that we live in a nation—and perhaps a world—obsessed with power and money. The people who consistently get attention are those with both, and many of them spend a lot of energy clamoring for more. The people who are consistently not only left out but are often demonized are those who have very little.
Leading up to our most recent presidential election, the two candidates raised and spent almost four billion dollars. I don’t even know how to imagine how much money that is. I can put it in this context: The average SNAP benefit—what people get a month to help them buy food—is $187. A month. That four billion dollars would pay that bill for over twenty-one million people.
Instead, we got to see attack ads.
Paul wrote his letter to the Philippians understanding full well what brazen power can do. He had been in Roman prisons. He had seen how the empire destroyed families and even nations. He wasn’t writing a Christmas letter to the young church, but he was telling the same story of how love speaks truth to power—and he used it to call people to live out that love in the way they treated one another.
He said, “Adopt the attitude that was in Christ Jesus: Though he was in the form of God, he did not consider being equal with God something to exploit.”
Jesus wasn’t born to take control. We have heard and said it so many times that we can miss the shock of it—God entered the world as a baby, as a helpless human being born into a family without influence or privilege.
The incarnation of God is an act of love, not power. Jesus didn’t come to conquer or take over. He came to join with us as a human being, to show us how to live into our humanity, into our lives as those wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved.
Paul said that is the foundation for how we treat each other:
“Therefore, if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort in love, any sharing in the Spirit, any sympathy, complete my joy by thinking the same way, having the same love, being united, and agreeing with each other. Don’t do anything for selfish purposes, but with humility think of others as better than yourselves. Instead of each person watching out for their own good, watch out for what is better for others.”
As we hear those words, let’s go back to Bethlehem.
When you imagine what Jesus’ birth was like, what do you picture? Is it a staid, even stark, scene like our little nativity here? At Ginger’s church, the littlest ones are the animals for their Christmas pageant and they are encouraged to dress as their favorite creature, so there are bears and lions and dinosaurs and Poohs and Eeyores all gathered to welcome the baby. I don’t know how the tradition started, but its good theology.
The word in Luke 2 that the King James Version translated as “inn” really means guest room. Some families had an extra room they rented out; that is to say they had two rooms. The manger was in the room—not in a barn—because the animals were brought inside for safekeeping at night, into the room that was also the kitchen and the bedroom and whatever else it needed to be. Jesus was born in the middle of it all, into the middle of a big welcoming mess.
With that image in mind, here these words again: “If there is any encouragement in Christ . . . .”
The root of the word courage means heart, so to encourage is “to put the heart in” whatever it is we do and say, to not just go through the motions out of habit or duty; to not let ourselves go along with things because that’s just the way things are; to choose not to take the easy road of cynicism but to choose the challenge of hope; to imitate Christ by not exploiting our advantages but seeing them as ways to, as Paul said, watch out for what is better for others.
I know. It’s the same old story. But it’s a great story. And this time around, we are the ones in the movie, if you will, we are the ones that have the chance to tell the story of how God’s love alive in us can change things when we encourage one another, when we put our hearts in it. Amen.
Peace,
Milton
