A Sermon for Lessons and Carols

​I love the service of Lessons and Carols. I love many things about this service. One is that we sing lots of carols. The Christmas season always moves by so fast that we don’t get to sing as much Christmas music in Church as I would like. So, today we pack in eleven Christmas hymns!
 
I also love working through the entire biblical story, from creation and fall back in our first reading all the way to our last reading about the final consummation of all things, when God establishes a new heaven and a new earth.
 
We need to know the biblical story because it provides the context and purpose for our own lives. We are part—a small part, but part nonetheless—of that grand story of salvation history. Our nine lessons this morning contain an enormous amount of wisdom and guidance for us, as we try to do our part to move that history forward, to do our bit to advance God’s mission in our world, to work towards God’s kingdom.
 
At the center of that grand story, giving meaning to all the rest including to our lives as God’s people in this time and place, stands Christ.
 
It starts with creation and the calling of Abraham. But already in our third and fourth lessons, from the prophet Isaiah, Christ’s birth was foretold, something like 700 years before it happened. The next four lessons give us Luke’s and Matthew’s version of the Christmas story, the story of Christ’s birth. All that remains is a reading from Revelation about the coming of the kingdom of God, when Christ returns in power and great glory to finish the work that began on the first Christmas.
 
Taken together, those Lessons remind us that the first Christmas was the great turning point in human history. Everything before the first Christmas led up to it. Everything that comes after the first Christmas is shaped by it.
 
And that is because, on that first Christmas, God entered human history in a new and unprecedented way.
 
Many of you probably know the Christmas film “It’s a Wonderful Life,” starring Jimy Sewart. If you don’t know the movie, I recommend it.
 
In the movie, Jimmy Stewart is a good man facing financial ruin and despair. Jimmy has come to believe that his whole life has been a failure, that the people he most cared about would be better off if he had never lived.
 
Enter Clarence the angel in training. Clarence shows Jimmy what his town would have been like without Jimmy. Seeing the world as it would have been without him, convinces Jimmy that he has made a difference. Jimmy’s hope is restored, and, in a sweet and predictable ending, everything works out fine, just as we want in a Christmas movie.
 
Let’s do the same as a thought experiment. Pretend for a minute that Jesus had never lived. In that case, everything we know about the world is based on what we see and hear on the news and around us.
 
In that world, a world without Christ, it looks a lot like force always prevails, like the powerless are inevitably victims, that evil is winning and may well prevail. It’s a bleak world, without much reason for confidence or hope.
 
Continuing with our thought experiment, let’s pretend that everything we know about God comes from the Old Testament and the book of Revelation. That’s the story from creation to final judgment, but now without the Gospels or Paul. Without Jesus in it, it’s a pretty scary story, dominated by a pretty scary God. Without Jesus, we would surely fear God, but it would probably be hard to love God. It’s not even clear that we would want to love God.
 
That is our world and our God as they might appear if Christmas had never happened.
 
But, as Lessons and Carols reminds us, Christ is in the story, indeed Christ is at the center of the story. And with Christ in the story, everything changes. Everything is made new. We get a new picture of God, and we get a new picture of our world.
 
What we learn from Christ about God is that God is not just a mighty king who expects worship and obedience from us and who punishes us when we fail. The God we meet in Christ is humble, and self-sacrificing, and vulnerable, astonishingly vulnerable. The God revealed to us in Christ Jesus loves us, loves us so much that God is willing to become flesh, to live among us as one of us, to submit to all the trials and tribulations of human life and human death.
 
God does all that in order to bring us back into a free and loving relationship with God and with each other.
 
That’s what we learn from Christ about God. That is the God we know in Christ.
 
What we learn from Christ about our world is that it is created good, that it is in the process of being redeemed, that it is destined to be fully God’s world once again.
 
The Christmas story as we normally tell it is sweet, all about the baby Jesus and the shepherds and the wise men bringing gifts. It’s beautiful, and it’s fun, and its especially good for children.
 
The service of Lessons and Carols is all of that. It’s fun to hear the different chapters of the biblical story, punctuated with Christmas hymns between each lesson.
 
But the service of Lessons and Carols goes beyond sweet or fun. Lessons and Carols points us to the deep truth that the first Christmas challenged everything we thought we knew about God and about the world. The first Christmas introduced us to a side of God we could not otherwise have known. On the first Christmas, Christ entered the world, God incarnate, God with us in the world. Christ remains in the world, with us always.
 
And so on this first Sunday of Christmas, I end with thanks to God for his Word and for the opportunity to celebrate that Word in songs of praise.
 
In Christ’s name. Amen.