Christ is Lower Still
Sermon Notes 12-24-24
To celebrate the third day of Christmas, I’m sharing my sermon notes from our Christmas Eve service. I preach from an outline, so there isn’t a transcript to share. Every Sunday that I preach, I share similar sermon notes with supporting members. But I wanted to share my message this year with everyone. Listen to the song Christ is Lower Still that inspired most of this sermon.
I do hope these outlined notes will convey the meaning of the sermon, even with the incomplete sentences and shorthand. I also hope this will be the beginning of a conversation, so please comment and share your questions.
If you’ve ever felt a little bah humbug, you’re not alone.
I thought I was so smart this year and got net lights for our hedges. I bought them early and on sale, and of course, by the time I went to put them up, I realized 2/3 wouldn’t light.
What am I doing? Why do we do this? Christmas is hard work!
How does this have anything to do with Christian faith?
If you’ve ever celebrated Christmas in another part of the world – that isn’t dark and cold – you can more easily see just how influential Charles Dickens is over the Biblical account itself.
In Northern hemisphere, most practices have to do with winter, not incarnation: Lights, bringing tree inside, baking. Don’t get me started on Gift giving: its own thing – taken on life of its own, own orbit.
I ask myself: does anything we do actually celebrate the incarnation? Is anything at least remotely connected to actual Christian theology and teaching? Sure, there’s generosity and connection. But that doesn’t really have anything to do with incarnation, per se. Before you call me a scrooge, stick with me …
Let’s take step back: what is Incarnation? Belief that Jesus isn’t just a learned teacher or a nice guy, but that God chose from all time to live a human life. Jesus was fully human and fully divine. God wants not to be far from us but close. God didn’t give us a doctrine, or book of rules, but came to us in human life, told stories, taught in parables.
When we emphasize that Christ came as a baby, it’s not to valorize family life. (I’m all for family life – two thumbs up). But we emphasize that Christ came as a baby to show how God chose to come into the world: as a fragile infant – completely helpless and in need of care.
This goes against ideas of God as above everything, high and mighty, invincible. If you’ve been around a newborn recently they are weak, fragile, in need of constant care.
I always bristle at the Christmas songs that say how different Jesus was from other babies “No crying he makes”? Yeah right.
Instead, I prefer those that emphasize what a risk this was for God to come as baby. Turns out Christ’s fragility wasn’t something that went away. Just look at the way he died – abandoned and executed alongside criminals by violent empire.
It’s the lowly part that really sticks with me. We love to think of God as all the superlatives: all powerful, high above, ‘my ways are not your ways’. And sure, all that’s true.
And the paradox of Christianity, the uniqueness of God’s presence in Jesus is that God isn’t above us, separate, or distant. But here. Right where we are, going through what we go through.
This is actually really good to hear, and a shift of what the popular understanding of God - like Zeus, judgmental and scowling on a cloud with lightning bolts. Instead, God is as tenuous and feeble as we are, living minute-to-minute like a baby.
I don’t really know how one makes holiday traditions around God as fragile, forgotten, iconoclast, but at least we’re off to a good start
This Advent season, we’ve explored theme as those who dream: Dreams of hope, peace, joy, love. “Dream” less as a goal and more as a vision.
No matter what life circumstance we’re in, we can always dream. I think of people at lowest point in life still having the courage to dream. In fact, especially when we are low, we dream even more boldly.
The courage it must have taken for people like Nelson Mandela to stare out the window of his prison cell night after night and dream of being released one day. Not just a dream for himself, but for an end to apartheid in South Africa. How many nights over 27 years must it have seemed that those dreams were foolish? This is exactly when we need dreams the most – when we are at our lowest.
When hate is on the rise, we dream of love
When violence is taking over, we dream of peace
When division and rupture separate us, we dream of mending broken hearts
When power stamps out the voiceless, we dream that the last shall be first
This is where the incarnation blossoms into its full meaning. It’s exactly at our lowest point that God comes to us. God is not distant, wholly different and patting our head with a “there-there”. As low as we are, God is just as low with us.
Sometimes we feel so low, so separated from God and like we’ll never be able to dig ourselves out.
No matter how low our experience
No matter what struggles we face
No matter what is going on or how heavy our hearts
Whatever awful thing we are feeling and how low down we feel
Christ is lower still
No matter how much we have been wounded,
No matter how much hate comes at us or at people we love
No matter how low we are being dragged at this moment
Christ is lower still
So God never leaves us alone and therefore, we never leave one another alone.
So sure, hang up lights – why not. Give gifts. Do the winter thing. But most of all, don’t leave one another alone. If Christ is waiting in the valley, let’s wait in the valley too.
And if someone you know is low, if this is an especially hopeless day for whatever reason. If you are looking at the year ahead with dread and dismay. If you have fallen low, we know that Christ is lower still.
Friends, we are not alone. We have never been alone.
And it is really good news for us today, that when we find ourselves in a hopeless situation, that’s exactly where we’ll find Christ waiting for us: sick, in prison, silenced, rejected, in hiding, lost, hopeless.
Tonight, we hold fast to the promise of Christmas that wherever we are, Christ is even lower – and ready to embrace us no matter what.
Thanks be to God!
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~What I’m reading~
Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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