Jeremiah 31:7-14
Ephesians 1:3-6,15-19a
Luke 2:41-52

Christmas time is here, finally. All the extra work to prepare is over, and now all the extra work to clean up kicks in. After almost a decade and a half in the kitchen, and now after three years in the office, I still think that if Jesus had known about all the business people did to celebrate his birthday, he would have had second thoughts about being born. But, there seems to be a need for some people to do all the special stuff around Christmas time – the rest of us just get caught up in the whirlwind of it all. Maybe the reason is because it is one of the ways we can tangibly express our conviction that the birth of Jesus is special, and is in fact the most important birth to ever have occurred, because his birth really is about God and creation becoming one.

I have a Hindu friend who emails me to talk about religious things, and he has no problem with saying that Jesus is God, because to a Hindu, everyone and everything is God. I tell him that I prefer the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim view that there is a difference between God and creation. The reason I prefer that view is because I really do hope that God is Love, and I really do think that it takes more than one party to love. If we are all God, and we love each other and God, and God loves us, then all that means is that God has a healthy, well-rounded psychology. It is important to love oneself, but if all there is is just one person loving that self, then I will be greatly disappointed.

I want the God who takes the true risk of love – opening Himself to others who have every right to refuse that love and walk away. God does just that. God loves us, even when we do all we can to pain him and spurn his love. God makes himself so vulnerable that God became one of us just so we could have more opportunities to accept his love, as well as more opportunities to reject it. Jesus is indeed special. He is God, here and now in this universe, on this planet. He is God, and we are not, but we are in a very real way, equal partners in love. Not that Jesus ever spurns our love, but that we can reject his. Jesus reaches out to us every day and every moment with the hope that we will take his love and by so doing become truly human, just like him. If we can remember back in junior high how scary it was asking that special person to our first school dance, or as adults asking that special person to marry us (this example would apply only to guests, of course) – how anxious we were and maybe still are in our dealings with people whom we want to love us – that is how vulnerable God is nonstop with six billion people on this planet. Usually, we say no to his advances. Hopefully, slowly, by doing what we do in this monastery every day, and by doing what others do in their homes and parishes, we all are becoming more apt to say yes to God’s gift of love, and so are being made not only more fully human, as Jesus is, but also even divine.

Jesus is special in a way we are not – he is God and we are not. However, we are made in the image of God, and God sees us all as special in our own ways. As we heard Paul say to his listeners in Ephesus in our second reading this morning, God: “….chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love. He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will…”. God has adopted us – in other words, God has chosen to love us. That makes us infinitely special, and since God sees us all that way, we should also see everyone as a special, chosen child of God.

Yet, how often we don’t do that. Instead, we spend a lot of our time dismissing others as worthless or evil. No one is either of those, since we are made in the image of God – of infinite worth and holiness. We do tend to do worthless and evil things, but that does not change our underlying dignity. The people who need our love and prayers most are the people who fly airplanes into office towers, or who legislate discriminatory laws, or who con money from elderly people. They, just like us, are wonderful, beautiful children of God who are ensnared by sin, and for whom God lived among us and died for us. And we must be careful to never denigrate others as persons, even when they differ with us in religion, politics, or culture. It just might be the case that they pray, read scripture, and want to help others just as much as we do, even though they have come to different conclusions about things. We must learn to discriminate between actions and persons. Persons are always images of God, no matter how much our actions have obscured that image.

We all know that we do not do a good job at always honoring the worth of the people around us, or the people we read about in the news. That is ok, our job is growth, not immediate perfection. We just need to always look at Jesus until we start seeing his face in everyone, and everyone’s face in him. Paul has something to say about that growth, as we heard in our second reading this morning: “I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of Glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power.” Christmas time is here, happiness and cheer – no better time to start on that road to holiness and joy.   AMEN