01.01.2023 - Christmas 2 - Incarnation

Scripture: Hebrews 2:10-18

Hebrews 2:10–18 NRSV

10 It was fitting that God, for whom and through whom all things exist, in bringing many children to glory, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through sufferings. 11 For the one who sanctifies and those who are sanctified all have one Father. For this reason Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters, 12 saying, “I will proclaim your name to my brothers and sisters, in the midst of the congregation I will praise you.” 13 And again, “I will put my trust in him.” And again, “Here am I and the children whom God has given me.” 14 Since, therefore, the children share flesh and blood, he himself likewise shared the same things, so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, 15 and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death. 16 For it is clear that he did not come to help angels, but the descendants of Abraham. 17 Therefore he had to become like his brothers and sisters in every respect, so that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make a sacrifice of atonement for the sins of the people. 18 Because he himself was tested by what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested.

Incarnation

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Awareness

It is a new year, and we have a lot of opportunities and challenges waiting to meet us. It is the time of year when businesses bank on our budding self-awareness that happens as things grind to a halt after Christmas Day before launching out again into the wild months of January and February. We aren’t expecting or wanting complete self-awareness. That kind of insight might wreck our economy. Instead, our world wants us to look down at ourselves and say, “I can’t believe I ate that much over Christmas weekend. I’m going on a diet and buying a gym membership.” We will stick with the diet and gym membership until we get to the Super Bowl party, about a month from now, at which point we will lose said awareness until it is convenient to pick it up again.

It is not that change does not happen. On the contrary, it does every year. However, many of those changes do not occur by choice. They happen because our cultures, lifestyles, quirks, and habits run our lives for us and lead us to seemingly inevitable conclusions. Counselors deal with us all the time, and their sessions may seem like watching primetime sitcoms and dramas. Yet, something goes wrong within the first few minutes of our week's story. Everyone reacts in their typical way. We band together to devise a reasonable solution, but someone falls through, and everything begins to fall apart at the seams. Then, at the last minute, there is a glimmer of hope that barely gets us through the day, but our story ends, revealing yet another challenge for tomorrow, bigger than the one we faced today.

Those tv shows get very predictable after a while. Unfortunately, so do our lives, especially when we use the same scripts in the relationships around us, day after day. I am not a trained counselor, but one of the few tools I have to share with those dealing with relationship issues is to change the script. Say something different. Do something different than you did last time. Change the script.

God created us with a good and growing relationship with Him, and Adam and Eve decided to follow the devil’s script instead. Every generation after them has been stuck in a loop, committing the same sins repeatedly, which ultimately leads to our destruction. God sent prophets to call us out of sin and set high priests to help us find forgiveness and live according to God’s plan. Every step of the way was made with intentional choices, though, and all too often, we chose to do the same thing. It may have a slightly different spin, but it takes us to the same place. Broken, disappointed, and separated from God, the source of everything good in life.

Our prophets and priests were sinners, just like us. They had good and bad days, and some ended up failing altogether. So God decided to change His side of the script and do something different. Rather than calling people out of sin and giving them the rules to live by, God came down Himself in Jesus Christ. Jesus was God Incarnate, or God “in the flesh.” Fully God and fully human, all in one. Because Jesus is God, not just a person carrying a message from God, He can truly offer us forgiveness, and because He is fully human, He can show us how to make intentional choices to live for God.

Jesus can lead us because He knows what it is to be us.

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Choices

We don’t live lives like Jesus. We were not born from immaculate conception, nor do most of us die on crosses. Everything in between tends to be different from Jesus as well. So it is strange to claim that we can have eternal life like Jesus, the power to overcome sin and death like Jesus, and the opportunity to become adopted children of God. Like Jesus. We strive to become more like Jesus every day, from using the power of the Holy Spirit to empower us to serve with our spiritual gifts to simple things like putting up stickers to remind us to consider: “What Would Jesus Do?” Everything about accepting Jesus and becoming a disciple of Him, and everything that follows, is strange because we often consider Jesus a visitor from Heaven who came to hold the door open for us. But that is because we do not understand how God could become human.

One of the most significant aspects of being human is having choices, and Jesus had many in His life. I don’t know if He, from his home in Heaven, was able to choose the time and circumstances of His birth, but He was certainly able to choose the circumstances of His death. There were days that we don’t have recorded in scripture when Jesus experienced pain, grief, and sorrow. It is weird to think about, but Jesus probably caught a cold at one point or another. We know he experienced heartbreak, betrayal, and conflict in his family. While his life may have looked different than yours and mine, Jesus suffered just as we suffered. And He did it by His own choice.

Our passage today tells us that this made him the perfect sacrifice for us. He accepted our consequences when He could have escaped them. When a guilty person suffers, we don’t even blink. “You reap what you sow,” we say to each other. Maybe that punishment will deter others from following in their footsteps. When a righteous person sees others being punished and says, no, take me instead of them, it gets our attention. The world wakes up when the killer is set free at the end of the story because the detective offered up his own life in their place. That script doesn’t work! Please send it back to the editors. No one will learn to live right that way! They won’t be afraid of punishment! They will take advantage of the love of others and keep on sinning. It won’t make any difference.

Except it makes a difference for the one who was set to die in their sin. Those who haven’t been caught and think they won’t get caught don’t care, but for those of us who know we have done wrong, seeing Jesus die for us makes all the difference. We understand that he chose the worst parts of human life and offers us the best part of eternal life.

Jesus didn’t choose to suffer because He liked it. He chose it because God asked Him to, and He loved His Heavenly Father, and He loved us as well. He was tempted to make different choices. The devil tried to get Jesus to use His power to have the smallest bit of comfort in His life, but Jesus refused. He did not want to use His power to make Himself any better than you or me. Instead of using His Godlike powers for Himself, He instead trusted God to take care of Him, just as God asks us to trust Him to take care of us.

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Priestly support

Verse 18 says,

18 Because he himself was tested by what he suffered, he can help those who are being tested.

Not only was Jesus a perfect sacrifice, He, like a High Priest, can help us move from living in sin to living with God. There are support groups worldwide that help people move from a path of death and destruction to healthier living. They have a plan, and the best plans have specific and intense instructions to get to that better life. But it takes work and a supportive community to help us make those intentional changes that overcome our own cultures, lifestyles, quirks, and habits. We won’t take those instructions from someone we don’t trust, and we won’t trust someone who cannot understand who we are.

The suffering Jesus chose to experience allows us to trust Him. When He tells us we need to trust God when the going gets tough, we know that we can believe Him because Jesus experienced the worst life had to offer. He not only knew pain, He knew what it meant to fear pain as He prayed in the Garden before His arrest. When we face the temptation to go our own way rather than follow God, Jesus can tell us He’s been there because He has.

The role of the priest in the time of Jesus was similar to a doctor. If you had spiritual or social issues, or perhaps physical problems that led to spiritual or social concerns, you went to a priest to find out how to get better. They had instructions from scripture to direct you to make sacrifices, cleanse yourself, or sometimes wait on God to bring healing or help. Whatever they told you to do, you were expected to do.

Nowadays, we sometimes go from one doctor to the next, getting second and third opinions until we find one we can trust. We are not always good at following the doctor’s instructions. We feel tempted to diagnose ourselves, self-medicate, tough it out, sit it out, or ignore the pain until it is too much to bear anymore. Sometimes our doctors get it wrong. Many times we get it wrong as well.

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Jesus the High Priest

This is your New Year to live any way you choose. Our lives are not a democracy. Neither voters nor representatives do not make our decisions. No committee meetings will help us decide what kind of life we will lead this year. Instead, our lives are ruled by one throne, and we get to choose every day whom we will allow to sit there.

Will you let one of your friends or family members dictate your life? Do you put a community leader or favorite teacher in charge of your decisions? Or do you work hard to keep yourself on that throne, making sure no one else tells you how to live your life?

We were created to put God on that throne, and He came in the flesh to prove He was worthy of being there. By His suffering, death, and resurrection, we are set free, healed, and helped out of further temptation... if we trust Him enough to follow Jesus.

Because Jesus is God, He can truly offer us forgiveness, and because He is fully human, He can show us how to make intentional choices to live for God. Jesus can lead us because He knows what it is to be us.

Join me as we invite Jesus to be our High Priest and the Lord of our Lives.

Julie will give us a short time of meditation at the end of our communion liturgy, and we invite you to pray at the altar or in your seat during that time.

Communion – The Great Thanksgiving II

Christ our Lord invites to his table all who love him, who earnestly repent of their sin and seek to live in peace with one another. Therefore, let us confess our sin before God and one another. Merciful God, we confess that we have not loved you with our whole heart. We have failed to be an obedient church. We have not done your will, we have broken your law, we have rebelled against your love, we have not loved our neighbors, and we have not heard the cry of the needy. Forgive us, we pray. Free us for joyful obedience, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. Hear the good news: Christ died for us while we were yet sinners; that proves God's love toward us. In the name of Jesus Christ, you are forgiven! In the name of Jesus Christ, you are forgiven! Glory to God. Amen. The Lord be with you And also with you. Lift up your hearts. We lift them up to the Lord. Let us give thanks to the Lord our God. It is right to give our thanks and praise. It is right, and a good and joyful thing, Always and everywhere to give thanks to you, Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth. And so, With your people on earth And all the company of heaven We praise your name and join their unending hymn: Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might, Heaven and earth are full of your glory. Hosanna in the highest. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest. Holy are you, and blessed is your Son Jesus Christ. By the baptism of his suffering, death, and resurrection you gave birth to your church, delivered us from slavery to sin and death, And made with us a new covenant by water and the Spirit. On the night to which he gave himself up for us he took bread, gave thanks to you, broke the bread, gave it to his disciples, and said; “Take, eat; this is my body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” When the supper was over, he took the cup, gave thanks to you, gave it to his disciples, and said: “Drink from this, all of you this is my blood of the new covenant, poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins. Do this as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” And so, In remembrance of these your mighty acts in Jesus Christ, we offer ourselves in praise and thanksgiving, as a holy and living sacrifice, in union with Christ’s offering for us, as we proclaim the mystery of faith. Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again. Pour out your Holy Spirit on us gathered here, and on these gifts of bread and wine. Make them be for us the body and blood of Christ, that we may be for the world the body of Christ, redeemed by his blood.” By your Spirit make us one with Christ, one with each other, and one in ministry to all the world, until Christ comes in final victory, and we feast at his heavenly banquet. Through your Son Jesus Christ, with the Holy Spirit in your holy church, all honor and glory is your, almighty Father, now and for ever. Amen The body of Christ, given for you. Amen. The blood of Christ, given for you. Amen. Sunday school starts in just a few minutes.