Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

Pray.

Hook:

Headed to Christmas (or any holiday) there is a time of preparation.

Where we kind of do an inventory of who is going to be there and what dynamics we need to manage.

How about those deeper places of hurt and pain.

I remember going to Christmas and knowing that we have a kid now and my parents are separated and my brother in the navy was not going to be able to come home and another brother would spend that time in prison....this is messy.

How do we navigate this?

Last year, those that gathered in this space had to see me preach from a recording on the screen because COVID had me quarantining.

How do we navigate this?

What does this Christmas story instruct me during this time?

Tonight we celebrate the birth of a king, powerful, mighty, the hope of the world.

At the same time we turn our attention to a messy scene.

In the world of this manger, politics, faith, desperation, uncertainty.

This is the place that God inserts himself

The promise of Isaiah captures some of the tension of promise and vulnerability....

Isaiah, a book of hope

The context of Isaiah is a complicated one.

Israel is on the cusp of exile to the babylonians and the assyrians.

Isaiah is charged by God to tell of the coming judgement of Israel at the hands of the enemies and a message of hope.

This is a complicated position for Isaiah.

Isaiah has to go to the king of Judah, Ahaz and tell him that he is going down, is going to lose, and the people will be conquered by the Assyrians.

All of this comes to pass and the people in the middle of this will face complete darkness.

Scripture says:

This is what it will be like when darkness falls.

Distressed people, hunger, anger and fighting, people turning away from God.

This struck me this week.

Characteristics of darkness in the land:

scarcity

desperation

anger

turning away from God

We are not the Israelites facing the Assyrians, but are these ways that we might describe the world we live in now?

What about your world?

So Isaiah then brings a word of hope to the people of Israel, we read it to begin.

He says a light is coming.

Written hundreds of years before the coming Christ and now fulfilled, the light has dawned.

Israel does not get what they wanted, they get what the needed

The people of Israel were fighting against a real looming threat, the assyrians.

They were also fighting against their own selves in admitting they had a problem, but as catastrophe closed in on them, the word of hope is not a temporary relief of suffering but it is the cosmic promise of God.

I know it might be frustrating to us that whatever we are going through might not have a quick fix, but part of the meaning of Christmas and the coming Christ is to raise our eyes, to raise our hearts to a greater reality.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer understood this.

In 1940 he is writing to pastors and church leaders in the resistance against the Nazi Reich.

Even as he himself is largely secluded to hiding at this point, he beckons the pastors to cling to the truth that Christmas brings:

How shall we deal with such a child?

Have our hands, soiled with daily toil, become too hard and too proud to fold in prayer at the sight of this child?

Has our head become too full of serious thoughts … that we cannot bow our head in humility at the wonder of this child?

Can we not forget all our stress and struggles, our sense of importance, and for once worship the child, as did the shepherds and the wise men from the East, bowing before the divine child in the manger like children? -Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Bonhoeffer is not dismissing their problems as not important, but he is challenging our tendency to dismiss things like the incarnation as magical and unhelpful in the face of real life problems.

Man, woman, and child in the midst of anxiety, or the unknown, or suffering, or stress, perhaps tonight your first and most important task is to cling to the baby born in the manger.

What will you find there?

A child

a King

For unto us a child is born

The light has dawned and it is a fragile child born.

He is born to a young teenage girl and in the most precarious of situations.

(Fragility, and the opposite of a King’s birth)

Luke’s telling of the story whispers of the fragility of the politics in place.

A King’s birth would be majestic, it should be an announcement that is celebrated amongst the nobility, declared for the world.

Mother should be cared for and baby receive everything needed.

But this child is born nowhere... like a child set to be forgotten, amongst the forgottens.

(Mary and Joseph cast away)

Did you know that it is likely that Mary and Joseph are not turned away from an Inn....I know that messes up things for you, but it is likely since Joseph is travelling back to his family’s origin that he is turned away from people he knows.

Possibly because of the scandalous pregnancy or because of their being no room.

(Shepherds, example of the nobody’s)

The shepherds are the first to learn and receive word.

These people were the ilk of society.

Their testimony not even welcome in the court of law.

Credibility—none.

Likeability—absolutely 0.

J. Riess puts it this way:

The throne of God in the world is not on human thrones, but in human depths, in the manger.

Standing around his throne there are no flattering vassals but dark, unknown, questionable figures who cannot get their fill of this miracle and want to live entirely by the mercy of God. - J. Riess

Why is this important?

Are you feeling lost?

Insufficient?

Do you struggle with the things of God because it is too hard to make sense?

This story of humble means, this entrance into the world, this birth and all the characters in it is the declaration that Jesus came for the insignificant ones, the lost ones, the rough around the edges.

(Christmas’ best:)

It is hard to see it on Christmas Eve.

We get all dressed up in our best.

Try to get a Christmas photo.

Heck we even provide the photo booth and the hot chocolate to coax the kids into “just one good one.”

But the truth is behind it all....I am certain many of us feel like a mess.

Most of us, if we are honest, need to hear that God is present in the middle of it.

I know I do, Desperately need to hear that there is light in the middle of it.

Santa the other night for a toy drive.

It was so fun.

Two types of kids, the teenagers soooo embarrassed by me and their mom making their window roll down.

Then the enamored completely into it kids.

Have you been good this year?

Truth is none of us has.

Santa is not theologian because we all stink in our own way.

While this is true, it is not the primary message of Christmas.

So I started to say, “you are loved”

The child born in the middle of the chaos communicates a God who came to redeem it.

This light came for the darkness, how do you know? because he went straight for it!

But here is the thing.

The child is also a king.

Isaiah 9 tells us this child is on a mission: