Sunday Before Nativity

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ… I greet you this morning at the beginning of a new year. In a few moments we will pray together for God’s blessings on the new year before us and pray that we all might experience health, salvation, and all good things. We all wish for happiness and peace in our world.

But where is that peace to be found? As we look at the world around us, we sadly see so much suffering… nation fighting nation in wars, brother against brother in hatred and killing… Why is the world so broken? And the question placed before me so often is: Where is God in all of this? Can’t He do something about it?

The answer to that question is ‘Yes, of course God can do something – and He has.’ But what God has done is so little understood by us and so contradicts what we think we would want Him to do. We may dare to even place the blame for the presence of evil in this world upon God and standby passively demanding that it is up to Him to stop it.

In thinking this way, we disassociate ourselves and our behaviors, words, and thoughts from having any impact or responsibility for the sorry state of the world. We do not realize that our sins, our anger, our lack of love – all of these things contribute directly to the unfortunate state of things. As Professor Ivan Andreyev wrote in his book on Moral Theology: ‘All for one and one for all are guilty: this is the essence of the social ethic of Christianity… We are all guilty, for we are sinful; we do evil, contribute our evil to the universal storehouse of evil. And this evil accumulates into an immense universal energy of evil and seeks for its incarnation the vessels of bodies without grace, and when it finds them it becomes incarnate in them and they perform great evil deeds. Let each one think of himself – what were you doing at the time when some evil deed was performed? Perhaps it was your sin, your immoral deed, your malice, which turned out to be the last little drop which caused the vessel of evil to overflow. This is the way we must reflect, if we are Christians.’

If we can have the humility to begin to glimpse this reality of our interconnectedness to all things, then we may begin to understand the depth and the breadth of what God has done for us.

We stand today on the threshold of the great feast of the Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ. The significance of the incarnation of Christ is something that goes so far beyond what our human solutions might come up with… our desire that God would step in and overpower us. No, God’s plan in the incarnation is an act of extraordinary compassionate love which addresses the brokenness of the world at its core… within each individual human heart and soul!

The Evangelist John proclaims: ‘For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.’

The suffering and brokenness of the world is not a concept or an impersonal problem to be overcome. It is a collective issue of the consequences of the lives of each and every individual human being. And the way out of that brokenness takes place within the life of each and every individual human being.

The Divine Lord became human in order to restore all that it means to be human back to its intended nobility.

When we contemplate the fact that God Himself has taken on humanity and become a man born in time and place, a man of flesh and blood, submitting Himself to cold and heat, to friendship and loneliness, to hunger and fullness, to joy and to sorrow, even unto torture and death... we should not only be astounded by the generosity and compassion of God, but we also must recognize that God – having passed through the human experience – understands our own sorrows and trials in the most intimate way possible… for He has endured them all.

And not only has He endured our pains and sorrows, but as God, He has triumphed over them and has transformed them – giving us hope and opening them up as a door toward our own healing and salvation.

People see the sorrows and misfortunes in the world today and they say: ‘Where is God?’ Why doesn’t He do something?’…

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ… God does not stand impotently by, at a distance from the sorrows of the world! He descended from His Heavenly Throne to enter into the misery that WE have created of this fallen world. He bore everything upon Himself and He has triumphed over it. He does not rob us of our freedom, He does not overpower us – with a stroke of His hand solving things by spiritually lobotomizing us, making us obedient robots. He calls to us from His humility as a babe in a manger and as the Heavenly King Who suffered and healed all for our sakes. He knocks on the door of the individual human heart and promises to heal us if we will allow it.

Let us watch and pray as we await the awesome Nativity of our Lord. Let us reflect on how incredible it is that He who cradles the universe in the crook of His arm deigns to be cradled as a child in the arms of a young virgin. May the words of the Holy Evangelist John the Theologian resound in our soul, that Christ ‘was the True Light which gives light to every man coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, and the world did not know Him. He came to His own, and His own did not receive Him. But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name: who were born not of blood, nor the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.  …And of His fulness we have all received, and grace for grace. For the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.’ Amen!