Grace, mercy and peace be to each of you from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. In concert with our worship theme for today LOVE, the title of my sermon is “Finding Love in Our Differences”. Let’s pray…
“Heavenly Father, we thank you for this day, and for the extraordinary love you have shown each of us through the gift of Your Son. May we all celebrate and spread Your love among those around us, not only during the Christmas season, but every day. We ask this in His precious name. Amen
There once was two old farmers, who were neighbors, but they have a feud that’s been running for years. They no longer speak to each other.
And the whole thing got started over a cat. The cat was a stray, but both farmers began feeding the cat and claimed it as theirs. From there, everything went downhill.
The neighbors quit talking, and the grudge escalated to the point that one of them dug a ditch to reroute a creek to make sure it divided their properties.
One day, a carpenter came through the area looking for work. He knocked on the door of one of the farmers. The farmer thought, “If he’s going to divide our property with that ditch, I will have you build a tall fence all the way across my property.
The carpenter said, “OK, I can do that, but it will take a lot more wood.” So, the farmer went into town to buy more wood, and the carpenter started working with the wood he had on-hand.
When the farmer came back from town, he looked across his field and didn’t see any fence. Instead, he saw that the carpenter had built a bridge across the creek.
And there across the bridge, his neighbor was walking toward him with his hand outstretched, and a big sheepish grin on his face.
“You’re a brave man,” he said. “I didn’t think you’d want to hear the sound of my voice again. Can you forgive me?”
The first farmer was surprised, and as he reached out to shake his neighbor’s hand, he found himself saying, “Aww, I knew it was your cat.”
That story is by the singer David Wilcox, who uses it as an introduction to his song called “Fearless Love,” which is about a church conflict, and a person caught up in it, who remembers Jesus’s teaching to love one’s enemies. The chorus goes like this, “Fearless love makes you cross the border.”
The love that Jesus embodied in our world is indeed a fearless love that literally defies and overcomes fear. Today as we continue our journey through Advent, we are focusing on the love that Jesus brought into our world, into our lives.
As a quick recap, the word Advent means “coming” or “arrival,” and the season is marked by expectation and longing for Jesus’ return.
As we’ve journeyed through Advent, we have been looking at different people in the Nativity story. We have usually dug into the experiences of one individual, but today, I’d like to look at ALL the people in the biblical account of Christ’s birth. When we do, you will realize that the birth of Christ brought together a wide variety of people from across many different divides and contrasts.
If we walk through the story in order, we start with Zechariah and Elizabeth and Mary and Joseph – the old and the young. The prophets and covenants of Israel’s past and the fulfillment of the promise of THE Messiah for a new spiritual future.
Then we meet the shepherds and the angels – the beings of earth and of heaven, the physical and the spiritual.
And as they head to the stable, there are animals as well as people, the beings of creation. And then we can look at Matthew’s Christmas account and meet the Magi. Who were these mysterious visitors from the East?
We are not entirely sure, but we know they had followed a star a long distance to find and worship the promised Messiah. Some scholars even think they may have been from China.
At any rate, whether they are astrologers or some kind of rulers, the Magi are noble and wealthy men, who demonstrate God bridging even more divides.
The Magi are the opposite of the lowly shepherds in human social structures. But their appearance is IMPORTANT because they were Gentiles, not Jews. And their inclusion in Jesus’s birth story echoes the radical idea that Christ the Messiah brings salvation and restoration to all people, not just the Jews.
The Magi are also holy men of some sort. They seem to belong to more of a mystical tradition than the Jewish religion, and they certainly contrast the Jewish leaders of the day.
The bottom line is that there are no Pharisees or Sadducees or spiritual VIPS of the day who are invited to Jesus’s birth.
Instead, there are these travelers of a different race, who are willing to disrupt their lives with a great journey and humble themselves to worship the baby of a poor, unassuming couple in the countryside.
The cast of characters God assembled for the arrival of His Son on earth is far from what we would have expected. And probably even farther from the expectations of the people of that day, who lived and breathed its divisions.
To us, it may seem like a ragtag bunch gathered for Jesus’ birth. And to them, it was downright blasphemous that the Messiah would enter the world so lowly as a baby in a manger with poor parents.
I think you will agree with me when I say that Jesus could not have united any more societal divisions with His birth. And in so doing, God revealed several things about His LOVE, that I’d like us to explore today. First is the idea that…
Christ Is Love Personified.
The Bible talks about love in so many places. It makes the case that God is love, and the Bible is His love story for all humanity. From Creation, God made people and shared time with them in the Garden of Edan as companions and children.
When sin entered the world, bringing death and brokenness and separation from God, He continued to work and covenant with people. Through generations and generations, He worked His plans and promised a Messiah to make a way to restore His relationship with humanity.
That way is Jesus, who is described as the groom and the church as His bride. This relationship with God that He brings us into is a relationship of love. It is a reunion with love itself.
The Apostle John describes the love of God in our first lesson this morning…
“This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins … since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another … we know and rely on the love God has for us.” 1 John 4:7-16
John tells us that God is love. Love is His nature, and He has shown it to us by sending Jesus. When we come to Jesus, giving Him our lives, we are essentially restored to love.
We are fulfilled in love. We can count on God’s love; it won’t let us down. It fills us and fuels us. It calls us and enables us to love each other. And that brings us to our second point.
Love Defines and Propels Us.
Jesus brought this reconnection and restoration to love Himself when He entered the world. Near the end of His earthly ministry, as He is gathered with His twelve disciples for their last Passover meal together, He tells them this…
“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
John 13:34-35
As Jesus teaches His disciples, He wants to make sure that they love like He does. And here’s the most important part: How will people know that they are followers of Jesus? Jesus simple answer … by the love they show to other people.
You have heard this before. How will people know we are Christians? By our love.
Love is what defines us. It marks us and characterizes us. At least it should. The Church hasn’t always done such a great job of this. We as a church body don’t always do a great job of this.
And it’s easy for us to point the finger at some pretty big wrongs by the Church throughout history. And we can all probably think of public Christians and churches in our current times, who make us cringe with anger or embarrassment at their rigid, often unloving actions.
But we must also look at ourselves too. Of course, none of us is perfect, as individuals or as a Church.
But each of us can certainly find opportunities in this Christmas season, and in our current cultural climate, to allow God’s love to flow through us to others. On that note, we move to our final point…
Love Empowers Us to Cross the Borders
Wow, these are divided times. It seems our culture, our nation, our world, our people have multiplied the ways to divide us. It seems the “US” and “THEMS” have been running wild as of late.
It’s by no means an excuse, but throughout history, our world has been filled with wars and plunder and oppression. There have always been the weak and the powerful, the haves and the have-nots. Jesus even said, “You will always have the poor.”
There certainly has been too much US versus THEM since Jesus’s day, and even farther back in history. Sadly … there still is.
That is precisely why Jesus’ teaching was so radical. It is why God’s love is so radical. In our Gospel lesson Jesus said this…
“‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Matthew 5:43-44
Jesus not only tore down the walls of division at His birth, He continuously reached across the chasm of separation and exclusion. He befriended hated tax collectors, and even invited one, Matthew, to become an Apostle.
He spoke with a Samaritan woman at the well, which broke two societal taboos at once, (1) Jews did not associate with Samaritans, and (2) Jewish men ESPECIALLY did not talk with women like this in public.
He told His listeners that if a Roman soldier forced them to carry his pack for a mile, which the soldiers could legally force them to do and often did, they should carry it two miles instead.
One of Jesus’s most powerful stories about this kind of “UNEXPECTED love in action” is the story of the Good Samaritan you heard earlier this morning.
A traveler was robbed and beaten and left for dead on the side of the road. A priest came along and did not stop to help. An assistant priest did the same. But finally, a Samaritan came along and stopped to help. The Samaritan bandaged the wounds, put him on his donkey, and delivered him to an inn. He even paid the innkeeper to take care of the man until the Samaritan could return. (Luke 10:30-35)
This is a good and challenging story for us today, but it was astounding to Jesus’s ancient listeners. The Jews hated the Samaritans. Their racism against the Samaritans went back centuries when the kingdom of Israel split.
The Samaritans intermarried with foreigners, and established their own temple to worship in. The Jews considered them an inferior race with a corrupt religion and viewed them with disdain. But a Samaritan was the one who Jesus held up as an example of loving our neighbor.
Jesus was crossing a huge divide. He reached across cultural, spiritual, political, and racial divisions. And today, He CALLS us to do the SAME. He was constantly illustrating the kind of love John describes later in 1 John, Chapter 4…
“There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” 1 John 4:18-19
Jesus’s love is a fearless love that CALLS us and ENABLES us to cross borders, to tear down barriers, to reach out above any disagreements. The fear that is driven out by love is the fear within ourselves.
Love overcomes the fear of others, who may not look like us, or sound like us, or share the same perspective or experience as us.
Maybe your bridging begins by reaching across the divide within your family. Or, perhaps, in your home or neighborhood or workplace or community.
Jesus, especially at Christmas, calls us together into His loving presence, and invites us to make room for everyone, whether we think they deserve to be there or not.
There is a humility in love, a willingness to put someone else first. Sometimes love means taking the simple step of building a bridge as a gesture and an invitation.
Sometimes it is being willing to listen and not just defend.
It is always being willing to choose to see someone else, not as an “other,” but as an US, equally LOVED by God, equally WELCOMED into His presence, and equally DRAWN into and propelled out of His all-consuming love.
This is God’s love. This is the gift of Christ. This is the heart of Christmas.
As we rapidly approach Christmas Day, I invite and challenge all of us to rediscover Christmas by rediscovering the overwhelming, all-encompassing, all-welcoming LOVE of God.
I encourage each of you to think seriously about WHERE you can build bridges this coming week instead of maintaining walls. Amen …
“We pray as Paul did in Ephesians 3:17-19”…
“And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge – that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.” Ephesians 3:17-19