Christmas I - Sunday January 1st, 2006
(by Rev. Glenn Brown)
In this morning’s passage we have a transition from God’s grace to us, to God’s gifts to us. The last sermon in Advent was about nothing being impossible for God; from there I proceeded at Christmas to preach about God’s grace, that is, the fact that God freely bestows on us; now I move to the actual gifts which God bestows. I do this because in the language of the New Testament the words grace and gift come from the same root. In the letter to the Ephesians there is reiterated a central message which Paul asserts throughout his letters, that each of us is given gifts to be used in this life.
From Paul’s point of view, the gifts are given primarily for the building up of our faith and the life which we have together in the church. But we know that the gifts we have can also be for our own satisfaction and enjoyment. It is not that we are to be selfish about them, but rather that we get to feel the enrichment of our lives as a result of these gifts.
At New Year’s Day, many of us find ourselves contemplating the past year with its trials and accomplishments, its sorrows and its satisfactions. And many of us also think about the future. You heard various people’s wonderful contemplations about uncertainty – many of us will wonder what the future will bring, and will think about what we want to do to cause things to happen in the future as well. Some of those plans for the future will be small and personal; others will be large and beneficial to additional people, perhaps the community at large.
For there are problems in our society which want broader and deeper engagement and which, perhaps, await solutions which you alone are likely to suggest. (I hear frequently from people that I often seem to assert that the religion demands too much from them. They look for inspiration about matters that are closer to their personal lives. I respect that, and I don’t want this sermon to be taken as just one more list of great problems to solve. But you and I serve a Jesus who said not only that his yoke would be comfortable for us, but also that we would do greater things than even he did. My responsibility and, I think, yours, is to heed both statements.) Those problems include finding a way to use the federal election to force all parties to govern rather than just politic; doing something about the degradation of our society caused by the willful violence we now witness; persuading the rest of society that its religious components are for the most part health-giving; and making preparations so that our children will be able to deal with the environmental problems which have immediate effects, and which will probably become ever more damaging.
But we remember that the core ethic of our religion is loving others as much as ourselves, loving ourselves as much as we do others. So there must be something in this for our own personal satisfaction and fulfillment.
I know a couple who were married many, many years ago. It was the custom of their generation and social set to purchase crystal table settings for weddings, and so it was done for them. But they were a couple who traveled much and so their first relocation caused them to have their beautiful crystal backed in excelsior in barrels. These barrels were moved with them every time over the years, and each residence seemed always so temporary that they did not unpack the barrels for many, many years. It wasn’t until their fortieth anniversary that they unpacked these gifts. Almost all the gifts were broken and now useless. There are other kinds of gifts which we are given, given by God, which may stay too long in storage as we move through our fast-paced lives and which become lost, or lost to us through age, lack of use, or mistreatment. We owe it to God and to ourselves to take a look at all our gifts, those newly given and those given long ago, perhaps at our beginnings, and see if we are getting the joy from them that we ought.
Ours is not meant to be a religion of self-sacrifice – Jesus has already been there, done that. I urge you to look at your life this New Year’s day and consider whether you have gotten to all your gifts yet. Is there some satisfaction you have put off because you have not yet found the place for a particular gift in your lifestyle? Should you really be putting it off? Or is there someone you are loving more than yourself, rather than as much as yourself? I do not pose this question as one who has succeeded in using all his gifts. So in preaching this sermon, I join with you in sitting down to appraise God’s grace.
God has given us “grace upon grace,” as Paul puts it, and has given us gifts. We are to love our neighbours as much as we love ourselves, and we are to love ourselves as much as we do our neighbours. Jesus assures us that his yoke will be appropriate to us, and that we are to do greater things than even he.
Much to contemplate on New Year’s Day.
