Love Has No To-Do List
FROM THE RECTOR
This sermon was preached at St. Paul's on Christmas Eve.
Merry Christmas! You’re here. You made it. You can check getting to church off your list. Take a deep breath. Know that God is here and that, simply by showing up, you’ve already done everything you need to do in order for God to meet you in this place. I’m glad you’re here. And I believe that God is, too. I just wish the secret to navigating the rest of my holiday stress was as simple as showing up.
The holidays are hard, aren’t they? And that’s true even when Christmas Eve doesn’t fall on a Sunday. You’ve got to figure out what gifts to buy and where to find them. You’ve got to go to work parties and neighborhood parties and friend parties and family parties. There’s food to make for your own household and food to give away. Then there’s travelling—either loading up the car and setting out or welcoming your family in from out of town. Either way, it’s a hassle. And the whole time there’s the struggle of trying to keep the peace between people who seem to show up just looking for a fight.
All we really want is for the people we love to be happy, but making other people happy is a pretty stressful affair. Maybe if they just told us what they want—if they made a list of all the gifts and foods and conversation topics that would make them happy and gave it to us, then we would know exactly what to buy, what to cook, and what conversations to steer away from. If we could just add all of their preferences to our holiday to do list, then maybe everything would work out just right. But you know that isn’t how it works, don’t you?
When I was a little kid, I spent a week at my grandparents’ house every summer. It was a magical week of being the center of attention. Each day while I was there, my grandmother planned a different activity like going to the museum, playing miniature golf, or showing me off to some of her friends. One thing we never failed to do was go Christmas shopping. My grandmother would take me through the mall—from Toys-R-Us to Macy’s department store to Barnes and Noble—and let me pick out whatever I wanted to find under the tree five months later. At first, it was a fabulous arrangement. Who doesn’t want to pick out his own presents? There was no risk that an out-of-touch septuagenarian would choose the wrong thing.
But, before long, the magic was lost. By the time I was eight, my memory was good enough that I could pick up every wrapped gift and know exactly what was inside before I tore off the paper. About that same time, I started to feel some pressure to pick out the “right” gift—the one that would make my grandmother happy. As we went shopping, I picked up on what I thought were subtle clues about what she thought her grandson should want, and I often ended up with a pile of books, CDs, and learning games that were better suited for a classroom than a playroom. She wanted to make me happy, and I wanted to make her happy, and, in the end, neither of us was.
Even perfectly made and perfectly executed plans fall short. We don’t want stuff under the tree. We want the stuff under the tree to be a sign that we are loved. And we want to be loved without having to tell someone what to get or what to cook or what to say in order to make us feel loved. We want to be loved by someone who loves us enough to know us and care about us and do all those things for us just because they love us. And we want to love them back in the same way. We want to love them in a way that shows them just how much we love them—more than they can possibly imagine. But loving someone like that isn’t easy. Even perfect plans fall short. And that’s why the holidays are so stressful. But it’s also why Christmas is so important.
On this holy night, we hear the angel say, “To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” And, with those words, God let us know that it doesn’t matter whether our plans are perfect or whether they miss the mark completely. What matters is that God has already loved us and that God’s love has the power to make us perfect.
The birth of Jesus was not a plan set in motion but the fulfillment of God’s love for all time. The angel didn’t say that the child would one day grow up to be our savior. God did not tell the shepherds to come back in thirty years when the child was ready to take charge. God did not ask the world to stay tuned and wait for the day when Jesus would come and save them. The good news of Christmas is that our salvation comes to us as fully and completely as a newborn baby. Like any child who comes into our lives, God’s salvation isn’t something we need to learn how to take advantage of or figure out how to use. It’s not something we can mess up or get wrong. The gift itself is perfect because it is perfect love.
There in Bethlehem, all the love we would ever want to show or ever hope to receive is wrapped up in those bands of cloth and laid in that manger. That’s because, in the birth of Jesus, God has taken what is unavoidably imperfect within us and united it to God’s perfect self in order that all our brokenness might be made whole. And all we have to do is show up. There is no assembly required. There is no need to keep up with gift receipts. There is no chance that something will not fit. There is no worry that our plans will fall short.
By coming to us as perfect love, God makes our love for each other perfect. God does not give us the Christ child to show us that we have the potential to become better—that, if we work at it hard enough, we might actually succeed in loving one another as fully as we hope. No, in the birth of our savior, God has already made our love perfect by loving us perfectly.
We come this night to see again how much we are loved—enough that God would be born in us and for us. On this night, our souls are filled again to overflowing, not because they have been empty or lacking but because, at Christmas, we see again that they have always been full. It is nothing less than our own perfect love that we behold in the birth of Jesus our savior.
“Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.” Let us see in the Christ child how much we have been loved by God—loved even to perfection—and let us love one another with that perfect love which is God’s gift to us this night.
Yours Faithfully,
Evan D. Garner