You might have had no choice but to come and join our Christmas service for the peace of your family. Perhaps in order to have a family Christmas dinner, which would happen right after this service, you really couldn’t skip this part. I’m quite curious how many of you have been somewhat forced to come here by our wonderful and faithful members of Saint Agnes Church! I am not going to ask you to raise your hands if you are here because of family pressure. I’m kind of guilty of that. My son, for example, had no choice. Sitting here and singing Christmas carols might feel like torture to some. Who led you to this suffering!? Well, I can make my sermon short and sweet to lessen your suffering, but I would like you to remember that in whatever suffering, the real suffering you’re in, that is where God comes and is. And Jesus whose birth we celebrate today is that very presence of God in the midst of suffering.
The Christian faith is unique and strange in the sense that we believe in this God who is far from power, wealth, and security. This God who shows himself to us and to the world leaves behind everything that we think God (or we?) should have. It’s like this God doesn’t really help us become powerful, successful, glorious, or be in control of things happening in our lives. Instead, this God gives up what we consider most valuable and worthy in order to show us something else. That is the way of love. What’s most important in our lives, in our community, and in the whole world, what matters to you and me, all of us is this love that God reveals in Jesus of Nazareth. The birth story of Jesus we heard this evening should shock us. We encounter God, not in a beautiful and magnificent castle which represents power and glory in this world, not even a decent looking hotel room, but in a manger. We celebrate the one born of the virgin teenage girl, not yet registered or maybe undocumented, now lying in this unsanitized, filthy, grubby manger. St Luke tells us what situation God got himself into, “...there was no place for them in the inn.” God has no place for himself to be in this world he created. Of course, God does have a place, but chooses to be where he is most unlikely thought to be present. The story doesn’t get any better, that even the glory of this God, this news of God becoming flesh becomes first available to the shepherds who also have no place to live or sleep but stay in the fields to keep watch over their flock all the time. The first people who pay a visit to this God are not of noble background but of working class in St Luke’s version of the story. This birth story of Jesus then takes us to the death story of Jesus. In his death story, we encounter God who is far from being enthroned but is hung on the cross, naked and wounded. We hear the crying voice, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” He’s betrayed by his best friends and persecuted, mocked, killed by the power that be. The ones who are around him are two criminals hung on the cross and his mother, Mary with his friend John standing next to him. The God who is revealed in Jesus of Nazareth comes from the manger to the cross. The mystery of the incarnation lies in the manger, and the resurrection is born out of the cross. What this divine journey from the manger to the cross shows us is God’s love to be always ever present in life’s suffering. The image of this God in Jesus is much closer to the divine firefighter who is running into the fire of your suffering than some kind of superhero who can stop or prevent all the accidents. At this point, some of us might be disappointed with this picture of God in Jesus. This God seems too weak, helpless, and even useless. What good is it to believe in this God who cannot take you out of suffering? Why does God let us suffer if God is love? No theologians until now have a definite answer to this, but what God looks like he’s doing is that he joins in life’s suffering. If we want a kind of god who can simply remove all our suffering, then what this tells us is we fear suffering more than anything else. We might be living in this life driven by fear and anxiety, constantly trying to run away from danger. This kind of deity may be useful yet limited that its purpose is only to get you out of suffering. This god clearly can neither acknowledge nor feel the pain you have in your suffering. This god might be what Karl Marx refers as ‘the opium of the people.’ One of the most unbearable and challenging emotions that humans can experience is this feeling of being helpless or powerless. Especially, when we see our loved ones suffering, this feeling of powerlessness and helplessness intensifies, which itself becomes a different type of suffering. We want to do something for that person we love, and there’s nothing much to do but to stay with them. As a hospital chaplain whose training is to bear and stick with that experience of being helpless, useless, or powerless, I can tell you that this act of sitting in the midst of your loved one’s suffering may be the most powerful expression of love you have for that person. And into that very suffering that we cannot join, God jumps in, sits with, suffers with, bleeds with, cries with, and loves those suffering in isolation no matter what. I see lots of family reunions in our gathering. One of the things that family does for one another is to care for one another, especially when one member of the family suffers whether physically, financially, emotionally, or spiritually. For our family members we love and care, we never turn our eyes away from their suffering. It is because deep down in our hearts, we know very well that your family is not replaceable. This is so, not simply because you’re biologically tied to each other, but because you know them, share your life with them, and love them. When we know someone in a deeper level to the point where we start caring about, that person becomes irreplaceable. And in Jesus, you are never replaceable. A lot of corporates like to say something like “We are one family in this company.” This is actually not true because families don’t fire each other. We don’t lay off our family members. This evening, we are gathered to celebrate the coming of God in Jesus of Nazareth. Let’s look at where God comes in. Into the teenage girl’s womb, in the manger, on the cross, in the tomb, into all your sufferings. In the midst of suffering, he dies with you and rises with you. This is the way of love that Jesus shows us, and we are called to find Jesus in our suffering and let others meet Jesus as we are present to their suffering. And as we are irreplaceable in God’s household, those suffering become irreplaceable in our lives. Let us look at the manger where Baby Jesus lies. Let us look at the cross where Jesus is hung. Let us not turn our eyes away from suffering where Jesus is. This call to face suffering where Jesus is born into doesn’t justify human suffering or any kind of suffering. What we believe and see in Jesus, however, is that out of that suffering, the joy and hope of the resurrection arises. Only because of the one who we see in suffering, it becomes bearable, promising there’s something beyond that suffering. And we see that it is Jesus who picks us up, resurrects us, and sends us back to those suffering with the hope that Jesus has brought. In this holy season of Christmas, may God grant you the courage and faith to look at your own suffering and that of others to see Jesus who loves you until death and raises you from death. And may you find the divine joy of meeting Jesus in you and others in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. |
Paul"...life up your love to that cloud [of unknowing]...let God draw your love up to that cloud...through the help of his grace, to forget every other thing." Archives
January 2025
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