Christmas Eve sermon notes

sketch Xmas 2013 as a panorama--hotels may post no vacancy signs--Some of us are anxiously awaiting safe travel for our loved ones in planes and trains, and cars. A family is packing up to flee to oasis during another holiday rampage-someone mutters some Christmas as they are laid up in a hospital-Somewhere as Nick Lowe sings, they are spending Christmas at the airport- a family happily settles in at a beautiful hotel and are eyed with pain by someone spending the first Christmas in forever alone and on the road

I  was struck again how Luke gives us a political panorama to start the story fo the birth of jeuss. We move from the story of two surprise births into  Roman colonial officials.a political irony to start it with-Go beneath the headlines Luke tells us. sometimes a tiny item on page 6 is the far more important. Who noted the birth of Abraham lincoln? Look beneath the surface of daily events. Hidden away in a seemingly small matter can be someone or something tha twill offer new gifts to the world.

Why no room at the upper room? The only other place it appears at at the last supper.

look at the first audience.and us. Both of us know what it is to be on the outside looking in, to not be the center of attention. We both know what it is like to feel edged out of something due to lack of space. Perhaps the great human fallacy is our secret fear that a hear to does not have enough capacity to hold such love. One of the reasons Christmas is so hectic is that we pla do place the hopes and fears of all the years on to this holiday, but can it sustain the love? Did god wonder how that baby could sustain divine love within?I am so glad to see folks at a Christmas Eve service. We seem to rarely make room in the upper room , the inn of our lives to appreciate the season. Especially, we have lathered the season in so much sentiment that it is difficult to drill into its central Christian affirmation, the Incarnation.   God is fully present in a human life, a baby’s life. the Creator of all is present in a created life.We certainly have no room in the social upper room for so many of our fellow citizens, and I will just touch briefly on the the necessity for us to  make safe places for hte mentally ill to find a place of respite as missouri is doing wht its Fulton project.Maybe one of hte great issues for us with room at the inn/upper room is time. We are so overburdened with too many competing claims on our wallets and attention and compassion, maybe especially at this time of year.

christmas peace without and within

use hymn words for sermon to alert to words last year O Little Town so the cloven skies the portal is made between heaven and earht in that out fo the way village, and the portal opens for us in worship this evening

John Calvin said “when a lodging was refused him among us, it was that heaven might be opened to us, not as a temporary lodging, but as our eternal country, so that the angels might receive us into their abode.”