December 22, 2013
The Fourth Sunday in Advent

"What's your sermon going to be about this week?"   Phyllis usually asks me this question about the middle of the week, thinking that I certainly will have my thoughts organized by then.   Surely there must be a plan, anyway, she thinks.   But sometimes not.    So my answer is always the same.  "I'm preaching about love."

After all, love is at the heart of the Scripture’s witness, at the core of anything we can possibly understand about the creator of the universe.   Some physicists even postulate, in a huge use of scientific metaphor, that love is what holds star systems, planets, moons, and constellations together.   Love is the gravity that binds the worlds of our own human constellations as well.      But the love we proclaim in this Christmas season is a power of a different sort.   It is not simply a gravitational force that pulls everything together, a warm feeling of attraction to those who appeal to us.   It is an act of will.   The divine will chooses to love what is unlovable, rebellious, distant.   It reaches out to us not at our best, but at our worst.

This weekend I performed a wedding.   The reception hall was decked out in garland and twinkling white lights, and on the wall the bridal couple's initials were formed out of pine cones.   They were a lovely pair who have been together eight years, and as they said their vows they looked at each other with that romantic gaze which says, "You are the most wonderful person I have ever known.   I love you."   I hope that they will always remember that moment.   But when the difficult times come and the romance fades a bit in some weary winter of their marriage, I hope that they will still choose to love each other, to be just and kind and humble to each other anyway.   I hope that love will still surprise them  in the dark corner of a stable or a wintry shepherds' field.     I pray that love will never let them go, no matter where their journey may take them.    Love is the greatest gift we can ever receive, the greatest thing we can ever give.  Love is what we must choose.  Love is what God chooses.    Always.

Love the Gift

Tune: Von Himmel Hoch
From Heaven Above to Earth I Come

Now is the year's festivity
The time of berried branch and tree
Of feast and gift and candle light
To mark a birth one holy night.

For this small child there seems no place
As humans venture into space
And probe the atom's mystery
Or search the secrets of the sea.

But still we come, from all the earth
To marvel at this manger birth,
And bend our hearts in quietness
As we our tender love confess.

O love, the gift on us bestowed,
The light upon our wintry road,
Be child and star and angel song
To guide us through our whole life long.

--Timothy Haut, December 22, 2013