SermonStudio

Seasonal Theme
God with us in human flesh. The incarnation means God knows what it is like and has entered the world to save us.

Theme For The Day
How good is our God and Savior and how bad is our sinful nature which perverts how we ought to be.

Old Testament Lesson
Isaiah 63:7-9
God Elected Us
The words are a prelude to an intercessory prayer of Isaiah, on behalf of his people Israel, which begins with verse 15. They model a good way to pray such a prayer by beginning with praise of God, as do many biblical prayers. Notice the words describing God's grace: merciful, kind, good, and rescuer of the people. Similar verses are found in Psalms 145:7, 51:1, 78, 89, 105, 106. Perhaps this Old Testament reading was selected to give a second punch to the celebration of Christmas, especially in verse 7 -- what the Lord has done is come to be with us in the flesh. That deserves praise.

Verse 8 makes a wonderful claim we can own also -- it is that God elected us to be God's. Verse 9 tells of God's saving which reinforces our relationship with him as one who has seen us in trouble and come to our rescue. And notice it was not just at the beginning of Israel's life that he was with them: "he carried them all those years" (v. 9b). This metaphor is often used for God's care of his people as in Exodus 19:4, Deuteronomy 1:31, and Hosea 11:3. So faith is not so much presented as a burden, but rather as being upheld by God.

New Testament Lesson
Hebrews 2:10-18
God Takes The Initiative
The writer of Hebrews wrote with the emphasis on just how important Jesus is. Here the author says that Christ is the one who brings human salvation. He did this by coming in flesh and blood and identifying with us humans (v. 11b). God takes the initiative and our origin is God. While our separation from God by sin is emphasized, our relationship with Christ is also promised. Psalm 22:22 and Isaiah 8:17-18 are quoted. The emphasis is on the way the Christ conformed himself by becoming one of us so he could sacrifice himself for our forgiveness. And the fact he used this identification gives us the assurance we have his help when we need it.

The Gospel
Matthew 2:13-18
The Holy Innocents
Often called The Holy Innocents, this story is a brutal one following on the lovely account of Jesus' birth. Father Joseph dreamed a warning and so the holy family headed for Egypt, a country where Jews often sought refuge. When they arrived there they would find many Jewish countrymen for support. The quotation of Hosea 2:1 in verse 15 actually had nothing to do with Jesus and nothing to do with their escape in Egypt. Nevertheless, it no doubt influenced the Jews for whom Matthew wrote. Bethlehem was small and probably the number of boys killed about twenty. This sounds like what Herod would do and is a first example of the extremes people will go to get rid of Jesus when his presence threatens what they want to do or be. Matthew again finds a prophecy where none exists in verses 18. But for his day this made sense (Jeremiah 31:15). This story was used later by his enemies to say Jesus worked in Egypt and learned Egyptian magic which he used to work his convincing miracles.

Preaching Possibilities
What a good Sunday to give over to a visiting seminary faculty or an intern! But maybe there is something here after all.

Perhaps the sentimentality of the Christmas story needs this earthy, cruel story to shock us out of the world of over-glamorized mangers, angels, and shepherds. If the incarnation of God in Jesus is too good to be true, perhaps the killing of Bethlehem's boy babies is too true to be good. Suddenly we have the real world impinging on our unreal world. There is the jealously and scheming of King Herod and the actual murder of those children. One might even question first how wise those wise men were when they handled the situation which led to the slaughter.

So we might preach on this Gospel story as an example of how ugly sinful life is and how much we need the Christ to become one of us and to rescue us (Hebrews 2:14 and 15). Could we stretch this story of ultimate child abuse to talk about that subject in this sermon?

Perhaps the best approach is to concentrate on the Hebrews passage and use the slaughter of the boy babies as an illustration of how ugly sin can be and how badly we need "... Jesus to become one of us" (v. 14b). It explains Christmas of a few days ago in a much more realistic way. We also know slaughter of children in our schools and in the Los Angeles Community Center. One could simply concentrate on the Isaiah 63 passage and tell of "things we should know about our own God": is kind, has mercy, is good, and claims us a child.

A hymn can easily be found to re-enforce each of these attributes and might be sung after each point.

Possible Outline Of Sermon Moves
1. Introduction: tell a little of the marvelous experiences of Christmas like family, food, friends, giving, and so on.

2. Then tell the ugliness of this Christmas from items on the news, in the papers, or in your Christmas memories. Now contrast the Old Testament description of how wonderful our God is with the Gospel's description of how awful sin can be.

3. Then move to the Hebrews author's description of what the grown-up Bethlehem Savior does for us.
a. He becomes one of us -- incarnation.
b. He suffered and was tempted like us.
c. He can help us because he knows what it is like and he paid the price for us on the cross.

4. Frame the sermon by contrasting Bethlehem's birth and Bethlehem's slaughter about eighteen months later.

5. Conclude by returning to your own good and bad Christmas just past.

Prayer Of The Day
As Isaiah was thankful, so are we for you are a kind God of mercy who is deeply troubled when we are troubled and offers to rescue us. We celebrate the way you worked it out to be one of us and are thankful you know how it is to live as a human being. Help us to be kind and merciful to each other. Amen.

Possible Stories
In the made-for-television show, Inside The Third Reich, a little boy saw soldiers at the train station coming back from the front. So he slept on the hard floor in order to sympathize with them. After this discovery, the father said, "Son, I hope I can always remember how much I love you right now." The God person comes incarnate to sympathize with the human existence.

Julie Walters, 34, an actress making the film She'll Be Wearing Pink Pajamas, announced during a nude scene that a new ruling by the Screen Actors Guild said that all technicians must also get nude during the filming. The naked truth was that it was a bluff; she told them after they had done it. Jesus came to earth to strip down just like us and share what it's like to be fully human -- it's called the incarnation.