God With Us (Christmas Eve)

Christ.

Amen. Would you pray with me, Father? God, we thank you so much for this day. God, we thank you that you are God with us, that you are Emmanuel. That we have assurance, Father, that in this life and the next, we are not forgotten or alone because of.

Of that baby who was born in Bethlehem centuries ago. We're grateful God, to be together tonight in his name. And we pray all these things in his name. Amen. You can go ahead and be seated.

Well, good evening and Merry Christmas and welcome to Greenwood Christian Church. My name is Matt. I'm one of the ministers here, and we are thrilled that you're here tonight to celebrate the birth of Jesus with us. I gotta find out real quickly who are the dog people in the room. Let me see your hand.

If you're a dog person, there are lots of us. You're in good company here. My family and I are, to be specific, we are golden retriever people. Now, dog people and golden retriever people typically live in the same neighborhood, but we golden people just carry a lot more residual fur with us at any given moment. Despite our best efforts with a lint roller, Allison and I usually have at least one, if not a few, long golden hairs clinging to our clothing.

And if you visit our house, you're probably gonna take a long, stringy souvenir with you as well. We've had goldens for the last 20 years or so. Got a picture of them here. That's Sunny there on the top bunk of the loveseat there, and Luna on the floor in front of her. As you can see, they're very alert and hard working dogs.

But all I have to do is say the word squirrel and they're on their feet and they're looking out the window. We're a family of dog people. And it just so happens that goldens are people dogs. They want to be where we are. So when we watch tv, they watch TV or they sleep on the couch while we do that.

When we're in the kitchen, they usually show up hoping that we're going to drop something edible. When we sit on our screen porch, they follow us out there. When we go to bed, the dogs go with us. I wake up every morning with two golden retrievers sleeping right next to me. Now, not everybody knows this, but golden retrievers actually have excellent technology skills.

I don't know how they enter the data, but there are lots of them like Zebby here who have their own Instagram and Facebook accounts. I mean, there are lots of them. And I think my wife follows every single One of those accounts. She sends me a lot of dog videos, and so do a lot of other people. A friend recently sent me a video about an animal shelter where the dogs choose their humans.

Maybe you've seen some of these videos. In this video, there's a large room full of people. They're all seated around the perimeter in chairs, and it looks like they're all given instructions to just look straight ahead. And then one by one, dogs of all types are let loose to travel around the room and pick their human. So this tiny little mutt comes flying across the room and just does a flying leap into a woman's lap.

And then after that, an English bulldog parks itself in front of another guy, and the guy has to get down on the floor because that English bulldog looks like it has a vertical leap of about 0 inches. So this guy has to get down on the floor. But then this big, fluffy Bernese mountain dog spots a man in a wheelchair and comes up behind him and forces a hug by shoving his nose under the man's arm. And then a golden lab picks an elderly gentleman leaning on a cane. And then a beagle walks up to a couple and just stops and starts to wag its tail.

And then my favorite is a big golden retriever that chooses a tiny little girl. Now, I love that video for lots of different reasons. Part of that is just because there are lots of dogs in it and we are, like I said, dog people. But I love the tears of joy and the wagging tails when those matches are made. I love the way the dogs seem to know instantly from clear across the room who their humans are.

And I love the unpredictability of some of those pairings. Christmas, if you think about it, is all about unlikely matchups. The almighty God of the universe chose to put on a mortal human body, and not just any human body, but a tiny, helpless newborn baby body. Jesus chose not a prominent city like Jerusalem, but the obscure town of Bethlehem as his birthplace. Jesus didn't pick billionaires to raise him.

Instead, he chose a very poor couple. A couple so poor that on the night of his birth, a livestock feeding trough was the only bed they could offer him. And Jesus sent angels to announce his birth first and foremost to some grubby, smelly, socially unacceptable shepherds. Not exactly a Hallmark story. We read in the Gospel of Matthew, the first book in the New Testament, these words.

Matthew writes, this is how the birth of Jesus, the Messiah came about. His mother, Mary, was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be pregnant through the Holy Spirit because Joseph, her husband, was faithful to the law and yet did not want to expose her to public disgrace. He had in mind to divorce her quietly. But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus because he will save his people from their sins.

Jesus came here to save us from the brokenness of this world, which we caused with our own sin and selfishness. Jesus came here not by chance, not by mistake, but with purpose and intention. Matthew goes on to summarize. He says all this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet. The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Emmanuel, which means God with us.

Our world is sometimes so dark and so scary that we're tempted to question whether God loves us or whether he even notices us. But Christmas answers both of those questions for us. God so desires a relationship with you and with me that he crossed time and space and. And he put on a human body to provide us a way back to him. Jesus was the only baby in history who got to choose his own name.

In fact, he chose multiple names, each of them loaded with meaning. Joseph and Mary followed instructions and they gave him the name Jesus, which means the Lord saves. The prophet Isaiah, centuries ahead of time, called Jesus Emmanuel, which means God with us. My friend who sent me that video about the dogs at the shelter picking their humans. He told me when he sent that video to me, he said, I love this idea.

But he said it also brings back childhood trauma of not being picked for games. Not sure I could handle being the last one, and the dog looks at me and turns to go back into the shelter. Do you relate to that? You know, many of us fear being rejected. We fear being alone.

But Christmas reminds us that neither of those things is true of us. God loves us. He refuses to abandon us. It was always his plan from the very beginning, to put on flesh and come after us, to be Emmanuel, God with us, so we don't ever have to worry about not being picked. Scripture says it like this.

In the book of Ephesians, the apostle Paul says God chose us in Christ before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love. He predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ in accordance with his pleasure and will, to the praise of his glorious grace which he has freely given us in Jesus, the One he loves. In him, we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God's grace that he lavished on us. We celebrate Christmas together, not just because of a manger, but because of a cross.

Jesus came to earth and he gave his life for our sins so that every single person in every single place, throughout every single generation who trusts him, can be made holy and adopted into God's family and redeemed from empty dead end living and be forgiven of our sins. So for all of these reasons, we celebrate Communion each and every Christmas Eve. And we want to invite you tonight to join us in remembering that Jesus came to save us. You may have noticed as you came in the room this evening that there are some tables along the back. There are tables corresponding to those along the front of the room as well.

And on each of those tables you'll see some shiny stacked trays containing some double stacked plastic cups. That bottom cup contains a small piece of bread that is simply a symbol of the body of Jesus that He allowed to be nailed to a cross for our sins. The top cup contains grape juice that is a symbol of the blood that Jesus shed willingly for all of us by giving his life. In just a moment, I'm going to pray for us, and then we're going to invite you and whoever you came with this evening to move to whichever of those communion stations is nearest you. And it could very well be that the one closest to you is behind you.

So don't overlook the back wall. We don't want anyone to feel any pressure or obligation to participate. But we do want you to know that you are absolutely welcome. Because what Jesus came to do, he did for all of us, whether we recognize that yet or not. We'll invite you to join us in remembering Jesus sacrifice for us by eating the bread and drinking the juice.

And then you can put your empty plastic cups in the containers that are provided there on the floor. And after you discard those empty cups, we would love for you to take one of the little white round plastic tea lights that you'll find in baskets in the middle of those tables. If you'll take that tea light back to your seat with you. There will come a time a little bit later in the service when we'll all be prompted to turn those tea lights on together as we sing Silent Night. But for now, would you pray with me as we remember the sacrifice that Jesus came to offer.

Lord God, we are grateful tonight for your gift of Jesus.

We're thankful for your willingness to humble yourself, to give up the glory that you are rightfully entitled to, to put on the. The frailties, the vulnerabilities of a human body, to suffer and die in our place on a cross, so that the sin that otherwise separates us from you could be pushed out of the picture forever. We're grateful, God, for that gift. And we're grateful that tonight we have the opportunity to come together and celebrate that. And we ask, Lord, that during these moments that we share together, that you would remind us all over again of the depth of your love for us.