Gloria Dei Lutheran Church

Texts: Isaiah 52:7-10; Hebrews 1:1-4; John 1:1-14

Dear Friends in Christ, God’s grace and peace be with you.  Amen

In Kate DiCamillo’s sweet story, Ferris[i], we meet 11 year old Ferris, and her best friend Billy Jackson. Billy, being raised by his father, plays “Mysterious Barricades,” on the piano over and over and over again. We’ll learn later how the song helps him remember his mother who died before he knew her. But throughout the story, Billy’s song seems to help his friends (and in fact, their whole community) grow to trust the abiding goodness of love in spite of belligerent relatives, challenging problems, and deep sorrows.

When Ferris asks Billy what the point of love is if people die, Billy replies, “That’s what music is for.” Charisse, Ferris’ dying grandmother agrees, “Every good story is a love story,” she teaches.

Every good story is a love story.

So here’s mine: John and I were both right out of college when we were placed as volunteers in service jobs in cities across the country with a small group of housemates. I was placed in Milwaukee where I taught math in a struggling Catholic grade school; John was in Cleveland with the food bank.

Periodically, all the volunteers from the Midwestern cities of our organization gathered together at idyllic retreat settings to reflect on our work, take a break to pray, sing, and play together.

After the second retreat, John sent me a letter including a recipe for some cookies someone from his community had made that I had loved. I responded with a thank you note, and we slowly started a letter exchange that over the coming weeks grew friendlier and sweeter. My housemates grew suspicious and probably giggled behind my back as I casually asked if the mail had come.

Eventually, the relationship grew from pen-pal to romance, and we became long-distance sweethearts.

Over the next few years, each of us pounded out letters on the trusty manual typewriters we had carried with us from college and stayed in touch as best we could. Each of John’s missives, which admittedly arrived more frequently than I replied, was a gift. I loved reading his humorous accounts of the work he was doing, or interactions between him and his friends, and simply his take on life. The words were compelling.

But after 3 years, both of us wanted more than words on a page. The real presence of being with each other living in the same city, became the gift that changed my life. The word became flesh, you could say, so love could flourish.

Every good story is a love story.

So here’s ours: From the very beginning was the word of God. The word was God. The recipe was sweet and created. The message shone with God’s glory, and it was good[ii].

In the fullness of time, the word became flesh, and lived among us, so love and life could flourish. The word, the beauty, the song, the wisdom of God, was poured into the life of Jesus. And if the word could become flesh, then the word is baked into all creation. The whole cosmos reveals the presence of God; all the ends of the earth can see God’s love made real.

Every good Christmas story is a love story. Many of us love to tell the one we heard last night: angels sing good news; shepherds rush to see for themselves; sages follow the star.

But in my favorite images of Christmas, the glory is revealed to many more. Not only the shepherds, but the sheep on the hills catch the angels’ Gloria; not just the donkey who carries dear Mary, but a little drummer boy, and a baker woman from the village, and the dove in the rafters all hear it too. There are always a few renditions which include unlikely exotic animals– random peacocks, or panthers, or penguins– strutting in from far off places, and usually a little mouse dancing in the corner. We don’t even shy of singing of pipers piping and dancers dancing, geese laying eggs and calling birds shouting out good news for all the earth.

Inanimate objects of the earth, too: the hay itself glows in the stable, the valleys are lifted up, the mountains brought low, and the stones themselves begin to sing.

The artists and story-tellers trust what all creation has known from the beginning: the glory of God is not inaccessible, but is always and forever being revealed. From distant galaxies and mysterious dark matter, it flows along wind currents and atmospheric pressures, pops out in flowers and colors and changing sunlight, trickles along river streams, shines along icy banks. Its goodness perfumes decaying leaves and passes microbial messages through the dark, moist soil, so that the rocks, hills and plains, all of it, repeat the sounding joy.

In fact, there is no place that does not echo the song’s refrain. Robust choirs proclaim it in crowded cathedrals, and tiny congregations repeat it in familiar carols inside sweet churches out on the prairie.

It’s not confined to houses of worship either. The song hums along light rail tracks and bus lines in and out of St. Paul. It creaks in the limestone and beams[iii] of construction cranes, and in noisy traffic patterns. It whispers in the back of board rooms, and dentist offices, in bank lobbies and government agencies. It bubbles up in classrooms and hospital labs, buzzes in supercomputers calculating long codes of 0s and 1s, and whistles down the hill at the golf course when the first snow falls.

We hear it in sadder spots, too, on corners of the city where people sit alone today, in hospital wards, and hospice rooms, and nearly empty diners. In war-torn Kiev and Gaza, in Madgeburg’s Christmas Market, in cemeteries and the rubble left where mighty structures once stood.

Like Billy Jackson’s haunting piano melody played incessantly, the song of God continues to sing of the love that brought us into the world, even when we can’t remember it. The peace of God becomes flesh in our working to understand our most belligerent relative. The wisdom of God is shown in our efforts to bridge divides and solve unknown mysteries. The beauty of God is made real in the kindness we offer those who are grieving or lost. It holds us close when things are crumbing around us, and it urges us forward when our fears seem too strong. Its goodness is baked into the very stuff of earth: wind, fire, water, bread wine, you, me.

Its music reminds us of the point of love–that in spite of loss or struggle we might see God’s glory, full of grace and truth.

No love story is ever completely written. My husband and I are still writing ours, through our own challenges and sorrows, our own divisions and losses. Each chapter feels a little sweeter than the last, and pulls us ever more fully into the life that we’ve hoped for.

God’s greatest love story is still being written, too, and we are the main characters. The word is proclaimed in the songs we sing, in the puzzles we strive to untangle, in the gifts we exchange, and in the grace we know in our daily lives. The light shines in the darkness, the love lives on in new generations, the sweetness takes on flesh in us, and we see the very Glory of God. Christ is born today!

______________

[i] DiCamillo, Kate, Ferris, Candlewick Press, March 5, 2024.

[ii] John 1:1-14

[iii] Brokering, Herbert, Earth and All Stars.