Paul Walker, “Mercy is in the Air!”
“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.” That’s the message of the angels on the first Christmas, a message that we need today – peace on earth, good will toward all people everywhere. Tonight, we welcome all people everywhere to Christ Church! At Christmas time, most people are looking for peace on earth, and peace much closer to home. Christmas is a time of joy – and of stress.
Comedian Nate Bargatze jokes that every couple is made up of two kinds of people. The one that says, “Hey, we’ve got plenty of money! Let’s go do something fun!” And the one that says, “NO! There is to be no fun had by anybody! And turn the thermostat down to 59 – heat is expensive!” In the Christmas version you get one person who comes in laden with presents for young and old, a $100 free range duck, 3 bottles of Chateau Neuf Du Pape, and Figgy Pudding for an army.
The other person, meanwhile, says, “Wait! What are you doing! We said no presents this year – only donations to the World Wildlife Fund! And who turned the heat up?!” Maybe a little like the New Yorker cartoon of the Wise Men, bringing the gifts to the manger and saying, “Just so you know, Jesus, this is both for your birthday and Christmas.”
Well, all are welcome here - spenders and scrooges, misers and the munificent, the prodigious and the parsimonious. The world increasingly demands us to choose sides, but inside these doors there is no choosing. We’re all on the same side. That’s because we all hear the same Christmas message from the angel: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.”
This 2000-year-old message has endured. 399 years ago on this very day, the poet John Donne, then the Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, climbed into the pulpit and began his Christmas sermon thus, “The air is not so full of atoms as the Church is of mercies; and as we can suck in no part of air, but we take in those atoms; so here in the congregation we cannot suck in a word from the preacher, we cannot sigh a prayer to God, but that whole breath and air is made of mercy. “
Mercy – mercy is in the air! “Love and mercy – that’s what we need tonight.” From the Angel in the Middle East to Donne in London to this preacher tonight - the song remains the same. Peace on earth and good will toward men is as made up of mercy as the air is made up of atoms. You need mercy, don’t you? Writing about Matthew Perry’s death this year, one writer describes the universal human condition. She says, “There are those of us who feel isolated in this world, as if everyone else had some secret formula for getting along, for fitting in, and no one ever let us in on it.”
Nobody has that secret formula all the time. And it’s no secret that Christmas, for all its joy, can be a lonely time as well. It is certainly a time when we need mercy and God’s good will toward men more than ever. Yes, headlines feel dire, and maybe your home front feels lonely, but the Christmas Angel’s message of mercy announces a counter-veiling force that resists the world’s frantic rush to its own ruin.
What does that counter-veiling force look like? Probably not what anyone would ever expect. It’s said – quite obviously – that you only get one chance to make a first impression. When God made His first impression, He chose what seemed to be the silliest tomfoolery imaginable. Into the world’s frantic rush to its own ruin, He chose to come with all the force of a helpless infant. “And this shall be a sign unto you; ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.” A baby? Really? What force does a baby have? Well, when you think about it, an irresistible force. Who doesn’t love a baby? Babies are universally and primally attractive.
A minister friend tells the story of doing a communion service at a nursing home. One day he brought his newborn baby daughter, sleeping in a car seat. A woman named Nancy who had Alzheimer’s was there. Usually she sat still, vacant in her seat. But when she saw the baby, she sprang up and came to the baby and laid her hand on her foot. Nancy was helped back to her seat, but all through the service, Nancy kept getting up to touch the baby. Stripped of all her normal filters, all she wanted to do was be with the baby.
Later we will sing, “Child, for us sinners, poor and in the manger.” God came as a child for us sinners, the power of love overcoming the power of loneliness, the power of light overcoming the power of darkness, the power of mercy overcoming the power of judgement. This child born for us sinners would later die for us sinners on a cross – the power of mercy in its most counter-intuitive and counter-veiling and most powerful form.
All Nancy wanted to do was come see the baby. How about you? Isn’t that, after all is said and done, why you are here? “See how the shepherds summoned to His cradle draw night to gaze. We too will thither, bend our joyful footsteps. Oh, come let us adore Him.”
Merry Christmas! Amen.
