Every preacher likes to be
told that the sermon was great. It gives the ego a boost. Yet the preacher's
ego being inflated is not the goal of the sermon. J. H. Jowett on the real goal
of the sermon: "What you are after is not that folks shall say at the end
of it all, 'What an excellent sermon!' That is a measured failure. You are
there to have them say, when it is over, 'What a great God!' It is something
for [people] not to have been in your presence but in His."
When I read that quote, I was
a little ashamed. My shame came not from the fact that my goal in preaching is
to receive compliments – it is not (but, to be honest, it is always nice to
hear when it happens), but that I often forget what that goal is: to remind all
of us, myself included, how great God is.
God is great. That is, above
all else, the message of the Christmas Season. In spite of everything, in spite
of our sinfulness and selfishness, in spite of the fact that we often think
more of ourselves than we do of God, in spite of everything we have done and
will continue to do, God loves us. As that famous passage from John reminds us,
God loved us so much that he gave us His Son whose birth we celebrate during
this time.
God gave us God’s Son to love
us, to live and die for us, to show us by his life the type of life we, too,
can and should live – from the moment of our birth to the moment of our death
and every second in between. It was not an easy life for Jesus, to be sure and,
as we all well know from experience, it is not an easy life for us at times.
But it is the life we are called to live.
The Christmas Season is a
time for remembering God's greatness, a time for giving thanks for God’s great
love and God’s great Gift to us, a time to remind ourselves that our lives are
to reflect God's glory and not our own by what we say and do each moment of
each and every day. We do all that, or at least try to do that. But like preachers, we often forget that we
are to do it all the time and not some of the time.
Maybe we'll never get it
right all the time given our humanness. No, we will not get it right all of the
time. Thankfully, God knows and understands and forgives. Maybe that is why we
need seasonal, if not constant, reminders of who we are, who God is, what God
has given us and what we should do in response.
May we all take some time
during this season to personally reflect on God's greatness and goodness and
give thanks in the way God did in and through Jesus: by giving of ourselves to
others even more than we already do. Giving ourselves: not giving gifts but the
greatest gift of all, the gift of self. That is not always easy to do, as the
Gospels remind us. But as those same Gospels also attest, the grace of God is
always present, always offered. May we be open to receive it. And not only
receive it, but do all we can to live it.
A blessed and grace-filled
and grace-giving Christmas and every day thereafter.
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