Sunday, December 24, 2017

Dec 24, 2017 - Advent 4 - Children Proclaiming the Gospel

This is the fourth Sunday since we began hearing the words from both Isaiah and John the Baptist proclaiming that a voice cries out in the wilderness. Depending on how you read the punctuation, these passages either tell us that there is a voice crying out that we are to make the paths straight for the coming of our LORD, or that the one crying out in the wilderness is making those paths straight. Either way, we have these prophets of God telling us to prepare for God’s presence, and for the last three weeks, we have been doing that.

And today we have the children proclaiming the Good News and preparing us for tonight.  Today, it is the children who are the voices crying out in the wilderness. The children are the ones telling us that Christ is coming.

You know, the children’s Christmas pageant is not just an exercise in cuteness. I mean, yes, they are clearly amazing and they tell us the Christmas story from a fresh perspective because it is still, in many ways, new to them. And yes, we love watching them up there - their shining faces bring us joy and their innocence touches us.

But we don’t encourage children to lead us in worship because we are sentimental, or because we want the children to feel important, or because we are hoping to create future leaders of the church, although these things are true. We encourage children to lead us in worship because we believe that God comes to us most clearly in those with the least power. When we proclaim that God became flesh in a tiny baby, we’re not doing it because babies look cute on Christmas cards. We’re doing it because a baby is the most powerless creature there is. While the Roman Empire proclaimed that a god’s power comes through the Emperor and through military might and physical strength, the first Jewish followers-of-Christ proclaimed the complete and total opposite: God’s power, true power, comes through those overpowered by the military and by physical strength. 

Two thousand years later, when we proclaim that our God came into the world as a newborn baby who simply cannot survive on its own without help, we continue to say something profound about our God. The central message of our Christmas story tells us that God has chosen to no longer work through the strong and the powerful, through the competent, or the adult. Rather, God has chosen to work in the world through the weak and the powerless. That is because it is the powerless who can most be trusted with God’s power, because it is the powerless who know, through experience, the damage that is caused when that power is misused. Among us, the weakest and the most powerless right now are our children.

And so, following Christ in this as in all things, we welcome them and we give them the greatest power––the power to proclaim the Gospel to us. It’s a dangerous thing we’re doing, actually. Proclaiming the Gospel, that God has come among us with grace and love, is a real act of power, because when we proclaim it, it happens. When I say, “God be with you,” God is with you. When I say, “God forgives your sins,” God forgives your sins. Not because of me, but because of the words themselves. There are no idle words in the proclamation of the Gospel. And here we are, giving this immense, profound, holy power to these children. We don’t trust them to drive a car, we don’t trust them to stay home alone over the weekend, we don’t trust them make decisions of any real significance. But we trust them to proclaim the Gospel to us.


Rather, I should say, we trust God. We trust and obey God who has told us that Christ comes to us in the powerless. And we seek them out so that we can hear what the Son of God has to say to us. We seek them out because when these children were baptized in the church, the Holy Spirit fell on them with “the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord, the spirit of joy in God’s presence.” God has sent them to us, and so we encourage their participation and we listen to their proclamations about God as they prepare us for Christ to come again. Not because they are super-cute, although they are, but because they are God’s prophets, sent to tell us that Christ is near. Thanks be to God. Amen.

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