On This Night

On This Night

Brad Bailey – Christmas Eve 2018

(The following are notes which were too extensive to share completely for a Christmas Eve service… but were and can be shared more briefly.)

Intro

So good to share this time with you.

I still can recall the night of Christmas Eve when I was 16 years old. … long after family gathering… driving down Sunset Blvd… near midnight.

I was well aware that the world was not what it should be…nor was I… but feeling that quiet sacred sense… of what this night bore…and seeing a sign … Christmas Eve…Candlelight Service at midnight.

That night I felt like the world stopped with a hush… a quiet moment…in which everything seemed different… something had crept into the world to set it right.

What I felt that night has never changed.

A night of peace when the worlds drama slows down, and we sense more not less is at hand.

A night that a presence entered our world… and took it back.

A night in which the eternal declares to this world that it there is a greater will and a greater work that will prevail.

As was read at the start of our gathering tonight… the way Jesus’ closest disciple explained it…

John 1:14

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

John had used the phrase “Word” to speak of God’s as the creating force behind all. The source from which all was created… entered the creation.

God, who knows no beginning…and no end… entered time and space.

God, who is Spirit and knows no boundaries … took on the shocking confines of a tiny baby… who entered the nature of a human physical life… whose physical life was dependent upon a teenage girl. [1]

I know that there a trend in the past few years for some to boldly believe that: “This is all there is.”

• Maybe it’s a desire to express a type of courage to face what seems like a hard truth.

• Maybe it is deemed to be associated with being a person of facts over faith.

But it seems to me that there is reason to pause…and question the claim that there is nothing more… nothing outside us…nothing more central than us.

It seems to me that if there is anything we have learned over time…it’s that it we have a limited perspective. In the full scope of human history, it wasn’t long ago that everyone believed that the world was flat…because from a limited perspective… it seemed clear. Then we naturally believed that the sun revolved around the earth (after all…it appears to rise each day)… but again… we assumed we were the center.

I believe if we can step back… a little further from ourselves…we will find that, more than that which suggests that this is all there is… we see the signs of a world that points beyond itself.

Many engaged in the study of quantum physics… describe an increasing way in which what is being discovered points to a another dimension that must exist outside the dimension of time and space that we exist in.

And our most defining longings point beyond this world as well.

For on this night… long ago… what entered the world pointed to the way things should be.

What came into our world that night… was like the answer a problem we could never find…that has always eluded us.

Like a song we could never rightly sing… and then we heard the right note.

Like a light piercing darkness... not complete but clarifies what is not yet fully seen.

Tonight, I invite us to consider what that night brought…

Perhaps the most captivating aspects of that night… was the choice of who was at the forefront.

It took place among a people so common…yet so unique.

They were part of a people who began as a small nomadic tribe… who had grown and become known as a people who had been called out by God…not the common myths of gods that were simply deified versions of humans…but One who claimed to be the source and center of all existence… and who declared he had called out these people because through them…he would bless all nations… all people…the whole earth.

Now they had become dispersed… and living under the oppression of the Roman Empire.

Centuries of prophets had been raised up… and prophecies given… now waiting in the silence.

And now the time begins. But not among the elite… nor the educated. Not from the prestigious…but common peasants. Far in the backwoods of these people…the Creator of all existence as we know it, comes to a young woman Mary…pledged to be married….to a working class villager.