Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
December 24, 2004

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Maybe for the first time in our history, the United Church of Christ has a theme this year, an identity that we are finally sharing with the world: "God Is Still Speaking." We quote Gracie Allen, of all people: "Never place a period where God has placed a comma." God is still speaking. Revelation is not closed. It didn’t end with Jesus. It didn’t end when the Bible went to press. As our Congregationalist ancestor in the faith John Robinson told those others of our direct spiritual ancestors the Pilgrims as they left Europe for a new world in 1620: God has yet more light and truth to break forth from God’s holy word.

God is still speaking. That of course means that God also spoke in the past, and as Christians we believe that God spoke most loudly and most clearly to us in Jesus, the one whose birth we now celebrate. God has spoken to other people in other ways, and Jesus doesn’t take away from God’s word in other traditions; but for us Christians God speaks first of all in him. He, not the Bible, is the Word of God Incarnate. On Christmas we celebrate the miracle, God coming to us in the form of the infant Jesus. And if God spoke to us in Jesus we need to ask: What did God say? I suppose the whole Christian life is about discerning the answer to that question, but on Christmas I think we can say that God said at least this: "I come as one weak and defenseless. I come as a stranger in a strange place. I come as one who’s birth the world scorns because I came outside of society’s conventions of marriage-after all, my mother wasn’t married when she became pregnant, and Joseph accepted her as his wife against all the religious laws and societal norms of the time. I came among the poor, the scorned, the rejected and despised. You 21st century people may not know it, but the religious establishment of the day considered those shepherds to whom I came to be scoundrels, blackguards, even unfit to participate in their religious rites simply because they were shepherds." That, and much more besides, is what God spoke in the birth of Jesus.

God is still speaking, and despite all the religious voices to the contrary, despite all the attempts of religion to silence the divine voice, to lock it up in a book where we can manage it and keep it from challenging our comfortable beliefs and cultural prejudices, God is saying the same thing now. "I come to the poor, the stranger, those who don’t fit your conventional norms of marriage and family life." God is still speaking the divine word of all-inclusive grace that God spoke through the Jewish prophets and most clearly in Jesus. God is still trying to break through our refusal to listen. God is still speaking and trying to get us to hear.. Tonight we celebrate the birth of Jesus. Will we have eyes to see and ears to hear what the still-speaking God is saying to us tonight? Amen.