Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
Dec. 28, 2008

Scripture:

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.

Well, it’s been an interesting couple of weeks, hasn’t it. I’ve live in this part of the country most of my life, and I’ve never seen anything like it. We had temperatures that I haven’t seen since the year I lived in Moscow—Russian, not Idaho. We had more snow than I think I saw even Russia, although that may be a bit of an exaggeration. We had to cancel all of our church activities, including most sadly our Christmas Eve service that I and so many of us love so well. On a personal note, if you’ve been getting my emails you know that I was first snowed into my house in Sultan, then snowed out of it. The only way my wife Jane and I could spend any time together on Christmas was to meet at my son’s house in Seattle, and I could only do that because he’s got a big 4x4 pickup trick and was willing to come out to Sultan to get me. I’m sure many of you, and many of our members and friends who aren’t here this morning, have similar stories of being stranded or other stories of hardships caused by the snow.

And to be perfectly honest, I haven’t handled it very well. I’ve had the feeling for many days not that all this snow and the difficulties it has caused were just grinding me down. I hadn’t seen Jane for something like two weeks. Then when I woke up on Christmas morning to see that at least six more inches of snow, and probably more, had fallen in Sultan and that it was still coming down really hard, I got pretty depressed. It meant, as far as I knew then, that on top of having had to cancel Christmas worship I probably wouldn’t see my wife at all for Christmas. To put it mildly, I was bummed. My son’s gracious offer to come get me from Sultan and his invitation to Jane and me to spend a couple of nights at his place helped a lot, but I was still worried about getting home and getting to church today. Sue finally made that happen when she came and got me at my son’s place yesterday and let me stay with her and Manny last night. We all drove here together this morning. Yet even now I wonder if I’ll be able to get home this afternoon. And I wonder whether if I do if I will be able to get back out again in my little car, which has all wheel drive but not much ground clearance. So all in all I haven’t handled this siege—that’s what if feels like s siege, very well.

Yet one day in the midst of my moping I was reminded that St. Paul says in 1 Thessalonians that we are to give thanks to God “in all circumstances.” Not for all circumstances, in all circumstances. I don’t know why that verse popped into my head, but when it did it sure wasn’t very welcome. I thought: Giving thanks to God right now is about the last thing I want to do. Still, that verse got me thinking—often a dangerous activity to be sure. We all have things happen to us in life for which we can hardly give God thanks, nasty snowstorms I suppose being fairly low on that list in the larger picture of things. Yet Paul asks us to consider: Even when we can’t give God thanks for something, can we nonetheless give God thanks in whatever is happening? That’s what he says we’re supposed to do, yet for me at least it is a very real question how we are supposed to be able to do that. It sure isn’t easy much of the time.

Well, I think the event that we are celebrating today points us to the answer to that question. In this Christmas season we celebrate the birth of man named Jesus of Nazareth. Yet we celebrate so much more than that. In this Christmas season we celebrate the birth of the one the Gospel of Matthew calls Emmanuel, a name that in Hebrew means God With Us. In this Christmas season we celebrate the greatest gift that God has ever given to the world, gift of God’s own Son incarnate in the person of Jesus. The birth of Jesus is for us Christians nothing less than the coming of God into the world in the flesh. The birth of Jesus is God coming to us as one of us to be with us in all that happens to us. The birth of Jesus is God coming to us as one of us to show us in the most immediate way possible that God is with us in all that happens to us. That’s who we Christians confess that Jesus is—Emmanuel, God With Us.

And that, my friends, is how we can give thanks to God in all circumstances. We can give God thanks in all circumstances because we know in and through Jesus Christ that God is with us in everything. God is with us in the things for which it is easy to give God thanks. More importantly, God is with us in the things for which we can’t bring ourselves to give God thanks. God i9s with us in nasty snow storms. More importantly, God is with us in things a whole lot worse than nasty snow storms. God is with us in everything that happens in life. God is with us even, or perhaps most especially, when we can’t feel that God is with us. After all, on the cross even Jesus cried “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” God knows even our feeling of God-forsakenness because God has experienced it in God’s own person, in the person of Jesus Christ.

That’s why we celebrate today. For Christians, that’s why the birth of Jesus is so important. Christmas after all isn’t really about the birth of a human infant. That happens all the time. It’s a miracle every time it happens, but we don’t and couldn’t possibly celebrate the birth of every human infant. We celebrate the birth of this human infant because of who in faith we confess this human infant became. So maybe after all we can give thanks to God in all things, even in snowstorms that either trap us in our homes or keep us away from them. Maybe even in things much worse than that. Maybe even in illness and death. Maybe even in the fact of all the violence and injustice in the world. Maybe we really can give God thanks in all of those things because we know God is with us in all of those things, standing in complete solidarity with us, sustaining us, encouraging us, inspiring us. We know all of those things through the one whose birth we now, finally, celebrate together, even Jesus the Christ. Amen.