Christmas Eve 2006 (Sermon 2006-12-24) Peace Lutheran Church Grass Valley CA

Christmas Eve 2006: “Give Him Your Sins”

In the newspaper a few days ago, a headline caught my attention: “Hippo Haven in Colombia.” It seems that the infamous drug lord Pablo Escobar some years ago built a fabulous palace which included a private wild animal park full of exotic creatures. Since his death, most of these animals have been rounded up and shipped off to various zoos, but the Colombian government hasn’t been able to do anything about the hippopotamuses. There were four of them, but they’ve multiplied and now there are 16—and because they are very large and rather ornery, they have eluded capture. The government has offered to give a hippo free to anyone who will come and take it away.

All of which, of course, reminded me of that immortal Yuletide song, “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas.” My wife and kids thought I was making this up, but I remember the song very clearly from my childhood and I remember most of the words: “I want a hippopotamus for Christmas, only a hippopotamus will do; no crocodiles or rhinoceroses; I only like the hippopotamuses.” I was sort of hoping this song only existed in the memory of aging baby-boomers, but I did a google search and got 975 hits. Sure enough, you can still buy a CD with this song. Please don’t anyone buy that for me! But if anyone on your gift list in fact wants a hippopotamus for Christmas, I know where you can get one for free!

Sometimes finding the perfect gift for those we love is a difficult task. Maybe you saw the very moving story in The Union a few days ago about the “white envelope.” It was about a suburban woman who always had trouble finding the right gift for her husband Mike. One year one of their teenagers was on a wrestling team, and they had a non-league match with a team sponsored by an inner city church. Their son’s team had spiffy uniforms and all the appropriate headgear to protect them from injury; the other team looked like a bunch of ragamuffins, with no uniforms, shoes held together only by the laces, and no protective headgear. Their son’s team won every single match. Mike said, “I wish just one of them could have won. They have a lot of potential, but losing like this could take the heart right out of them.” That gave his wife the idea for the perfect gift. She went to a sporting goods store, bought an assortment of shoes and headgear, and sent them to the church in Mike’s name. She put a note in a white envelope on the Christmas tree, telling Mike that this was his present. Mike was understandably moved, and proclaimed it without question the perfect gift.

It became a cherished tradition in their home; each year the kids looked forward, more than anything else at Christmas, to the end of the ordinary gift exchanges, when their Dad would open the white envelope telling of the special gift his wife had done for someone else in his name. Some years later, the Christmas after Mike’s death, each of his now-grown children, unbeknownst to the other, placed a white envelope on the tree telling their dad something they had done in his name. In that family, they had certainly solved the problem of finding the perfect gift.

But here we are, on Christmas Eve, drawing near to the manger, the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ . . . and the question for us tonight is: What would be the perfect gift for us to bring to him? I’ve always loved Christina Rossetti’s Christmas hymn, “In the Bleak Midwinter,” with its closing verse: “What shall I bring him, poor as I am?/If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;/If I were a wise man, I would do my part,/Yet what I can, I give him; give my heart.” It’s a wonderful sentiment, but truth be told, my heart isn’t such a great gift. My heart is often cold and dark, fully aware of my sins, the things I’ve done and left undone. How can I offer such a thing to the Baby Jesus?

I recently found in my files a faded carbon copy of something my father-in-law gave me several years ago. It was a translation of some German text he found—unfortunately he didn’t write down the source, or the date, just that he had translated it. It was titled, “A Conversation between the Venerable Church Father, St. Jerome, and the Infant Jesus in the Manger.” Jerome was the 4^th century scholar who first translated the Bible into Latin. He spent the latter part of his life in the town of Bethlehem. Legend has it that he refused an opportunity to be made a bishop because he would not leave Bethlehem: “Nothing,” he insisted, “can draw me away from the Manger of Christ.”

He went on, according to this story, to explain his devotion to the manger: “Whenever I look upon this place, my heart holds a sweet conversation with the Infant Jesus. I say to Him: ‘Oh, Lord Jesus, how you tremble! How hard is your bed for the sake of my salvation! How shall I ever repay this?’”

“Then it seems to me that the Holy Child replies, ‘From you, Jerome, I ask only the song, Glory to God in the Highest! Let that be enough for you. My need will be deeper yet in Gethsemane and on Calvary.

“I speak further: ‘Dear little Jesus, I must give you something. Let me give you all my wealth.’ The Child replies, ‘From the beginning the Heavens and the Earth are mine. I do not need your treasures. Give them to the poor. I shall receive that as if you had done it to me.’

“I speak again: ‘Dear little Jesus, this I shall do gladly, but I must also give something just for you, or I shall die of sorrow.’ The Child replies: ‘Dear Jerome, since you are so generous of heart, I will tell you what you may give to me. Give me your sins—your bad conscience—and your condemnation!’

“I ask: ‘What will you do with them?’

“The infant Jesus says: ‘I want to take them upon my shoulders. This shall be my glory, and my glorious deed, as Isaiah once said, that I shall take your sins upon myself and carry them away.’

“At this I begin to weep bitterly, and say: ‘O, Child, dear, holy Child, how deeply you have touched my heart! I thought you wanted something good—but you want everything in me which is bad! Oh, take what is mine! Give me what is Yours! Then I shall be free from sin, and assured of eternal life!’”

This charming little story is a classic example of what Martin Luther called “the great exchange.” It was, for Luther, absolutely central to the meaning of Christmas. It means that Jesus, the only person ever to live without sin, the only one righteous in God’s sight, comes into the world with the purpose of trading places with us. He becomes like us, takes on our human form, lives here in the midst of all the trouble and sin of this world. He takes our sins upon himself. And in exchange, he gives us his own righteousness, his kingdom, his glory.

The perfect gift, the gift that the Christ child desires more than anything this night, is the gift of your sins, your bad conscience. He wants you to take that load off your own shoulders, and give it to him. He wants to receive those sins from you, so that he can give you in their place the joy and the peace that belong to a child of God.

Norman Vincent Peale tells about his own most memorable Christmas. He was a 15-year-old boy, whose father was a pastor in Cincinnati, Ohio. The telephone rang late on Christmas Eve. The call was for his father. It was a woman who ran a brothel in the red light district of Cincinnati. One of her girls was dying and was asking for a pastor. Would he come? His father said, “Get your coat, Norman. I want you to come too.”

The place was a big old house; the sick girl was white and frail, just a teenager herself. Norman’s father, who had been a physician before he went into the ministry, saw at once that she was gravely ill. He sat down on the edge of the bed and took her hand. The girl said she had come from a good Christian home, and was sorry for the things she had done and the life she was leading. “I’ve been so bad,” she said. “So bad.”

The pastor replied, “There’s no such thing as a bad girl, or a bad boy; there are just people who sometimes act badly. But God made all of us, and God makes all things good.” At the pastor’s encouragement, the girl spoke a simple prayer: “Dear Jesus, forgive me for my sins.” Then he said, “God loves you, his child, who has strayed, and he has forgiven you.” “If I live to be a hundred,” Peale wrote, “I will never forget the feeling of power and glory that came into that room as my father then prayed for that dying girl. There were tears on the faces of the other women standing there, and on my own, too, because everything sordid, everything corrupt was swept away. There was beauty in that place of evil. The love born in Bethlehem was revealing itself again on a dark and dismal street in Cincinnati . . . . nothing could withstand it. Nothing.”