Christmas Eve – December 24, 2013, Luke 2:1-20
Luke 2:1-20
The Church You Can Eat
Christmas Eve – December 24, 2013
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
You’ve come on an amazing day for First Lutheran Church.
This is surely the first – and maybe the only time – you will ever see a
replica of First Lutheran Church made out of gingerbread!
I still can’t quite get my head around this.
But area residents Gerhard Wiebe and his daughter Anna Weier liked the look of our building
and decided to build it in gingerbread this Christmas.
They do this every year, and we are in exalted company:
last year they built the Museum of Human Rights, and in previous years they have built
St. Boniface Cathedral and Westminster United Church – and . . . the Taj Mahal!
We are really grateful to Anna and Gerhard for loaning us this amazing creation for tonight.
Soon it will be donated – and consumed! –
by patrons of Rossbrook House over on Sherbrook Street.
The mission of Rossbrook House is to provide a safe place for children and youth to
belong, play, learn, and become.
Its doors are always open, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
There is always always room at this inn.
Food is a constant theme at Christmas.
Whether you’re looking forward to eating a lot of it,
or whether you’re horrified by the thought of eating a lot of it,
food and Christmas go together like turkey and stuffing, gravy and mashed potatoes,
Christmas cookies and milk, or rum and eggnog.
Here’s the thing: I actually think the deep association of Christmas and food lurks within the
story Luke tells this evening.
At confirmation class last week I asked the students: “What’s a manger?”
And we talked about how a manger is just a feed-box for animals:
probably a roughly made box of wood that the animals’ food was eaten out of.
It’s this that Mary placed Jesus into, probably because there was nothing else to hand.
1500 hundred years later, when Martin Luther was instructing his own people about
how to take the bread at communion he said this:
just make a manger with your hands for Jesus to be placed into.
From the beginning, Jesus was sustaining food – for Luke’s community, surely.
For Luther’s community, obviously. And for our community this evening.
Make a manger with your hands for Jesus when you come forward for communion this evening.
Jesus is the true food of Christmas, and at the table will give you all his Christmas gifts:
gifts of peace, gifts of love, gifts of forgiveness, gifts of strength, gifts of joy.
You don’t need a lot: a little goes a long way!
So you don’t have to worry about your waistline with this Christmas meal!
Sharing this meal together is what makes us at First Lutheran a church community.
Sharing Jesus’s body together binds us together and turns us into what we eat: the body of Christ.
That is a tremendous gift on Christmas Eve, maybe the most amazing gift of all:
that we become what we eat, the body of Christ, bread for the world.
Our historic building that Anna and Gerhard have fashioned out of gingerbread turned
100 this year: I don’t think they knew that when they decided to make it,
but it is a happy coincidence.
We call it a church, but the building is certainly not the church:
you’ll notice that I’m always careful to call it the church building, never the church.
You, the community of God’s people – you, the body of Christ – are the church.
The Spirit or Energy of God, Luke is so careful to point out,
was from the beginning active in this child Jesus.
And that Spirit or Energy remains active throughout his ministry: in healing the sick,
in forgiving the sinful, in including the excluded, in raising the dead –
in all the ways in which he showed that God’s reign is coming very near in Jesus,
including feeding the hungry.
God’s reign, Luke tells us, comes near not in the political might of Caesar, but in the
love incarnate – the love made flesh – in Jesus: that is how God re-makes the world.
After Jesus is raised from the dead, that Spirit is poured out on the community of disciples –
the church – on the day of Pentecost in Luke’s Gospel.
In Luke’s mind, the Spirit or Energy that was at work in Jesus is now at work in
the community of the church.
Through our baptism, the church is now the body that houses the very Spirit of God.
The community of the church is now Jesus’s physical body on earth.
The church is now the means by which the reign of God’s mercy and compassion comes near,
near to all who need it: the ill, the broken, the sinful, the lonely, the dead, the hungry.
You are now the physical body of Christ on earth.
And just as the body of Jesus was placed in a manger to become food for
all the hungry ones of this world on that Christmas Eve long ago,
so you too become as a community what you eat on this night:
bread for the all the hungry ones of this world.
Mother Teresa insisted over and over again that that is what Christians are for:
that they are to be eaten all up by those who are hungry, by those who are hungry for
peace, hungry for justice, hungry for friendship, hungry for healing, hungry for
hope, and hungry for that most basic of all human needs: hungry for food.
If this gingerbread First Lutheran Church is the church building that can be eaten,
then truly on this night, when Jesus binds himself to you once again in wine and bread, you as a community will become the church you can eat.
First Lutheran Church at 580 Victor Street has indeed become the church you can eat,
and that is evident in all our ministries in this neighbourhood.
Whether through our visitation of the sick and shut-in, or
through our free children’s drop-in ministry in the summer, or our refuges sponsorships,
or through our Hats for the Homeless Project, or our weekly Food Banks,
or our bi-weekly community meals where we literally feed our neighbours,
or our Christmas Food Hamper drive:
in all these ways and countless others First Lutheran Church is the church you can eat.
It’s the church that feeds, it’s the church that gives itself away as food for the hungry.
Just as Jesus was placed in that manger long ago to become our bread,
so on this night we eat what he offers us in this our true Christmas meal:
the gift of himself, that we might become what we eat:
bread for the hungry, the gingerbread church, the church you can eat.
So together let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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