December 30, 2012 – Colossians 3:12-17; Luke 2:41-52
Colossians 3:12-17; Luke 2:41-52
New Clothes for a New Day
First Sunday of Christmas – December 30, 2012
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
Anyone get any clothing for Christmas?
Socks? A new bath robe? A silly toque?
On this First Sunday of Christmas, the writer of the letter to Colossians reminds us
The Christmas clothing we’re given in our baptisms:
Compassion, or loving action;
Kindness, which in Greek implies open generosity;
Humility, or not thinking better of yourself than you are;
Meekness, or gentleness in dealings with one another;
Patience, or the dogged persistence of never giving up;
And above all, love, that is, loving action for the sake of the other.
The writer commends this clothing to the community at Colossae because
It is the clothing Jesus wore.
These are the qualities that make community life healthy and vibrant.
The writer is saying that if the people in a community are clothed with these qualities,
These qualities that are gifts of the Spirit of the living God to them,
That community will reflect the life of Jesus in its own actions.
In the ancient world, these were the qualities of friendship,
The qualities that make friendship possible.
The writer is envisioning a community bound together by these qualities into a
Harmonious agent of God’s loving care.
The writer is envisioning a community of people clothed with these qualities who will
Not just reflect the risen Jesus in their life, but who will be the risen Jesus.
Today, Tristan and Nia are clothed with the garment of these qualities.
They are given these things as a gift and invited to wear them their whole life through.
Loving compassionate action;
Generous kindness;
A humility which can see one’s own gifts clearly as well as the gifts of others;
A gentleness in dealing with other fragile human beings as well as
this fragile planet we inhabit;
The patient persistence that never gives up on God’s loving mission to
love bless and heal this world and every person in it.
And above all, the thing that binds all of us together so that we can work together for
The sake of this mission, love.
Over the past 12 years, I have come to know First Lutheran Church as a place where
These garments have been worn well.
Oh, sometimes we forget to put one or two of them on.
But I have seen loving, compassionate action here.
I’ve seen generous kindness on many occasions.
I’ve witnessed the humility where a people see their own gifts and limitations clearly
as well as the gifts of others.
I’ve seen a lot of gentleness in dealing with one another in all our fragility.
I’ve seen tremendous, tenacious patience in actively trying to figure out how we can best
Participate with God in God’s mission to love, bless and heal this world.
And I’ve seen how love binds us all together to figure out how to best care for one another
In order to be the community God is calling us to be.
It’s quite a thing to welcome Nia and Tristan into such a community this morning.
Into God’s community and God’s family.
It is a day to rejoice and give thanks, and pray that we might be a blessing to them,
And that they might be a blessing to us.
Today they too are clothed with these gifts for the sake of our common mission.
These are pretty down to earth qualities: compassion, generosity and all the rest.
But they are the way that God is choosing to act and work in the world.
In the way that Jesus did, so are we to do.
Last week I said that in many ways the Christmas story in Luke returns us to a very
Down to earth scene after much of the Bible has to do with kings and queens and
Armies and courts.
God’s rule of justice and peace and mercy for the vulnerable will come, Luke is saying,
Through the down to earth qualities of down to earth people,
People like you and me, people like Nia and Tristan.
And God has given us the Christmas gift clothing we need to do what God calls us to do.
We are perfectly clothed for the task we are chosen for: being blessing to one another,
And being blessing to the world.
It is not all so very complicated.
God will turn the world through us and our everyday lives.
It’s the season of Christmas and so Christmas’s most famous saint is on our minds,
St. Nicholas, Santa Claus.
But who was the real Santa Claus?
St. Nicholas was not so much dressed in red and white as he was dressed in
his baptismal clothing of compassion and generosity and kindness.
Not much is known about him, but we do know that he lived a long time ago,
In the 4th century, almost 1700 years ago!
He was a bishop in a place called Myra, which is in Turkey today.
Nicholas, though, is most known for a radical act of generosity.
He gave money to a poor family so that their daughters would have
Enough money for their dowries, so they could get married.
Had it not been for this gift, the daughters of this family would have lived lives of poverty and
Would probably have been forced to make a living in a very dishonourable way.
Here we have the down-to-earthness of the Christmas story come alive in the life of
A very down to earth Christian in a very down to earth action.
It was 1700 years ago, sure, but apparently some clothing never goes out of fashion.
Nia and Tristan: today the clothing you have been given and garbed with by Jesus is
A style of clothing that will never go out of style:
Compassion, generosity, genuine humility, dogged patient persistence, and love.
To be sure: these are large, roomy qualities: this is not constrictive clothing!
This is the clothing of Jesus, of the second person of the triune God!
They will have a lifetime to grown into it, as do we all.
Even Jesus grows into it, as we see today in the Gospel story.
Jesus learns about his Father’s business or interests as a 12 year old,
About the age when Nia and Tristan will begin confirmation classes.
Up to this point, all the signs of Jesus’s special mission have been through others:
Through the angel Gabriel’s announcement,
through Mary’s song the Magnificat,
through the Shepherds and Simeon and Anna,
through the song of the angels,
but now, now, as he stays behind to study and question and learn,
now he claims for himself that special relationship to God which all the rest has been
pointing to: he claims that God, not Joseph, is his true father and that
of course he must be found in his Father’s house or, better,
about his Father’s interests,
which are indeed the restoring and healing of this world and every person in it.
Each of us must come to that moment when we discover the true meaning of our lives,
Of purposefully dedicating ourselves to the triune God’s interests of blessing this world,
Of God’s reign of justice and mercy and peace.
For Jesus it means assuming the mantle of compassion and the garment of love.
The church has formalized this moment in the rite of confirmation.
But really, it could happen any time.
For you, it could be this morning. It could be now.
In fact, most Christians would probably agree that this moment probably happens every morning,
When we rise and, as Martin Luther says, we remember our baptisms.
When we remember that in our baptisms we were clothed with the best Christmas clothes of all,
For the work that God has called us to that day.
Living with this clothing that we’ve been graciously given is a choice we must make each day,
Over and over for the rest of our lives.
There’s a wonderful scene in the film Keeping the Faith, when an old Roman Catholic priest
Gives some advice to a young, new priest who is having trouble with his vow of celibacy.
When you start out, he says, you think the vow is a vow you make once for the rest of your life.
But really, he says, a vow is a choice you make over and over again each day.
There’s wisdom in that.
Let us simply remember that in our baptisms, along with Nia and Tristan,
we have been clothed with some pretty beautiful clothing that is
good for us and good for the world.
Let us choose to wear this clothing with integrity for this day for, as Jesus himself said,
Today’s troubles are enough for today.
Let us choose to commune together today and share the peace and the bread and wine and
Be bound to one another in love on this day.
Let us do what we can do together, with St. Nicholas,
to alleviate the plight of the vulnerable on this day.
And let us be thankful, for the gift of this clothing of grace given us by a God who love us,
For the gift of one another, for the common mission we share, and for the gift of
The risen one living among us, living in us, living through us.
So together let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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