Christmas Eve Sermon                  12/24/2007                                    Preached at ULC

Text:  Luke 2:1-20                        Title:  CHRISTMAS MEMORIES or TO GIVE AND RECEIVE

First of all, Merry Christmas!  This…is a great place to celebrate the birth of the Savior.  And the best people in the world to celebrate with.

I’ll tell you what, I’ve been thinking about this moment for the last two years.  I can remember on Christmas Eve 2005 finishing up with the midnight service and thinking it would be two years before I got to celebrate this holiday with you again.  But two years have passed, and here we are, and it is good to be here!  Can I get an amen?  How about from all you Norwegian Lutherans out there, can I get a “Yah, sure”?

If you’re here visiting for Christmas, and this isn’t your home church, I should probably explain that in January of 2006, I was called to active duty as an Army chaplain and spent a 20 month tour of duty away from home, most of it in the Anbar province of Iraq.  So when you hear all those songs about being home for Christmas, well, I’m living them this year. 

Now I made myself a promise when I got back, and I’m making you the same promise now, that not every sermon I preach is going to be about my war stories.  But tonight I do want to share with you some memories from my Christmas in Iraq because there are some great stories and some unforgettable lessons that have changed how I think about Christmas here.

There’s an Army tradition that on Christmas Day, the officers of the unit will take certain duties to give the young enlisted soldiers the day off.  Usually it’s jobs like serving food or guarding the latrine or something like that.  I chose to take a young soldier’s spot that day on a patrol into a local village, so he got the day off and I spent Christmas Day in my body armor.  

On this patrol, we were searching a stretch of road for bombs, just like we did every day, when we came across, of all things on Christmas Day, two shepherds with a flock of sheep getting all fat and happy because winter is the green season in the desert.  The shepherds were leading a donkey by a rope, and for a couple of bucks they were more than happy to let us climb up its back and take pictures.  So while all our relatives back home had shepherds and sheep and donkeys made of out plastic for their Nativity sets, we had them for real.

Then there was Christmas Eve, one of the most deep and sad and powerful and fun times of worship I’ve ever led.  It’s hard to explain how one service can wrap all those things together, but it did.  Just like at Christmas back home, we sang “Silent Night”, without any organ or piano or anything like that, of course, and as we started the second verse, just after singing about heavenly peace, heavenly peace, no kidding, the walls of the chapel shook with the sound of artillery.  Seconds later, two helicopters rocketed right over us, all a reminder that the heavenly peace of Christ is a promise that will not be complete until the day he comes again.

But we kept singing, because the promise of that peace was real to us, even more so over there.  Violence and terror were only one reality.  Heavenly peace was a deeper reality, love’s pure light was a deeper reality.  Christmas was a deeper reality.  That’s a little too poetic for a soldier, but I think that’s how we felt, and why we finished singing the song, and why I’ll be thinking about Iraq when we sing “Silent Night” today.

But what I think about the most when I remember Christmas overseas is the men and women I spent the holiday with.  It was really hard to be apart from our families, but I was really glad for the amazing Marines and soldiers who spent the holiday with me.

There are two of the men in particular that I want to tell you about tonight.  Both of them know that I tell you these stories, so I’m not breaking their trust by telling you about them. 

The first is SSG Randy Woodward, an infantry grunt from northern Minnesota.  I met SSG Woodward within the first hour after I signed into the training base at Camp Shelby, MS.  There I was, just off the plane, as wide-eyed and green as a new soldier can be, and a sergeant comes up and says, “Hey, chaplain, do you have a minute to talk to my buddy?” 

There in my office, which I hadn’t even seen yet, was Randy.  He’d already been at Camp Shelby for 3 months with the rest of the battalion, and he’d just found out that his wife, the mother of his four children, was pregnant with a fifth.  And it wasn’t his.  It belonged to her 17 year old boyfriend, whom she had invited to live in his house while he was gone.  Welcome to the Army, chaplain, we’ll start you out easy with your first case.

Well, I wasn’t able to make his problems go away.  But I gave him a listening ear and gave him a little advice that he found helpful.  And I gave him my prayers, and my promise that I’d keep praying for him.

Randy kept coming back to my office, and every time he came, all I had to give him was a listening ear, a little advice, and my prayers.  Then we got to Iraq, and I started noticing that SSG Woodward wasn’t just coming to my office.  He was coming to church, sometimes twice on a Sunday.  He was coming to Bible study and prayer group.  He hadn’t even been a Christian when the deployment started, but now he’d made the choice to be baptized and he was soaking up everything about Jesus that we could give him.  He even brought two other soldiers from his company to be baptized, one of them just a few days before Christmas.

I’d like to say he reconciled with his wife, and everything turned out OK at home, but that’s not how this story goes.  She eventually divorced him, and that was really hard, but through all this pain, he kept coming and we kept giving him what prayers and encouragement we could, and eventually we found that SSG Woodward had become a different person.  He had found strength, he had found good news of great joy and a reason to hope for the future because of Jesus.  One of my greatest blessings of this deployment is that God used me to help give him that joy.

The other soldier I want to tell you about is SSG Sam Williams.  Sam is a medic.  He’s a lifelong Christian and one of my closest friends from Iraq.  I’ve told his story in other talks about Iraq, but never in worship, which is where it belongs the most.  The reason I want to tell you about Sam isn’t because of what I gave him but because of what he gave me.

It was during one of the most difficult times of the deployment, a time when I was working 14 to16 hours a day counseling and visiting and trying to keep soldiers’ spirits up even while my own were sinking.  It was then that my friend SSG Williams came into my office one morning and asked, “Sir, do you have a minute?”

My first thought was to say, “Honestly, Sam, I don’t right now.”  But that’s not what I said, praise God.  I looked at him and said, “For you, Sam, yeah, I’ve got a minute.  What’s up, buddy?”

He said, “Chaplain, you know I always pray for you.”  I said, “I know that, Sam.”  And he said, “Last night I was praying for you, because I know with all we’re going through it’s got to be a huge burden on you, too.  And I was reading the book of John in chapter 13 where Jesus washed Peter’s feet.  This is probably going to sound crazy, so you can just tell me if I’m nuts, but would you let me wash your feet?”

Wow.  You know as an Army chaplain, you learn to be ready for anything when a soldier asks if you have a minute.  I wasn’t ready for this.  For one thing, just imagine what your feet look like after 14 hours a day in your boots when it’s 120 degrees and dusty.  I didn’t want to touch my own feet with my bare hands.  And here he was, with a washbasin and two bottles of water, asking to kneel down on the dusty concrete floor and wash my feet.

I did the only thing I could.  I sat down in my chair and said, “OK, Sam.  OK.”

So he washed my feet, then he got up and straightened up his uniform and we said a quick prayer together and he went about his day.  And I spent the next half hour in my office with the door locked, crying and thanking God for a buddy like Sam.

Now, why am I telling you about SSGs Woodward and Williams on Christmas Eve?  What about baby Jesus and angels and wise men?  What’s with all the war stories, and what do these men have to do with how we think about Christmas?

Well, here’s what their story has taught me.  They say that Christmas is a season of giving, and it’s true.  This is a season of giving and it is a blessing to give.  When I think about SSG Woodward, I think about how blessed I was to be able to give him the help that he needed, to give him directions, if nothing else, to find his way to Jesus.  I hope you find the blessing of giving this holiday season, many, many times over.

But this is also the season of receiving.  Not just the presents under the tree, either.  I like getting a new Mr. Grinch tie as much as anybody, but I’m talking about receiving the gift of Christ, receiving salvation, receiving peace, receiving hope.  There are only a few times in my life I have been blessed like I was when I received that amazing gift from SSG Williams, a gift he gave me in the name of Jesus.

Maybe it is more blessed to give than to receive, but I want you to remember this -- it is most blessed of all to do both.  This year at Christmas, I think about all I have received and I know I am blessed.  I think about all God has helped me to give, and I am doubly blessed.

I pray that every one of you will receive all the joy of knowing Christ as your Savior.  I pray you will give that same Christmas joy to someone else.  And I pray that in both your giving and receiving, your Christmas will be blessed, wherever you happen to be to celebrate.  Amen.