Welcome to St. Augustine’s this Christmas.  It’s our hope that each one of you would come to know the same great joy that the shepherds knew that first Christmas night; that like them your fear would turn to rejoicing; that you too would hear the good news of glad tidings that the God of all creation has declared his everlasting good will toward men, that he himself is our peace, that his very name is Immanuel, God-with-us, the God who came this holy night to forever be with us and for us in our flesh and blood, our poverty, our hopes and fears, our loneliness, our need, our rejoicing, our dear shabby sorry little corner of creation that matters so much to the eternal Almighty God that he emptied himself of everything except love to be born here among us in a barn, a poor boy reaching out his arms for his mother, and for you, and for me.

You have to imagine that John was sitting there in prison thinking to himself, “This isn’t how it was supposed to work.  Herod’s days are supposed to be numbered but it still looks like he’s on the throne.  Violence and injustice still sit on the thrones of power and the poor are still crying out for salvation.  I’m not supposed to be in jail at this point in the story, Herod is!  Did I miss something?  Yes, I heard the voice from above saying that Jesus was the one; yes, his very name means savior and deliverer, but I don’t feel very delivered right now.  Israel doesn’t look very delivered.  Is this the one who was to come, or are we to wait for another?”

We see the lion attacking the calf; we see addiction overcoming the will of our loved ones; we see cancer or illness or age wasting away the bodies of our friends; we see death prowl. But what our eyes see and what our ears hear is not the ultimate truth, is not the most trustworthy revelation, is not the reality of the kingdom of God. And there’s a hint of it right here, my brothers and sisters, and it’s why we come to church each Sunday, to be reminded that what we see out there is not the final word, is not where our hope rests, is not the reality that we’re called to place our faith and hope in.

Life is short.  What are we living for?  Can we see who we are and who we’ve become?  Can we see the world six inches past our own nose?  Are we ready to meet God?  Are we awake or are we asleep? I need to be clear: St. Paul called death “the last enemy to be defeated.”  I repeat, death is not a good thing in and of itself.  But the God who loves us more than life itself uses death to try to wake us up from our slumber, to shake us up like the grandmother in O’Connor’s story and open our eyes to the reality of the state we’ve gotten ourselves into and the life that really is life.  How many people there are who’ve come near to death for the first time and realized how precious every day is, how so much of what we think matters really doesn’t, how much we’ve made a mess of things or how foolish we are to hold onto some grudge, and how we may not have many more chances to change our lives.

We are, all of us, refugees, aren’t we? All searching for a safe place to dwell, all looking and longing for a home to call our own, a place to rest and to thrive, a place to heal and be well. This psalm, and St. Augustine, tell us that this refuge we seek is found only in surrendering all our life and all its content and all our ambitions and all our worries and brokenness to God in Jesus.

What does Jesus have to do with the institution of the church?  Why should I give time and money to support it? I want to focus this morning on two answers to that question. First and foremost, the answer is that Jesus wants to pitch his tent here among us. In Jesus the eternal Word of God became flesh and moved into the neighborhood, and God wants to set up shop and take on flesh here in this neighborhood too. That’s the first reason.You might call it the incarnational logic of Christianity—God wants to be as real and present here in Oak Cliff on Kiest Boulevard as the coffee shop or the elementary school or the 7-11. The second reason is tied to the first—when God moves into the neighborhood he wants to gather together a people, a forgiven and reconciled community drawn from every nation and tribe, doing what Jesus does and going where Jesus goes. Jesus has a mission for us, and it’s a mission that we can only carry out together.

One reason we celebrate All Saints Day is that the saints show us that when we truly do rely on God, when we seek his will in prayer, when like Ruth we follow him to places that don’t make sense unless God shows up in power and keeps his promises—we see in the saints another way to live. The lives of the saints surprise us because we see in them a way of life that doesn’t make sense unless Jesus is risen from the dead and the Holy Spirit is alive and very present in the world today, in our church, in our lives.

If you look around at the many injustices of our time and pray day and night that God would grant justice to the downtrodden and the oppressed and the voiceless, look out: God may be calling you to go and do something to help him make your prayer come true. Prayer is action, calling on God to open up the floodgates of his power to make God’s kingdom come, God’s will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Prayer is action and prayer calls us into action, getting us involved with what God is doing in the world to do battle with the powers of darkness, proclaim good news to sinners, fill the hungry with good things, and lift up the lowly.

Naaman discovers that the world of the Lord — that is, the Kingdom of God, the authority of God given to Elisha the healer and prophet, is not the same plane as worldly authority, indeed, it is opposite in many ways.

What might we learn from this revelation, how might it apply to our daily lives?

Love and costly grace showed up in the story of Ruth and Naomi, you might even say in person, and brought about redemption and new life in the village of Bethlehem. One day years later in the very same place, in the very same family, love and grace showed up in person once more, and began to work redemption and new life into the story of the whole world. It’s a story that’s still being written. Your lives, our lives, this city, this country—we too can follow the footsteps of Ruth and Boaz, with faith and grace and costly love, and be written into Christ’s story of redemption. May we all have faith, like Ruth, and trust that the way of steadfast love, no matter what, and costly grace is the way of new life, God’s way to bring redemption into your life and our world.