Please note: The following sermon is provided as a resource for the thought, prayer, and meditation of the members and friends of St. Mark's. It is the residue of a verbal event, and thus it does not have academic footnotes and other details that would be expected in a written document. The writer gladly acknowledges the prior thought and work of many Christians before him.

What a story it is!

What a wonderful group of young persons to proclaim it in our midst this night!

Anything that is worth doing is worth spending time in preparation also; and our young proclaimers were busy in rehearsal over the past month.

The whole congregation did not get to see the decision-making process about who stands where and what is said.

We didn't experience the awkward pauses while problems were worked out and narrators remembered when to speak. 

We didn't see the great confusion while costumes were found and fitted and adjusted.

We didn't see all of the amazing things that happened during the final rehearsal last Saturday.

We have experienced only the presentation of the nativity story in its finished, polished form.

And even then, there are surprises as someone will always do something differently than in rehearsal.

And then afterward, Bernadette will be thinking, “If only I had directed the youth to do  thus or so, it might have been even better, or avoided this or that problem.”

But we are working in the “present imperfect.”

We don't have the possibility of going back and living a particular event over again.

Life is what it is, the first time through.

And there are always imperfections.

We can imagine how awkward things were on that first Christmas Eve.

--The discomfort of traveling late in pregnancy.

--Arriving too late to get the guest room in some relative's house, and so having to make do at the edge of the family room where it joined the area reserved for the animals.

--And those shepherds that come barging in while things are still in an uproar with the baby's birth.

--Do you let them in at all?

--If so, where do they stand or sit, since most of the room is taken up with sleeping pallets and animals?

--And what do they say?

--And how important is it?

--And does it have anything to do with the anyone else?

There must have been lots of awkward moments as all these questions were worked out with Mary and Joseph, the shepherds and others.

There would have been many imperfections that they would have liked to have handled differently.

The Good News of the night is that the Lord God works with us who are living in the “present imperfect”!

He knows already about things being imperfect – let's say it even more honestly – things are a mess!

In so many areas of life, wouldn't it be nice to back up and do something differently!

But of course we can't.

Sin, the brokenness of our lives and relationships with God and each other, entangles us so that we stumble one way and trip another direction.

God is come in the flesh, Jesus is born in Bethlehem, as an announcement that the awkwardness, the brokenness, the sin shall not be the biggest part of  our lives.

Those things shall not define who we are.

The mistakes, the wrongs, the pains we give or receive do not win.

In Jesus' birth, God says I love you, the people of my promises, in the “present imperfect.”

Through the birth and life, death, and resurrection of Jesus I'm showing you that I love you, imperfections and all, and will yet wipe away every tear, mend every brokenness, and give new life where death thought it was winning.

It is a wonderful thing that our youngest members have helped to proclaim the Good News this evening.

We learn something more thoroughly when we not only hear it, but see it and indeed act it out.

And it is OK if some detail wasn't exactly as the director wished;

that simply means that it is like the rest of our lives as we bump along from one crisis to the next.

I know that this is a very hard point for me to handle, since I'm always trying to have everything run perfectly.

I am not looking for an excuse for sloth or sloppiness, but when we are working as diligently as we can and still something goes awry,

then we need to take our anxiety down a notch and remember that we're not the ones who are finally in charge here!

Everything here belongs already to God.

The Lord of all creation is come among us as an infant to let us know that the “present imperfect”

          with all of its pains along the way

          and with death at its end

          is not the way things will always be.

In God's good time, the imperfections will be overcome and the power of death undone.

This news encourages us to laugh with joy!

And to sing:

Good Christian friends, rejoice

With heart and soul and voice;

Now ye need not fear the grave;

Jesus Christ was born to save!

He has opened heaven's door

and we are blest forevermore.

Christ was born for this!       [LBW 55:2,3]

The “present imperfect” rules us no more!

St. Mark's Lutheran Church

142 Market Street

Williamsport, Pennsylvania

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