Silent Night
I begin my sermon with a story: Come with me - if you will - to a cold Christmas Eve morning in 1818 to the small Austrian mountain village of Oberndorf. As you look across the mountain tops, you will see a lonely figure trudging down the road. It is the local vicar Father Joseph Mohr (1792-1848), on his way to visit his friend Franz Gruber (1787-1863) - who lived in the neighbouring town of Arnsdorf. Mohr brought with him a poem he had written some two years earlier. He desperately needed a carol that evening for the midnight service that was now only a few hours away. He hoped his friend, Gruber, who was the church’s choirmaster and organist - could set his poem to music. Gruber looked at it and said “yes” he could something with it. And so that afternoon he composed a melody for Mohr’s poem. However they couldn’t play the carol on the local parish organ because recent flooding of the nearby Salzach River had put it out of action. So Gruber composed the music of Mohr’s poem for playing on a guitar. A few hours after Gruber finished his composition, he and Mohr performed the new song in St. Nicholas Church in Oberndorf. And that evening, the world heard for the first time a new carol “ - Silent Night”
Is it a true story or is it false. Well actually it is a mixture. It is fact that Joseph Mohr and Franz Gruber did write the famous carol “Silent Night” on Christmas Eve in 1818. Yes it was written to be played on guitar. And it was performed on Christmas Eve 1818 in St Nichaols’ Church in Oberndorf. Sadly, the story of the broken church organ appears to be fiction.
Unlike the story of “Silent Night”, the story of the first Christmas is a not mixture of fact and fiction, it is historically true. The fact is that Christmas is really all about the birth of Jesus. Jesus was the first Christmas present ever - God’s Christmas present to the world. And it is completely relevant to us in the 21st Century.
What do we know about Jesus? On paper his CV wasn’t very encouraging
i) He was born the son of an unmarried mother - he had the stigma of being a bastard
ii) He never got married nor had a family
iii) He never held high political office
iii) He wasn’t a great military commander
iv) He didn’t make it in the religious establishment. He was rejected by most of the jewish leadership.
v) He only ministered three and a half years and then he was executed as a common criminal. And when he died, his followers ran away
So what was so special about this baby. After all, on the same day, there were thousands of babies born throughout the Roman Empire. So why focus on this one? The reason was that Jesus was special and unique. He was the son of God, he came into the world to pay the penalty for our sins by dying on a cross to make us right with God. He rose from the dead so that we can have eternal life through faith in him once we die. And because of this his followers turned the known world upside down within 300 years.
This Christmas may I encourage you to look at the reasons why Jesus has had such an effect on our society?
1. Has it has a lot to do with his teaching? He taught us to put ourselves last and others first and to love our enemies and to always forgive unconditionally. This is absolutely revolutionary.
2. Has it anything to do with the remarkable claim that Christians make - that Jesus died and rose again from the dead?
3. Has it anything to do with his mission on earth, which was to bring people everywhere back into a relationship with God – a relationship, which had been broken by our wrongdoing or sin?
I’d like to leave you with a thought. Whatever the reason - can we really afford to ignore Jesus this Christmas?