First of all, I wish in my own name, in the name of your pastor, my senior Gato, and father Hartel, to wish all of you each one separately a very blessed Christmas, which will carry through the year with its blessedness and a very happy New Year. And the angel said unto them, fear not, went out to know after the birth to carry the good news to the shepherds in the field. And the angel said to them, fear not, for I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be for all people. For unto you today is born in the city of David a savior, who is Christ the lord. Words taken from Saint Luke the second chapter.
In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. Four weeks ago to the day, I began my remarks during Advent quoting Saint Augustine. And his words were something like this, continue on your way, but keep singing. Because as I said at the beginning of Advent, we are not looking forward to a savior as if he had not come.
We are looking forward to an anniversary of his coming. We are looking forward to an opportunity of reviewing our lives and saying, has he come to me? That the son of god, god become man stands at the door and knocks, but I have to open. And so I wanna bring saint Augustine into the picture this morning in a from a sermon of his on Christmas, on the feast of the incarnation, on the feast of God becoming a human being. And Augustine is carried away with a joy, and he says, awake.
Wake up, you human beings. For your sake, god became man. For your sake, god became man. And I say it again, for your sake, god became man. And this is the point I wanna leave before you.
We have a savior. We have the fact, the existential fact that God almighty sent his son into this world as a savior for me because I needed and need a savior. And the point is I have one. I have a savior. And if I look at the cross, I know that there's a resurrection right behind it.
And if I see the gloom of Calvary, I also see the glory of the resurrection on that marvelous morning that Christ broke the tomb and kept his promise. And it was a physical resurrection, not some kind of a projected belief or wish or faith or myth. These are the things that our lives and I let's not talk in this collectivity. Let us not forget that we are talking to individual human beings. We work out our salvation in a very real sense alone except for Jesus Christ.
Now just recently, I saw a bumper or rather a sticker on the bumper of a car, and it said something like this. Life is tough, and then we die. Life is tough and then we die. And that reminded me on a visit I made to Maria Locke in 1934. The guest master asked me to translate something that was in the guest book.
And what I read in the guest book was way beyond my facility with German to translate because somebodyand I happened to know the man who wrote it, believe it or not! He wrote as he was leaving the good monks at Life's a bowl of churries. What the hell's the use? Now, is that the way we look at life? Now, I've been thinking about these words very much in the last week when we had, first of all, this tremendous tragedy, if you want to call it that, in Armenia, with destruction and suffering beyond imagination.
Then we have this plane popping and dropping out of the sky, Pan Am one zero three. And everywhere people are saying, why? Why do these things happen? Are we to close our minds and say, well, they happen. That's all.
And we can't do anything about it. So let's pick up. Let's let's sweep it under the carpet or send it to the cleaner or do something. But keep on. Life must continue.
Life must go on. So we pick ourselves up, a la Nietzsche, and we continue on without any any remote explanation of why such things happen. We close our minds to them. We become dumb. Dumb.
Now we say that Christ that god became man to bring his light into the world. And if we need that light in any sense, we need that light to face the trials, the troubles of life. It's only the it's only the very young kid today who is not acquainted with the trials and the troubles of life. As you get older, they they get worse and maybe norm more numerous, but they get definitely worse. And what are we to do with this?
The whole thing is we either are blind and we ignore it and we grit our teeth and we are heroic souls and we continue on. But why? Why should I continue on? As Nietzsche said, He who has the why to live can bear most anything of the how. Nietzsche said that, of all people.
And it's a great but if it's true, then what is the contrary of that? What happens if you don't have the why? We're worse off than the animals because they can't even think. Now, nobody, nobody is going to tell you that because I believe I have a savior, there's not going to be another earthquake. I lived through an earthquake in Guatemala, and it was a pretty bad one.
Not as bad as that. It was a real bad one. Half the city slid off the mountain. Nobody is going to tell you that because Jesus Christ, the son of God, became man to to give you the light and life to conduct your life with him, that that's going to remove the tragedies, the sorrows, the bereavements, the disappointments, the defeats of life. Far from it.
But let me tell you one thing that's beyond all dispute. It will produce a Mother Teresa. That's what it will do. It will give us a Mother Teresa. She didn't come out of any paganism.
She didn't come out of any any, waiting for Godot. She didn't come out come out of any nihilism. She didn't come out of any dumb, ignorant escape from reality. She came out and comes out and is with us today, probably in Armenia, because she has the light and the life of Jesus Christ. And nobody can deny it.
Just before she went to Armenia in the early part of November down in South Africa, Africa. This little lady, she's a very tiny, wheezed up little bean. She stood up before a crowd of 8,000 people and told them all that they have to live together in love. And the love she's talking about is not liking people. It's loving God.
Because she herself said, I don't love these people, these terrible derelicts who are dying or close to dying or stinking messes. She says, I don't love them. I love god. That's all the difference in the world. All the difference in the world.
And if faith in Jesus Christ, the the baby born of a Jewish virgin that faith will not change the horrors of the world, and I'm not about to try to explain them. But it does give us hope. It tells us this is not the end of the world, that death in any form is what we're all going to have. We are all going to get it. Some people say we will experience it.
Nobody ever experiences death. You just die. Our our lord Jesus Christ did not take away death, but he did take away the horror of death. He did not take away earthquakes, but he does take away the horror of the earthquake. He does not take away the tragedy, the sorrow, the loss of close to 300 people dropping out of the sky, but he takes away the despair.
We have the hope of a new day because we know from the day we're born that we're going to die. We tell that tiny little infant when it's being baptized, carry this light so that you will have eternal life. This baby that's barely been born, we're saying life is over, and we hope you make it. And that's the thought I want to leave with you this morning. You individually have a savior, Jesus Christ, who is with you and guiding you and lighting the way for you in a world which indeed is tough.
Tough. And if it's true that we then do die, the Christian looks at death in the light of the resurrection, and we sing our. We are resurrection Christians, and hallelujah, praise God, is our song. In the name of the father and of the son and holy spirit. Amen.