The Nativity of Our Lord, Christmas Eve… “Love is Here!”
Wednesday, December 24, 2025
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Oxford, WI , 8:00 pm
A Hymn Service for Christmas Eve
Hymns: “O Come, All Ye Faithful” #379;
“O Little Town of Bethlehem” #361
“It Came Upon the Midnight Clear” #366
“Away in a Manger” #364
“What Child Is This” #370
“Angels We Have Heard On High” #368
“Gentle Mary Laid Her Child” #374
“Silent Night” #363
“Hark, the Herald Angels Sing” #380
Dear Friends In Christ;
Grace, mercy, and peace to you, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, born for us to bear our sin and be our Savior. Amen.
“Where are you, Christmas? Why can’t I find you?” says a popular Christmas song. It’s surprising, when you talk to people, how many of us feel that way this time of year. All the time and effort and work – and money – we put into making our Christmases turn out “just right” -- and somehow, we end up putting out the day-after-Christmas trash, and putting the decorations and lights back in the box, and feeling like all that love and goodwill this season is famous for is getting put back in the box, too. And that we’ve somehow… missed something again.
Maybe it’s because, like another old song says (definitely not a Christmas song), we’ve been “looking for love in all the wrong places.” In “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” good old Charlie Brown, feeling all worn out and frazzled the same way we sometimes do at Christmastime, cries out, “Can’t somebody tell me what Christmas is all about?” And that’s when Linus stands up and reads him the Christmas story from St. Luke’s Gospel: “Tonight has been born to you, in the City of David, a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.”
Tonight we celebrate the arrival here on earth of the love of God in human flesh. “God is love,” our reading from First John tells us; and the infant lying in Bethlehem’s manger is the flesh-and-blood expression of God’s love -- God’s deep and holy love shown to sinful people and to a sin-broken world, and calling the world to come home to Him. God’s love tonight is a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes, come to give His life for the sake of us all. God’s love is here! His love is real! Real as a baby’s tiny hand, real as an infant crying in the dark.
“Dear friends,” John writes (“beloved” or “agape” is the actual word he uses), “My beloved, we also ought to love one another, because love comes from God.” God is where all love comes from; He invented love, you know. In fact, He is love; love is the essence of who God is. God is the Spirit of Love, everything there is that’s loving and joyful and holy and good, all wrapped up, all contained, in one divine and loving Being.
The God of love, whom we call our Father, made us and loves us and calls us His children - even if we don’t know yet who He is, even if we haven’t been told about Him yet, or have yet to acknowledge Him, and even if we have yet to say we love Him back. Sinners that we are, we look for love and hope and joy - and anything we can reach for to give our lives here on earth some kind of meaning - anywhere but with the God who made us; and somehow we end up never satisfied. And yet the Father still loves His children; what else can a Father do?
So, John says, because God loves us, He showed His love among us -- hoping somehow that we’d stop our running around long enough to notice and see and look up to Him. And He showed His love -- merry Christmas to you all -- by “sending His one and only Son into the world, that we might live through Him.” Love is real! Love is here! “She gave birth to her firstborn Son and laid Him in a manger.”
So this is love, John says. This is the essence, the heart, the soul of what love is, and everything it was meant to be: “Not that we loved Him, but that He loved us.” That’s the kind of love God has for us, and the kind of love God is looking for when He looks down here on His world: Not the kind of love that won’t love unless it’s loved in return, or love that only gives expecting to get something back; but love that just… loves … because that’s what love does. “God demonstrates His own love for us in this,” St. Paul says: “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
Again -- merry Christmas to you all -- God loved us so much that He “sent us His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” That’s how God showed at last how much He loved us, and how God made His love for us visible and unmistakable and real. Holy infant, tender and mild, born on earth to die. First a cradle, then a cross. Love in His first borning cry, then love in every drop of His blood, His life given for yours. “Greater love has no one than this, than that He lay down His life for His friends.”
So Christmas, where can we find you? We’ve found Him tonight, as we celebrate His birth: Jesus, Immanuel, “God with Us,” God who loved us enough to come down to this awful mess of a world and be one of us.
This world, thanks be to God, still has good and faithful people in it, which means this place is still redeemable and there’s still hope down here. This world still has people like Mary and Joseph, who did what God asked of them, even if they didn’t quite understand what God was doing; and people like Simeon and Anna, who waited faithfully all their lives for their Savior to come. But this world also still has its Augustus Caesars, and King Herod’s, and Pontius Pilate’s, people who live for themselves and never look up to God. That being the case, we know the truth about Christmas have to do the best we can, and do all we can, to be the ones to try to make it better, until Jesus comes back again. If God’s love is in us, what else can we do?
And through it all, no matter what happens in the world, or what the world does to us, or what we might have to face when those Christmas lights go back in the box -- as good St. John says, “Since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and His love is made complete in us.”
That’s where you’ll find Christmas -- the ‘Jesus’ Christmas, anyway, not the storebought kind. You’ll find it in the love God has for you, and in the love all of you can show to one another. And that isn’t something you can giftwrap, or exchange for something else in a return line, or put in a box and up on a shelf until next year. “We live in Him, and He in us,” John says. Christmas isn’t just one day on a calendar; it’s the hope God has given us, and the Spirit that lives in us, because of the hope God has poured into our souls. “We have seen and testify that the Father has sent His Son to be the Savior of the world.” Write that on your Christmas cards, and write it on your heart, and tell someone about it whenever you can; and your Christmas will be everything you’ve ever wanted it to be. In Jesus’ name; Amen.
Rev. Larry Sheppard, M.Div.
Trinity Lutheran Church, Packwaukee, WI
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Oxford, WI
pastorshepp@gmail.com