Neiman Marcus  BOASTS that it offers gifts even for that person ‘who, to your annual great frustration, seemingly already “has EVERYTHING!”  A few years ago, you could order for your wife or sweetheart a modest, 44-caret diamond ring — a steal for a mere $800,000!


Five years ago Neiman Marcus offered, if you so chose and if you had the wherewithal, to arrange a private concert with English singer and songwriter Sir Elton John for you and up to 500 guests.  Sir Elton would have performed for you and your guests in the Coliseum at Caesar’s Palace, Las Vegas, using his Elton John Signature Yamaha Red Baby Grand Piano.  You could, I’m sure, easily have afforded it for just one million, five hundred thousand dollars ($1,500,000)! Transportation to Las Vegas for you and your 500 guests, of course, and production expenses for the program were NOT included.  You’d have to shell out more dollars for that.  However you would have been able to keep the red baby grand upon which Sir Elton had played!

    SADLY in this year’s (2009’s) Christmas catalogue, Neiman Marcus, perhaps because of the financial downturn, had to scale down a bit its offerings.  Yes, the RECESSION has even reached the oil tycoons of DALLAS!  It seems that the most expensive gift you could ORDER from the store this season cost a mere $250,000.  It would have let you put under your Christmas tree (or, at least, in your backyard if big enough, but, more realistically, on a nearby airstrip) a His ‘n’ Her package of an ICON A5 sports airplane with custom trailer.  Sport-pilot license training for you and your significant other were included. The aircraft featured an amphibious hull and landing gear to take off and land just as easily on water as on land—IDEAL for your life here in sunny, southern Florida!
 
     Now I seriously doubt that anyone HERE this morning bought this year, for another person or even for yourself, a Christmas present either as EXOTIC or as EXPENSIVE as any of these.  But, friends, you CAN give a gift FAR MORE COSTLY than anything Neiman Marcus offered in its 2009 or any OTHER year’s catalogue!  Yes, whether you have MUCH money or LITTLE, EVERYONE present today can afford a present that’s PRICELESS!    What IS it? –We heard about it in our Second Lesson this morning from I John, chapter 4.  LISTEN again! – “Beloved since God has loved us so much, we also ought to love one another.”

    Friends, that’s IT!  The most expensive gift you can give to another person or to other people, either at Christmas or at any other time of year, is LOVE!
                                                  
    “HOW TRITE!” you’re probably saying.  But before you turn me off completely, let me assure you that by love I DON’T mean SENTIMENTALITY!  Flannery O’Connor, the great author born in Savannah and brought up in Middle Georgia, once declared, “Sentimentality is the ENEMY of religion!”

    And by “love” I don’t mean, too, the Christmas cheer and laughter of Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim and the born-again Ebenezer Scrooge.  I don’t even mean that vague “peace on earth, goodwill to men” by which we MIS-translate the Christmas song of the angels to the shepherds!  (The real meaning of those words is “Peace on earth to all people in whom God is well pleased.”)

    Love ISN’T a FEELING; it’s ACTION!  Love ISN’T a NOUN so much as it’s a VERB!   Love is unselfish, self-giving DEEDS on behalf of OTHERS, even when those others may not be so pleasant to be around, or grateful to you.  In fact, they may even be hostile, but you love them anyhow.  It’s the same kind of love that GOD has shown for YOU and ME in Christ!   It’s EXPENSIVE love!

    And WHY is that love so expensive? –Because it cost God SO MUCH!  Our lesson puts it THIS way:  “In this is love, NOT that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.”

    The late Dale Evans, cowgirl wife of Roy Rogers--and, incidentally, like him, a California Presbyterian—said once: “The greatest gift [God] ever gave was the Person of His Son, sent to us in human form so that we might know what God the Father is really like!  Every time we love, every time we give, it’s Christmas!”
                       
    Of course, friends, it’s relatively easy to love in this way those closest TO us:  our children, parents, siblings.  But what about folks outside your circle?  What about people who are DIFFERENT?  Who are hostile?  Who are psychotic (many homeless folks are, you know!)?

    God loved you and me even while we rebelled against him!  Undeserving as we are, God unselfishly sent Christ, at GREAT COST, to live and to teach and to DIE for us!  And God commands you and me to give like this to OTHERS—especially to the STRANGER, the LONELY, the OUTCAST, the HUNGRY—the same kind of love that God has given us in Christ.  TELL me, what do you or you and your family or your friends plan to DO in this regard in the new year, 2010?  What are you doing NOW, in this continuing CHRISTMASTIDE?

    Pardon me if now I get a bit too personal.  But when I think back over my OWN boyhood Christmas memories, one particularly stands out. It was not long after World War II.  My father was a pastor in a small Central Mississippi town. The nuns of a nearby, rural Roman Catholic mission school for African-Americans, located in the plantation area west of us, had sponsored a displaced Hungarian family, and brought them to live temporarily on campus.  Mr. Barczay was an elder in the Hungarian Reformed Church.  Before the war he had been a prosperous farmer In Transylvania, that area of eastern Hungary that, when we hear the word, makes us Americans think immediately of COUNT DRACULA and the horror movies.  But “Transylvania” should REALLY make us recall, instead, our Reformed cousins-in-the-faith, especially the province’s capital city of Debrecen (called the “Calvinist Rome” because of its famous, 16th-century university, seminary, and towering church on the central square). Yes, Transylvania for nearly 500 years now, has been the stronghold of Protestantism and, consequently, of freedom and justice in Hungary and Rumania.  (Lajos Kossuth, the famous, 19th-century Hungarian patriot, who led his people to rebel and, eventually, to win their freedom from the iron rule of the Austrian Habsburg emperors, delivered his most notable speech from the pulpit of that Great Church, Debrecen.)

    But let me get back to that Christmas there in our little Mississippi town, just after World war II.   Before that conflict, Mr. Barczay had been a highly successful farmer in Transylvania.  But AFTER the war, when the Soviet army marched in to SEIZE and COLLECTIVIZE his holdings and perhaps to harm his wife and two daughters, he had to FLEE with them in the dead of night, with little more than the clothes on their backs.  For a year or more they’d lived in a displaced persons’ camp in Germany.  But now they were happy finally to be in the U.S.A.  Since the wife and daughters were Roman Catholic, they were brought over by those good nuns of rural Mississippi, as refugees.  And one morning, at the small, nearby country church where my father led worship on Sunday afternoons twice a month, Mr. Barczay showed up for the service, to my father’s great surprise and the congregation’s.

    “Let’s invite the Barczays for Christmas dinner!” my mother said.  So, bright and early Christmas morning, Daddy drove out to that rural school and picked up the family, driving them in our old Ford.  The Barczays’ English was poor, and our Hungarian and German were non-existent.  So we communicated by gestures and smiles.  But breaking bread together and, later, singing “Silent Night” in our separate languages before the lighted Christmas tree, made us feel like old friends!

    In fact, looking back on boyhood Christmases, I can’t recall a single one at which some stranger—some person outside my immediate family--wasn’t present.  Someone whom my mother had invited to share our meal.  One year, it was the alcoholic from down the street, whose family finally, just before Christmas, had had enough, and left him.  (I remember he wept softly through much of dinner.)  Another year, it was the lonely Irish priest of our overwhelmingly Southern Baptist town’s tiny Catholic parish.  And EVERY year there was at least ONE--usually MORE than one--older person who lived alone.
                         
    Later, when I went off to university and seminary, I sometimes resented a bit having to share my family, at Christmas, with someone else, for I didn’t get home often.  But now I realize HOW GLORIOUS those times were!  What a BLESSING to me, because my mother had learned the gift of giving LOVE, the most costly of all! –And she was trying to teach the REST of us the VALUE of that gift!
                                                                 
    But, friends, what does it mean for the needy person to be on the receiving end of love at Christmas time? –I’ve known this, too.  Another unforgettable Christmas to me was, years AFTER that Christmas after the war, when I was spending a Fulbright year in Amsterdam.  How I dreaded my very first Christmas AWAY from HOME!  A group of us American students, with a few Dutch, had rented a Volkswagen van—and driven across the snowy alps all the way to Vienna, Austria, for the holidays.  The cheapest place we could find to stay was a modest hostel, run by nuns.

    December 24th dawned freezing, with snow on the ground there in Vienna.  I thought of my family, back home in mild Mississippi.  And loneliness began to set in.  But imagine our delight when one of the sisters approached us and said, “Please be our guests for dinner this evening!”

    At dusk we sat with the nuns in their refectory—and dined on a simple but delicious meal.  Their Christmas tree glowed with real candles.  And, after dinner, a young sister, with guitar, led us in singing “Stille Nacht” and other carols in the German language—perhaps the most beautiful carols in all the world!

    Suddenly, it didn’t seem that “home” was thousands of miles away.  These nuns had given us love—the most expensive gift in the world!
                      
    What about you in this continuing Christmastide?  What was the costliest present you received?  The most expensive that you gave?  The costliest that you can STILL give, during this wonderful season and ANYTIME?

    I’m so proud of this congregation, because on recent Sundays, one or more homeless people have been present.  And most of you welcomed them with concern—and warmly invited them to the refreshment time, or brunch, after worship.  I was able to put some of them up, for one night only, at the motel just down the A1A (the second, on the right, or west side of the road).  It’s owned by a Turkish-American (and, incidentally Muslim) who, as a favor to the church is only charging us $60 a night when we do this.  I take the money from the T.R.U.E. fund, which is very limited, but which you replenish each time we celebrate the Eucharist on the first Sunday of every month.

    Christina Rossetti, in her immortal poem and hymn, re-minds us:


Prayers:
    O God, Your Son our Lord Jesus Christ was born to Mary and Joseph and brought up a human being, like us.  We praise and thank You for that Incarnation, for that love that caused him to leave the limitless realms of heaven and enter the confines of time and space, to know life as WE know it, to speak to us of YOUR way, to live for us, die for us, and CONQUER death for us!   Teach us the meaning and the preciousness of that kind of self-giving, sacrificial love.  By your Holy Spirit, work through us to bestow that most valuable of ALL gifts on others, even though we can never do this near perfectly.
    Eternal God, you Son is the KING and HEAD of the Church, his Body, bless your people throughout the earth, and particularly this congregation of your saints and those represented here today; grant that ALL your people may learn to share His love.
    God of all the nations, send Christ’s peace on earth, and put down greed, pride, and anger, that turn person against person, and land against land.  Make the U.S.A. a nation of peacemakers. Bless the United Nations, the governments of the lands of North America, Great Britain, and Europe, and especially bring justice, freedom, and stability to the Middle East.  Speed the day when wars everywhere will end, and all people call you Lord;
    Merciful God: you bear the HURT of the world.  Look with compassion on those who are sick. Comfort with your sure promises and presence those who mourn;
    Finally, God of our fathers and our mothers, in gratitude we remember the tie that binds us to all who, in Christ, have gone before us into your perfect Kingdom.  Keep us in unity with them until we, like them, see you face-to-face; for we make these and all our petitions in the name and for the sake of Christ, our Lord.  AMEN.