Bethany Lutheran Church

Honest Christmas | Honestly Seen

December 11, 2022 Pastor Martin Danner
Bethany Lutheran Church
Honest Christmas | Honestly Seen
Show Notes

Christmas is about the incarnation of God in Christ. That is, God is seen and experienced in Christ. To be seen means we open ourselves up to judgement, to pain, to suffering. To be seen means we open ourselves up to love and to touch. Incarnation is about being known. We are invited to know God in Christ and in Christ we become known too.

Isaiah 53:1-3 (ESV)
Who has believed what he has heard from us?
    And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
For he grew up before him like a young plant,
    and like a root out of dry ground;
he had no form or majesty that we should look at him,
    and no beauty that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by men,
    a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;
and as one from whom men hide their faces
    he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

John 4:13-18 (ESV)
Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.”

Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come here.” The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; for you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband. What you have said is true.”