They're unpredictable little critters. Sure, they behave themselves most of the time, buzzing around their hives and making delightfully delicious honey. But cross them just once, and they'll stick you with a nasty sting.

Fortunately, a monk named Remy Rougeau is madly in love with them.

On days like today, when heavy snowfall blankets the upper Midwest, Remy puts on his snowshoes and walks two miles over prairie hills with a shovel. His reason for making this trek is to clear the snow off of the honeybee hive, because if hive entrances are covered, the bees can suffocate.

He's got a real heart for honeybees.

But Remy does more than simple snow-clearing. Throughout the year, he keeps some bees at the abbey so that he can sting himself. Yes, that's right: Sting himself. On purpose. Each week he takes one bee sting in the knee; a local allergy specialist suggested this. "Years ago," he recalls, "when I was first assigned the apiary, I nearly choked to death when a bee got into my suit and stung me in the neck. I was far from help and not breathing well. Fortunately … after three injections of epinephrine my throat began to relax. Later, after the allergist thoroughly tested me, he suggested regular exposure to venom. And nowadays, I have no reaction to bee stings at all." (Diary of Benedictine monk Remy Rougeau, Slate.com, May 11, 2001, http://slate.msn.com/diary/01-05-07/diary.asp)

Exposure to venom. It's not a deadly thing for Remy Rougeau. In fact, it's the poison that enables him to maintain his passion for the honeybees.

During this Christmas season, we should open our eyes and see that God loves us in the same way that this monk loves his honeybees. Our Lord adores us -- really adores us -- despite the fact that we are unpredictable little buzzers, responsibly doing our jobs one second, and then aiming our stingers and shooting venom the next.

Because of this, God sent his Son Jesus to enter human life in Bethlehem, and to show us the path to glory. Jesus did this by sharing our flesh and blood, by experiencing our pain and death, and by stinging himself again and again. According to the letter to the Hebrews, God made Jesus -- the pioneer of our salvation -- "perfect through sufferings" (2:10). Jesus exposed himself to our venom so that he could identify completely with our suffering and death, and so that he could have a full understanding of the human condition.

Venom. It sounds so foul, especially when our poison is a deadly mixture of hatred and resentment, selfishness and spite, lust and anger and prejudice and greed. The venom of our sinfulness is at least as deadly as the secretions of snakes, spiders and scorpions.

Think of envy, which doesn't have the toxicity of a sin like anger, but can kill us nonetheless. Envy works on us year after year after year, and in the end we die without seeing all the blessings that we have been given throughout life.

Or how about selfishness? It works like the venom of the poison arrow frog, a muscle relaxant. We assume that we've worked hard and we deserve our success, so we retreat into a relaxing cocoon -- oblivious to the needs of the world around us.

Then again, maybe our sin is despair, a sense of hopelessness about the life we are living. Like the victim of a black widow spider, we may find ourselves wanting to just curl up into a ball and die.

It hardly seems possible to endure so much poison.

But maybe the sting of sin somehow leads to salvation. The good news of Christmas is that Jesus came to be stung -- to be stung by all this sinfulness. "Because he himself was tested by what he suffered," says the letter to the Hebrews, "he is able to help those who are being tested" (v. 18). Sometimes we need a fellow sufferer to lead us on the path to salvation; sometimes we will only follow a guide who knows us and understands us and has felt our deepest pain.

Just a few Christmas Eves ago, pastor Thomas Tewell was preparing to lead worship at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City. As he was about to enter the Sanctuary, he ran into a church member who looked terribly discouraged. Tewell knew that the man had suffered from a drinking problem and had been on the wagon for a few months; what he didn't know before that night was how lonely and depressed the man was feeling at Christmastime.

Gazing out over the Sanctuary, the man said, "Look at all these happy families. If I hadn't messed up so badly, I'd still have a family, too. I'm going to get out of here and go have a drink."

With just a minute to go before the Christmas Eve service, there was no time for a counseling session. So, thinking fast, Tewell ushered the man into a nearby room and then walked to the front of the Sanctuary to make an announcement.

"Friends," he said to the congregation, "we're going to start worship in just a minute. But first I need to ask, 'Are there any friends of Bill W. here?'" Tewell knew that Bill W. was the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, and that any recovering alcoholic would consider himself or herself a friend of Bill W.

He went on to say to the gathered crowd, "There is a man here who is feeling very discouraged, and could use the support of a friend. If you could offer some help, please come with me now."

First, a woman got up. Then a man. Then another and another and another. Tewell had no idea that he had so many recovering alcoholics in his congregation. Soon, a whole crowd had gathered in the room by the Sanctuary, and they spent that Christmas Eve offering life-saving support to a brother who was struggling with his desire to drink.

Thomas Tewell says that there was hardly anyone left in the Sanctuary for the worship service. But he knew that sometimes we need a fellow sufferer to lead us on the path to salvation. (Thomas Tewell, Preaching With Passion National Conference, Washington, DC, May 31, 2001.)

Jesus is a suffering savior, for sure, but he is more than that -- he is also the destroyer of the sting of death. He shared the very same things that we do, insists Hebrews, "so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death" (vv. 14-15).

With Jesus, the pioneer of our salvation, poison doesn't cause death -- it destroys death. Jesus used his exposure to venom to gain power over the very evil that he encountered. He took the sin of the world on himself when he went to the cross, sacrificing himself for our forgiveness, so that we could be free to join him in eternal life with God. As we will celebrate in Communion in just a few minutes, he gave his body and his blood so that we could know forgiveness and new life.

"I do love honeybees," says Benedictine monk Remy Rougeau. "For me, nothing in the world is more calming than to clean out hives after the long winter. Bees buzzing around my head seem to know I'm tidying up for them." In the same way, Jesus has a powerful and passionate love for us, and he acts as our merciful and faithful beekeeper. He cleans out our hives. He offers us forgiveness. He grants us new life. The very least we can do is buzz around him a bit, offer him our trust, and give him praise and thanks for all his goodness to us.

After all, Jesus exposed himself to venom. He let himself be stung, again and again. And he did it all for us, so that we could have life. Amen.