By Faith Christmas Comes Alive
Sermon
GOD'S TWO HANDS
Sermons for Advent, Christmas and Epiphany
In his prophecy, Isaiah used the image of a messenger returning from a distant battle. He is seen by the anxious people when he is still atop the mountain and comes running down the mountain toward them. They can tell even at that distance that he brings good news, news of victory, news of peace. Good news of righteousness! Good news of redemption! "Thy God reigneth!" God is in control. Look to the future!
In foretelling Christmas, Isaiah, inspired, was revealing a glimpse of the eternal realm under God's love and authority. In the coming of Christ, humanity's victory was won. Our ultimate fulfilment was assured; our final peace was revealed. All this can exist this Christmas, and yet most of humanity remain stubbornly on the outside of it. This is God's sorrow; this is Christ's cross.
How does humanity "come in" to share God's eternal gift at Christmas? By faith; by commitment; by complete acceptance; by trust that includes the risk of everything. Then it happens; it becomes true for me, and I know it in my total being. God makes it clear to me. I feel it; I know! It is my faith that makes it real. This is good news; this is salvation, redemption; this is love and joy; this is righteousness and peace; this is eternal life. "Thy God reigneth!" The message has been delivered.
But God is not the focal point of the contemporary world. Science is that which sets the course in our lives - science, money, power, sex, materialistic knowledge. God is kept conveniently on hold only in case everything else fails. If humanity wants to try everything else but God, God permits it. But in our organized, mechanized, power-steering lostness, we are about to discover that "all else" has failed to make life real and meaningful. In our present extremity, we just might try checking out God this Christmas, to see what there is here; we just might be surprised.
Davitas' Harp is an excellent novel by the Jewish Rabbi, Chaim Potok. The main character is a brilliant but lonely little girl. Sensitive as she is, all kinds of adult thoughts rush through her mind. She perceives and imagines what others never dream of. Her communist mother came from the Jewish faith which she has totally repudiated. Her father has repudiated his Christian faith, even though he is a loving, dedicated man. "We don't believe in God," was a constant assertion. But everybody in the book is so tired, so exhausted, you can hardly endure the burden. The father is killed trying to save a nun's life in the Spanish Civil War. Davita has a nervous breakdown. She is nursed back to health by her father's sister, who is a radiant, compassionate Christian. Davita has a little friend whose family are faithful Jews. Davita loves the candles, the songs, the evidence of love in this family. She begins to go to the synagogue and discovers a satisfying way of life.
The mother has a breakdown and is nursed back to life by the same gentle Christian aunt. The fires of faith begin to blaze in her heart and she rediscovers the old faith. Strangely, this family is transformed by both the Jewish and the Christian experience (the reality of a God of love). They are not tired or exhausted any more. There is evidence of love and peace amidst the continuing struggle of life. The music had come back into life. At Christmas, "We see into the future, and it works."
Another contemporary novel is Colleen McCullough's A Creed for the Third Millenium. A new glacial age is creeping upon the world. People are cold and depressed. There are suicides everywhere. But there is one psychiatrist who is pure love and wisdom. He is trying to treat what he calls "millenial neurosis" - the terrible despair of the twenty-first century.
Dr. Joshua Christian is chosen by the President of the United States to lead the people back to a hope that could sustain life. He does this by his own determined faith:
It's not enough any more to live with self at the center of the personal universe. If it ever was ... spiritually the communists are very much better off than we, because they've got the State to worship ... we don't worship (period). Our people must find God again. They must learn to live again with God and the self at the center of their personal universe ... God is not human! God is God, is ever and always simply God. I tell my patients, Believe. I tell them, if they cannot believe in an existing concept of God, then they must find their own concept (of God). But they must believe! For if they don't, they will never be whole. (McCullough, p. 100)
As the story unfolds, Joshua continues to exhort the people in this fashion. He functions as a sort of national cheerleader, urging Americans to look beyond themselves to something theistic, something worthy of their trust. He warns his fellow citizens that humanity without God "is a purposeless speck of protoplasm," no more than an accident whose presence in the universe will prove eventually to have been meaningless.
Over two-hundred pages later, author McCullough still has her hero speaking in this way:
Hope in the future ... hope stemming from the fact that you have been entrusted by God with a mission to preserve and illuminate this planet ... (McCullough, p. 443)
After speaking and writing to the nation and the world in this manner, Joshua Christian wears himself out, and dies. But a new hope and a new vision had been born. Once more life makes a difference, because that life is responsive to God.
It is interesting to note that, at this moment in the history of the world, two prominent fiction writers should take humanity and God with such seriousness. There are signs that the secular age is drawing to a close and that a new age of the Spirit has begun.
Christmas is the prophecy of that new age. There is a typical incident in the life of Jesus. He was followed by two blind men who cried out, "Have pity on us." And when Jesus had gone into the house, they came to him. They were persistent in seeking, and expectant in their quest. The Master asked, "Do you believe that I have the power to do what you want?" "Yes Sir," they said. Jesus touched their eyes and said to them, "According to your faith be it unto you."
How do we read the evidence? What do we believe about life, about ourselves, about the universe, about values, about God, about Christ? What do we really believe? What are we committed to? We will never seek God unless we believe something is there, and unless we believe that that something relates to human beings and to human need. Some people believe a "no" defines life; others believe a "yes" defines it. The results of these two ways of life are essentially and eternally different. The promise is given every Christmas: "Seek, and ye shall find; ask, and ye shall receive; knock, and it shall be opened unto you." Otherwise, we miss both the meaning of Christmas and the fulfilment of life.
Do we hear the "good tidings"? Do we realize that "our God reigns"? Do we receive the gift of peace? Jesus focuses the light of God's love at the point where the trouble is. God's light, God's love, shines upon life's brokenness, its darkness, its sickness, to heal and redeem. Much modern psychiatry holds that the human self emerges in a biological process, and that it grows in a social matrix, that the development of the self is effected only by natural processes. Christians are not at home with this view of life, and neither are many of the leading psychiatrists today. Faith is breaking out again in the worlds of Psychology and Philosophy. In the old view our existence is limited to the boundaries of the material world. But if we are willing to check it out in our own existence, the fact that God is, that God loves, that God deals with individual and social life creatively, then we can discover in our own experiences new and higher dimensions of life. Albert Outler suggests the sequence: "Man from God, man before God, man against God, man redeemed by God, man in communion with God." Christmas calls for the spirit of Jesus to possess the earth.
Naturalistic psychology tells us that the great majority of individuals do not "make it," that, non-fulfilment is the norm. When we choose to live only on the level of the biological, non-fulfilment does become the norm. When we dare to live by the risk of faith in a Christ-like God at the heart of the universe, we discover that the basic direction of life is forward and upward, that non-fulfilment is a distortion, and that, we are made for faith, for commitment, for community, and for love.
Once at an Oxford University Christian Seminar, I heard one of the world's greatest atheists. He spoke brilliantly for an hour and a half on the theme, "Faith in God is not necessary for moral and ethical living." At the end of the lecture he paused and admitted frankly, "But I cannot compete with you, I have no hope." That's when life breaks down. Christmas is the perennial voice of hope.
As materialistic life piles its burden more and more heavily upon us, and we are about to be crushed, because we have no spiritual energies to sustain life, we admit with Robert Raines:
O.K., I'm scared. I admit it. Scared of the lust and deceit and jealousy biding their time in me, waiting for a weak moment ... scared of the possibility that I don't have the stuff to succeed in the terms I have set for myself ... scared I might fail, might be failing now, with my children, with my marriage, with my friends ... scared that I might have missed the boat already ... and not be aware of it. I'm scared because I have forgotten who I am. I am your son, Lord, heir to all that you would give me.
Or we say with Bonhoefer, "Who am I Lord? These questions frighten me. But whoever I am, thou knowest, O Lord, I am thine." It is good to be scared in our non-fulfilment. Scared enough to respond to the witness of God in my own life. When we do, God, himself, moves in. Remember the footsteps on the mountain. The good news of peace, of redemption. Thy God reigneth!
In his Gospel, John said, "Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God ... girded himself with a towel ... and began to wash the disciples' feet." The greatness and the humility of Jesus was rooted in his conscious relationship with the Father. The vital risk of faith could do just that for me this Christmas season. Knowing the constant God-relationship in my own experience, I might discover the courage to serve, the courage to be great in little things, the courage to forget what people might think, the courage to fulfil a life of love. In the power of such an experience, we feel "humbled to the dust, yet exalted to the stars."
What's our problem? Perhaps we have been believing too much. Maybe we have held false ideas about God, and when they didn't hold up, we lost God. On the other hand, we may have been believing too little about God, about the universe, about life itself, and life has no dimensions of richness. As Jesus said, "As you believe, be it unto you." This Christmas will be great or without meaning, according to your faith.
Too many of us are like the mice in Leslie Weatherhead's parable. A family of mice lived in a large upright piano. They heard its music fill their dark house with melody, soft sounds, and harmony. The mice were comforted by the thought of someone, unseen, but close to them; and they loved the great player they had never seen. Then [the age of Science], an adventurous mouse climbed higher in the piano and came back thoughtful. He said, "I have found out how the music is made. There are wires stretched tight of different lengths, and they are vibrating. This is the music." Only the naive could believe in the unseen player. And then another mouse climbed even a bit higher than this, and got another variation. He came back saying, "No, that is not the way it is. There are hammars dancing and tapping on the wires; this is the music. We live in a mechanized world." The unseen player was only a myth, but he continued to play the piano. (The hammers danced and the wires sang because the player played). But the mice were now alone and frightened in a dark, meaningless mechanized world.
As we hear the music of Christmas, will we forget the one who makes the music, the one who is back of it all?
To be effective, faith must, of course, coincide with the facts of the universe, seen and unseen. As we try to comprehend God with our finite minds, there are great gaps in our comprehension of him. Many of these questions can never be totally answered with our present limited vision. But as we look at God honestly, and seek to fill in the gaps, relative to his relationship to life and to us, we can insert Christ into those gaps - his spirit, his love, his identity with man, his suffering and his resurrection, and it fits. It fits gloriously. We have caught a glimpse of the player of the music. As we put Christ in the gaps, God himself draws close to us and whispers to us in the voice of Christ. We begin to know God, and trust him. We feel at home with this Christ-like vision of God. We believe that this fits the facts of the larger universe, even the scientific universe. We have found our response to life, and life's response to us - not in non-fulfilment, but in fulfilment. We feel God's hand in this. And we know, as one knows deep things, that, he can take our life, order it, fulfil it, in the crises and at the crossroads, and fit it into the total schemes of other fulfilled lives. He really can! "According to your faith ..."
Let this Christmas come alive with Joy!
Isaiah caught a glimpse of this centuries ago:
How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace; that bringeth good tidings of good, that publisheth salvation; that sayeth unto Zion, Thy God reigneth!
Aftermath
When the song of the angel is stilled,
When the Star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring Peace among brothers,
To make music in the heart ...
(Author unknown)
In foretelling Christmas, Isaiah, inspired, was revealing a glimpse of the eternal realm under God's love and authority. In the coming of Christ, humanity's victory was won. Our ultimate fulfilment was assured; our final peace was revealed. All this can exist this Christmas, and yet most of humanity remain stubbornly on the outside of it. This is God's sorrow; this is Christ's cross.
How does humanity "come in" to share God's eternal gift at Christmas? By faith; by commitment; by complete acceptance; by trust that includes the risk of everything. Then it happens; it becomes true for me, and I know it in my total being. God makes it clear to me. I feel it; I know! It is my faith that makes it real. This is good news; this is salvation, redemption; this is love and joy; this is righteousness and peace; this is eternal life. "Thy God reigneth!" The message has been delivered.
But God is not the focal point of the contemporary world. Science is that which sets the course in our lives - science, money, power, sex, materialistic knowledge. God is kept conveniently on hold only in case everything else fails. If humanity wants to try everything else but God, God permits it. But in our organized, mechanized, power-steering lostness, we are about to discover that "all else" has failed to make life real and meaningful. In our present extremity, we just might try checking out God this Christmas, to see what there is here; we just might be surprised.
Davitas' Harp is an excellent novel by the Jewish Rabbi, Chaim Potok. The main character is a brilliant but lonely little girl. Sensitive as she is, all kinds of adult thoughts rush through her mind. She perceives and imagines what others never dream of. Her communist mother came from the Jewish faith which she has totally repudiated. Her father has repudiated his Christian faith, even though he is a loving, dedicated man. "We don't believe in God," was a constant assertion. But everybody in the book is so tired, so exhausted, you can hardly endure the burden. The father is killed trying to save a nun's life in the Spanish Civil War. Davita has a nervous breakdown. She is nursed back to health by her father's sister, who is a radiant, compassionate Christian. Davita has a little friend whose family are faithful Jews. Davita loves the candles, the songs, the evidence of love in this family. She begins to go to the synagogue and discovers a satisfying way of life.
The mother has a breakdown and is nursed back to life by the same gentle Christian aunt. The fires of faith begin to blaze in her heart and she rediscovers the old faith. Strangely, this family is transformed by both the Jewish and the Christian experience (the reality of a God of love). They are not tired or exhausted any more. There is evidence of love and peace amidst the continuing struggle of life. The music had come back into life. At Christmas, "We see into the future, and it works."
Another contemporary novel is Colleen McCullough's A Creed for the Third Millenium. A new glacial age is creeping upon the world. People are cold and depressed. There are suicides everywhere. But there is one psychiatrist who is pure love and wisdom. He is trying to treat what he calls "millenial neurosis" - the terrible despair of the twenty-first century.
Dr. Joshua Christian is chosen by the President of the United States to lead the people back to a hope that could sustain life. He does this by his own determined faith:
It's not enough any more to live with self at the center of the personal universe. If it ever was ... spiritually the communists are very much better off than we, because they've got the State to worship ... we don't worship (period). Our people must find God again. They must learn to live again with God and the self at the center of their personal universe ... God is not human! God is God, is ever and always simply God. I tell my patients, Believe. I tell them, if they cannot believe in an existing concept of God, then they must find their own concept (of God). But they must believe! For if they don't, they will never be whole. (McCullough, p. 100)
As the story unfolds, Joshua continues to exhort the people in this fashion. He functions as a sort of national cheerleader, urging Americans to look beyond themselves to something theistic, something worthy of their trust. He warns his fellow citizens that humanity without God "is a purposeless speck of protoplasm," no more than an accident whose presence in the universe will prove eventually to have been meaningless.
Over two-hundred pages later, author McCullough still has her hero speaking in this way:
Hope in the future ... hope stemming from the fact that you have been entrusted by God with a mission to preserve and illuminate this planet ... (McCullough, p. 443)
After speaking and writing to the nation and the world in this manner, Joshua Christian wears himself out, and dies. But a new hope and a new vision had been born. Once more life makes a difference, because that life is responsive to God.
It is interesting to note that, at this moment in the history of the world, two prominent fiction writers should take humanity and God with such seriousness. There are signs that the secular age is drawing to a close and that a new age of the Spirit has begun.
Christmas is the prophecy of that new age. There is a typical incident in the life of Jesus. He was followed by two blind men who cried out, "Have pity on us." And when Jesus had gone into the house, they came to him. They were persistent in seeking, and expectant in their quest. The Master asked, "Do you believe that I have the power to do what you want?" "Yes Sir," they said. Jesus touched their eyes and said to them, "According to your faith be it unto you."
How do we read the evidence? What do we believe about life, about ourselves, about the universe, about values, about God, about Christ? What do we really believe? What are we committed to? We will never seek God unless we believe something is there, and unless we believe that that something relates to human beings and to human need. Some people believe a "no" defines life; others believe a "yes" defines it. The results of these two ways of life are essentially and eternally different. The promise is given every Christmas: "Seek, and ye shall find; ask, and ye shall receive; knock, and it shall be opened unto you." Otherwise, we miss both the meaning of Christmas and the fulfilment of life.
Do we hear the "good tidings"? Do we realize that "our God reigns"? Do we receive the gift of peace? Jesus focuses the light of God's love at the point where the trouble is. God's light, God's love, shines upon life's brokenness, its darkness, its sickness, to heal and redeem. Much modern psychiatry holds that the human self emerges in a biological process, and that it grows in a social matrix, that the development of the self is effected only by natural processes. Christians are not at home with this view of life, and neither are many of the leading psychiatrists today. Faith is breaking out again in the worlds of Psychology and Philosophy. In the old view our existence is limited to the boundaries of the material world. But if we are willing to check it out in our own existence, the fact that God is, that God loves, that God deals with individual and social life creatively, then we can discover in our own experiences new and higher dimensions of life. Albert Outler suggests the sequence: "Man from God, man before God, man against God, man redeemed by God, man in communion with God." Christmas calls for the spirit of Jesus to possess the earth.
Naturalistic psychology tells us that the great majority of individuals do not "make it," that, non-fulfilment is the norm. When we choose to live only on the level of the biological, non-fulfilment does become the norm. When we dare to live by the risk of faith in a Christ-like God at the heart of the universe, we discover that the basic direction of life is forward and upward, that non-fulfilment is a distortion, and that, we are made for faith, for commitment, for community, and for love.
Once at an Oxford University Christian Seminar, I heard one of the world's greatest atheists. He spoke brilliantly for an hour and a half on the theme, "Faith in God is not necessary for moral and ethical living." At the end of the lecture he paused and admitted frankly, "But I cannot compete with you, I have no hope." That's when life breaks down. Christmas is the perennial voice of hope.
As materialistic life piles its burden more and more heavily upon us, and we are about to be crushed, because we have no spiritual energies to sustain life, we admit with Robert Raines:
O.K., I'm scared. I admit it. Scared of the lust and deceit and jealousy biding their time in me, waiting for a weak moment ... scared of the possibility that I don't have the stuff to succeed in the terms I have set for myself ... scared I might fail, might be failing now, with my children, with my marriage, with my friends ... scared that I might have missed the boat already ... and not be aware of it. I'm scared because I have forgotten who I am. I am your son, Lord, heir to all that you would give me.
Or we say with Bonhoefer, "Who am I Lord? These questions frighten me. But whoever I am, thou knowest, O Lord, I am thine." It is good to be scared in our non-fulfilment. Scared enough to respond to the witness of God in my own life. When we do, God, himself, moves in. Remember the footsteps on the mountain. The good news of peace, of redemption. Thy God reigneth!
In his Gospel, John said, "Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God ... girded himself with a towel ... and began to wash the disciples' feet." The greatness and the humility of Jesus was rooted in his conscious relationship with the Father. The vital risk of faith could do just that for me this Christmas season. Knowing the constant God-relationship in my own experience, I might discover the courage to serve, the courage to be great in little things, the courage to forget what people might think, the courage to fulfil a life of love. In the power of such an experience, we feel "humbled to the dust, yet exalted to the stars."
What's our problem? Perhaps we have been believing too much. Maybe we have held false ideas about God, and when they didn't hold up, we lost God. On the other hand, we may have been believing too little about God, about the universe, about life itself, and life has no dimensions of richness. As Jesus said, "As you believe, be it unto you." This Christmas will be great or without meaning, according to your faith.
Too many of us are like the mice in Leslie Weatherhead's parable. A family of mice lived in a large upright piano. They heard its music fill their dark house with melody, soft sounds, and harmony. The mice were comforted by the thought of someone, unseen, but close to them; and they loved the great player they had never seen. Then [the age of Science], an adventurous mouse climbed higher in the piano and came back thoughtful. He said, "I have found out how the music is made. There are wires stretched tight of different lengths, and they are vibrating. This is the music." Only the naive could believe in the unseen player. And then another mouse climbed even a bit higher than this, and got another variation. He came back saying, "No, that is not the way it is. There are hammars dancing and tapping on the wires; this is the music. We live in a mechanized world." The unseen player was only a myth, but he continued to play the piano. (The hammers danced and the wires sang because the player played). But the mice were now alone and frightened in a dark, meaningless mechanized world.
As we hear the music of Christmas, will we forget the one who makes the music, the one who is back of it all?
To be effective, faith must, of course, coincide with the facts of the universe, seen and unseen. As we try to comprehend God with our finite minds, there are great gaps in our comprehension of him. Many of these questions can never be totally answered with our present limited vision. But as we look at God honestly, and seek to fill in the gaps, relative to his relationship to life and to us, we can insert Christ into those gaps - his spirit, his love, his identity with man, his suffering and his resurrection, and it fits. It fits gloriously. We have caught a glimpse of the player of the music. As we put Christ in the gaps, God himself draws close to us and whispers to us in the voice of Christ. We begin to know God, and trust him. We feel at home with this Christ-like vision of God. We believe that this fits the facts of the larger universe, even the scientific universe. We have found our response to life, and life's response to us - not in non-fulfilment, but in fulfilment. We feel God's hand in this. And we know, as one knows deep things, that, he can take our life, order it, fulfil it, in the crises and at the crossroads, and fit it into the total schemes of other fulfilled lives. He really can! "According to your faith ..."
Let this Christmas come alive with Joy!
Isaiah caught a glimpse of this centuries ago:
How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace; that bringeth good tidings of good, that publisheth salvation; that sayeth unto Zion, Thy God reigneth!
Aftermath
When the song of the angel is stilled,
When the Star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring Peace among brothers,
To make music in the heart ...
(Author unknown)
