Return to the New
Sermon
Reading The Signs
SERMONS FOR ADVENT, CHRISTMAS AND EPIPHANY (SUNDAYS IN ORDINARY TIME)
The shepherds in the Christmas story appeal to our sentiment, but the wise men appeal to our imagination. Those wise men are mystical figures: they came from a great distance, led by a star and their own strange research; they gave extraordinary gifts to a child whose setting hardly seemed to deserve such recognition; and then they went home "another way."
That return by "another way" fascinates us. We know it is a geographical term, but we sense that it also symbolizes a spiritual change. One of the notable poets of this century, T.S. Eliot, was so caught by the story that he speculated on their feelings:
... were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad for another death.1
1. T.S. Eliot, "Journey of the Magi," The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1935, (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1958), p. 68.
By comparison, the shepherd story seems almost ordinary. True, the angel visitation was dramatic. But where the wise men traveled for weeks from a great distance and a different culture to see this child, the shepherds stayed in their own neighborhood. It was probably only a fair run from their hillside down to the village of Bethlehem. Culturally, it was an even closer journey. The shepherds belonged to one of the most despised elements in first-century society, but they were closer to Josph and Mary on the social strata than were the wise men. The shepherds could feel quite at home by a manger.
The contrast which strikes me most forcibly is the homeward journey. It was a return of dramatic difference for the wise men. But for the shepherds? Saint Luke puts it this way: "And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them." (Luke 2:20)
"And the shepherds returned ..." It is not another road for them. There is no Herod to escape, and no long journey for pondering the change that has come to their lives. They return to the same job, the same hillside, the same sheep. And, with it, the same public disfavor and the same lack of personal esteem.
I wonder, even, about their witness. The wise men, no doubt, got a good hearing simply because of their prestigious standing. But when the shepherds returned "glorifying and praising God," I wonder if the people of Bethlehem discredited their word. After all, what would shepherds know? And if God were doing something special, why would he choose to reveal himself to shepherds? You may argue that the people of Bethlehem would hear the shepherds sympathetically because Israel's greatest king was once a shepherd boy. But you know better. We had a president who was formerly a rail-splitter, and it hasn't made us more impressed with the potential wisdom of all common laborers.
So they returned to an ordinary life in an ordinary place. It's hard to go from a unique experience back to the routine. When I preached, years ago, for youth camps and institutes, I often warned the young people of the difficulties they would face in returning to home, church, and parents who wouldn't easily empathize with their week of spiritual and social high. "How do I settle back into ordinary life after ten days of such beauty?" a woman asked me as a religious tour group was heading back to the states. Such was the problem of the shepherds. They had made company with angels and had bowed before the King of kings; how could they now return to sheep and hillside and lonely nights? How could they return to the old?
You and I are in a position to understand the shepherds - to feel a kinship with them - especially at this bridge of the year, as we bid farewell to the old and set out on the new. All about us we hear references to a new start. Our Christian attitude responds warmly to that idea, for we believe in new beginnings and we know that God is with us in our efforts to start anew. But sometimes there's something a little depressing about the call of the New Year, because we know that the new year will be simply a continuation of the year to which we are saying goodbye. The cartoonist may picture it as an infant in a diaper, bannered by the number of the year, but we know it is nothing more than an extension of the year which has just ended.
So it was with the shepherds. They had a new experience - something so vital they could hardly contain it. But now they must return; and it looked as if it would be a return to the old. You and I celebrate a new start today, but it will be with the same bills to pay, the same trash to carry out, the same difficulties to be dealt with.
Except for one vital fact which changes the whole picture. The shepherds had seen Jesus, and that was making all the difference. It is true they would be shepherds, still committed to hard and lonely work. But now they were different men. And if the person has changed, he does not return to the same old place; he or she returns to the new. It is new because he is new.
John Masefield said it very well in his epic poem, "The Everlasting Mercy." Saul Kane, the roustabout ne'er-do-well, had come to know Christ. The next morning he awakened to a new world. It contained the same old houses, brick walls, and flora and fauna; but it was all new to Saul Kane because he was a new man. So,
The station-brook, to my new eyes,
Was babbling out of Paradise,
The waters rushing from the rain
Were singing Christ has risen again.
I thought all earthly creatures knelt
From rapture of the joy I felt.
The narrow station-wall's brick ledge,
The wild hop withering in the hedge,
The lights in huntsmen's upper storey
Were parts of an eternal glory,
Were God's eternal garden flowers.2
2. John Masefield, The Everlasting Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street, (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1919), pp. 78, 79.
You and I need such an experience as we enter the new year. The late William Barclay once said that one of the most tragic things that can happen to a person is the loss of wonder. When we're young, he said, we live in a thrilling, wonderful world; but as we grow older we find ourselves living in a world which has grown grey and commonplace. "But the change," Dr. Barclay wrote, "is not in the world. It is in ourselves."3
3. William Barclay, Daily Celebration Volume 22, (Waco, Word Books, 1973), p. 12.
If that be so - and it undoubtedly is - the reverse is also true. If we can allow our world to grow commonplace with the passing of time, we can just as surely see it come alive in some new way if we will cooperate in bringing it to pass.
But how do we bring such newness to pass? On the one hand, there are some practical, down-to-earth things we can do. It's necessary, at times, for all of us to take ourselves by the nape of the neck - mentally and emotionally - and direct our attention to what is good and hopeful. "Think on these things," Paul said, thus acknowledging that it is at least partly in our hands to choose what shall receive our attention. Many voices solicit our attention, and sometimes our physical and psychological condition make us easy prey to that which is less than uplifting; nevertheless, we can help ourselves a good bit, if we will.
We may need to choose quite deliberately, especially at this early point in the year, to seek out some new kind of rçading, or plan travel to a different kind of place, or expose ourselves to some new possibilities in friendship, music, or adventure.
But these efforts will probably not be enough. G.K. Chesterton said, in his autobiography, that the real difficulty for us human beings is not to enjoy specific things - whether landscapes or dandelions - "but to enjoy enjoyment." We need to get a new excitement for life itself. We need, like Saul Kane, to receive from God the gift of new life within.
Am I speaking of conversion? Yes, I surely am. But I'm not thinking exclusively of the initial experience of conversion - though I'd surely begin there. I'm thinking particularly of continuing renewal. Even the greatest saints slip into a kind of spiritual ennui if they are not regularly and frequently restored within. The same is true of us lesser souls.
How do we get such renewal? There is an answer in the latter portion of our Scripture text of the day. It may sound commonplace, but it is very instructive. Listen: "And at the end of eight days, when he was circumcised, he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb." (Luke 2:21)
The best way to the new is often by way of the old. Jesus was God's new and unique work in the world - so new that we call the document written about him the New Testament. But he entered upon his life bowing to the ancient regulations which were required of every boy born into a Jewish home. Joseph and Mary might easily have reasoned, in light of the peculiar circumstances of his birth, that Jesus was too "special" to be subject to the routine regulations of Judaism. Instead they submitted him to the rite of circumcision in the same fashion as every other Jewish family.
If you and I want the coming year to be marked by a very real newness within, we would do well to review some of the ancient practices which good people have found helpful over the centuries. I pastored in Green Bay, Wisconsin, during part of the period that Vince Lombardi was coaching the Packers to football immortality. Mr. Lombardi was often asked about trick plays and the secrets of coaching; he always answered that it was simply a matter of blocking and tackling. There were no new, clever ideas that really mattered unless one mastered the fundamentals of the game.
I've concluded that the same thing is true of the spiritual life. Books, retreats, and religious conferences are constantly promising us some new formula for spiritual vitality. Some of them may stimulate us for a time. But, in the end, we'll need to come back to "blocking and tackling" - such basic matters as Bible reading, prayer, group worship and sharing, and good devotional reading.
God can break into our lives regardless of attendant circumstances, but he is more likely to do so in settings which are hospitable to his purposes. A structured pattern of Bible study, prayer, and devotional reading may seem as uninspiring as the ancient formula of circumcision. But there is a place for such structure. The Spirit of God seems pleased to work through such channels of commitment.
So there's something rather exciting about entering a new year at the time of the Christian Feast of Circumcision and the occasion of the naming of Jesus. It is a time for you and me to make a new start, with the secular calendar offering its help by a whole new sheaf of pages. Yet, we confess that we will have to make this new start with largely old elements: same house same job, same friendships, same bills to be paid. Like the shepherds of old, we are returning to that from which we came when the angels called us.
But within, we can be new. We have seen the Christ and have found new life and hope in him. Now we intend to nurture that life and to make sure that the new year really and profoundly is new. And we will insure such progress by ancient formulas - routines as timeworn as the ancient Jewish rites of passage. But we will do so with help which makes all the difference. We celebrate today that occasion when they named the infant Jesus. He was given that name because he was sent to be our Savior. You and I can expect new life as we enter this new year, because we have met the One who saves. In him, all things are become new. He is our prospect for new hope and new joy, as we turn the page for a new year.
That return by "another way" fascinates us. We know it is a geographical term, but we sense that it also symbolizes a spiritual change. One of the notable poets of this century, T.S. Eliot, was so caught by the story that he speculated on their feelings:
... were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad for another death.1
1. T.S. Eliot, "Journey of the Magi," The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1935, (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1958), p. 68.
By comparison, the shepherd story seems almost ordinary. True, the angel visitation was dramatic. But where the wise men traveled for weeks from a great distance and a different culture to see this child, the shepherds stayed in their own neighborhood. It was probably only a fair run from their hillside down to the village of Bethlehem. Culturally, it was an even closer journey. The shepherds belonged to one of the most despised elements in first-century society, but they were closer to Josph and Mary on the social strata than were the wise men. The shepherds could feel quite at home by a manger.
The contrast which strikes me most forcibly is the homeward journey. It was a return of dramatic difference for the wise men. But for the shepherds? Saint Luke puts it this way: "And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them." (Luke 2:20)
"And the shepherds returned ..." It is not another road for them. There is no Herod to escape, and no long journey for pondering the change that has come to their lives. They return to the same job, the same hillside, the same sheep. And, with it, the same public disfavor and the same lack of personal esteem.
I wonder, even, about their witness. The wise men, no doubt, got a good hearing simply because of their prestigious standing. But when the shepherds returned "glorifying and praising God," I wonder if the people of Bethlehem discredited their word. After all, what would shepherds know? And if God were doing something special, why would he choose to reveal himself to shepherds? You may argue that the people of Bethlehem would hear the shepherds sympathetically because Israel's greatest king was once a shepherd boy. But you know better. We had a president who was formerly a rail-splitter, and it hasn't made us more impressed with the potential wisdom of all common laborers.
So they returned to an ordinary life in an ordinary place. It's hard to go from a unique experience back to the routine. When I preached, years ago, for youth camps and institutes, I often warned the young people of the difficulties they would face in returning to home, church, and parents who wouldn't easily empathize with their week of spiritual and social high. "How do I settle back into ordinary life after ten days of such beauty?" a woman asked me as a religious tour group was heading back to the states. Such was the problem of the shepherds. They had made company with angels and had bowed before the King of kings; how could they now return to sheep and hillside and lonely nights? How could they return to the old?
You and I are in a position to understand the shepherds - to feel a kinship with them - especially at this bridge of the year, as we bid farewell to the old and set out on the new. All about us we hear references to a new start. Our Christian attitude responds warmly to that idea, for we believe in new beginnings and we know that God is with us in our efforts to start anew. But sometimes there's something a little depressing about the call of the New Year, because we know that the new year will be simply a continuation of the year to which we are saying goodbye. The cartoonist may picture it as an infant in a diaper, bannered by the number of the year, but we know it is nothing more than an extension of the year which has just ended.
So it was with the shepherds. They had a new experience - something so vital they could hardly contain it. But now they must return; and it looked as if it would be a return to the old. You and I celebrate a new start today, but it will be with the same bills to pay, the same trash to carry out, the same difficulties to be dealt with.
Except for one vital fact which changes the whole picture. The shepherds had seen Jesus, and that was making all the difference. It is true they would be shepherds, still committed to hard and lonely work. But now they were different men. And if the person has changed, he does not return to the same old place; he or she returns to the new. It is new because he is new.
John Masefield said it very well in his epic poem, "The Everlasting Mercy." Saul Kane, the roustabout ne'er-do-well, had come to know Christ. The next morning he awakened to a new world. It contained the same old houses, brick walls, and flora and fauna; but it was all new to Saul Kane because he was a new man. So,
The station-brook, to my new eyes,
Was babbling out of Paradise,
The waters rushing from the rain
Were singing Christ has risen again.
I thought all earthly creatures knelt
From rapture of the joy I felt.
The narrow station-wall's brick ledge,
The wild hop withering in the hedge,
The lights in huntsmen's upper storey
Were parts of an eternal glory,
Were God's eternal garden flowers.2
2. John Masefield, The Everlasting Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street, (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1919), pp. 78, 79.
You and I need such an experience as we enter the new year. The late William Barclay once said that one of the most tragic things that can happen to a person is the loss of wonder. When we're young, he said, we live in a thrilling, wonderful world; but as we grow older we find ourselves living in a world which has grown grey and commonplace. "But the change," Dr. Barclay wrote, "is not in the world. It is in ourselves."3
3. William Barclay, Daily Celebration Volume 22, (Waco, Word Books, 1973), p. 12.
If that be so - and it undoubtedly is - the reverse is also true. If we can allow our world to grow commonplace with the passing of time, we can just as surely see it come alive in some new way if we will cooperate in bringing it to pass.
But how do we bring such newness to pass? On the one hand, there are some practical, down-to-earth things we can do. It's necessary, at times, for all of us to take ourselves by the nape of the neck - mentally and emotionally - and direct our attention to what is good and hopeful. "Think on these things," Paul said, thus acknowledging that it is at least partly in our hands to choose what shall receive our attention. Many voices solicit our attention, and sometimes our physical and psychological condition make us easy prey to that which is less than uplifting; nevertheless, we can help ourselves a good bit, if we will.
We may need to choose quite deliberately, especially at this early point in the year, to seek out some new kind of rçading, or plan travel to a different kind of place, or expose ourselves to some new possibilities in friendship, music, or adventure.
But these efforts will probably not be enough. G.K. Chesterton said, in his autobiography, that the real difficulty for us human beings is not to enjoy specific things - whether landscapes or dandelions - "but to enjoy enjoyment." We need to get a new excitement for life itself. We need, like Saul Kane, to receive from God the gift of new life within.
Am I speaking of conversion? Yes, I surely am. But I'm not thinking exclusively of the initial experience of conversion - though I'd surely begin there. I'm thinking particularly of continuing renewal. Even the greatest saints slip into a kind of spiritual ennui if they are not regularly and frequently restored within. The same is true of us lesser souls.
How do we get such renewal? There is an answer in the latter portion of our Scripture text of the day. It may sound commonplace, but it is very instructive. Listen: "And at the end of eight days, when he was circumcised, he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb." (Luke 2:21)
The best way to the new is often by way of the old. Jesus was God's new and unique work in the world - so new that we call the document written about him the New Testament. But he entered upon his life bowing to the ancient regulations which were required of every boy born into a Jewish home. Joseph and Mary might easily have reasoned, in light of the peculiar circumstances of his birth, that Jesus was too "special" to be subject to the routine regulations of Judaism. Instead they submitted him to the rite of circumcision in the same fashion as every other Jewish family.
If you and I want the coming year to be marked by a very real newness within, we would do well to review some of the ancient practices which good people have found helpful over the centuries. I pastored in Green Bay, Wisconsin, during part of the period that Vince Lombardi was coaching the Packers to football immortality. Mr. Lombardi was often asked about trick plays and the secrets of coaching; he always answered that it was simply a matter of blocking and tackling. There were no new, clever ideas that really mattered unless one mastered the fundamentals of the game.
I've concluded that the same thing is true of the spiritual life. Books, retreats, and religious conferences are constantly promising us some new formula for spiritual vitality. Some of them may stimulate us for a time. But, in the end, we'll need to come back to "blocking and tackling" - such basic matters as Bible reading, prayer, group worship and sharing, and good devotional reading.
God can break into our lives regardless of attendant circumstances, but he is more likely to do so in settings which are hospitable to his purposes. A structured pattern of Bible study, prayer, and devotional reading may seem as uninspiring as the ancient formula of circumcision. But there is a place for such structure. The Spirit of God seems pleased to work through such channels of commitment.
So there's something rather exciting about entering a new year at the time of the Christian Feast of Circumcision and the occasion of the naming of Jesus. It is a time for you and me to make a new start, with the secular calendar offering its help by a whole new sheaf of pages. Yet, we confess that we will have to make this new start with largely old elements: same house same job, same friendships, same bills to be paid. Like the shepherds of old, we are returning to that from which we came when the angels called us.
But within, we can be new. We have seen the Christ and have found new life and hope in him. Now we intend to nurture that life and to make sure that the new year really and profoundly is new. And we will insure such progress by ancient formulas - routines as timeworn as the ancient Jewish rites of passage. But we will do so with help which makes all the difference. We celebrate today that occasion when they named the infant Jesus. He was given that name because he was sent to be our Savior. You and I can expect new life as we enter this new year, because we have met the One who saves. In him, all things are become new. He is our prospect for new hope and new joy, as we turn the page for a new year.
