12/24/10
Christmas Eve 2010
Hudson UMC
As Americans, we live in a culture that is increasingly secular, pluralistic, and even pagan. We, as a whole society, don’t really like the central claims of the Christian faith: that there is a God, that this God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, that this God created the universe which is, in turn, dependent on him. We don’t like those claims because, at the end of the day, it means that there are certain things that are what they are and not something else, which means we can’t make them mean anything we want to. If the basic Gospel message is true, then we are not the lords of our own lives, but are subject to a God whose word is always final.
What is interesting is that, in spite of the secularity of our culture, we still really like Christmas. We love the idea of gathering together with friends and family, to show our love in a tangible way by giving gifts to those who mean the most to us, and to do all of this while our days are short, dark, and cold, almost as a kind of protest against the weather. But when we separate the celebration of Christmas from the events that gave rise to that celebration in the first place, it becomes transformed from rejoicing over the compassion and self-giving of God to the strained financial giving of human beings; the beautiful symbolism and love that was inherent in the gifts the wise men gave to the child Jesus gets flattened out into gadgets and gift cards.
Even our music seems to suffer from this general secularizing trend. I, thankfully, have not had to spend too much time in stores this holiday season, but already I am completely sick of “Winter Wonderland,” one of the only songs that the secular marketplace can play during this time of year that reminds us of Christmas, but without the offense of actually talking about Jesus. To think that the season that has inspired so many songs that capture the essence of the Christian faith has been collapsed into “Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow,” or “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” is something of a depressing prospect.
In light of the fact that our culture is really good at celebrating on December 25, but not necessary good at celebrating Christmas, my challenge as a Christian pastor is not to get people excited about shopping or the spirit of giving, or anything like that. My challenge is to take a moment in the midst of this hectic time, and bring a reminder of just how significant the event we celebrate at Christmas really is because, in spite of the fact that it might seem that our festivities have been blown out of proportion, the truth of the matter is that we don’t celebrate nearly enough, when we compare it to what God has done by coming among us as one of us and one with us.
Let us consider the words of Paul in his letter to the Galatian Christians. “My point is this: heirs, as long as they are minors, are no better than slaves, though they are the owners of all the property; but they remain under guardians and trustees until the date set by the father. So with us; while we were minors, we were enslaved to the elemental spirits of the world. But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children. And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’ So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God.”
Paul describes the birth of Christ as being, in a sense, the coming of age of humanity, the time when we were able to stop being like slaves and little children and be mature adults, full participants in the inheritance of God. Now, we who are part of Western culture like to talk about coming to maturity; we love to think about shedding the authorities we used to be bound to and going out on our own to make a name for ourselves. However, this is not at all what Paul is saying. Paul is not saying that the birth of Christ merely signaled the maturity of humanity, as if we would have reached maturity anyway. Rather, the birth of Christ brought about that maturity and did so, not primarily in us, but in Christ, where we reach our own maturity. It is not on our own maturity, as if sheer individualism was a goal in itself; our maturity is to be found only in Christ.
If we just read the words that Paul wrote, and we don’t dig deeper into the meaning with which they are loaded, we can miss what he is really saying. He is saying that, on our own, even when we are in some kind of external relation to God, like the nation of Israel was for so long, we are enslaved to the ways of the world. Not only that, but we are enslaved by our own will. Since the very beginning, human beings have chosen the world over God. The problem is not just that we don’t know any better and so we don’t choose God by mistake; rather, the problem is that we know only too well what choosing God means and so, even though we do know better, we still avoid God. This is a difficult situation for humanity to be in. If we are not only enslaved, but enslaved by our own choice, what is God to do?
Paul tells us that, “when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children.” Why did Jesus come when he did? Why did he not come hundreds of years earlier? Why did he not wait until our day and age to come? We can never know, but what we do know is that, in the eyes of God, Jesus came at the fullness of time, the time when everything was ready, when the conditions were perfect. We might look at the events in the life of Christ and see that, at the end, he was completely abandoned, even by his closest friends. When we see that, we might doubt whether the time was really right or not, and yet, we are assured that this was the case and so the burden is thrown back on our shoulders to try and understand it.
Regardless of that, however, when Jesus came, he did not come as some high and exalted king, far away from ordinary folks like you and me. He did not hold himself aloof, even while coming to meet us. No, he was made just like us, born of a woman, born under the law, all so he could redeem those who were under the law, that is, you and me. This is Paul’s way of saying that, when God became a human being, he really came to share in our human experience, to join in the same world of space and time that we live in, to bear the same burdens we bear, because the trials of this life have changed forms but are substantially the same as they were two thousand years ago in ancient Israel.
Can you imagine what that means? It means that the God of the universe, who created everything we can see and everything that we can’t, from the largest galaxy to the tiniest sub-atomic particle, the one who maintains the staggeringly constant velocity of light throughout all of creation, became a human being to live in that universe. Compared to the immensity of the cosmos, we are but a speck of dust, less than that, even. And yet the God whom even the highest heavens cannot contain, chooses to become one of us and live a human life. Not only that, not only did God choose to come among us as a human being, which must seem incredibly primitive to God, he chose to live under the same law that he created for us. He lived all of his life, perfectly submitted to his own laws, and then was willing to be condemned by people who did not follow those laws, and be nailed to a cross by those same rebellious people.
And the question we have to ask in light of this fact is “why?” Why would God do this? If God were like us, we would have a hard time coming up with an answer. He did not do it because he had to; after all, God does not have to do anything at all. He did not do it because he got anything special out of the deal; after all, how could the God who created everything in the first place need anything from that creation? The gospel assures us that God did all this for one reason and one reason only, to not be God without us, because he loves us and wants us for his own.
But why does God love us? This is something that has given many people, perhaps even someone here tonight, a really hard time. There have been many people who have said, “God might love everyone else, but he couldn’t really love me.” Why do we say that? Do we really think that we are the worst person ever? Do we really think that, in spite of all the evil that human beings have ever done that God can forgive, somehow we have done something that God just can’t forgive? Do we honestly believe that somehow we, finite and weak human beings that we are, have managed to find a way to sin so badly that even the blood of Christ cannot cover it?
Think about the people in the Bible. Abraham, the one that God chose to be the father of the people of God was a liar. Moses, who was chosen to lead the Israelites out of Egyptian slavery, was a murderer. David, the one that God said was “a man after my own heart,” was both a murderer and an adulterer. Even the disciples of Christ themselves had lots of problems. James and John were power-hungry, Matthew was a greedy tax collector, Nathanael was a bigot, and Peter, the one that has gone down as the leader of the apostles, denied Jesus three times within hours of pledging his undying loyalty to him. Even Paul, who perhaps did more to spread Christian faith throughout the world than anyone else at the time, was a persecutor of the church and a murderer of Christians; once he even referred to himself as the chief of sinners.
In spite of this laundry list of sins, both sinful actions and sins of the heart, who can point to any one of these people who was finally rejected by God, who was told, “There is no atonement for you, for you have sinned too much.” Indeed, it is precisely because these people were such great sinners that the grace of God can be seen to be grace and not something that we earn for ourselves. Paul even goes so far as to say that sinful people, even the chief of sinners himself, are made, in Christ, the children of God. Because of what Christ has done, God has sent the Spirit of Christ into our hearts so that we join in Christ’s cry, “Abba! Father!” Even though we were born into slavery and even though we continue to choose slavery for ourselves day after day, in Christ, we are no longer slaves but children, and if we are children, we are heirs of God, those who will inherit the boundless kingdom of God.
If people like you and me, ordinary people with nothing special about us, are so transformed that we have become the very heirs of God, not because we did something great but because God did something great, all at tremendous cost to him so that it might cost us nothing, then our celebrations seem so very small in comparison. How can we possibly rejoice enough to show our gratitude for what God has done and is continuing to do day by day? Even though it is so far beyond us, let us do our best. Though everything we have to give is inadequate, let us give it anyway, for God has given us everything. Let us pray. AMEN
No comments:
Post a Comment