"The Relevance of Christmas"

      12/16/12            "The Relevance of Christmas"          Grace UMC

In my experience, I can hardly go more than a few weeks without hearing someone who wants to talk about the relevancy of the gospel of Jesus Christ.  People are concerned with whether the church, and the gospel it proclaims, is relevant to the lives of people today.  There seems to be a widespread concern that the gospel, or at least the church is irrelevant.  What is interesting is not that there are people who are concerned with the relevance of the Gospel but rather the people who are so concerned.  The people who are saying these things so I can hear it are not my atheist friends.  After all, they don't need to express concern with what they perceive to be the irrelevance of the gospel; they simply ignore it.  It is actually the pastors I know who are very much worried about the relevance of the gospel.

This quest for "relevance" has been going on for a long time now.  In fact, we could trace the modern crisis over relevance in the church to some trends that started at the very beginning of the 19th century.  With the rise of the Enlightenment and modern science, there were many people who thought that Christianity as traditionally understood could no longer be believed.  Some people rejected the new ideas entirely, separating their faith from the world that was investigated by science, the world in which they lived their daily lives.  Others simply abandoned the faith of their childhood to take up a new faith, whose basic statement of faith could be, "Science is God, and Newton is his prophet."

There were others still who tried to reconcile their old faith with the new science.  First, there was an attempt to show that Christian faith and natural science were simply not in conflict.  While this might be true in fact, there was no question that there was indeed a conflict between science as people understood it at the time, and the way most people practiced their faith.  Then, there was an attempt to show that basic Christian beliefs could be arrived at through philosophy and science and there were many people who proclaimed loudly that this was the case.  After all, they argued, what did the philosophy and science of the Enlightenment teach us?  That there is one God over all, that all human beings are brothers and sisters, and that we ought to be nice to one another.  It is as that classical Enlightenment document says, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

There is, of course, a problem with that.  Historically speaking, none of those have been considered to be the basic building blocks of Christian faith.  It is true that Christian faith proclaims one God, but it is not the abstract god of the Enlightenment, but the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who came and lived among us.  It is true that we believe that we are all bound together, but we are not bound together simply because we are human beings, but because we are people for whom Christ has died.  Ought we be nice to one another?  Absolutely, but not simply for the sake of being nice, but because we have been commissioned to continue Christ's earthly ministry through the power of the Holy Spirit.

The fact of the matter is that, in spite of the fact that there are many people who are deeply concerned that the gospel is seen as irrelevant, I would bet that there are many people even in this room who cannot even understand the issue, who have never even doubted the relevancy of the gospel.  What is going on?  How is it that something that can be as clear as day to one group of people can be so in question by another group that there is serious concern about it?

When people say that the gospel or the church has become irrelevant, what do they mean?  They mean that the contemporary world is becoming less and less familiar with Christian concepts that, a generation ago, we could have assumed they knew.  They mean that, just as Americans have a tendency to question every authority in their lives, they also are questioning religious authority.  They mean that there are certain practices of the church that might be more bound up with a particular generation of American Christians than they are with the Bible and need to be revised.

All of that might very well be true, though I would say things are actually significantly more complicated than that.  I would contend that the younger generations are actually more interested in the church being true to its foundations than trying to make everyone happy and that if we are going to revise our practices, we should try very hard to not just change the generation we are pandering to, but pursue faithfulness to the history of our faith, a history that challenges every generation, not just the ones before (or perhaps after) our own.

Though at any moment, it is always a question whether the church is relevant, I simply cannot see how the gospel could ever become irrelevant to human beings, regardless of how much our culture changes or how much we lose our biblical literacy as a society, and the reason I have this conviction is because of what we are celebrating during the Advent and Christmas seasons.

What is it that we celebrate at Christmastime?  There are some people, to be sure, who celebrate giving but perhaps more the receiving of gifts, but surely that is not what Christmas is about.  There are others who love Christmas for no reason other than it gives them an excuse to get together with family and friends.  It is a wonderful thing to gather with loved ones, but the reason for the season is much deeper than that, isn't it?

At its core, Christmas is about the amazing fact that Almighty God, the one who spoke the universe into being, the one who delivered the Israelites from the mightiest of human kingdoms, and who continually interacted with his people through the prophets, came into our midst in and as the man Jesus of Nazareth.  Because of Christmas, we cannot speak of God as being some kind of being "out there," but as the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who loved us so much that he would not simply sit idly by and let sin destroy us but directly and decisively intervened.

Our text for this morning is one of the most amazing passages that points out the relevance of Christmas, even though people don't usually think about it when they think about Christmas.  "We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life— this life was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it, and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us— we declare to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. We are writing these things so that our joy may be complete."  John is telling us that the gospel isn't just a story, it isn't just an idea about God, but a dynamic and concrete reality that we can hear and see and touch.

Christmas celebrates that the vast distance between God and humanity has been bridged by God himself.  In Christ, God has walked the same ground we walk, has breathed the same air we breathe, ate the same kinds of food that we eat, spoke with the same kinds of words that we speak, and in every way joined us where we are.  It is an absolutely staggering reality, and it is something that sets Christian faith apart as unique in the world.  Every other religion and philosophy thinks it to be absolutely insane to say that God somehow comes to us as a man.  And yet, that is precisely what God has done in Jesus Christ, come to us, in all his fullness, as a human being.  As Paul says, "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 the Son into our hearts, crying, 'Abba!  Father!'"

The depth of this reality is only deepened when we look at the letter to the Hebrews.  "Since, therefore, the children share flesh and blood, he himself likewise shared the same things, 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.  For it is clear that he did not come to help angels, but the descendants of Abraham.  Therefore he had to become like his brothers and sisters in every respect, so that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make a sacrifice of atonement for the sins of the people.  Because he himself was tested by what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested."

Again the book of Hebrews says, "Since then, we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast to our confession.  For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin.  Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.

What's the point?  We have a sign in the office that says "Christmas means we never have to ask God how much he loves us."  It is a wonderful reminder that when we say to the world, "God loves you," we aren't talking about some vague idea of love.  We are saying that God loves you so much that rather than sit off aloof in his almightiness, he chose to come, to be born as a helpless baby, to be ridiculed his whole life, be hated by the authorities, betrayed by his closest friends, and ultimately executed unjustly, all for no other reason than because he loves you and wants to be reconciled.  Our God is not a god who lives up in the clouds somewhere that may or may not answer prayer or even know we exist.  Our God is not a god who micromanages every little detail so that every tiny thing is either a reward or a punishment.  Our God is a God who comes close, who meets us where we are, and who transforms us from the inside out.  God knows the struggles of human life, not because he is all knowing but because he has lived it.

I have my own theory about the problem of the relevance of the church.  The way I see it, the church, as the earthly-historical continuation of the ministry of Christ, is intrinsically relevant.  How could it be otherwise?  The church is the means appointed by God to live out the gospel, to proclaim the love of God to the world, to make a difference, to fulfill the promise of Jesus that we would do even greater things than he did!  In what possible way can that be irrelevant?  We live in a world where people are hostile to God and hostile to one another, As we have seen so painfully, just a few days ago.  We live in uncertain times where we are not sure whether we will have our job next year.  There is brokenness and despair everywhere we turn.  And in the midst of it all, we have a message of reconciliation, of transformation, of healing for all.  We have good news of God come to earth, of a God who is not an idol, but that we can hear and see and touch in Christ.  If that is so, how can it even cross our minds that the church is irrelevant?

And yet, maybe that is the problem.  It seems to me that if we ever think that the church can be irrelevant it means that the church has become detached from her mission, from her identity in Christ and the gospel.  If the gospel is intrinsically relevant, if the gospel has a message for every generation and every individual, and the church is considered to be irrelevant, what can have happened but a loss of what it means to be the church in the first place?

How do we lose sight of our calling as a church?  It can happen when we get more interested in how to bring people in than how to go out and serve others.  It can happen when we view the church as more of the hub of a social circle than as a fellowship with other sinners and a group of people who help us to grow in our faith in order to take it out into the world.  It can happen when we look outside of our walls and start talking about "them," as if "they" were not already bound to "us" in Christ.

The relevance of Christmas, and the relevance of Christian faith as a whole, is that, though this world is not how it should be, God has done something about it in Christ, by coming among us and invading our world of space and time in order to set up a new kingdom.  But the good news is not just that God did something once upon a time and then stopped.  The good news is that God is still doing a mighty work through Christ, but now it is a work that is taking place in and through each of us by the power of the Holy Spirit.  That is good news; but it might also be bad news for some people.  It might be bad news for some because a reclaiming of the relevancy of the gospel means that being relevant is not something that we achieve by our own strength.  We cannot make the gospel relevant any more than we can make it irrelevant.  What that means is that the relevancy of the gospel is not up for grabs.  It is not something that can be collapsed into a certain kind of music or a well-run program.  We must cling to the relevancy that is already present in the gospel or else we either become irrelevant as just one more social club or we impose a relevance of our own devising and just pretend it is the gospel.

What is exciting is that the gospel cannot be defeated.  It is still the good news and it is still the driving force of the church whether or not any particular church realizes it.  In fact, I would imagine that God is at work in any particular church more than most people think.  God is working, even when his people don't listen to him.  There is some concern about a war on Christmas, but I am not worried.  What we celebrate at Christmas, the coming of God into our world, cannot be made false by legislation or changing culture.  The truth of God would stand firm, even if everyone told lies about it, and they do, and it does.

When people set out to make the gospel or the church more relevant, they have set themselves an impossible goal, to do what cannot be done because it has already been done.  If we set out to allow the gospel to do what it does, what it was meant to do, and transform lives, starting with our own, we are not only setting out to do something that is very much possible, but one that in a very real sense has already been accomplished.  In Christ, the work has been done.  Our calling is to rejoice and to let it work itself out in our hearts and lives so we can bear witness to it more fully, so others might join in the transformation and the reconciliation.  Let us pray.

AMEN

Emmanuel, God With Us

12/18/11 1 John 1:1-10 Grace UMC

Several years ago, at a different church, when I preached my very first Christmas Eve sermon, I made a statement that the birth of Christ was a relatively unimportant event. I did not say, nor did I mean, that it was unimportant, but that it was relatively unimportant. In the message, I spelled out some of the things that Jesus did not come to do: he did not come to give us an extravagant, human-centered holiday, he did not come to brainwash us and make everyone conform to some narrow definition of "the Christian life," he did not come to make everyone happy and, perhaps most importantly, he did not come to leave us how we are. Then I raised the question, "If those are some of the things that Jesus did not come to do, what did he come to do?" I took the response from John's first letter, where he says, "The Son of God was revealed for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil," which happened most fully and finally in the death and resurrection of Christ. That is to say, Jesus was born so that he could die.

While I still stand by the fact that the death of Christ is of supreme importance for us as Christians and that we cannot correctly understand the New Testament witness to what Jesus has done on our behalf and in our place if we forget about Good Friday and Easter, I will never again make the point that the birth of Christ is unimportant, relatively or otherwise. You see, it is not just important that we have a God who dies for us, as amazing as that might be, but we also have a God who lives for us, a God for whom no sacrifice is too great, even becoming a creature and entering into his creation.

The reason I said what I said my first Christmas as a pastor is because I had been misled by a well-meaning but inadequate understanding of just who Jesus is and why he came, which is quite common in our world today. If you were to ask many Christians, "Why did Jesus come?" the answer would often be something like this, "Jesus came because God needed a perfect human to die for us so we could be forgiven." If pushed, they may continue and emphasize that Jesus' teaching ministry was important as well, that we needed to learn from Jesus as well as have him die for us. The radical humanity of Christ tends to play nothing more than an instrumental role in God's plan; that is, it serves as a vehicle to get a perfect human being from the cradle to the cross, but not much more.

I don't mean to imply that the things this view emphasizes are fundamentally wrong. It is absolutely true that Jesus lived his life in utter human perfection, that if he had not lived in such perfection, it would call into question God's saving act through his death. It is true that we benefit from Jesus' teaching, which often surprises us and catapults us out of our comfort zone. My point is that the reality of what God has done in, through, and as Jesus is far more dynamic and staggering than this view leads us to believe. As true as it might be, we cannot collapse all of what God has done in Christ to simply the formula, "We had a debt, God paid it, now we are free."

When we look closely at what John tells us in our passage for this morning, we see that he, at least, understood the coming of God in our midst to be of supreme importance. "We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life." According to John, the word of life is not just a concept, not just an idea that we can learn once and then never worry about again. The word of life is something that does not stay "out there" but something that comes and meets with us, that is something that entered into our world of space and time, that was actually encountered by real human beings. Jesus of Nazareth was not just a man, but the very word and truth of God, taking up residence in the same world we live in, walking around real places that we can visit today, using real human words, eating real human food, interacting with and building relationships with real human beings not unlike you and me.

I don't know how often you think about the fact that the God who created the universe with nothing more than a word, who never needed to create the universe or people to live in it, actually stepped into it, God becoming a man, the Creator becoming a creature, but it is truly astonishing. In Jesus we have a word that we don't just hear, but that we can see and touch and enter into relationship with. In the baby in the manger we have nothing less than all the fullness of God in our midst, the God of all as a human infant, the Creator of all the vastness of the cosmos so small you could hold him in your hand, the very Word of God unable to speak but reduced to cries to communicate with his parents, those he had created. When I think about the earth-shattering idea that God himself has met with us, I am so overwhelmed, I can't hardly get over it.

Though the coming of God into our world in Christ has become a fairly common notion, something that we affirm, often without thinking about it, it was not always so. There have been many people who have found it impossible to believe that God either could or would become a human in our midst. The ancient Greek philosophers argued that God was so utterly detached from the world that we live in that God could not come among us, even if he wanted to. The Jewish thinkers of the first and second centuries who engaged in dialogue with Christians affirmed that God could become a human being, but that he never would do so, that they simply could not entertain the idea that the holy and glorious Lord and God of the universe would stoop to such a lowly position as to become a human being.

The offensiveness of this central claim of the Gospel, that in the man Jesus of Nazareth, we have to do with God himself, did not go away. Arius, a church leader in the early fourth century, said that God would not have come among us, so we must think of Jesus as a creature, a lofty messenger, but not God. A group called the docetists taught that, if Jesus really is God, then he cannot really be a a human, but only seems to be like us. Apollinaris of Laodicea argued that, in becoming a human, God refused to take on a real human mind, since it is so diseased by sin, and so Jesus is not really a human in the same sense that we are.

Even when Christianity became the dominant religion in the West, resistance to this idea that God would really meet us and make himself accessible to ordinary humans like you and me continued. Isaac Newton, the great physicist, thought of God as the great container of the whole of space and time. If that is the case, to say that God entered into his creation is like saying a box contains that contains many things, also contains itself, which would be ridiculous. Even today, we are surrounded by people, theologians, biblical scholars, and many others, who simply cannot bring themselves to really believe that when we look into the face of Jesus, we see the face of God, a face that we have never seen anywhere else and that we could never see in any other way. The reality of the incarnation, that the God of the universe has come among us, is repeatedly domesticated into the idea that Jesus was just really good at being good, that we follow him like we would follow any other human leader, that the real work of Christ is to provide us a model to follow in our lives (though even when we look at it this way, we usually stop short of suffering and dying, like he did), and in other ways as well.

Why do we do this? Why is it so hard for human beings to admit the possibility that maybe, just maybe, Jesus is who he claims to be, truly united to the Father, the Son of God in whose hands the Father has placed all things, the one who is in the Father and in whom the Father dwells, the one through whom all things were made and without whom the Father does nothing? I think it is because we are terrified to see the coming of God into our world for what it really is: an invasion. It doesn't take much to see that we live in a world that is dreadfully infected with sin. It isn't just that we commit sins, but that sin goes down to the core of who we are. We don't just make mistakes, we don't just make wrong choices because we don't know which choice is right and which is wrong. All too often, we know all too well what is the right thing to do and choose the wrong thing anyway. And it isn't just that we sin, but our neighbors sin too, and it is isn't just we as individuals who do what is wrong, we as a society sin, too.

In the midst of all this sin, it really is no surprise why we would rather find some way, any way, to keep God from meeting us here in this world of ours. So long as God remains "out there," we are like kids who have made a huge mess while our parents are out of the house. We keep telling ourselves, "We'll fix it in time, we'll get it all cleaned up before they come home." But every time we try to clean up our mess, in spite of our best efforts, we make it worse. So long as God has not actually come among us, we can still convince ourselves that there is still time to make things right on our own; we can still get our act together, we can still pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. Maybe, just maybe, God won't even notice that we haven't been as good as we would like to think and we'll be let off the hook. Maybe we'll get it all cleaned up in time, maybe we'll never have to face the consequences for what we have done. As soon as we admit that, in Jesus we have to do with nothing less than the very God of the universe, we realize that we are out of time, that we were out of time even before we were born. We have made a mess and we didn't get it cleaned up. Indeed, we realize, when we are face to face with God, that we never could have cleaned it up on our own.

But when we realize that the jig is up, that we didn't, and even couldn't save ourselves, when we realize that the high and holy God has actually come near, has met with us, who has, by his Spirit, probed into the depths of our hearts, we find that all the consequences we feared do not come to pass. When we come face to face with God in Christ, we are asked to open our hands and give up everything we have. We are asked, not only to give over the mess we have made, but we are asked to give up even all our best attempts at cleaning it up, and God takes them from us and takes them to the cross. The only way we face punishment is if we stand before God and say, "I never made that mess; it was someone else; I was set up," or perhaps, "Yes, I made a mess, but I did my best to clean it up, so that should count for something."

We read in the New Testament that there will be a judgment, that we will all be judged. This can be, and has been a frightening thing for many people, but we need to ask, "When we are judged, who will be our judge?" We are told in the book of Revelation that the one who oversees the judgment is Jesus, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, the one who conquers, but when this Lion is revealed, what is it that we see? "A Lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered." Our judge is not a vindictive human being like we can so often be, but one who has been sacrificed in atoning reconciliation on our behalf and in our place. The one who will judge us is not some angry pagan god who weighs up our good deeds and our evil deeds and we had better hope and pray that we've done more good than bad. Rather, the God who judges us is the God who has made our cause his own who, when he set out to redeem us from our sin and death, did not count it too great a sacrifice to become one of us, God of the universe though he was, live in our broken world and finally take our disease, sin and death on his own shoulders and take them to the cross.

As Charles Wesley wrote, "'Tis mystery all, the immortal dies, who can explore his strange design. In vain the firstborn seraph tries to sound the depths of love divine. 'Tis mercy all, let earth adore, let angel minds inquire no more."

If we were in a situation where we had simply built up a debt that needed to be paid, then all we would need is a savior who would be willing to die for us. If all we needed was a savior who would die our death on our behalf and in our place, then we could say that Christmas only matters because there has to be Christmas before there can be Easter. But we are not just people who commit sins, we are sinners. The fact that, in Christ, we see God walking as one of us and one with us, we see him enduring our temptations and overcoming them, we see him confessing our sins when he is baptized in the Jordan, we see him being faithful where we are all too often faithless, shows us that we do not only need a God who dies for us, but a God who lives for us. We not only have a God who offers up his own death so that we do not need to suffer the eternal death that would separate us from God, our God also comes and lives the life that we could not live and offers that in on our behalf and in our place. To believe in Jesus is not just something we say, not just something to check off our list of things to do in this life, but a profound trust that, when God judges us, it will be the God who sacrificed himself for us and that this God will accept, not only the death of Christ in the place of our death, but the life of Christ in the place of our lives.

Because of what God has done, we are bound to Christ in every way. Listen to these words of Gregory Nazianzen, one of the most important leaders in the early church. "We needed an Incarnate God, a God put to death, that we might live. We were put to death together with him, that we might be cleansed; we rose again with him because we were put to death with Him; we were glorified with him, because we rose again with him." In everything we do, whether in life or in death, we find that it is in Christ that we live and move and have our being. Our God is a God who does not abandon us, but meets us where we are, long before we ever dreamed of turning to him. Though the coming of Christ is an invasion into this world of sin and that means even our sin is under attack, it is not an attack that destroys us, but liberates us and makes us free to love like we have never loved before. O come, O come, Emmanuel. Let us pray.

AMEN