PASTOR’S PERSPECTIVE: BE A CHILD NEVER BETTER THAN AT CHRISTMAS.
In his book Whistling in the Dark, Frederick Buechner tells how one young Pastor had the real message of Christmas brought home to him in a real way. This is what Buechner says, “The lovely old carols played and replayed until their effect is like a dentist’s drill or a jackhammer, the pathetic banalities of the pulpit and the chilling commercialism of almost everything else, people spending money they can’t afford on presents you neither need or want, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, the artificial tree, the cornball crèche, the Hallmark Virgin. Yet for all our efforts, we’ve never quite managed to ruin it. That in itself is part of the miracle, a part you can see. Most of the miracle you can’t or won’t see! The young clergyman and his wife do all the things you do on Christmas Eve. They string the lights and hang the ornaments. They supervise the hanging of the stockings. They tuck in the children. They lug the presents down out of hiding and pile them under the tree. Just as they’re about to fall exhausted into bed, the husband remembers his neighbor’s sheep. The man asked him to feed them for him while he was away, and in the press of other matters that night he forgot all about them. So down the hill he goes through knee-deep snow. He gets two bales of hay from the barn and carries them over to the stalls. There’s a forty watt bulb hanging by its cord from the low hanging roof. He turns it on. The sheep huddle in a corner watching as he snaps the baling twine, shakes the leaves of hay apart, and starts scattering it. They come over bumbling and shoving to get at it with their foolish, mild faces, the puffs of their breath showing in the air. He is reaching to turn off the bulb and leave when suddenly he realizes where he is! The winter darkness. The glimmer of light. The smell of the hay. The sound of the animals eating. The smell of the dung. He is of course…in real life…AT THE MANGER! He only just saw it! He whose business it is above everything else to have an eye for such things is all but blind in that eye! He who on his best days believes that everything that is most precious anywhere comes from that manger, might easily have gone home to bed never knowing that he had himself just been in the manger! The world is the manger. It is only by grace that he happens to see this other part of the miracle. Christmas itself is by grace. It could never have survived our own blindness and depredations otherwise. It could never have happened otherwise. Perhaps it is the very wildness and strangeness of the grace that has led us to try to tame it. We have tried to make it habitable. We have roofed it in and furnished it. We have reduced it to an occasion we feel at home with, at best a touching and beautiful occasion, at worst a trite and cloying one. But if the Christmas event in itself is indeed as a matter of cold, hard facts all it’s cracked up to be, then even at our best…our efforts are misleading. The Word became Flesh. Ultimate Mystery born with such vulnerability his life could be snuffed out with one hand! Incarnation. It is not tame! It is not touching! It is not beautiful! It is uninhabitable terror! It is unthinkable darkness riven with unbearable light. Agonized laboring led to it, vast upheavals of intergalactic space/time split apart, a wrenching and tearing of the very sinews of reality itself. You can only cover your eyes and shudder before it, before this: ‘God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God…who for us and for our salvation’, as the Nicene Creed puts it, ‘came down from heaven’ “ In his book, Faces of Jesus, he adds, “The incarnation is a kind of vast joke whereby the Creator of heavens and earth comes among us in diapers…Until we too have taken the idea of the God-man seriously enough to be scandalized by it, we have not taken it as seriously as it demands to be taken!”
The great German Theologian Karl Barth, in his Dogmatics In Outline, says, “The nativity mystery conceived from the Holy Spirit and born from the Virgin Mary, means that God became human, truly human out of his own grace. The miracle of the existence of Jesus, his ‘climbing down of God’ is the Holy Spirit and Virgin Mary. Born of the Virgin Mary means a human origin for God. Jesus Christ is not only truly God; he is human like every one of us. He is human without limitation. He is not just similar to us, He is one of us!” C.S. Lewis is even more emphatic about how we should see the Birth and Incarnation of our Savior. He writes, in his book Miracles, these vital words, “The Central miracle asserted by Christians is the Incarnation. They say that God became Man. Every other miracle prepares us for this, or exhibits this, or results from this. Just as every natural event is the manifestation at a particular place and moment of Nature’s total character, so every particular Christian miracle manifests at a particular place and moment the character and significance of the incarnation. There is no question in Christianity of arbitrary interferences just scattered about. It relates not a series of disconnected raids on Nature but the various steps of the strategically coherent invasion-an invasion which intends complete conquest and occupation. The fitness, and therefore credibility, of the particular miracles depends on their relation to the Grand Miracle; all discussion in isolation from it is futile!” He also speaks to lowly condescension we often fail to comprehend with the Incarnation. In The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, he writes, “God could, had He pleased, have been incarnate in a man of iron nerves, the Stoic sort who lets no sigh escape him. Of His great humility He chose to be incarnate in a man of delicate sensibilities who wept at the grave of Lazarus and sweated blood in Gethsemane. Otherwise we should have missed…all the all-important help of knowing that He has faced all that the weakest of us face, has shared not only the strength of our nature but every weakness of it also, except sin. If He had been incarnate in a man of immense natural courage that would have been for many of us almost the same as His not being incarnate at all!”
Charles Dickens observed, “It is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a Child Himself!” Lewis gave a final thought about His coming down from heaven that is probably most significant. He wrote in Mere Christianity, “The Son of God became man to enable men to become the sons of God”. That is what happens when He is Born in Us during this season. Come Down From Heaven and Be Born in Us Today!
SERMON: HAVE YOURSELF A MIRACULOUSLY GRAND CHRISTMAS
Matt. 1:18-25
I. EXPERIENCING CONCEPTION
II. EXPERIENCING CHARACTER
III. EXPERIENCING [THE] CROSS
IV. EXPERIENCING CONVERSION