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BECAUSE HE CAME
The history of American business is crowded with story after story of companies that slipped out of the hands of their founding family and came under outside control. Poor performance together with a sound strategy for gathering up sufficient votes and proxies are usually enough to get the job done.
I've always had a soft place in my heart for family members who have been ousted in this way, however deservedly from a business point of view. Once in charge of policy and production they look on helplessly as other hands and minds move in.
As a minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ I confess to being grieved at times that Christmas has passed from the "family control" of the church and come under the influence of secular celebrants. In those alien hands Christmas has been trivialized, commercialized, vulgarized, mythologized, and sentimentalized. Such is the price for going public.
What really hurts is that we seldom let the gospel message speak to us at those deeper levels of need where the human spirit cries repeatedly for hope and certainty. Christmas has some vital things to say to life's big questions. This morning I would like to illustrate what I mean. I would like to do so in the mode of personal testimony.
BECAUSE JESUS CAME, I HAVE A DIFFERENT VIEW OF TIME THAN MIGHT OTHERWISE BE THE CASE. Time is one of those realities we all understand until we sit down to think about it. At the personal level each of us must come to terms with time sooner or later. At some point along the way I suspect that every normal human being feels threatened by the irreversibility of time's one way flow.
We know that while the clock ticks off time evenly we do not experience time evenly. Thus we can say on some occasions, "How times flies!" On other occasions, "Time hangs heaven on my hands!"
BUT THE BIG QUESTION REGARDING TIME HAS TO DO WITH ITS ULTIMATE MEANING. IS TIME GOING ANYWHERE?
Loren Eiseley, in his book "The Night Company," gives us a striking vignette of life as he encountered it while taking off from New York City on a weekend train. It was midnight and he was tired as he moved into the smoking car of the train. After seating himself he noticed a man a few seats forward who was obviously pale, poor, and disheveled. The little brown sack in his lap suggested that this was all he had to his name in the world.
Let Eisley tell the story from there: "By degrees the train filled and took its way into the dark. After a time the door opened and the conductor shouldered his way in, demanding tickets. I had one sleepy eye fastened on the dead-faced transient. It is thus one hears from the gods. "Tickets" bawled the conductor. I suppose everyone in the car was watching for the usual thing to occur. What happened was much more terrible. Slowly the man opened his eyes, a dead man's eyes. Slowly a sticklike arm reached down and fumbled in his pocket, producing a roll of bills. "Give me," he said then, and his voce held the croak of a raven in a churchyard, "Give me a ticket to wherever it is."
Is time going anywhere? The coming of Jesus into the world at a given point in time, after adequate preparation in time, with a future mission and program for time, helps me to understand time in a linear way. Time moves on an upward slanting line. It is highly significant that the years after Christ's birth are numbered forward and backward from that centering event.
There are cultures in our world, and have always been, where time is seen as circular, cyclic, and repetitive. In such a view of time nothing sticks, nothing finally matters. Time is simply a wheel that keeps turning on a fixed axis to no ultimate purpose.
Christ rules time. Time is in God's hands. Every year is Anno Domini, the year of our Lord, just as every month, week, day, and minute is of and to the Lord. Time is not the enemy of eternity. Eternity has come to dwell in time.
BECAUSE JESUS CAME, I HAVE A DIFFERENT VIEW OF HISTORY THAN MIGHT OTHERWISE BE THE CASE. One way of looking at history, popular in our time, is to see it as nothing more than the result of natural necessity. Mindless forces simply carry life along. History is utterly lacking in any transcendent reference point and partakes of no durable meaning. Shakespeare caught this sentiment and philosophy well when he described history as "A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
Others hold that historical existence merely provides us with opportunities to lay hold on eternal and changeless ideals such as goodness, beauty, and truth. Such values ride high above the world and we can perceive them only as we transcend history. Ideals are like kernels for which history is the husk. We all know what eventually happens to husks.
Those who believe in a purely naturalistic view of history look for no salvation, for none is possible. Those who hold that history is merely the place where we lay hold on timeless values see salvation as a deliverance out of the flux and ambiguities of history.
With the coming of Jesus Christ into the world I learn that God takes history seriously and that I must take it seriously too. "The word became flesh," (not merely human, but flesh, to underscore the point) "and dwelt among us." History is not to be endured. It is not to be transcended. History is to be thankfully received as the theater of God's work and glory.
"An angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph: 'Get up; take the child and mother and escape to Egypt, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him." "After Herod died, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in Egypt: 'Get up, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who were trying to take the child's life are dead.'" Jesus came into history in all of its concreteness. Earth is the object of heaven's love. We pray, as Christians have always prayed, that God's will may be done on earth as it is in heaven.
BECAUSE JESUS CAME, I HAVE A DIFFERENT VIEW OF GOD THAN MIGHT OTHERWISE BE THE CASE.
Those who think of God at all tend to think of him in terms of unapproachable majesty, power to do what we would do if we were God, and righteousness. The common figures for God that rush to mind are those of moral judge, ruling monarch, or omnipotent creator. When we contemplate the manner of Jesus' birth at Bethlehem, the demeanor of his life, and the note of suffering love that marked his years on earth we must revise such views of God.
Care must be taken, however, not to go along too glibly with those who suggest that since man has become post-modern we can now throw away the fundamental assertions of The Westminster Confession and see God as only working on the inside in the role of recording secretary. God still has power.
A professor widely known for his ego was recently one-upped in a galling way by one of his students. This learned man was showing a friend into his office. As he neared his computer he noticed that someone has left him a message. He couldn't resist clicking it on. The message read: "Today is Tuesday. Yesterday was Monday. Tomorrow will be Wednesday. Is this alright with you?" Signed, God. The Almighty is not in that position however much the advocates of Christian secularity might suggest to the contrary.
But, from the gospel of John we learn that God came not to judge or condemn. He came to save us, not from without by fear, but from within, by love. Through the lens of Jesus I see God as a parent who loves and cares.
FINALLY, BECAUSE JESUS CAME I HAVE A DIFFERENT VIEW OF MYSELF THAN MIGHT OTHERWISE BE THE CASE. I confess that I frequently experience a crisis of self-confidence. Do I have some company among you? When some of our astronauts go cavorting into outer space, they remind me again of how small we are in relation to the enveloping universe. Light travels at a little over one hundred eighty six thousand miles a second, far beyond the conceivable speed of any space vehicle yet devised, and yet it takes light something like one hundred thousand years just to travel across the star field of the Milky Way. It has been estimated that to reach the nearest star to our own, four lights years away, would require at the present speed of our spacecraft a time equivalent to more than the whole of written history!
I feel politically insignificant. No matter what I think or feel or say or do, nothing really happens as far as I can see. And when I look within, I feel that at times I am inclined to directions I have no business even thinking about.
And yet, with Christmas, I sense that however small my worth might be in my own eyes, I am of incalculable worth to God. I was made in God's image. I am the object of God's seeking and saving love. He took my flesh upon him. What higher compliment can be paid to a person than this, that God chose to dwell among us as a human being?
Because he came, I have a different view of time, a different view of history, a different view of God, a different view of self. In short, thank God for Christmas.
PRAYER
Dear God, grant that the wonder of the Word made flesh may claim our lives anew, with compelling force, and make us forever different. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.