SERMON B S.Paul’s Church Adventure Bay Sunday 19Dec 2010 before Christmas J.K.Cannell
At the beginning of the service there will be short skits by Bob and Margaret: Listen to your mother-in-law: and by Margaret: How did I get into this? (told by Mary)
WHAT CHILD IS THIS?
When Leonardo da Vinci was about to paint the face of Jesus in his fresco of the Last Supper, he prepared himself by prayer and meditation. But when he raised his brush to give expression to his devout thoughts, his hand trembled too much to continue. I reckon we need to approach the birth of God’s Son like that.
What an incredible time Christmas is! Men at war stop fighting, people are generous with each other, charities flourish because of people’s kindness, abandoned children are loved, and even in the most squalid slums of Calcutta people enjoy a time of peace and fellowship. On the other hand it is often a time when dysfunctional families experience their worst distress. Do you have special memories of Christmas? I imagine that in years to come, of which may the Lord give me plenty, I’ll especially remember kindness and joy on Bruny Island and in the Channel at Christmas.
My best memories of Christmas in Adelaide include preparing for the new Christmas morning 8am Holy Communion, beginning the crowded and expectant service, filled with my youth fellowship mates, yelling “Christians awake, salute the happy morn” and the kookaburras laughing outside. Later in the day every Christmas afternoon we would go to my Grandma’s (it was always hot and Auntie Marj would give us cold lemonade) when the whole extended family would gather for love and encouragement, high tea and games, and presents for me and my family. (“Oh Minnie, you shouldn’t have. What a beautiful tea-cosy”)
Later in life when I was 24 I began to live in England and would usually manage to catch a train from Rugby to London each Christmas Eve afternoon to get to the Great Evensong at S.Paul’s Cathedral at 4pm. London is cold on Christmas Eve. But packed into that huge place with 3000 other people, overpowered by the vast vaulted ceiling and the towering christmas tree donated every year by the people of Norway, seeing the thousands of gaily wrapped presents for the poor kids of London, I was overcome. The Dean and bishop of London would process with the famous choir down to bless the giant crib, somehow getting through the throngs in the aisles. The growling organ would begin to peel ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ and the Cathedral roof would almost lift. Afterwards in the winter dark the crowds would go home to their bright warm houses in Middlesex and Surrey and I’d be left in the now quiet streets of the City in my overcoat, making my cold way back to Euston Station. In the 82-mile journey home to Rugby I’d think about it all, and what Mary went through to deliver God’s baby for the World, and what a lot of trouble God went to to install His holy Son on earth, the long awaited Messiah, and to guarantee the boy survived in those troubled times. By 1968 I had a beautiful wife and a fantastic little daughter so it wasn’t possible to get to London on Christmas Eve any more, but wherever I was I sought more answers. I’d like to share some with you.
So put aside all the cards and tinsel, all the booze and expense, the Rudolphs and Jingling Bells. I want us to concentrate on the most important questions in the World concerning the newly born baby in the manger.
Who is he? I knew at least one thing: he loved me. But I wanted to tell others who he is. Who is he was a question frequently asked right through Jesus’ time on Earth and is certainly being asked today. Without Jesus the Messiah (in Greek the Christ), there can be no Christianity. You’ve heard today’s readings. So let me ask, ‘Is he or is he not God on Earth’?, or as theologians put it, God incarnate, God manifest in the flesh? Don’t dismiss expressions like that, or mess around with them. God manifest in the flesh means God clear to sight and mind, and God revealed to us as a man, God with us on Earth, Immanuel. The unambiguous and consistent witness of the New Testament is that he is just that: the Son of God, and one with God, and indeed what God is he is; he is the fullness of God, he is the image of the invisible God (Col 1.15). But he’s also real man, and that’s vitally important!. And yet he acted out of a single coherent personality.
First there’s the nature of Jesus. One thing that impresses itself on a serious reader of the Gospels is the moral perfection of Christ. The Gospel evangelists Matthew Mark Luke and John present the portrait of a real Man who displays restraint, courage, truthfulness and love at every stage of development and in every circumstance of life He was without flaw or contradiction. He never spoke (as I am prone to do) when it would have been wiser to remain silent, never kept quiet when he should have spoken. He displayed loving sympathy without surrendering truthfulness. The excellences of both sexes were displayed in him. He was loving, often tender, merciful but never effeminate. Indeed people thought of him as being like the rugged Elijah, or the austere John the Baptiser (Matt 16.14). He was well able to pour blistering denunciations on hypocrites and parasites, yet always welcomed the penitent. He is always consistent and the character of Christ is one and the same throughout (The Incomparable Christ, by J Oswald Sanders, Moody, Chicago, 1952). But He is unique: He is uniquely Son of God and Man. Sometimes his divine majesty blazed through the veil of his humanity. On the occasion of his arrest, when he said to the soldiers those authoritative words often quoted the Gospel of St.John, “I AM”, the soldiers drew back and fell to the ground. It was in full consciousness that “The Father had entrusted everything to him, and that he was from God and would return to God, that he rose from the (last) supper table, took off his outer garment and, taking a towel, tied it around him. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet and to wipe them with a towel.” (John 13.3-5). Christ the King was also Christ the Servant!
Where did He come from? When did it all begin? We’ve all seen dramatic scenes of the nativity of Jesus and the stable. But when did it all begin, I mean long before Bethlehem? Centuries of prophecy amazingly foresaw this very event. Christ existed long before his conception and birth, and this is assumed everywhere in scripture and used as the basis of our christian doctrines. His birth in Bethlehem was not his beginning, only his incarnation, because there can’t be an incarnation without a previous existence. (Incarnation means becoming a human person on Earth). If he did not exist before Bethlehem he cannot be God, and if he is not that he can’t be the one who was there in the beginning with God as co-Creator. The bible often calls him, God’s word. The opening words of John’s Gospel read “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He (and that’s the Son) was with God at the beginning. Through Him all things were made; without Him nothing was made that has been made. In Him was life, and that life was the light of men. What God was the Word was.” Likewise he cannot be the redeemer either, unless he is not only God’s obedient son but also God in the flesh of Earth, and ascended. He didn’t become God’s son at the incarnation at Bethlehem, or when he rose from the dead 33 years later; He always was. Christ is God, a person of the Trinity, just as The Father is one of the Holy Trinity, and so is the Holy Spirit.
That’s who is lying in the manger in the stable, with Mary, at Bethlehem. And that’s the first thing that we celebrate at Christmas; God with us! So did the angels whom the shepherds saw that night, whom I imagine standing on tip-toe to see the child, on that once-for-all-time night in heaven and earth. The bible also tells us lots about the eternal relationship between The Father and The Son. This promise from Micah 5 was written about 700BC: *“But from you, Bethlehem....from you will come a king for me over Israel, one whose origins are far back in the past, in ancient times”. And Hosea 11: “When Israel was a youth, I loved him; out of Egypt I called my son...”. Many other prophecies about the coming Messiah are embedded in scripture. You heard one of the greatest, read this morning by Pat MacDonald from Isaiah 9: “For a child has been born to us, a son given to us...and his title will be: Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty Hero, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace.” What about this one from Isaiah 7: *“...The Lord of his own accord will give you a sign; it is this: A young woman is with child, and she will give birth to a son and call him Immanuel (God with us).” Obviously it’s a mystery, how God implanted that active fertilizing cell that joined Mary’s ovum, and how 280 days later the child was born naturally as a person on Earth, and loved and nourished. But there’s plenty of evidence that it happened alright.
Why did He Come? What’s the reason for the season? We now understand that this is the Mission of Christ: 1) Absolutely fundamental to God’s purposes and our eternal lives, he came to take away the sins of the world and our deadly burden of sin, so that we could be God’s children, reconciled to Him. That is, he came to redeem us. 2) He came to earth to show us what God is like and what He wants. 3) He came to begin and build His Church, to be filled with the redeemed, to continue his works of salvation and healing.
When I talk theologically I don’t want to leave anyone behind. We can be religious and nod vaguely about holy-sounding words, like redeem, but it’s important to have some vocabulary we can share, otherwise we can’t communicate. It means to buy back. If I sell or give my car to a local dealer in exchange for money that I need, and later I find enough money to buy back my car, I redeem it. Like in a pawn-broker’s shop if they still exist. To redeem us someone had to pay the costs of our sin, and that of the world, but nobody but God could afford it or dare to try. So God’s Holy Son was sent to undertake this monstrous challenge and do for us what we could never do for ourselves. Archbishop Cranmer described what Jesus did as well as anyone ever did as ‘one full perfect and sufficient sacrifice oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world’. You may think that’s a bit of a mouthful but Cranmer spent 16 years thinking and praying about those 16 carefully chosen words (which he put forever and indelibly, so he hoped, in the BCP Holy Communion service. But he still ended up being martyred for his integrity). Every word counts. Christ’s sacrifice was a once-off, for all time. In view of who He was, where he had come from and what he did, it was enough to pay the cost, to redeem us who repent and believe in Jesus as Lord and Saviour. It was enough to satisfy God, and to allow us to come close to God and enter a living relationship with Him! So when we are happy and well or when we are crushed and in pain and grieving, even though we are sinners, because of what Jesus has accomplished God can now come alongside us. (We are justified). God can look into us, see it all, forgive us, heal us, rebuild us, pick us up again, dust us down and send us out to be His strong people in His Name!
What do we do about it? To be sure, it’s a great time to celebrate. Certainly it’s a perfect time for brothers and sisters, mums and dads and all to forgive and embrace each other, as well as strangers at the gate. It’s a perfect time too for church folk in all denominations and families to join together and adore him, and to be kind to each other as members of one christian family..... This is a perfect time to thank the Father for His Son Jesus the Christ. For God is so whole a God as not only to create us and our environments and give us good things on Earth, as in Bruny Island. He also sustains this planet in the space of His cosmos by His Word. Amazingly He also gives us love that makes life worth living. Indeed the scripture says He is Love. That in turn means He gives us grace and mercy, hope and healing.
His greatest gift is to guarantee forgiveness and restoration through the passion, death, resurrection and ascension of His Son, if we believe. That saves us for now and for eternity. That’s why we call Jesus Our Saviour. It was primarily to effect that greatest of sacrifices for the sins of the world, and give us the gifts of forgiveness and eternal life, that the holy child was born in Bethlehem.
But is he born in you and me? I desperately need to be saved. I can’t handle the thought of one day dying in my sin forever. Jesus is born at Christmas in Bethlehem, let him be born today in me.
Goodness, if my Mum or my wife or someone gives me a gift on Christmas Day, am I likely to give it back without opening it? God’s gift of Jesus is offered personally to you and me. If you accept it you can have the love and power and the new life of Christ in your life. Why would you refuse it, as so many people do? Why would I dismiss the gift of eternal life and the promise of sins forgiven, now? If you accept the gift, and say “yes” to God, and “come to me Lord Jesus” to Christ, He will come and live in you, and you in Him. Understanding this, whoever would say no?
Nobody has to do or say anything, but those of you who would like to, say these words asking Christ into your life after me. Let us pray: You promise eternal life, Lord. Please save me. Help me confess and unload all the rubbish in my life. Please take away all my hurt and resentments. All the sin and selfishness and self-indulgence. Jesus, you promise to come to me if I repent and believe in you. I know you are my Saviour and King. I’m sorry for all my sins. I want to give my life to you. So come beloved Lord Jesus. Amen (let it be so).
