Month: December 2017

Luke 1:26-37; 2:25-35

Let’s play a Christmas song game? I will give you a clue, you figure out the Christmas song:

1. Righteous Darkness
   O Holy Night
2. Far Off in a Feeder
   Away in a Manger
3. Bantam Male Percussionist
   Little Drummer Boy
4. Nocturnal Noiselessness
   Silent Night
5. Jehovah Deactivate Blithe Chevaliers
   God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen
6. Delight for this Planet
   Joy to the World
7. Perceived Carillon Noel 24 Hours
   I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day

“I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day, their old familiar carols play
And wild and sweet, the words repeat, of peace on earth, goodwill to men.

But in despair I bowed my head, ‘There is no peace on earth,’ I said
“For hate is strong and mocks the song, of peace on earth, goodwill to men.”

That contrast in the song I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day serves as a reminder that this is not always the Most Wonderful Time of the Year. I always hear two songs in the air this time of the year: a song of wonder and awe; as well as songs of sorrow and woe.

Today’s passages remind us that even Mary heard the same two songs. She heard the majestic voice of the angel singing: “You will become pregnant and have a son, and you are to name Him Jesus. He will be very great and will be called the Son of the Most High” (Luke 1:31-32). But she also heard the foreboding song of Simeon: “This child will be rejected by many in Israel and it will be their undoing. And a sword will pierce your own soul” (Luke 2:34b-35).

Sometimes it seems that the song of the sword will drown out the song of wonder. (more…)

Isaiah 9:1-6
John 1:1-14

One of my favorite pastors relates the following story about buying a Nativity set.

My mother-in-law, Ruby, lives in the southern Indiana town of Paoli. We spend family Christmas with her. But Christmas isn’t official in Paoli until Wilson Roberts decorates his variety store, which he does on the day after Thanksgiving. Each year it is the same adornments: a cardboard cutout of Rudolph taped to the front window, a strand of tinsel hung over the check-out counter, a bucket of candy canes sittin’ next to the cash register. On that day, at precisely 8:50am, people from all over town head to the variety store to start their gift-buying. It is a migration every bit as predictable as the swallows of Capistrano. I stopped in a few years ago looking for a nativity set. It’s a small store, in sore need of a liquidation sale. Wilson’s motto is, We have it, if we can find it. Forty years of merchandise is stacked to the ceiling. I went inside and sought out Mr. Roberts; he was sittin’ in the back of the store, puffin’ on one of those rum-soaked Wolf Brothers Crooks cigars, his ashes dribblin’ on the floor.

“I’d like to buy a nativity set.”

“Well I know we have one if we can just find it,” he said.

He began to look by the hair nets and bobby pins, not there; by the garden hoses, not there; by the yard goods and notions, not there either. He looked over near the lawn chairs, then underneath the candy display, which is where he found it. He blew the dust off the box, opened it up and began to take a roll call. One manger, one kneeling mother, one proud father, three wise men, one sheep, one cow, one donkey, and oh yea, one baby Jesus.

“Everyone present and accounted for; that’ll be 12 bucks,” he said.

“How ‘bout 10?” I countered, “The box is torn and the cow is missing an ear.”

Wilson Roberts squinted, shifted his cigar from one side of his mouth to the other, and finally said, “Deal.”

The day I bought the nativity set was the last day I saw Wilson Roberts alive. He died the next year; we drive past his old store on the way to Thanksgiving dinner at Ruby’s. The variety store is closed now. When he died; it died. Every now and then I think back on Wilson Roberts searching here and there amidst hair nets and bobby pins and garden hoses and yard goods for the baby Jesus. Sometimes our search for the Divine, our longing for the true meaning of Christmas has us poking around into all kinds of corners. ¹

John writes, “He (Jesus) came unto His own, and His own received Him not”

because even though they were wishing and hoping and begging for an encounter with the Divine, they were looking in all the wrong places. John tells us that when John the Baptist tried to point them in the right direction they weren’t buying what he was selling: a carpenter’s son? from Galilee? who preaches peace and love?

John writes, “He (Jesus) came unto His own, and His own received Him not,” because even though they were wishing and hoping and begging for an encounter with the Divine, they were looking in all the wrong places. They were desperately looking for a Jewish Messiah who would come among them as a Warrior Priest who would lead Jewish revolutionaries in an overthrow of the Roman government. When instead, He died on a Roman cross His own people rejected the entire idea of a suffering Messiah, despite the fact that’s how the scriptures pictured Him. And consequently, they missed out on their one real chance to hook up with God.

They, like Wilson Roberts, were looking in all the wrong places.

In some circles, the same dynamic exists 2000 years later. (more…)

Isaiah 6:1-5
Luke 1:5-13

Most of us have heard of Claustrophobia, but when was the last time you heard someone refer to ‘Xenophobia’? Xenophobia is the ‘fear of strangers or foreigners’ or ‘of anything strange or foreign.’

Like an awe-inspiring angel of the Lord suddenly and without warning appearing where and when least expected? Zechariah, Mary, the shepherds; they all experienced an ‘appearing’ and those appearings caused a xenophobic reaction in all of them as it would you and me.

A couple of weeks ago when we were studying Isaiah, I challenged my Disciple students by saying something like, ‘if you unequivocally and without a shadow of a doubt knew that God Almighty was sitting on His throne in that room behind you how many of you would jump up and vault right in there?’ On the other hand, if I were to charge each of you $5 for the chance to look through a little peephole in that wall back there to see God Almighty seated on His throne without Him knowing you were looking there would be a line down this aisle and clear out the door and I would be flush with cash.

My mother loves to tell the story of how she took me and my two brothers to see Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho when we were only 6, 7 and 8 years old. How, when it came to the scene when Anthony Perkins wielded that butcher knife, my mom noticed that all three of us had thrown our coats over our heads and that all three of us were also peeking out at the big screen.

In a similar way, there is something about the supernatural, the otherness of God, that both attracts human beings and repels us at the same time. We are mysteriously drawn to it and yet the closer we get the more we want to run away.

Is it possible that God is the ultimate object of our xenophobia?

That He is the ultimate foreigner; the mysterious stranger who threatens our security? That He is too awesome, too holy, too other-worldly for us? That in His presence we quake and tremble? That meeting Him personally may be our greatest trauma? That the real reason we fear death is because it implies meeting our Maker? (more…)

Matthew 24:1-44
I Thessalonians 4:13-18

Destiny came down to an island, centuries ago, summoned three of the inhabitants and asked, “What would you do if I told you that tomorrow your island will be completely inundated by an immense tidal wave?”
The first man, who was a cynic, said, “Why, I would eat, drink, be merry all night long!”
The second man, a mystic, said, “I would go to the sacred grove with my loved ones and make sacrifices to the gods and pray without ceasing.”
And the third man, who loved reason, thought for a while, and finally said, “I would assemble our wisest men and begin to study how to live underwater.”

What would you do if I told you that tomorrow we would experience the most cataclysmic event in world history? An event more dramatic than when the heavens opened and for forty straight days a deluge fell upon the earth almost wiping out the entire species of Homo-sapiens.

What would you do, if you knew without doubt that Jesus was going to return tomorrow?
Not as a helpless baby who after His birth was seen by only a select few. But as the Son of Man preceded by trumpet sounds and coming on the clouds with power and great glory, in such a way that all people everywhere would see Him at once?

What would you do today if you knew tomorrow Jesus would return, as He promised He would, to initiate that mysterious sequence of events associated with the end of time as we know it?

Would you like the man of reason, begin to figure a way to live with the negative consequences of such an event? Or would you be the mystic sacrificing and praying as you waited? Or would you just carry on, life as usual, like Noah’s neighbors, who were warned that a little rain was going to fall, but who were content for years to eat, drink, and be merry?

For to be sure, a few days before Jesus suffered and died on the cross He spoke to His followers about the things that would come in the “last days” and delivered a similarly clear message: “I am coming again, at a time you cannot know and will least expect; so I advise you . . . if you are not ready . . . get ready!”

I want to discuss just two aspects of the second coming of Christ. (more…)