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Revelation 1:9-20

January 7/8, 2012 • Portage First UMC

It was the band REM that sang a bunch of confusing, rambling lyrics—lyrics I can’t quite follow—that led up to a chorus declaring, “It’s the end of the world as we know it—and I feel fine.” Well, that song was released in 1987, and now it’s 2012, and not everyone is fine, especially since many believe this just might be the year when the end of the world arrives. The hubbub started a while back when someone realized that a calendar made by the Mayan Indians somewhere around the 5th century BC runs out on December 21, 2012. Because some believe the Mayans were remarkably accurate in their calculation of time, they believe the world will end when the Mayan calendar runs out. Of course, there are alternate explanations. Here’s a couple of my favorites: the calendar editor comes in with a round stone and says, “I only had enough room to go up to 2012.” To which the other man says, “Ha! That’ll freak somebody out someday!” Another of my favorites has a Mayan writing out the calendar and when he gets to December 21, 2012, he says, “Dang! Out of ink.” Not to be outdone, I found this in a catalog this Christmas: a Doomsday 2012 desk calendar, which stops on December 21. The ad copy says, “This page-a-day Doomsday! Calendar will help you keep track of all the stuff you need to do before, well, before it’s too late.”

Of course, some are taking this prediction seriously, and others are not. But either way, the news media is making something of it. Last Sunday, the Chicago Tribune had several articles about this prediction, including this one in which the reporter asked various celebrities (many of which I’d never heard of) where they would spend their last day on Earth. The answers included the Bahamas, the Flamingo casino in Las Vegas, the beach or Roswell, New Mexico. One said they’d want to be in either Jerusalem or Las Vegas. On Facebook this week, I asked the question, “If you knew the world was going to end tomorrow, what would you do today?” And I didn’t get very many responses, but those who chimed in said they would spend time with loved ones, spend time praying, go sledding, quit counting calories, and maybe cry. I think most of us just don’t think about that. There is an old tale (that may or may not be true) about St. Francis of Assisi who was asked one time what he would do if he knew he would die at sunset, if he knew his world was going to end that day. Francis reportedly said, “I would finish hoeing my garden.”

So what if the end is near? How should we, as Christians, respond to such predictions? How should we view “the end of the world”? Because we do believe that, one day, this world will end. And so, in response to those concerns that are occupying at least some of our culture, we want to spend the next few weeks looking at the book of the Bible that has more to say about the end of the world than any other, the book of Revelation. Now, I want to say a few things about what this sermon series will not be. This series will not be one that delves into absolutely every detail of the book. For one, we don’t have that kind of time, and for two, doing that misses the point of the book. Revelation is about a grand sweep, about a big story, and isn’t so concerned about details as it is about getting a particular message across. As Eugene Peterson says, “This book does not primarily call for decipherment,” but for wonder (Reversed Thunder, pg. xiii). We won’t have time or ability to read the whole book during worship, so each week in your bulletin and on the Facebook page there will be readings for you to do, and we’ll be preaching from a portion of that reading each week. I encourage you to read along, to make the most of this study by immersing yourself in the book itself.

This series will also not be one that presents a “timeline for the end of the world.” While I believe Revelation gives us hope for the end and for the return of Christ, this book is not first and foremost about a timeline, or about matching up clues in the book to so-called “signs of the times.” In that vein, you’ll find little in this sermon series that agrees with the popular notions of this book, a bad theology made most famous by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins in their “Left Behind” books. That particular way of understanding the book is relatively new, dating back to the 1830’s in the teaching of a man named John Nelson Darby. None of the early church fathers understood this book in that way; there was no teaching about a rapture before Darby began speaking about it. And, I would argue, John himself, the author of Revelation, didn’t understand his writing that way, either. The great British writer G. K. Chesterton once put it this way: “Though St. John the Evangelist saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators” (qtd. in Peterson xiii).

Finally, this sermon series will, hopefully, not be a frightening one but a hopeful one. Honestly, I stayed away from the book of Revelation for a long time because I had the life scared out of me by one of those “rapture movies” in the 1970’s. I also saw a lot of people who responded to Jesus because of that fear, and that sort of salvation and faith never lasted beyond the time when the fear wore off. Besides that, though the book is filled with frightening and confusing images, I don’t think John wrote the book meaning to, literally, scare the hell out of people. He wrote it to get heaven into people. This is a book of hope, because, in John’s mind, the return of Jesus was the greatest hope of the Christian. Other early church writers shared his perspective. Paul, for instance, after describing the return of Jesus, tells the Thessalonians, “We will be with the Lord forever. Therefore encourage one another with these words” (1 Thessalonians 4:17-18). He didn’t say, “Go scare people into the kingdom.” No, rather, he said, “Encourage each other—because no matter what happens in life, there is hope beyond all of this.” So my goal, in these next few weeks, is to do exactly that—to encourage us to have hope that the end of the world isn’t the end of our hope. In fact, the end of the world is the beginning of our hope.

And so we begin…with the title. In English, we call it “The Revelation.” It’s not, by the way, “Revelations,” because it’s not a series of visions. It’s one vision—Revelation. And there are indications that what John describes is happening all at once and he’s doing his best to write it all down as he has been commanded to (1:11). The original title, in the Greek, given by John himself is, “The Apocalypse of [or from] Jesus Christ.” When we hear “apocalypse,” we think of a great war or catastrophe, but the original word simply means, “unveiling, disclosing, revealing” (Mulholland, “Revelation,” Cornerstone Biblical Commentary, Vol. 18, pg. 410). In the first century, an “apocalypse” was a particular kind of writing, usually one that described an experience the writer had with a heavenly being or in the heavenly realms (Mulholland 410), and it was a coded sort of message. If you knew the meaning of the symbols, if you knew the secret code, you could understand the writing. You knew what the writer was saying. I remember as a kid we would make up codes and write secret messages to each other. And you did that so that if the teacher found it, they wouldn’t know what you wrote because they didn’t have the decoder, right? Without the decoder, the message was just a jumble. You couldn’t understand it. And that’s part of our struggle with Revelation. We live twenty centuries removed from the original context. Contrary to what some TV and radio preachers like to think, this book was not written for us. John tells us that. It was written for a group of seven churches in Asia Minor, seven churches who would have understood without question the symbolism and the secret code. It was written to their world, not to ours, and that’s part of why we struggle with this book. We’ve lost the context. Much of the symbolism is drawn from the Old Testament (Mulholland 411), and our failure to comprehend that symbolism tells us how illiterate we are today in the language of the Bible. Even still, it’s important to remember John is trying to describe things even he cannot fully comprehend using the only resource he has: language. That’s why, so often, he says something was “like” this or “as if” this were happening. To speak of taking Revelation literally misses the point. John did not intend us to take it “literally,” but to embrace the overall message wholeheartedly.

So John tells us he was on the island of Patmos on the Lord’s Day. He had been exiled there because of his leadership in this illegal religion, Christianity. Patmos is a barren, rocky little island about ten miles long by five miles wide in the shape of a crescent. It sits about thirty-five miles off the southwestern coast of Turkey (though today it is part of Greece) and has a modern population of nearly 3,000 (Wright, Revelation for Everyone, pg. 9). In John’s day, it was a place of banishment, a punishment the Romans favored for political prisoners. Scholars differ on when they think John was there, but many today favor somewhere in the 60’s, during the reign of Emperor Nero, when Christian persecution was beginning to really ramp up. At some point, John, friend of Jesus, had been captured and sentenced to exile on this rock in the middle of the sea. He says he is there “because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus” (1:9). He’s there because he couldn’t quit talking about Jesus. How many of us would have found ourselves in exile for that reason? I remember a Bishop asking us when we were in seminary: if you were accused of being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?

So there on Patmos, John is worshipping on the Lord’s Day—on Sunday, the day when Christians celebrated the resurrection just as we do now. And he says he was “in the Spirit” (1:10). I love that phrase. In one sense, I do think it indicates he was beginning to see heavenly realities, and we’ll talk about that in a moment, but in another sense, John recognizes that even though he’s in exile, he has not been forsaken or forgotten by the Spirit of God. People in Old Testament times often misunderstood God to be located in a certain place or land or building. The reason the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 586 B.C. was so devastating was because many believed God had been destroyed as well. When Paul writes, “Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God,” (1 Corinthians 6:19), he’s saying many things, one of which is that God dwells not in temples or in lands but in you. He goes with you. Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us. John is reminded that even when it gets difficult, even when you’re banished and removed from everything important and familiar, God is still with you. John was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, and in that state, whatever it was like, he heard a voice.

The voice was like a trumpet, and it instructed him to write down everything he was about to see and send it to the churches. So John turns around to see the voice—see the voice. Do you begin to get a sense of the limitations of language here? You can’t see a voice. You can see the owner of the voice, but John turns around at the sound of the voice and enters an entirely new world, a new way of perceiving things. In reality, as Eugene Peterson points out, John doesn’t actually see new things. What he describes in the book of Revelation is nothing new and doesn’t add anything to what we already know if we’ve read the Scriptures. Rather, the voice like a trumpet wakes John up so he can see what has been there all along.

Last fall, I remember a day when I woke up with my mind full of details and struggles and things I was working through. And those things occupied my mind all morning. Maybe you’ve had days like that—where you go about your routine and do what you need to do but your mind is somewhere else completely. And somewhere around 1:00 that afternoon, I noticed the sky. I remember texting Cathy, “I just now noticed the sky today.” Now, does that mean the sky had not been there? That somehow it had disappeared until 1:00? Not at all! It means that, at that moment, I woke up out of my inward focus, my self-centeredness and noticed something outside of me that had been there all along. Or it’s like those times when we hurry here and there and fail to notice someone we know standing right beside us. They were there all the time, but it took their voice or something else for us to “wake up” and notice their presence. That’s sort of what John is describing here. It’s not that all of a sudden Jesus was there. Jesus and the kingdom of God was present all along. In fact, that had been Jesus’ primary message, right? “The kingdom of heaven has come near” (Matthew 4:17). No, what happens in Revelation to John is that this voice wakes him up and enables him to see what—or who—has been there all the time.

And that meant a radical reorientation. John says—several times in this book, in fact—he “turned around” (1:12). We would say he did a 180. He looked a different direction. I don’t know if that means he looked behind him physically or if he’s describing something that happened in his spirit, but Jesus did say that, to be able to enter into and see the kingdom of heaven, we have to “turn around.” In that first sermon he preached, the first word is, “Repent” (Matthew 4:17), a word which, quite literally, means “turn around.” Go a different direction. If you’re headed west, go east—because the way we go and the direction we choose on our own is away from God. So if we’re going to find God, if we’re going to enter the kingdom, after we wake up, we have to turn around. We repent of the things we have done that moved us away from God and begin walking a path that moves us toward God. John needed that reminder on the island of Patmos. He turned around. We need that same reminder, in exile here in Portage.

So what did John see? Or, rather, who did John see? Because the first thing he describes is a person standing among the lampstands. The description is very visual and very Old Testament. He’s wearing a robe reaching down to his feet with a golden sash across his chest (1:13)—these are the garments of a priest, the high priest in particular, the one who stands in our place before God the Father. He’s the one who asks the Father to forgive our sins (Mulholland 428; Peterson 33). His hair is white—white represents purity—and his eyes are blazing fire. The Gospels often describe Jesus’ eyes. In Mark 3:5, he looks at the religious leaders in anger. In Mark 10:21, we’re told he loved the rich young ruler with his eyes. And in Luke 22:61, when Peter denies Jesus for the third time during his trial, we’re told Jesus gazed at him—he saw what was in Peter’s heart. The imagery in Revelation draws on all that because fire purifies, it brings out what is really there. It’s only destructive of attitudes and mindsets that are harmful, temporary. Only the things that are eternal will survive the blazing fire. Jesus doesn’t look at us; he looks into us (Peterson 34). His feet are bronze—a symbol of steadfastness, faithfulness. His voice is like rushing waters, which is the same way Ezekiel described the voice of God (cf. Ezekiel 43:2). He has seven stars in his hand—which speaks of him as a creator, but I love the point William Barclay makes, that this same hand that is strong enough to hold the stars is also gentle enough to wipe away our tears near the end of the Revelation. And out of his mouth comes a “sharp, double-edged sword” (1:16). The prophets and the apostles both described God’s Word as a sword that penetrates to the deepest part of our being. The writer to the Hebrews put it most clearly: “For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart” (4:12) (Barclay, The Revelation of John, Volume 1, pgs. 49-51; Mulholland 429). This not your typical Sunday School picture of “gentle Jesus, meek and mild.” This is the Son of God, ready to do battle with everything that threatens his disciples. John, as Bishop Tom Wright puts it, “would warn against imagining that Jesus is therefore a [cozy] figure, one who merely makes us feel happy inside. To see Jesus as he is would drive us not to snuggle up to him, but to fall at his feet as though we were dead” (Wright 7). This is like the prophet Isaiah, in the Temple after the king had died, when he gets a glimpse of what God looks like. His response? “Woe is me! I am ruined!” (Isaiah 6:5). This book is a revelation of Jesus Christ—of what he is really like. It’s a wake-up call to follow the real Jesus, and not the one we have made up in his place. To be able to see him as he is means we turn around and we become serious about being faithful to the true and living Christ.

So John falls down, and then that hand that is strong enough to put the stars in place touches him and says, “Do not be afraid.” This one who is above it all, above the suffering, above the persecution, above our momentary troubles (cf. 2 Corinthians 4:17), he is with us through it all. He was dead, he is alive again. He is in control of all things, including death and Hades. And because of that, he commands John to write letters of encouragement to the churches, to call out their best, to call them to faithfulness. This week, if you follow the readings, you’re going to read those letters to the churches, and it might be helpful to do so with a study Bible that gives you some background on each church. But I believe Jesus has a message for us in here, as well, a message to the church at Portage. The message is this: “Do not be afraid.” It’s the same message Jesus has delivered to the church throughout the centuries: “Do not be afraid to do what I’m calling you to do. No matter what the world think, no matter how you are judged, no matter how you might be persecuted—do not be afraid. I am the one who is on your side. I am first and last. I was there at the beginning and I’ll be there at the end—and all the points in between.” We know that, because Jesus has been with this church for 176 years and then some. At a Disciple class a couple of months ago, though, we discussed how so many people here don’t know our story, don’t know this church’s story, and because Revelation is a letter to the churches, it makes sense to tell our story alongside their story. And our story is the story of Jesus’ faithfulness throughout everything that has come our way. So we’ll be telling our story over the next few weeks, and we begin by remembering God’s faithfulness through the years.

VIDEO: Wanda Samuelson

The problem with vision is that, very often, Jesus only gives us one step at a time. A lampstand doesn’t give lots of light, just enough for the next step or two. And that’s the way Jesus works with us as well—one step he leads, and then another, and then another. So how do we respond to this text as we begin our journey into the strange and wonder-filled world of the Revelation? Well, first of all, we have to wake up—begin looking for Jesus in places we might least expect, because he’s there. Turn around, wake up, repent—whatever term you want to use, do what we need to do in order to see him working in our world, in our lives, in our church. You know, sometimes we get so focused on what we’re upset about, or what we disagree with, or what we don’t like that we forget to look for Jesus even in the midst of that. He’s there. He’s working, and he’s leading. And once we see him, our response is to embrace whatever calling he has placed on our lives. It might be scary. It might lead us to be looked on strangely by our world. People might not understand. But, as the Revelation shows us, salvation is worked out in the midst of hate and suffering or not at all (cf. Peterson 31). Where is God calling you to go and what is God calling you to do in 2012? What task will you put your hand to, whether the end comes this year or not?

This Saturday, 9 a.m., is our Vision 2012 event. We’re going to be talking about what it will take to move this church forward in 2012, and I want every one of you to be part of that discussion. Our Ad Council has already approved strategic goals for this coming year, and I’ll be sharing that with you as well as some thoughts on leadership. And there will be time for you to worship, as John did, and to seek out how God is calling you to respond in 2012 to this Jesus, this one “like a son of man,” the one who says to us, “Do not be afraid.” No matter what the future holds, he is with us. He has gone before us. And he will not leave us orphaned (cf. John 14:18). He still hold the keys of death and Hades. He’s still alive forever. Let’s pray.

Overjoyed!

The Sermon Study Guide is here.

Matthew 2:1-18

December 25, 2011 • Portage First UMC

This past week, I was discussing Christmas being on a Sunday with a friend of mine—okay, so I was complaining a bit…just a bit. She was telling me her family’s plans for Christmas and I sort of sarcastically said, “Well, you know, I have to work on Christmas Day this year!” To which she promptly responded, “Well, where better to be than in God’s house celebrating his birthday?” And you know what? She was right. There is no better place to be this morning than in this place celebrating Jesus’ birth. This morning ought to be a morning of worship, of celebration, of joy, and there is, perhaps, no part of the Christmas story that reminds us more of that truth than the story of the Magi.

We’ve been on this journey for the last month, the journey from Nazareth through Ein Karem and to Bethlehem, walking with Mary and Joseph toward and through the birth of Jesus, and it’s been my prayer throughout this series that perhaps you have learned some new things, maybe seen the story in a new light, but more importantly, I pray that you’ve drawn closer to the baby of Bethlehem because you’ve been on this journey. For us, it’s taken a month. For Mary and Joseph, it took nine months initially, and really a lifetime. And for some other travelers, the journey to the baby took at minimum three months and some suggest as long as two years.

They are the Magi. We often call them “wise men” or “kings” and we usually assume there were three of them because there are three gifts—hence, the carol we just sang, “We three kings of orient are.” But Matthew calls them not kings or wise men. He calls them “magi,” a word that can refer to astrologers or to magicians. The best scholarship today says they were likely priests in a religion called Zoroastrianism, probably from Persia (modern-day Iran), and they were men who believed that the stars contained messages for humankind. They studied the stars in order to predict the future (Hamilton, The Journey, pg. 121); astronomy and astrology were not such separate professions in their day. At one time, their religion was among the largest in the world, having begun in Persia with a man named Zoroaster. Zoroaster taught that there is a constant war between good and evil, and that humanity’s job is to keep evil at bay by entertaining good thoughts, speaking good words and performing good deeds. Sometimes, that’s what people want to reduce Christianity to—just doing nice things. Zoroastrians believe that good will prevail in the end and that at the end of the world, the universe will be renovated and a savior will appear. Today, there are still somewhere around 200,000 followers of Zoroaster, though their prominence in Iran in modern times has been diminished by Islamic rule. But it was this interest in a savior at the end of time that most likely led these Magi to study the Jewish texts available to them, because much that was written there sounded similar to what they believed. The Jews also believed in a savior, a Messiah, who would come to save the world and bring an end to history. And so the Magi studied the stars along with Jewish and other religious texts to try to find out when that would take place.

In the year 7 BC, there were three times when the planets Jupiter and Saturn were close to each other in the night sky. Now that’s significant because Jupiter was considered the “royal” or kingly planet, and Saturn was sometimes thought to represent the Jewish people. The two of them close together could have caused a bright phenomenon in the sky, and if these Magi, studying the stars, saw that, what other conclusion could they draw except that a king had been born to the Jews? But regardless of what it was they actually saw, Matthew is clear that when it began, they noticed it and they set out to find what event on earth was signified by this unusual bright light in the heavens (Wright, Matthew for Everyone, Part One, pg. 10).

Now, assuming they set out the night they first saw the star, and assuming the star first appeared the night Jesus was born, they still would not have arrived at the manger along with the shepherds the way most of our nativity scenes and movies have them. If they were from Persia, as many believe, they would have had a thousand miles to travel. It would have taken them somewhere between three and six months to make that journey (Hamilton 121). Jesus was no longer in the manger when they arrived. In fact, Matthew says the family was living in a house, probably still staying with Joseph’s family in their house. That would have been the tradition anyway, for Joseph to have brought his new family into his family home.

So the Magi arrive somewhere between three months and maybe as long as two years after the birth. But they don’t go immediately to Bethlehem. When there is a new king of the Jews being born, where would you expect that baby to be? Not in a lesser-known suburb. No, the baby would be in the capital, of course. In Jerusalem, and so that’s where they go first and they ask the king at the time, Herod the Great, “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews?” (2:2). “King of the Jews”—where has Herod heard that title before? Oh, yes! That’s his title. That’s the title Rome gave to him when he was appointed to rule over Judea. And it’s a title Herod was extremely protective of. Herod was more than a little paranoid. Whenever he perceived a threat to his kingdom, he would do whatever it took to eliminate that threat—whether the threat was real or not. He had numerous people killed, including three of his sons and his favorite wife Mariamne, because he was afraid they were plotting to take the throne from him. When we read the latter part of this morning’s passage, we learn Herod wasn’t above genocide, either, if it served his purposes. In order to try to kill this newborn so-called “king of the Jews,” he orders the execution of every male child under two years of age in Bethlehem. Granted, Bethlehem was a small village at the time, and it’s likely this “slaughter of the innocents” may have only been somewhere around a dozen or so children—that’s still a dozen or so too many, a dozen or so baby boys whose lives were taken from them because of Herod’s great paranoia (Hamilton 125).

So when the Magi come to Jerusalem, they approach the king, who then asks his chief priests and religious teachers about this king. They inform him that, according to the Scriptures, the savior would be born in Bethlehem, not in Jerusalem. They can even quote the exact passage from Micah that says so. And yet, I find it fascinating that even though Bethlehem is less than a day’s walk from Jerusalem, none of them—not the religious leaders or the king—are interested enough to go down to Bethlehem to find out if such a person, such a savior had been born. These Magi come to town, saying that the Jewish prophecy had been fulfilled, and the Jewish religious leaders and the king of the Jews sit tight in Jerusalem while the foreign pagan astrologers head on down the road toward Bethlehem. Those who worship a different god are more interested in finding out if the message of the Old Testament prophets is true than those who claim to have believed it all along.

And I don’t think things have changed all that much in 2,000 years. Very often, those of us who have heard it over and over are less likely to respond to it than are those who have never heard. Perhaps that’s why the church is growing in almost every part of the world except North America. As a culture, we’ve become almost immune to the good news of the gospel. We’re busy fighting wars over where you can place public nativity scenes instead of actually sharing the story in a way people can hear it. What I love about this Magi story is the way God shared the good news with them. He spoke their language, as he did to the shepherds as well. To them, God sent an angel with a promise that their messiah, their savior, had been born. But to these pagan astrologers, God used a star to communicate. Sometimes we get all worked up about how the good news is communicated. Can you use technology to tell the story? Can you use rock music to tell the story? Aren’t those things too worldly? But God uses whatever will get people’s attention. He contextualized the message so that it spoke to those he wanted to reach. Those astrologers wouldn’t have paid attention to an angel, but a star—that spoke to them. I wonder if, in this new year, we need to let go of our own prejudices, stop speaking in churchy language, and communicate the good news in whatever way we can so people can hear it. We don’t change the message, but the way we say it has to constantly be updated so the message can be heard in a new day.

A second thing this story tells is that the good news is, in fact, for everyone. The Jews in that day had believed that the savior was only coming for them, that the “Day of the Lord” (the end of the world) would be a time when they would be saved and everyone else would be judged. And so their faith, in those days, in many ways, had become very insular, very inward-focused. Even the message going to shepherds was pushing it, because shepherds were on the fringe. They were outcasts. But at least they were Jewish. Now this message goes to Gentiles, to pagans. They, too, are offered an opportunity to respond to the baby of Bethlehem. They, too, are given the chance to find salvation in him. It’s unthinkable! But aren’t we glad they were because if the message wasn’t given to Gentiles as well as Jews, most of us wouldn’t be here today. However, that wasn’t something even the early church grabbed onto easily. Jesus, when he preached and taught, had to emphasize that, and Peter, the lead disciple had to learn it again in Acts 10. Maybe you remember the story: Peter is hungry and while he’s waiting on his hosts to prepare lunch, God gives him a vision of a sheet that drops from heaven containing all sorts of animals Jewish people considered “unclean.” And a voice from heaven says, “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.” Peter is aghast: “I have never eaten anything impure or unclean.” And the voice says, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.” And right after that, Peter is invited to come to a Gentile’s home to speak, and the first thing he says when he arrives is, “I’m not supposed to be here, but God has shown me that no one is unclean.” Some call that event Peter’s second conversion, but it’s only an echo of what God was already doing in extending hope and salvation to the Magi when Jesus was born. The good news, the Gospel, is open and available to absolutely everyone (cf. Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes, pgs. 52-54).

Even Herod. Have you ever thought about that? Even paranoid, power-hungry Herod could have come and found the baby, the newborn king. But that would have required Herod to do something he wasn’t willing to do: to worship someone other than himself. Oh, he tells the Magi that’s what he wants to do. He gives them instructions: “Go and search carefully for the child. As soon as you find him, report to me, so that I too may go and worship him” (2:8). Now, because we know the rest of the story, we know Herod has no intention of worshipping the child, but what he proposes is exactly what the Magi do when they find Jesus. Matthew says, “On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him” (2:11). It’s the same word Herod uses: proskuneo. You hear echoes of our word “prostrate” in that word, don’t you? To be prostrate means you’re laying flat on the ground, and that seems to be what the Magi did in order to show respect to the Christ child. Matthew says they “bowed down,” which means you go from a higher position to a lower one. Now, of course, we picture that in a physical sense; the Magi knelt down, maybe even lay down on the ground, and lowered their heads, and that’s probably at least part of what’s going on here. The image suggests someone paying homage to a royal figure rather than, necessarily, worshipping a god (Carson, “Matthew,” Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Vol. 8, pg. 86) and that was done by physically lowering yourself. But there’s more than just that physical gesture going on here. The image is that these learned men, these Magi, are recognizing that in this baby’s birth, something significant, something far more than they really understand at this point, is happening. They’ve traveled so far and so long. They’ve risked everything to see what new thing this God of the Jews might be doing.

And when they see it, even before they understand it all, they bow, they worship, they offer gifts. Their response should be ours as well. We who know this story so well, maybe too well, are still called to bow, to worship, and to give our gifts. We bow by recognizing that God is God and we are not. One of the things I love about the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, the church that stands over the traditional site of Jesus’ birth, is that, in order to get into the church, you have to bow. The way in is through the door of humility. It’s a small, narrow entrance and there are lot of stories as to how that door got to be so small, but today, if you want to go to the manger, you have to bow. It’s a reminder that this place is not about me or you or anyone else. It’s about the one who was born there. I sometimes wonder if we shouldn’t put doors of humility on the fronts of all of our churches. Of course, building inspectors would never allow that today, but perhaps we can keep that image in our mind as we come into the church. God is God and we are not. We bow.

And then we worship. “Worship” is an old word that literally means “giving worth to.” We “worship” whatever is most important in our lives. Many people worship money or power or sex or material possessions. Those of the gods of the age, and to worship Jesus is a radical, counter-cultural act. But worshipping Jesus has little to do with what songs we sing or what style we sing them in. Worshipping Jesus has little to do with what we wear or what our standing in society is. Worshipping Jesus has little to do with what building we use or what language we use. Worshipping Jesus simply means we put him first in every aspect of our lives. Worship is a lifestyle, a 24/7/365 way of living rather than just an hour out of our week. Certainly, corporate worship, such as we do here, is essential for our soul, but it’s only the beginning point. When we worship, we give worth to Jesus and that can and should happen anywhere and everywhere. We bow, and we worship.

And we give our gifts to Jesus. The Magi “opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh” (2:11). There are varying opinions as to the significance of these gifts. You’ve probably heard or gotten an e-mail about the gifts and what they represent. Some say the gold represents royalty and Jesus’ role as king, frankincense represents prayer as often such scents were burned during prayer, and myrrh is a bitter perfume used in burials and would then represent Jesus’ death for our salvation. In fact, that’s sort of the track the hymn takes. And I’m not saying there weren’t symbolic meanings in the gifts. After all, they’re expensive things to give but they were not uncommon gifts. Some scholars think that perhaps these gifts were sold to be able to finance the flight to Egypt Matthew describes in verse 14 (Carson 89). And all of that may be true, but there is also a more basic thing happening here. The Magi give what they have to honor a newborn king, to honor someone significant. They give appropriate gifts for a king (Wright 12). They didn’t just give what they had leftover, or grab something at the dollar store on their way out of Persia. They gave costly gifts that would honor this baby. Which brings up the question: what do we give to Jesus that costs us something? What do we give that isn’t just something we have leftover? What do we give that truly honors who Jesus is? The Magi set the standard; will we follow their example?

All of this—bowing, worshipping, giving—is set in a context of joy. Matthew says when the Magi knew they were headed in the right direction, when they were going to see the newborn king, “they were overjoyed” (2:10). In fact, Matthew wants to make sure we get the message, and so “overjoyed” really doesn’t convey what he says. He uses two words, two big words, to describe this kind of joy, so it’s sort of like he says: they were greatly full of the biggest joy you could ever have. Literally he says they had “exceedingly mega-joy.” That’s a whole lot of joy. It’s not just, “Oh, going to church is kind of cool.” No, this is joy that takes over a person’s soul. And the cool thing is—they didn’t even really know anything about Jesus yet. We, who do, should also be people who bow, who worship and who give with “great, mega-joy.”

Now, I know sometimes our lives are not happy. Sometimes there are circumstances we’re going through that are not ideal. But joy is different from happiness. Joy is the deep-down conviction that God is good and that God is on our side, and that no matter what happens to us, God will take care of us. Happiness is dependent upon our circumstances, but joy comes from deep down within. Joy comes from knowing that baby of Bethlehem. And yet, so often, we come to bow, to worship and to give and we act like it’s a chore, or like it’s the last thing we want to do, or like we’re only here because we couldn’t come up with anything else better this week to do. What if, in this new year that’s coming up, we adopted instead the attitude of the psalmist who said: “I rejoiced with those who said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord’” (Psalm 122:1). The Magi came to the baby Jesus with joy—overwhelming joy; so can we. No matter what our circumstances, the promise of the Scriptures is that he is Emmanuel, God with us, through every moment, through every circumstance, through every success and through every failure—Emmanuel, God with us, bringing us joy, bringing us hope, bringing us life. That is a reason for joy, not only at Christmas but every day of the year and every day of our lives. That is a reason to be overjoyed. Emmanuel—God with us. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Be An Angel!

Luke 2:8-20

December 23/24, 2011 (Christmas Candlelight) • Portage First UMC

Cathy went into labor in the middle of the night. I hadn’t been asleep very long when she woke me up to tell me it was time. I knew what that meant! And so we hurried around, got to the hospital and got all settled in. I learned that night that labor is nothing like it is on television—you know, where the woman gives birth in just a few minutes. No, there are long hours of waiting, and there, at Ball Hospital in the middle of the night, we waited and waited and waited and watched as the hours ticked by. You see, I wanted to tell someone, but I was also smart enough not to make any calls at 2 a.m. So we waited—until about 6, and then I started calling. We called our parents first, then some friends and my senior pastor, and then anyone else we could think of who might want to know the news. Christopher wasn’t even born yet, and we couldn’t wait to tell someone.

But when the baby is the Son of God—who do you tell first? And who does the telling? Over the last few weeks, we’ve been journeying through the Christmas story, beginning in Nazareth, and traveling to such places as Bethlehem and Ein Karem. But tonight our journey brings us back to Bethlehem, back to Joseph’s hometown, back to his family’s home and to a stable tucked under his family’s house. Mary and Joseph have made the long, 10-day journey from Nazareth to respond to a Roman-ordered census, and now at some point after their arrival, the time has come for the baby to be born. I imagine Mary would have preferred to be back home in Nazareth for the birth, but babies don’t arrive on schedule; they care little for what else is going on in your life at the time. When Christopher was born, I was just five days away from being in charge of a major community-wide hunger relief fundraiser. When Rachel was born, it was Maundy Thursday, Holy Week, three days before Easter. Babies care little about our schedules; they come when they want to come, and the Son of God is no exception. He comes when they are in Bethlehem, far from Mary’s home and family, with no real way to let anyone know. No phones, no e-mail, no Facebook, no text messages. But God went one better than those methods of communication. And the first people he told were about the most unlikely.

In words that are famous to anyone who’s at least watched A Charlie Brown Christmas, Luke tells us that the first people to hear the good news were shepherds, living in the fields around Bethlehem, keeping watch over their flocks by night—because it was lambing season, the time of year when baby lambs were born, a time when they had to keep constant watch over the sheep in case any of them had trouble giving birth (Card, Luke: The Gospel of Amazement, pg. 48). Shepherds may not have been at the bottom of the social ladder, but they were close. Typically, they were uneducated and poor and considered religiously unclean. Rabbis had even gone so far as to ban them from testifying in court; their word was no good. They smelled of dirty sheep, and people disliked them because they often allowed their sheep to graze on private property, on their neighbors’ property (Card 48; Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes, pg. 35; Hamilton, The Journey, pg. 113). You would not have wanted your sister or daughter marrying a shepherd (Kalas, The Christmas People, pg. 21). In the midst of a lowly and humble village, these were among the lowest of the low. So when the Son of God is born, God chooses to announce the birth first to people whom no one liked, no one listened to, and no one cared about.

And that’s interesting, because the Old Testament is full of positive references to shepherds. One of the most beautiful is one we often read at funerals to remind us of God’s comfort. You probably know it well: “The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing” (Psalm 23:1). Somewhere along the way, people forgot that one of the ways God relates to his people is as a shepherd, and I wonder if that’s at least part of the reason why this birth was announced first to these low-class, forgotten laborers. God was, in some sense, reminding the people: what they do, the way they care for and nurture their sheep, that’s the way I care for you. God is a shepherd—and sometimes we still treat him like those Bethlehem villagers treated the ones out in the field. We don’t listen to what he says. We treat him as uneducated when we act as if we know better than him. And we resent his intrusion into our lives—we will call you when we want you, God. Otherwise, keep your distance. The Lord is a shepherd—and we often treat him that way.

To these Bethlehem shepherds, God sends angels—at first just one, but eventually a “host,” a whole bunch of angels. Throughout these Advent messages, we’ve been trying to peel back the layers of tradition and assumption to see the story the way it really happened, and one of those layers concerns the angels. We picture them (in fact, in our nativity sets, they’re always pictured) with wings, flying about in the night sky. But the word for “angel” simply means “messenger.” Angels are someone with a message, and in Scripture, they normally appear as ordinary people. In fact, in the letter to the Hebrews, we’re told we might even “entertain” an angel without being aware of it (13:2). I remember one icy night when we lived in Kentucky, and Cathy and I and a friend were driving back from Lexington to Wilmore when we hit an icy patch and slid off the road. We got the car well stuck in the ditch. So we put Cathy behind the wheel and Rob and I tried to push the car out, to no avail. All of a sudden, a man came up behind us and asked if we needed help. Of course, we said, and he joined his strength with ours and pretty soon the car was out of the ditch and headed the right way. “God bless you,” he said, and walked away. When we looked, he was gone. There were no cars nearby, no houses lit up. We had no idea where he came from, and to this day I believe he was angel, but he had no wings, no glowing presence. He appeared to us just as a man. In Luke’s story, there is some sort of the sense of God’s glory, God’s presence, enough to make the shepherds tremble a bit as the angel delivers God’s message to them: “I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign to you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger” (2:10-12).

Now, the implication is that the shepherds were to go find the child, to visit him. Why else would the angels give such specific signs? But shepherds, you remember, weren’t welcome in town. They weren’t welcome in respectable homes. If they tried to visit this child who is the Savior, the Messiah, the royal figure they’ve been waiting on for centuries, there’s no way they’d be let in—at least that’s what they must have been thinking. How could they possibly go visit such a dignitary when they knew they wouldn’t be welcomed (Bailey 35)? But, the angel had said the baby would be wrapped in cloths—probably scraps of cloth, rags—and he would be lying in a manger. Not a bed, not a crib, not a cradle, a manger. Something cattle ate out of. Rags and a feeding trough—those are signs for shepherds. Not only a way for them to know they had the right baby, but also a way for them to know that the baby was just like them. He wasn’t born in a wealthy home; he had to have been in a peasant’s home, perhaps one like theirs. Maybe they wouldn’t be turned away. And so they work up their courage and say, “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about” (2:15). And in that simple statement, they show confidence that God has not forgotten them. This baby has come for them, for lowly shepherds, for forgotten people. He is their savior, too.

So what does it mean, then, that Jesus is savior, as the angel said, “for the people” (2:10)? For him to be savior, it means he’s saving “all the people”  (including us) from something. Those shepherds, and many others in the first century, expected the Messiah to be a military man, one to run off the Romans and set up a throne in Jerusalem. He would rule like the kings of old. But it became obvious, as this baby grew up, that Jesus didn’t come to do that, nor did he come to save people from something as small as the Roman Empire. So what does he save us from? Or, perhaps the better question, is what does he save us for? Jesus came to save us from all the destructive ways we try to live our lives—we call that “sin.” It’s all the things we do that rebel against God and God’s plan for our lives. Jesus saves us from guilt and shame, from hopelessness and despair, from fear and death. You see, what began in a manger in Bethlehem really wasn’t finished until Jesus gave his life on the cross in our place, taking the punishment we deserve for our sin. That’s when he said, “It is finished” (John 19:30). And, ultimately, what began in a cave in Bethlehem reached a real climax when Jesus walked out of another cave on the first Easter, alive again (Hamilton 116-118). Jesus came to lead us away from the addictions and the selfishness and the anger and the bitterness and all the ways we break our relationships with each other and with God. He came as Emmanuel—God with us, God living among us. He came to lead us toward a life that’s better, life the way it was intended to be lived. Jesus came to save us from ourselves.

Pastor Jim Harnish tells a parable that might help us tonight, a story about his grandfather, who lost his son in World War II and his wife to a heart attack shortly thereafter. He was left with a teenage daughter and a younger son to raise. In the wake of that kind of grief, the grandfather began drinking, and by the time Harnish had been born, it wasn’t a casual activity. He had a real problem, and the local bartender would often call and ask the family to come get him and take him home. One night, the family was driving to church and they saw the grandfather’s car at the bar. Harnish’s father sadly said, “He’s at it again.” Then Louella entered the picture. “She was a simple country woman who worked as a waitress at a local diner.” When the grandfather began to show an interest in her, she made it clear she wasn’t going to put up with a drunk. If they were going to go out, he had to quit drinking. And he did, miraculously. Soon after that, they got married and he lived past ninety; she lived to be a hundred, but Harnish says his grandfather would not have lived that long or that well had it not been for Louella’s self-giving love and strict demands on how he was going to behave. He writes, “She saved my grandfather by the power of her love.” And that’s what Jesus does. “He comes in infinite love to save us and to lead us into a whole new way of living so that we become the agents of his saving love in the world” (Harnish, All I Want for Christmas, pgs. 43-44).

That’s what the shepherds did, at least that night. We don’t really know anything more about them beyond this Christmas night (Kalas, The Scriptures Sing of Christmas, pg. 23). Did they become followers of Jesus? Did they go back to the fields or did they take on a new job? We don’t know any of that, and it’s useless to speculate. What we do know is that those who saw angels on that holy night became angels themselves—not of the heavenly variety, but of the message-giving variety. Luke puts it this way: “When they had seen [Jesus], they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, and all who heard it were amazed at what they shepherds said to them” (2:17-18). Now, remember, they lived in a world where their testimony was not considered valid. If it came from a shepherd, you didn’t have to believe it. And yet, Luke says, the people who heard them were “amazed.” They marveled. They admired what the shepherds told them. It ought to remind us that there is something powerful in telling what you’ve experienced—your own personal experience with the baby of Bethlehem. Your story doesn’t have to be flashy or well-prepared. It just has to be yours. The shepherds just told what they knew. That’s what angels—messengers—do. They tell what they know.

So the first question for us this Christmas is this: have you experienced the baby of Bethlehem? Have you let him save you? It’s a gift, you know. You only have to receive it, to allow him to be part of your life and bring you to the life God intends you to live. And once you have experienced him, then, like the shepherds, we’re called to tell everyone what we have seen, what we know. We’re called to point others toward the savior, toward the manger so that they, too, can come to know this baby, this Jesus. We do that with our words. We do that with our lives. We do that with the ways we choose to use what we have. One way we’ll do that tonight is by sharing our offering. Everything we gave tonight will go toward two causes. Part of what we have given will go to build clean water wells in Togo, Africa, so that people there won’t have to die from preventable diseases. And another part will go to help feed children in our own community who live in “food insufficient households.” Kids will have food on the weekends because of your extravagant generosity. Near the end of this service, we will proclaim that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it (cf. John 1:5). Any time we have a chance to shine the light of Christ against the darkness of our world, we’re being angels, messengers of good news. So live a life that shows others the light of Jesus. Don’t just light a candle tonight as a ceremonial act. Let it remind you that you are the light of the world (cf. Matthew 5:14), called to shine his light in your words, in your deeds—in everything you are and everything you do. The light of the world is born, Jesus is here—thanks be to God!

Not a Silent Night

The Sermon Study Guide is here.

Luke 2:1-7

December 17/18, 2011 • Portage First UMC

Sometimes very precious things can lose some of their luster over time. For instance, take an engagement ring. When it’s presented, the diamond sparkles and shines, and the ring is worn with pride and admired by all. But as the years pass, as the engagement turns to marriage, and as life settles to something resembling normal, the diamond gathers dirt and begins to lose some of its shine. So you might take it to a jeweler to have it cleaned or to restore it to its original brilliance. In fact, the more the ring is worn, the greater the need for occasional cleaning, so that all can see what it really looks like. In many ways, the Christmas story is like that diamond. It’s something that’s very precious to us as Christians, but over the centuries, it’s gathered lots of layers of dust and tradition and stories that have little or nothing to do with the way its told in the Bible. For instance, most of our nativity scenes contain donkeys and sheep and perhaps a cow or two, but where are animals mentioned in the actual story? You won’t find them there. So during this season of Advent, we’ve been trying to peel off those layers, so to speak, so that the story can shine with its original, intended power and brilliance in our lives. We started with Mary in Nazareth, and how she took a huge risk in saying “yes” to God. Then we looked at Joseph, who most likely lived in Bethlehem, and how his humility made him the perfect foster father for Jesus. Last week, we looked at Mary’s visit to her relative Elizabeth, and how important it was especially at this point in Mary’s life for her to have a mentor, someone who could help her through these difficult days.

But this evening/morning we come to what is, perhaps, the most tradition-laden part of the Christmas story, and that’s the actual birth of Jesus. Luke 2 tells the story of Joseph taking Mary to Bethlehem, and while they are there, she gives birth to the baby who is the savior of the world. Matthew tells that whole story in a single sentence: Joseph “did what the angel of the Lord commanded him and took Mary home as his wife” (1:24). I want you to remember that phrase, “took Mary home,” because it’s a very important one. Joseph “took Mary home.” And where was Joseph’s home? Bethlehem. Now, Luke gives us much more detail, which is why many scholars believe Luke actually interviewed Mary at some point. He has much more of the story than anyone else does. We know that Mary returned home to Nazareth just shortly before John the Baptist was born to Zechariah and Elizabeth (1:56), and it’s possible Joseph accompanied her back to Nazareth at this point. Wedding plans were going to need to be made, and the wedding was probably going to have to be moved up. So they travel back to Mary’s home in Nazareth (a 9-day journey), and they put together a wedding, but somewhere in the middle of all that, the government steps in and throws in a new wrinkle.

Luke says, “In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world” (2:1). Augustus was, in some ways, the man who transformed Rome from a republic into an empire. Some call him the first Roman emperor, but he really was just a bloodthirsty tyrant. He issues orders for a census. Everyone must be counted so that he can tax them and get more money into the Roman coffers. When Luke gives us this historical context, it’s not just to fix the date. It would also have reminded the first readers that this is a time of upheaval, a time of great change. It’s a time when rulers were in the business of declaring themselves to be gods. “Augustus” means “exalted one,” and he carried the title, “Son of God.” Some people called him the “savior” of the world, and others called him “lord.” It was a corrupt, confusing time in human history (Card, Luke: The Gospel of Amazement, pgs. 47-48; Wright, Luke for Everyone, pgs. 22-23).

Now, Luke says this census took place when Quirinius was governor of Syria (2:2), and that presents a problem for historians. We know Herod the Great was the Roman-appointed king in Israel at the time of Jesus’ birth, but Herod died in 4 BC. Yes, the modern calendar is off by at least four years. Jesus was not born in the year 0. But historians struggle because the only recorded census under Quirinius took place in 6 AD—maybe as much as ten years after Jesus was born. However, recent archaeological evidence has been uncovered that Quirinius was probably governor twice, the first time from 10-7 BC (Card 48), and so it’s possible that a census was done then as well. But the larger point Luke is trying to make is that it was a dangerous time for a child to be born, especially a child whose followers would call him son of God, savior and lord. Caesar had already claimed those titles—what happens when someone challenges his claim? What happens when some people begin rejecting the creed “Caesar is Lord” in favor of one that says, “Jesus is Lord”?

So the government orders a census, and Joseph and Mary, who may have just begun to settle in to Nazareth, are now forced to return to Bethlehem, because that’s where Joseph is from, and that’s where he has to go register (2:4). Now, it’s about a ten-day journey from Nazareth back down to Bethlehem, if you take the short route. There are two possible routes they could have taken, and I’ll let you explore those in your small groups this week, but the best evidence we have is that they would have taken what is called the Way of the Patriarchs, through Samaria, past historic landmarks that meant so much to them as Jews. They would have passed the place called Jacob’s Well, named after one of their people’s ancestors. They would have passed the place where Joshua set up the place of worship when they first conquered the land. They would have followed the path that the ancient army of Assyria took when they conquered the nation of Israel. But this was not an easy route to take. [VIDEO: Judean Journey] The first part of the journey would have been on a plain through the Jezreel Valley, past a place called Megiddo, which in the book of Revelation (16:16) is the “hill of Megiddo” or Har Megddio, and they would have followed well-worn paths, but as they got further south, they would have crossed into mountainous areas and harsh desert lands. On the ninth day, they would have arrived in Jerusalem, and one more partial day’s walk would take them to Joseph’s hometown of Bethlehem (Hamilton, The Journey, pgs. 93-96). And while we picture Mary riding on a donkey, there is no mention of that in the text. Now, I would guess Joseph had something for her to ride on, but being poor, it’s entirely possible she might have had to walk. And even if she rode, how comfortable would it have been to be on the back of a donkey, nine months pregnant, for ten days? So when Luke says they “went there,” we have to remember it was not an easy journey. It was hard. It was unwelcome. But it was what they had to do.

Luke doesn’t tell us how long they were in Bethlehem before Mary gave birth. We always picture it as: they arrived, she instantly went into labor, and Joseph hurried around to find a place for them to stop for the night. But Luke says, “While they were there” (2:6), implying that they had been there for a little while at least (Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes, pg. 26). Which brings up the question I posed a couple of weeks ago: why does Mary give birth in a barn if this is Joseph’s hometown? Again, this one of those layers we need to peel back. The movies all have given us the idea that Joseph, panicked about the baby coming, runs from Motel 6 to Super 8 to Holiday Inn Express, trying to find an empty room, but they all have their “No Vacancy” signs hanging out. That’s the way it’s always portrayed in the Christmas pageants and the living nativities, and that’s based on a mistranslation in the King James Version.  Luke 2:7 in the King James Version says, “there was no room for them in the inn.”  But did you catch what I read today? “There was no guest room available for them” (2:7). We need to understand what houses were like in that time if we’re going to read this passage correctly, because when we hear “inn,” we picture a commercial motel, and Bethlehem in those days was unlikely to have been large enough to have a commercial inn. And anyway, that’s not the word Luke uses. If he meant a motel, he would have used a different Greek word. He calls the place that’s full a “kataluma,” the same word that’s used later in the Gospel to describe the place where Jesus and his disciples eat the last supper. It’s a guest room, usually an upper room in a private home. [VIDEO: Nazareth Homes] There would typically be a main room, where the family lived, and maybe there was also a second, smaller room that was used for sleeping. And upstairs was the “kataluma,” the guest room, where the children slept when there were no guests in the house. Because of the census, because everyone has come home, that’s the room Luke says is full. The “kataluma” is full of other relatives. Joseph came home to Bethlehem and took Mary to his family, but the room they would have ordinarily stayed in was full (Hamilton 97; Bailey 32; Wright 21).

“While they were there,” Luke says, “the time came for the baby to be born” (2:6). Perhaps Mary woke Joseph up in the middle of the night, like Cathy did to me, and said, “It’s time.” I remember wondering, up to that moment, if we’d know the right time. I shouldn’t have wondered; moms seem to sense when the time is right. And it’s at this point we need to know a bit more about first century houses. They typically, especially in poor houses, did not have a separate barn, out back somewhere, like we would. The stable would have been attached to the house, perhaps at a slightly lower level, or perhaps on the same level as the main room. For one thing, this meant the animals you owned were protected at night from thieves and predators. For another, especially in the colder months, the animals in the house provided additional heat (Bailey 29). And so when the time came for Mary to give birth, the stable also provided a more private place in a house full of company for her to deliver her child. She wasn’t alone, as we often picture it. She was surrounded by Joseph’s family, maybe even a midwife of sorts, and in that place, “she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger” (2:7; Hamilton 98). A manger was a feeding trough; it’s what the animals ate out of. This was no sanitary hospital, and contrary to what we will sing as we light candles this coming week, it was not a silent night. Do you know any mother who is silent while she is giving birth? Do you know any baby who is silent when he’s thrust out of a warm womb into a cold world? This was not the picture-perfect silent night. This was a normal birth, taking place in a stable, with the baby eventually laid in a feeding trough. And I can’t help but wonder if, at some point, Mary leaned back, looked around, and with tears in her eyes, thought or said, “This is not how I pictured it. I thought I’d be in Nazareth with my mother, my family, my midwife. I thought I’d be at home, not here, ten days from home, in a stable. This is not how I pictured it. This is not what I wanted for my son.” Contrary to our mental images of that first Christmas, Jesus came into the mess and the muddle of ordinary, noisy, crowded, complex life. Into the messiness and the pain of our world, he was born, and he spent at least his first night sleeping in a feeding trough. “It was disappointing and depressing and hard. Life can be that way” (Hamilton 100).

Don’t get me wrong—I love the song “Silent Night,” and Christmas Candlelight isn’t complete for me until we sing that every year. But I think sometimes, too, when we have this idea that Jesus’ birth was anything other than ordinary, we give the impression that you can’t really follow Jesus if your life is a mess, if your life is anything but “calm and bright.” That’s one of those layers we’ve put over the Christmas story, and I believe it’s one of the stumbling blocks that keeps people who are in a mess from coming to Jesus. It was not a silent night. It was a holy night, to be sure, but it was messy, and muddled, and for Mary, it took place in the midst of a journey she didn’t want to take. Some of us are on journeys like that right now. In the midst of the joy and the celebration of the season, we’re traveling a road we never imagined we would travel. And it’s hard. And it’s messy. And we’re wondering if there is any hope.

Maybe it’s a journey of a marriage that seems to be falling apart, and you’ve gotten to the point where you are just two people co-existing, or maybe you’ve had your spouse walk out on you, and this unexpected journey is not where you want to be this Christmas. Maybe you’ve lost a spouse or a loved one, or you’ve faced medical diagnoses that you simply can’t do anything about. Your life has become one trip to the doctor after another, and that’s not the kind of life you planned on. Maybe there’s something from your past that has caught up with you, and you thought it was long behind you. I know some of you have lost your job, and the journey you’ve been on seems endless, and you’re not sure whether it’s time to just take any job or try to get some new training. Some have ventured out and started a new position or a new ministry, and it’s just not worked out the way you hoped it would. I have a friend who has such a deep heart for ministry, but the doors just aren’t opening like he thought they would by now. Did he miss God’s call? Is he somehow on the wrong path? It’s hard; he’s not sure where the next paycheck is coming from. Still others of us are struggling with children who are on a destructive path, and no matter what we do, it seems we can’t turn them around. We know they’re going to hurt themselves and others, but our words fall on deaf ears. Many sleepless nights have been spent crying and praying and worrying over what they will do next. Maybe there is addiction, or broken friendships, or misunderstandings—life has its moments of disappointments and times of overwhelming sorrow or intense pain (Hamilton 100-101). Mary’s journey to Bethlehem reminds us that sometimes we end up on journeys we’d rather not take.

And yet, in the midst of the mess, Mary had a confidence that God had called her on this journey. She must have held tight to the words of the angel who appeared to her nine months before, that God was blessing her. This didn’t look much like blessing, but Mary knew that God has a broader view of things than we do. God had been with her all through these nine months; there was no reason to think that God would abandon her now. I wonder if the whole journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem was, in some way, God reminding Mary of that truth. As they passed by all those places where God had been found to be faithful to people in the past, Mary could find her faith strengthened that, just as God had been with them in their difficult situations, God would be with her in this one. I remember one Thursday evening—and the reason I remember it was Thursday is because it was my day off in those days—but I got a call to come to the hospital if I could because one of our pastors, John Paul Jones, was having emergency surgery that night. An unwanted journey in the middle of the night. So I hurried over there, and got to visit with John Paul for a while, then the senior pastor came in and we gathered around John Paul’s bed with his family and we prayed. And after we finished, John Paul looked at us and said, “The best of all is, God is with us.” As it turned out, those were among John Paul’s last words. He never woke up after that surgery, but at his funeral, every one of his family members expressed the faith that God was with them and God had been with John Paul during that unwanted journey. Mary reminds us to have a confidence that God has called us on this journey, even if we never understand the reasons for it. God does with us.

We have that confidence because of the Bible’s resounding chorus that there is nothing God can’t redeem. His name, throughout the Bible, is redeemer, and there’s this great picture in the book of Joel in the Old Testament, where the prophet sees a devastating locust swarm coming on the land, destroying the crops and ruining everything. The prophet sees it coming as an act of judgment on God’s part, and it probably is. It’s probably also more than just locusts, because there is a promise of an army that is coming to destroy the people because of their lack of repentance before God. It’s a horribly devastating image. But then, there’s this picture: God calls the people to return to him with all their heart, and when they do, God says, “I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten” (Joel 2:25). I will redeem all that you think is lost. In the midst of an unwanted journey, Mary and Joseph both knew this baby being born was going to bring redemption to the world. This baby was going to save the world. His name, both were told, was to be “Jesus,” which means “God saves.” And the angel even went further in telling Joseph, “You are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21). So though this birth looked nothing like Mary thought it would, and though this journey had been unbelievably difficult, she knew that, in some way, God was working through her in this baby to save people from their sins.

And that, ultimately, is what this season is about. Christmas is about hope—about having hope and about giving hope, even when (especially when) life gets hard. Pastor Adam Hamilton writes, “We are called to be prisoners of hope—captured by hope, bound by it, unable to let go of it. Hope is a decision we make, a choice to believe that God can take the adversity, the disappointment, the heartache, and the pain of our journeys and use these to accomplish his purposes” (102). Did you hear that? Hope is a choice. I’ve known people who have made the choice for it and against it—and their lives reflect that choice. Those who live with hope tend to face adversity with more confidence and more strength than those for whom the slightest stumble is an invitation to give up. And sometimes the choice for hope is seen in the decision to hang on to someone else’s hope when you feel you have none of your own. Some of you know it’s been a difficult year for me personally and professionally. In the midst of many, many good things happening here at the church, there have been some significant disappointments and some things said to me that were very hurtful. And there was a patch this fall where I wasn’t sure I wanted to do this anymore. I was on an unwanted journey and, honestly, I was ready to give up. I’m only still standing here this evening/morning because there were a few people who poured hope into my life and helped me see it, too. I’m forever thankful for those saints, but they remind me of our need not only to grab onto hope but to be available, in our hope-filled days, to pour hope into someone else’s life. This baby came to give hope in the midst of difficult and unwanted journeys. He came to give the hope of salvation to every man, woman and child. And we, his followers, are his ambassadors (cf. 2 Corinthians 5:20), offering that same hope to our world.

Every once in a while, I get to do that, too. I’m not one who claims I’ve ever heard an audible voice from God, but there have been a few times when I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt I needed to do something at that very moment. One of those moments happened several years ago. We had a lady in the church named Barb, who was a true lady. Always put together, always very proper. When she showed up a month early for her photo directory appointment, I should have known something was wrong. A couple of weeks later, I was told she was in the hospital, so I decided I would go see her that afternoon. But there was this nagging sense that I needed to go right then, so I did. When I walked into her room, she had just been told she had advanced stage cancer, and that there was nothing the doctors could do. No family was around, and why they told her that without her family is beyond me, but we got a chance that morning to talk about hope, to pray and to commit whatever was left of Barb’s life to Christ. I did not see her again; she died very quickly after that. But Barb, that day, faced her unwanted journey with hope—not because of anything I said, but because she trusted in the baby of Bethlehem who came to bring us life and peace and love and hope and salvation.

Where do you need hope this evening/morning? As we pray, can you entrust even that situation, that unwanted journey, to Jesus? Let’s pray.