Preached on the Fourth Sunday in Advent, December 23, 2012
Scripture readings: Psalm
148; Galatians 4:1-7
There is a set of books for children that have its
readers solve a single question. The question is: “Where’s Waldo?”
You are given a picture. It’s a very complicated
picture. It’s full of hundreds of people doing all kinds of different things;
on a big city street, in a crowded sports arena, at a fair, in a park.
In this picture, of hundreds of people milling around
and doing every conceivable thing that you can do in that place, there is
Waldo. Waldo is a tall and skinny guy, with a red and white tasseled cap, and a
shirt with horizontal red and white stripes, and blue jeans, and big round
glasses. You have to find Waldo in the picture.
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| Looking in at My Tree, 2012 |
There are people in the picture who look a little bit
like Waldo, in one way or another. They may have a red and white striped shirt,
but the stripes may go up and down, or the cap is wrong, or the person doesn’t
wear big round glasses like Waldo does. The book of big complicated pictures is
a story, and it doesn’t make sense until you find Waldo.
Sure, you can enjoy the pictures without finding
Waldo. There’s a lot to see and think about. You can get the feel of it, and
get into the experience of the big places in the pictures. You can think about
the times when you have been in such a place, and what happened to you there.
You can think about what you might like to do if you were in a place like the
one in the picture. But you don’t know the secret of the picture, or the
meaning of the story, unless you can find and follow Waldo.
Now the psalm we have read and the third and fourth
chapters of Paul’s letter to the Christians in Galatia give us two huge,
complicated pictures. There is the same secret to be found in both pictures.
There is a figure to find; an event to discover. The figure and the event is
God reaching into that picture and putting himself right into the middle of
that picture and revealing its secret meaning.
The psalm gives us a complicated picture that
contains everything that exists; beyond our world, and in our world. It
contains everything visible and invisible: angels, winds, stars, oceans,
plants, wild and tame animals, mountains and hills. There are people of all
kinds, and positions, and genders, and ages.
What do they have in common? They are created. They
are organized. They are praising God.
Why? At the end of the psalm, we see. Everything that
exists can see it. They see that God has reached down into this vast world, and
God done something that would make his people close to him. “He has raised up
for his people a horn, the praise of all his saints, of Israel, the
people close to his heart. Praise the Lord.” (Psalm 148:14)
What did God do? “He raised up…a horn.” And what does
that mean? A horn is a defense system for the animal that has horns. A horned
animal is an armed animal. A horn is like a weapon. It means, in the thought of
the Hebrew people, strength, and freedom, and life.
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| My Tree, 2012 |
“Raising up a horn for his people” would mean God
doing something to protect his people, or to make them strong, or to expand
their life, in a way that they couldn’t do for themselves. It could be
something like a victory won by God for his people.
It would bring them closer than ever. It would make
his people fit the name that the psalm gives them, when it calls them saints. The
word saint, in the Bible, doesn’t mean perfection or even goodness. Saint means
being set apart by God for a purpose.
But this special word especially means people who are
different because they are the target of a special love of God that does not
let go. It is a love that comes from God making a promise to them to love them
always. It means God never letting go of that promise, and always finding a way
to bring them close, even when their love fails.
Sometimes the word “horn” in the Bible refers to a
person. It may refer to a leader or a king. In this case this person, this
king, would be a gift from God to bring his people near; so that they can live
within the beating of his heart.
In the Gospel of Luke, before the birth of Jesus,
there is the father of a baby who was going to grow up to be the man we call
John the Baptist. John would be a prophet who prepared the way for Jesus by
teaching God’s people to be ready for their savior to come to them.
The father of John the Baptist was Zechariah. At the
birth of his son, Zechariah was filled with God’s Spirit and spoke about the
future of his son and the purpose his son would serve. Zechariah said, “Praise
be to the Lord, the God of Israel,
because he has come and has redeemed his people. He has raised up a horn of
salvation for us….” (Luke 1:68-69; also see Psalm 18:2)
This horn of salvation is Jesus. John’s purpose was
to live and speak a message to God’s people that would prepare them for the
appearance of Jesus.
The psalm tells us that everything in existence
exists to find its purpose in praising the God who reached into their world to
bring his human children close to him in Jesus. The sun and the moon, the
weather and the waves, the birds and animals and the creatures of the ocean
exist to praise the event in which God comes close, through the person who
gives to his people the strength, and the freedom, and the fullness of life
that they could never have without him.
Paul brings two big pictures together. He brings out
a picture of what he calls “the basic principles of the world”.
Part of what Paul may mean by this has to do with the
picture the psalm gives us. It has to do with all the parts and pieces of the
universe. They teach us lessons but they can also enslave us. They limit us and
confine us, unless God gets us beyond them.
The visible and even the invisible world can teach us
many things. We may even reason out, from what God has made, how God wants us
to live and why we are here. But we can never, Paul tells us, never get very
far unless we see the God, who made all things, reach down into our world to
act out his purpose in our sight. We can never grow up and grow close to the
heart of God, unless we see God reach into the world he has made, in Jesus, and
be born in a stable, and walk the countryside, and die for the sin of the world
on the cross.
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| Ornaments from Our Church Tree |
The other picture that Paul gives us, in Galatians,
is the world of God’s laws. So many people see God’s laws as the way to please
God, and win his favor, and get God to let us into his presence. So many see it
this way, and Paul saw it this way, as well, until he met Jesus.
Paul saw that living in the world of rules, even when
they are God’s rules, is really not the way to live. It is not the way to live
in a way that is fully and passionately alive. I mean that the law, seen like
this, creates a complicated world of obligations.
You ought to do this. You ought to do that. And you
can’t do it all. And each rule we address reveals some flaw or limitation
within us that we cannot overcome.
Each law shows us that there is a secret, or a not so
secret part of us, that plays with the laws of God, and always seeks our own
advantage, as if we wanted to be our own gods.
These laws, seen in this way, make us into
competitors, and into score keepers, instead of playing with all our might
simply for the joy of the game. There is a not so secret part of us called sin
that can take the map to the good life and make it petty and ugly. There is
this thing called sin that distorts our understanding of the good life and robs
it of passion and freedom.
We are nothing better than slaves in the face of
God’s laws, and the good life, until we see God reach into the world of laws
and rules. God reached down into this world of his own law and God became the
very victim of his own laws. He died at the hand of this world full of sinners who
claim to love God’s laws; or at least they claim to love truth, and right, and
goodness.
God reached down into this world of his law in order
to buy us out of the kind of slavery that thrives on taking his good laws, and
making them fail, and making ourselves worse as a result. God bought us out of
our slavery by becoming what our failure and sin actually make us, under the
law. Jesus was condemned by the law. God became a man condemned by the people
of God’s law, and nailed to a cross to die.
God came in Jesus and became the victim of his own
laws. He won a victory over his own law by keeping it perfectly, and by
overcoming the condemnation that comes from falling short.
God died on the cross in his Son, Jesus Christ, so
that we could be reborn into a new life through trusting the power of God’s
love and grace. Faith means trusting the faithfulness of God.
Receiving the faithfulness of God changes us. Instead
of obeying God in order to be loved, we obey because we are already loved. We
are loved with a love that is based on God’s promise, and not on our
performance. It is a love that makes us saints, who are loved by an unstoppable
love. It is a love that is perfect in its absolute commitment to us, the
beloved.
When I was little, I would try to get away with
things I wanted to do that I knew my parents didn’t want me to do. My mother
had this saying. She would give me a piercing look and say to me, “I can read
you like a book.”
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| Angel of Our Church Nativity Scene |
Most children suspect their parents have this kind of
superpower. Children learn to be good, first of all, by learning to be afraid
of getting caught and punished. When they get older, and no longer think of
themselves as children, they sometimes stop caring about getting caught; but
that doesn’t make them better people.
The best way to learn goodness is not about the rules
and the fear or being caught. And learning goodness doesn’t come from thinking
that our parents love the rules better than they love us.
We change for the best when we get a vision of
goodness that is stronger and more passionate than our own self discipline. Our
vision of goodness is a vision of what true love is.
This is part of the vision that comes from God
reaching into our world, in Jesus, and meeting the issues of sin and law, and
raising us into the issue of love and faith in the faithfulness of God. Jesus
is the faithfulness of God. Jesus is the horn, the weapon and the defense, of a
loving heart. Jesus is the horn, the weapon and the defense of the love given
to us by a God who goes into action to bring us close to him.
God came in the Son he sent, born of a woman named
Mary, to join us in the world where we live. Beginning in Bethlehem the Lord allowed himself to be
surrounded, as we are, by a big world that tells us many things, but not the
one thing we need to know. He became the Waldo we need to find, in order to
understand God’s story. He was born of woman to show us that single thing we
all need to know, of the reaching love of God that brings us close to him.
He was born under the law, among the people of Israel. They
loved God’s laws, but they continued to misunderstand the nature of the love
and the relationship that God really wanted. They kept straining to keep a
perfect Sabbath, and to live such a perfect life that God would be obliged to
come near to them.
So Jesus was born under the law in Bethlehem of Judea
to be the one thing that the law could not give. He became the secret thread of
the law. He became the Waldo that we must find, in all this world of
“everything we ought to do and be”. He became the perfect offering and the
sacrifice under the law that his people could never be; to be the gift, for us,
that we could never give to God.
And so God came in Christ to redeem us. This
redeeming means to be bought from slavery. God came and gave himself to us, in
Jesus, in such a way, that we would come to the end of ourselves, and die to
ourselves, and be born again.
In Jesus we become the beloved sons and daughters
that we could never be on our own. We become such beloved sons and daughters
that the Holy Spirit can freely come and tell us so.
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| Our Church Nativity Scene |
This is a miraculous way to grow up into the kind of
maturity that makes us children again. The Holy Spirit tells us so and, in our
hearts, a merely formal relationship comes to an end. A rule-conscious, obligation-conscious,
relationship comes to an end. We just start living in a way that calls God
“Abba: papa, daddy, dada.” This is what Abba means. The Holy Spirit brings us
to Jesus, and Jesus gives us the ability to say “dada” to God, by the power of
his Holy Spirit.
It is the glory and majesty of God that he has no
consciousness of his own dignity. It is the glory and majesty of God to make us
also forget his dignity. That is why he was born just as we are.
Everything in existence exists to praise this, and it
did. The whole universe can find no true peace without this reaching down of
God to us. That is why, on the hills near Bethlehem,
angels sang as they must have sung in the psalms: “Glory to God in the highest,
and on earth peace, good will towards men.”
Jesus is the prince of peace the prophets tell us
about. The angels tell the shepherds and us that the baby lying in the manger
will be the source of God’s peace and favor.
