Scripture readings: Isaiah
53:1-12; Revelation 12:1-17; Matthew 2:13-23
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| Riverside Community Church Mattawa/Desert Aire, WA Thanks to Those Lovingly Decorated Our Church for the Celebration of the Nativity December 2017 |
Christmas can look and
feel like a battle. The stores are battling to sell their stock. The customers
are battling to buy their gifts. It happens. One year I was stuck buying some
last-minute Christmas gifts, in the mall, on Christmas Eve. It wasn’t pretty.
There’s the battle to
beautify our homes, but I’ve surrendered in that war. There’s the battle of the
Tree. I found (late) that I had a broken tree so I found another by surprise
and got it put up yesterday, but I’m not going to decorate it. I’m living with
it, just as it is, for three days, then I’m flying home for a late Christmas
with my family. Wednesday, I fly from Pasco to Seattle, change for a flight
from Seattle to Portland, and then change for a flight from Portland to
Sacramento. Then, the following Wednesday, I fly back to you. But I love
Christmas.
Am I making it look bad?
For some people it really is: for soldiers on a foreign front, for the
homeless, for those in a home with unpayable bills and empty cupboards, for the
grief stricken, for the lonely.
The first Christmas (whatever
the date when it really happened) looked bad. There was a hundred-mile hike for
a young, pregnant teenager and her husband. (The Bible doesn’t tell us, in so
many words, whether she was lucky enough to have a donkey to ride. I think that
Christmas artists must just like painting donkeys.
There was the pregnancy
itself: how it happened was controversial, and (to some) unbelievable. There
are people who always like to think the worst, and they’re not afraid to say
what they think. You hear hints of this, later in the Gospel’s, there’s a time
when Jesus is called Mary’s son without naming Joseph. In that time and place
not naming the father was a kind of slur on Jesus’ parentage. (Mark 6:3)
There was the Roman,
so-called emperor. (Some thought dictator: and he had certainly killed enough
people to win his way into power, so that he deserved to be called a dictator,
no matter how smart he was.) The Roman Caesar ordered a tax-revenue and
military-occupation related census that forced the whole journey on Joseph and
Mary, and thousands of others just like them.
There was the “puppet”
king, named Herod. They called him the Great. Was he so great because he was
willing to kill all the baby boys of Bethlehem in order to get rid of some
peasant baby with a claim to be the King of the Jews? Herod was perfectly
willing to kill anybody in order to hold onto a title that he had already
killed for, just like Caesar. It all stank.
We don’t know for sure if
the manger was in the stable of an inn, or in the animal quarters of a peasant
house, where the one or two other rooms were filled with people. Peasant houses
did have animal rooms. Probably, the way that world smelled, the animal room
may not have smelled much worse. An article came out last week which had the
title: “The Real, Stinky Nativity.”
The interesting connection
between our world and that ancient, stinky world, is that those people, now,
for whom Christmas is a mess, are the ones who have the most in common with the
people of the very first Christmas.
Jesus was born to change
the nature of our lives, to fight the battle that would save us from the power
of sin and death, the battle that would give us life abundant, and life
eternal. The climax of that battle (which began in Bethlehem) was the cross and
the grave. Those were places that stank.
Jesus must also have been
born to change the smell of this world and the smell of our lives within this
world. The birth of Jesus was a heavenly miracle in which God, in all his glory
and power, invaded a world that stinks. Our world stinks with war, with
slaughter, with the slaughter of innocents and babies, with dictators killing
for power, with suspicion and fear, with injustice and poverty, with disease
and hunger.
The world is beautiful
with the power and ingenuity of God, but it is a fallen world, and it’s
fallenness stinks. Jesus was born to bring the beauty of God, the power of God,
the righteousness of God, the compassion of God, the servanthood of God, and
the love that comes from God, into the stink
of the world.
That was also a battle.
That is still a battle.
Jesus, and Mary, and
Joseph represent the presence of God giving meaning, and value, and blessing to
those who live with the indignities and the struggles that stink. That, too, is
a battle.
With the understanding
that Joseph gets left out of the picture so often that he stands for so many
invisible people who matter, lets look at a strange, strange picture in the
twelfth chapter of the Book of Revelation. It’s the picture of the woman, and
her baby, and a fiery, watery dragon.
It’s not a picture of
something that happens during the trouble at the end of things.
The picture began long
before that. The story of the picture began when a woman met a reptile in the
Garden of Eden. The reptile was called a snake there, but he has many names.
The reptile won that battle
in Eden, and his victory seemed to promise to ruin the lives of the woman and
her man, and all future human beings who came after them. Then, God promised
something better. God promised that a son of the woman would crush the
reptile’s head, even though that reptile would injure the son. God’s brand of
justice would be done, and that would bring about a new kind of world.
Revelation will show us pictures of that new world: that new heaven and earth.
The Book of Revelation
tells us that the birth of the son would defeat the dragon. And the son did
exactly that.
But, the Book of
Revelation, in this picture of the woman, the son, and the dragon, says that
this battle will go on for quite a while, and it has. We’re living in this
battle still.
Christmas carries the
message that we must get involved in this battle. We are enlisted in a war
where a baby has invaded the enemy’s territory. This baby has won the
essential, turning-point battles that will lead to the end of the war, in which
we and the baby will win.
I was thinking about war.
I watched the recent movie “Dunkirk” and think it was a great movie. But the
Battle of Dunkirk looked like defeat, at first.
Because of their defeat at
Dunkirk, some of the British wanted to negotiate a peace settlement with Hitler.
Prime Minister Winston Churchill saw it differently, and made it count as a
victory, in a way that surprised his own people. In this surprising sense, the
evacuation of Dunkirk by the British was a victory that help make the American
entry into that war possible. That led to the bloody, costly victory of the
Landing at Normandy, which enabled us to turn the German victories at the
Battle of the Bulge into allied victories there.
It still wasn’t done. There
were still more horrible battles to be fought until der Fuhrer shot himself in
his bunker. Our own war with the dragon goes on like that.
The dragon shifts his
strategy many times. Revelation shows us this. The dragon is going to raise up
two beasts: one, from the sea, will be a beast of political power; the other,
from the ground will be a botched imitation of the Lamb and this imitation Lamb
will have the power of spiritual deceit and blindness.
No matter how far away the
battle seems, the cultures of the world always try to mold, or scare, or trick,
or deceive the people of the True Lamb who was slain. The dragon, gently or
harshly, tries to loosen our grip on the True Lamb in heaven. If he succeeds,
he thinks that the True Lamb might get disgusted and loosen his grip on us.
This struggle began with
the Battle of Christmas, and we have been recruited to join this Battle. The
Christmas Battle is the invasion begun by The Baby of Bethlehem. We are the
invaders of a stinky world and we are called to take our stand against the
hardships that make life stink for so many.
We are the invaders of a
world disabled by sin.
So, we are the re-enablers of lives, and
relationships, and hearts and minds, through the power of forgiveness and love.
What strange weapons these
are! And what a strange strategy. It’s like the invasion of Troy by means of
the Trojan Horse. But, in our war, the strategy that defeats the dragon is the
Trojan Baby. Or you could call God’s strange tactics the mommy-and-baby
strategy: the discipline of forgiveness and love.
The mommy is Eve, and
Abraham’s wife Sarah, and the Lord’s wife Israel, and the Virgin Mary, and the
Bride of Christ, the Church. The mommy is God’s people nurturing and
strengthening each other, so that the Church becomes our mother. The
mommy-and-baby strategy stretches the whole Church inside out; because it has
taught us to care for the strays that wonder beyond us. Our hearts are tender
for those outside because the greatest baby we know is the battling baby Jesus.
The everlasting Son of God became a baby in order to conquer life itself, and
temptation, and pride, and hypocrisy, and sin, and death.
But there are lots of
other babies, just like us, in the Battle. The Dragon knows this and goes off,
in the end, to fight them and us. These babies are the other offspring of the
mommy, that the Book of Revelation tells us about.
Yes, they are us. No other
weapon will do but the blood of the lamb and “the testimony of Jesus”. We tell
the story of Jesus as he has taught us. We tell the story of Jesus in words and
in our lives.
We live what Jesus taught.
How can we give the testimony of Jesus without loving our enemies, or without
being the Good Samaritan to all of those who have been injured by the stink
that gets into the world, and into its people, and into us?
The Bethlehem Baby, and
the babies who are us, fight with these strange weapons. Jesus did this and we
follow him everywhere.
Isaiah told us what people
would think of these strange weapons. People who use the conventional wisdom will
never see that this is the strategy that will fight for the world as God
designed it to be. It takes a very different kind of wisdom to shift the powers
of our minds to see strategy that will change the world. “Surely, he took up
our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God,
smitten by him and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was
crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each one
of us has turned to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of
us all.” (Isaiah 53:4-6)
That looks like no way to
fight evil, or sin, or stink: for Jesus and us to bear it ourselves, to carry
it for others. Actually, it is a bit like a mommy’s strategy. The Battle of
Bethlehem was fought with mommy/baby strategy.
The baby who was growing
up to carry the sin of the world would have a strange bit of identity to direct
him in his purpose. When the boy Jesus was old enough to understand things, he
knew the story that other babies had died in his place, they died for him. What
would he grow up to do for others? We are the babies who follow him, and we
know that he has died for us and that others have died for him. All of them have
died for us too, so that we could know and follow the baby who was the Savior
they had loved.
That is the miracle of
Christmas. That is the calling of Christmas to each one of us. That is the
power of Christmas, or the Jesus of Christmas, that can change us, and work
through us for the washing, the disinfecting, the sweetening, and the healing
of the world, and for the coming new heaven and the new earth that will be won
by this baby.
People in times long past have understood this better than
we do. I’m going to finish by reading a poem written by a Catholic priest, in the
1500’s, who was executed for his faith by the government of Reformation
England. The poet’s name is Robert Southwell. His poem was later set to music
by the British composer Benjamin Britten in “A Ceremony of Carols”, during
World War II: “This Little Babe”.
This little Babe so few days old
Is come to rifle Satan's fold;
All hell doth at His presence quake,
Though He Himself for cold doth shake;
For in this weak unarmed wise
The gates of hell He will surprise.
With tears He fights and wins the field,
His tiny breast stands for a shield;
His battering shot are babish cries,
His arrows looks of weeping eyes,
His martial ensigns cold and need,
And feeble flesh His warrior's steed.
His camp is builded in a stall,
His bulwark but a broken wall,
The crib His trench, haystalks His stakes,
Of shepherds He His army makes;
And thus, as sure His foe to wound,
The angels' trumps the charge now sound.
My soul with Christ join thou in fight;
Stick to His tents, the place of might.
Within His crib is surest ward;
This little Babe will be thy Guard.
If thou wilt foil thy foes with joy,
Then flit not from this heavenly Boy!
(Written
by Robert Southwell, c. 1561-1595)
I really love the poem.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I love the photos from your church, all the lettered signs, very beautiful.