A Very Pregnant Christmas

Luke 1:39-55

My daughter-in-law Sarah and my son Ernie are expecting their second child - a girl this time – due on January 7. That is just two weeks away! So Sarah is very pregnant this Christmas. Having them living here in Sandwich makes this holiday is a very special one for us as grandparents. Expecting a child at Christmastime gives a new dimension to Advent and Christmas. All of England is thinking about the royal couple William & Kate expecting a child in the summer, but we are counting down the days to the birth of our own little princess. Expecting the birth of a child soon makes me think more about Mary’s pregnancy. A couple of weeks ago I entitled my sermon “What to Expect when you are Expecting Jesus” and today it is entitled “A Very Pregnant Christmas.”

At Christmas we normally focus on the baby born in Bethlehem – and the shepherds, angels, wise men, and all the cast of characters who appear on the scene on Christmas day and shortly thereafter. We generally don’t ponder too much the nine months leading up to this great event, nor about the labor and delivery. During those nine months before Christmas Day, Mary was getting bigger and bigger, experiencing morning sickness and cravings. Who knows what Joseph had to run out to the marketplace to buy? Mary was getting increasingly uncomfortable as Christmas Day approached, having a hard time sleeping, and so forth. Today, two days before Christmas, imagine what Mary was feeling two days before Christmas. As we celebrate Christmas, there are certain elements I want to emphasize about the meaning of Jesus’ birth.

I. First Jesus is God With Us. That is the meaning of the word Immanuel, one of the prophetic names for Jesus in the OT. The famous prophecy of Isaiah says, “Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign: Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and shall call His name Immanuel.” The gospel writer Matthew picks up that prophecy and applies it to Jesus, saying about the birth of Jesus, “So all this was done that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the Lord through the prophet, saying: “Behold, the virgin shall be with child, and bear a Son, and they shall call His name Immanuel,” which is translated, “God with us.”

When a child is born it completely changes your life. The parents forget what it is like to get a full night’s sleep. All of a sudden a new person is living with you, a person you have to pay attention to all the time. On that first Christmas that happened to Mary and Joseph, and in a sense it happened to all humankind. Jesus is God with us. Everything changed that first Christmas. Christian theologians use the term incarnation to describe what happened at Christmas. Christianity teaches that God became enfleshed (which is what the word incarnation means) in the person of Jesus. This is understood as something new in the history of humankind. In the OT God spoke to humans through inspired prophets. Angels were seen as messengers of God (which is the literal meaning of the term angel), speaking on behalf of God. There were even what are called theophanies, that is appearances of God in things like the burning bush, or the fire on Mount Sinai, or mysterious figures who appear and disappear suddenly in the OT narrative, like the one who wrestled with the patriarch Jacob.

But with Jesus something new happened. No other religious leader in the history of religion has ever claimed to be who Jesus claimed to be, according to the gospel accounts. This fact is not well known today. There is a lot of ignorance concerning what different religions teach. In what is thought to be a magnanimous spirit of religious tolerance, some people believe that all religions are basically the same. That they all teach the same thing, and that all the founders of all the world’s religions are pretty much equal in importance and spiritual standing - a sort of spiritual egalitarianism.  But an objective study of the religions does not bear that out.

No other religion claims for its founder what Christianity claims for Jesus. Judaism does not claim that Abraham or Moses were God. Islam does not claim that Mohammed was God. Buddhism does not claim that Buddha was God. Nanak the founder of Sikhism did not claim he was God. Even the Baha’i religion, a faith that started in the 19^th century in Iran and which comes closest to embracing this idea of spiritual equality, does not claim that Bahaullah was God in the sense that Christians say this of Jesus. They call their founder a Manifestation of God and that he was like all the founders of all religions, who were also manifestations. Their term means something much closer to the concept of prophet in Islam, because Bahai arose from Islam. In fact all other religious founders all expressly denied that they were God. Even Hinduism which teaches that all humans are by nature divine, does not have an historical founder who claimed divinity for himself. They have Krishna, who is a purely mythological figure and avatars who are likewise mythological.

Out of all founders of all the religions in human history only one person claimed divinity for himself – Jesus Christ. That is one of reasons he was killed - because that was considered blasphemy. At Christmas, Christians claim that Jesus is “God with us.” The eternal transcendent God became a mortal human. Every human ever born can be called a child of God in a general sense. When preaching in Athens to Greek philosophers, the apostle Paul said that we are all God’s offspring. But something qualitatively different happened in Jesus on Christmas Day, a unique event in the history of the world. Jesus is the Son of God in a different way than any other human is a son or daughter of God. God the Creator entered into his creation in the baby Jesus born in Bethlehem. Jesus Christ is God with us.

 II. Second Jesus is God In Us. This idea also comes from scripture. In his letter to the Colossians the apostle Paul writes “the mystery which has been hidden from ages and from generations, but now has been revealed to His saints. To them God willed to make known what are the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles: which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.” Not only is God with us in Christ, God is also in us. This idea is usually expressed in the Christian doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Christianity teaches that the Holy Spirit takes up residence in us when we give our lives to Christ in faith. We are literally a God-possessed people. The apostle Paul says our bodies are temples of God. He says to the Corinthians, “Do you not know that you are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?” Usually Christians speak of God as the Holy Spirit dwelling in us, but it is also biblically accurate to speak of Christ spiritually dwelling in us.

This is truly an amazing point to ponder. It makes Christmas much more than the celebration of something that happened two thousand years ago. It makes Christmas into a living experience for today. If we really want to experience Christmas, then it is not about having the right decorations, presents, party, music, Christmas dinner, or the perfect family gathering. It is not about anything outward. It is the interior experience of the indwelling Christ. I have a mystical bent to me. For me Christianity is about the present awareness of the inner Christ and his Kingdom here and now more than it is about rituals or beliefs or God’s kingdom coming in the future. I have nothing against the rituals, beliefs or a future coming of the Kingdom. As a pastor I practice the rituals and I believe the doctrines. But I find spiritual and emotional sustenance chiefly in my personal awareness of Christ in me.

The apostle Paul talks not only about Christ being in us, but also us being in Christ. This is a helpful corrective for me to what can become excessive introversion in religion. Some people make spirituality into a purely individual experience. Contemporary spirituality is often designer religion, custom made by ourselves for ourselves to accommodate our own personality quirks. Modern expressions of spirituality can be very narcissistic and self-serving. People craft a private interior world where they do not need anyone else. They do not need church. What matters is what they experience and believe on their own, and that’s all. But that is not all. The apostle Paul makes it clear that Christ is in us only insofar as we are in Christ – that is, part of a bigger picture of spiritual community. Paul talks about the church being the body of Christ and Christ’s spirit indwelling and animating the church. Just as our spirit indwells our body, so does Christ’s spirit indwell his body, which is the church. I am not talking about the church as a religious institution or an organization. I am talking about the church as a community that cares for one other and loves one another. When true community is present, Christ in the midst of it. Jesus said, “For where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am there in the midst of them.” God is in us when are together in community.

I recently read a book that I borrowed from the Wentworth Library. It is entitled “Faith No More: Why People Reject Religion” by Phil Zuckerman, published November 2011. Zuckerman is a sociologist and college professor. He and his research assistants interviewed 87 people who used to be religious but are no longer. The book describes the reasons they gave for leaving religion. Their reasons for leaving faith behind were the purpose of the book, but what was more fascinating to me was what they missed about religion after they left. Most of the people interviewed said that what they missed the most was community. Apart from the spiritual connection with God, I believe the greatest strength of churches is providing a sense of community. Christians are connected not only to God through Christ as individuals, but in Christ we are connected to each other in a powerful way as part of a spiritual family. This is what people need and long for. Humans are a social species. We need each other to give our lives meaning, purpose and direction. People can find community in nonreligious groups. But it seems that no other group in our society fulfills that function as well as religious communities do. Christ experienced in and through a church gives meaning and purpose to people’s lives. We experience Christ as immortal God in us when we experience ourselves in Christ’s body on earth. We are part of something bigger, a part of a community of faith, the body of Christ.

III. The third point I want to make this morning is God Through Us. God With Us, God in Us and God Through Us. This is the point made in Mary’s Magnificat, which is our gospel text for today. Mary is an example of all three of these points. She physically had Jesus in her womb; God incarnate was literally in her in the infant Jesus. Christ also literally physically dwelled with her in her home in her family for the first thirty years of his life. But the point I want to make here is that Mary also experienced God through her. Mary says in our gospel lesson, the famous passage  known as Mary’s Song or the Magnificat: “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.”

God was magnified thorugh Mary. I love the idea of Mary’s soul magnifying the Lord. I picture her soul as a magnifying glass. People have a hard time seeing God these days. The book that I just mentioned a moment ago “Faith No More: Why People Reject Religion” made it clear that increasing numbers of people are leaving faith behind. I am not just talking about leaving church; that has been going on ever sense the 1960’s. I am speaking of no longer believing in God’s existence or practicing any form of spirituality. The most dramatic shift in religious demographics this 21^st century has been the rise in the number of people who claim no religion at all. Most of these call themselves atheists or agnostics. This is the fastest growing group in America today. They are growing much faster than Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses. That is the direction that our country is headed; we are following the UK and Europe into a post-Christian secular society, where most churches are big stone empty buildings. More and more people no longer see the need for a belief in God, and they no longer sense the presence of God. In this type of godless society Christians are called to magnify the Lord – to be a magnifying lens so that people can see God again.

As we get older most of us need reading glasses. I have been near-sighted most of my life and have needed glasses to see objects at a distance. But a few years ago – actually more than a few – I needed reading glasses as well. So now I have bifocals, those graduated ones so I don’t have a line in the lens. People in our society do not see spiritually very well. They cannot see God in heaven or on earth. They are in need of corrective lens. We are that lens. Our job is to magnify the Lord - to make God bigger and clearer to people so they can see what they could not see before. There is a wonderful passage in the book of the prophet Habakkuk 2:2. God says to the prophet: “Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so he may run who reads it.” Another translation puts it: And inscribe it on tablets, That the one who reads it may run.” God is telling the prophet to write the message in an extra-large font so that even a person running would be able to read it while he runs. That is our job. Our task as Christians is to make the gospel so large and clear that people who are on the go – who don’t have either the time or inclination to read the gospel message – can see the gospel written in our lives.

Those who do not believe in God are not going to step inside a church to hear a sermon, not even at Christmas. They will not open a Bible. Most American homes own a Bible, but most of those Bibles are not read. Most Christians have not even read the whole Bible. That is because the Bible is not easy to read or understand. People need someone to magnify it and make it clear. We who believe that we have God with us, in us and through us, have that task. We are the only Bible most people will ever read. Are we making the message of Christmas plain? The message of Christmas is that God is with us in Jesus Christ. God is in us. God desires to live the life of Christ through our human lives. We are to be channels of God’s blessing and presence to his world. We are to mediate God.

Paul speaks of Christians as ambassadors of Christ. We represent Christ to this world. That is what it means to be made in the image of God. It doesn’t mean that God looks like us. It means that we should look like God to others. People should be able to look at our lives and see something Christlike in us, something Godly, something literally out-of-this-world. God came into this world in Jesus Christ at Christmas, so that we at Christmas might be examples of Christ-like living in the world. That the light of Christmas might shine through us, that we might magnify the Lord so that people might see more clearly that God is real. That God is with us. God is in Us. God is through us.