When Jesus Began to Preach

Matthew 4:12-23

Our gospel lesson for today is about when Jesus began his ministry as a young man of around thirty years of age. It seems like a good occasion to start it off with a preacher story.   A new pastor went to visit a single mother who had started attending church with her little boy. He was sitting in the living room with her young son waiting for the mother to bring tea from the kitchen. He noticed a bowl of peanuts on the table. So he began to eat them. The little boy watched him eat the peanuts with obvious interest but did not say anything, and did not ask for any. It took a while for the woman to come back with the tea, and by the time she did the bowl of peanuts was empty. When the mother finally entered, the young minister apologized to her, "I hope you don’t mind that I ate all your peanuts. I skipped lunch and was a bit hungry." The little boy quickly replied "That's okay, I already sucked all of the chocolate off of them anyway."

Such are the trials of the pastor’s life. The trials of John the Baptist and Jesus were a bit more than soggy peanuts. Our gospel lesson for today is about Jesus beginning his ministry. The stories immediately before this are about his baptism by John the Baptist, followed by his temptation in the wilderness for forty days. The scripture says he was tempted by the devil. Time for another story. Struggling to make ends on a preacher’s salary at his first church out of seminary, a young pastor was upset when he found a receipt for a $250 dress that his wife had bought. "How could you do this?!" he asked her. "I was in the mall looking at the dress through the window, and then I found myself trying it on," she explained. "It was like Satan was whispering in my ear, 'You look fabulous in that dress. Buy it!'" "Well," the pastor replied, "You know how to deal with that kind of temptation. You say, 'Get behind me, Satan!'" "I did," replied his wife, "but then he said, 'It looks fabulous from back here, too!'"

The temptation in the wilderness was a time of soul searching for Christ. I see that solitary wilderness time as a period when Jesus integrated his new understanding of himself and his relationship with his Heavenly Father and his mission on earth. He had to decide whether or not he was going to go into ministry, and he decided in the affirmative. I have four points I would like to make about Jesus’ ministry.

1. The first is WHEN Jesus began to preach. According to Matthew’s gospel, when Jesus returned from his time in the wilderness he heard that his cousin John, who had baptized him, had been arrested by Herod. John, by the way was never going to get out of prison. He would later be executed in prison. When Jesus heard about John’s imprisonment, our passage says that he left Judea and began his ministry in Galilee.

My point is that he began his ministry in difficult times. We do not know what difficult times are like here in 21^st century America. I was reading recently about an American Christian named Kenneth Bae, 44, of Lynnwood, Washingtom. He has been sentenced to 15 years in a North Korean labor camp for a "crime against the state." He has been imprisoned for more than 14 months, longer than any American has been detained in North Korea. He is accused of planning to bring down the government through religious activities. The evidence against him was that he had a Bible and other religious literature on him. He was actually on his 15^th tour of the country trying to bring economic investment to that impoverished land. That is difficult times. You have heard me several times mention Saad Abedini, the American pastor imprisoned since 2012 in Iran for preaching the gospel. He is enduring difficult times.

 My point is that ministry by its very nature is done in difficult times. Jesus did not start out with a honeymoon period. As soon as he stepped out of the desert and onto the stage of his public ministry, it was difficult. In fact the Gospel of Luke say when Jesus preached his first sermon in his own home town of Nazareth, that the congregation dragged him out of church, kicked him out of town, and tried to throw him off the nearest cliff. His ministry in his home town crowd did not go so well. My point is that churches and Christians and ministers expect things to go well in ministry. They look for success and define success in the same terms that the secular world uses to define success. That is the impetus behind the megachurch movement and much of the church growth strategies. But if Jesus and his ministry are our guide, then we have to expect ministry to be difficult. Even the most difficult time is the right time. As both Jesus and the apostle Paul would say Now is the time. Today is the day of salvation. The Kingdom of God is at hand now.

2. My second point is WHERE Jesus began to minister. Jesus did not start off in Judea following in the footsteps of John the Baptist. He knew that if he stayed there in Judea, it would end with him sharing John’s prison cell. Our passage says, “Now when Jesus heard that John had been put in prison, He departed to Galilee. And leaving Nazareth, He came and dwelt in Capernaum.” Jesus was no coward, but he also was no fool. There was no point in following John into prison in Judea, nor in flying off a cliff in Nazareth. So he made Caperaum on the shore of the Sea of Galillee, the center of his ministry. The gospel writer Matthew explains his choice as the fulfillment of prophecy. He says, “He came and dwelt in Capernaum, which is by the sea, in the regions of Zebulun and Naphtali, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Isaiah the prophet, saying:

 “The land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali,

By the way of the sea, beyond the Jordan,

Galilee of the Gentiles:

The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light,

And upon those who sat in the region and shadow of death

Light has dawned.”

Jesus began his ministry, and spent most of his three years of ministry (except for trips to Jerusalem for the religious festivals) in Galilee. The area is called Galilee of the Gentiles. It was called that because there were a lot of Gentiles – non-Jews – there. Galilee means circle and it describes the land encircling the Sea of Galilee. Jesus made trips into the Decapolis, the Greek cities on the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee. He made trips to Caesarea Philippi and Tyre and Sidon in the north. Even though Jesus said he had a ministry to the Jews he spent an awful lot of time with Gentiles. His chosen place of ministry was Galilee of the Gentiles.

Galilee was not an easy place of ministry. New Hampshire is not an easy place of ministry. I have heard Dale Edwards, our Baptist executive minister say on more than one occasion (including in his keynote address at our last Annual Regional Gathering) that the Baptist region of Vermont and New Hampshire are the two most unchristian states in the union. I have heard many of my colleagues refer to New Hampshire as rocky ground. They are not referring to the granite. They are referring to Jesus’ parable of the sower about the farmer trying to plant the seeds of the Kingdom of God. We do not live in the easiest place of ministry. You can trust me in this because I have ministered in several states, and this is difficult. That is why it is so wonderful. It is the same type of place that Jesus ministered. In fact we seem to have just as many rocks as Israel.

The Israelis have a myth about when God created the world that he sent an angel to scatter rocks evenly over the whole earth. But when the angel flew over Israel the bag of rocks ripped and deposited most of the bag’s contents in Israel. I personally think that the bag must have popped an earlier hole over New Hampshire, and especially over my back yard.

            Jesus sowed the seed of the gospel on rocky soil, and so do we. That is a good thing. Because the fruit that grows here – physical and spiritual – is that much sweeter. This is where God has planted us, and as the proverb says, “Grow where you are planted.”  God has put this church here in this community of Sandwich for a reason. That reason is to proclaim in words, but even more important in attitude and in action, the unconditional love of God in Jesus Christ. My understanding of the mission of this church is to be the love of God in this time and place. To demonstrate God’s love in whatever we do and whatever we say. The Bible says that God is love. Jesus was the love of God incarnate. This church is to be the love of Christ incarnate – enfleshed in us – in this place.

            3. We have explored the WHEN and WHERE of Jesus’ start of ministry. The third point is WHAT Jesus began to preach. The gospel lesson tells us, “From that time Jesus began to preach and to say, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” You have heard me preach on this before. This is Jesus‘ message in a nutshell, and I have cracked open this verse on a number of occasions.

            Jesus said, “Repent!” Normally this is taken to mean to feel sorry what we have done wrong and change your ways.  But you know that I do not like moralism and I especially do not like that smell of guilt. That is not what the word means anyway – neither the English word nor Greek word in the original NT. The English word “repent” means to rethink, to think again. The Greek word means the same thing – a change of mind. In his book “The Great Meaning of the Word Metanoia,” Treadwell Walden says that metanoia conveys the essence of the Christian gospel. He says that no word in the New Testament is greater than metanoia. But Walden says that the translation of metanoia as repentance is “an extraordinary mistranslation.” The great Greek scholar AT Robertson agrees. He says that a better translation is “change of Mind, a change in the trend and action of the whole inner nature, intellectual, affectional and moral,” “transmutation of consciousness.” Jesus is not talking about feeling sorry, regretful and guilty. He is talking about a spiritual transformation that happens from the inside out through the grace of God working in our lives.

Then he adds, “The kingdom of heaven is at hand.” That has also been interpreted in many ways. Often Jesus is pictured as an apocalyptic preacher, telling people to get their act together before it is too late because the end of world is coming soon. I don’t think that is what he meant. If it was, he was mistaken, because the end of the world did not come soon. I don’t think Jesus was mistaken; I think we are mistaken in our interpretation of his words. I think he is saying that the kingdom of heaven is at hand, meaning that it is so close that you can reach out your hand and touch it. He is saying, “Rethink the way you see yourself. God, and this world. It is not like you think it is. The Kingdom of God is right here in our midst. All we have to do is open our minds to see it and open our hearts to embrace it.

The Kingdom of heaven was present in Jesus’ ministry. Jesus said on one occasion, “Assuredly, I say to you that there are some standing here who will not taste death till they see the Kingdom of God present with power.” (Matthew 16:28) This verse has caused great consternation to Christians who understand the Kingdom of God exclusively as a future event occurring in history. Such a kingdom did not come in the lifetimes of the people who heard Jesus speak these words. But when the verse is understood as referring to a person who sees the invisible Presence of God, the saying makes perfect sense. Jesus is simply saying that some of the people who were listening to his words would personally “see the Kingdom of God present with power.”

On another occasion Jesus was performing exorcisms, and he said, “If I cast out demons by the Spirit of God, surely the kingdom of God has come upon you.” (Luke 11:20 Clearly Jesus taught that the Kingdom of God was already present, as evidenced in his ministry. Jesus also said, “The kingdom of God does not come with observation; nor will they say, ‘See here!’ or ‘See there!’ For indeed, the kingdom of God is within you.” (Luke 17:20-21) An alternate translation of the verse reads: “the Kingdom of God is in your midst.” This is our message: that the kingdom of God is here now in the living presence of the living Lord Jesus Christ now.

4. Fourth, what happened when Jesus began to preach? Our gospel lesson tells us that people began to follow Jesus. Jesus preached by the shore of the Sea of Galilee and the fishermen Simon Peter and Andrew began to follow Jesus. James and John, the sons of Zebedee began to follow Jesus. We can interpret what it means to be a Christian in many ways. We can interpret it in theological terms, defining people as Christians by whether they adhere to a defined set of beliefs established by Christianity over the centuries. We can define it in ecclesiastical terms, by whether they belong to the right denomination or the correct branch of Christianity. I define it simply by whether a person follows Christ and calls him Lord. When Jesus began to preach people followed him. When we preach Christ, people follow him.

And not only that, but our gospel passage goes on to say that healing of all kinds happened when Jesus began to preach. I pray that healing of all kinds happen when the gospel is preached here. Healing of heart and mind and soul. Healing of relationships, and most of all the healing of people’s relationship with God. This is what happened when Jesus began to preach. May it happen still today.

Jesus Who?

John 1:29-42

A couple in Tennessee this spring had a baby boy. They named him Messiah DeShawn McCullough. This summer a judge in Tennessee ruled that they could not name a baby Messiah. She said in her ruling that the name was a title, and only one person had earned that title - Jesus Christ. She changed the baby’s name to Martin. The parents protested and appealed, and the judge was overruled. So now there is a little baby in Tennessee named Messiah. Messiah is the Hebrew word that means Christ. Just so we are clear, Christ was not Jesus’ name either. Jesus last name was not Christ. As the judge said, that was a title given to him by his followers. Christ or Messiah means anointed One. It is just one of many names and titles that have been given to Jesus. One of the names we heard a lot during Advent and Christmas was Immanuel. Today in our gospel lesson we see some other titles for Jesus.

1. The first one is given to him by John the Baptist. One day John is walking with some of his own disciples, and Jesus approaches. John points at Jesus and shouts out, “Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” What a strange thing to call anyone. It is not the type of title that any human being would pick for their leader. Lambs are not known for their leadership qualities. King Richard was not called the Lamb-hearted. He was the lion-hearted. Lions are the king of beasts, not lambs. You won’t find sports teams called the lambs. You’ve got the Cincinnati Bengals, Indianapolis Colts, Jacksonville Jaguars, Denver Broncos, Boston Bruins. But you don’t have the Saint Louis Lambs. You have the Saint Louis Rams. But Jesus is not called the Ram of God, which is a symbol of strength. He is called the Lamb of God. You would not think that would inspire confidence. Lambs were followers. Lambs were domestic animals. Lambs were vulnerable.  Why is Jesus called the Lamb of God? What does it mean?

The primary reference of this title was to the Passover Lamb. In fact the apostle Paul writes in I Corinthians 5:7 “For indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us.” When John called Jesus the Lamb of God, Passover was approaching. It was on everyone’s mind. Passover is mentioned in the beginning of chapter two. The Passover was one of the most important festivals of Israel. It commemorated the time when Israel was freed from bondage in Egypt. Most people here likely know the story, but for those who don’t, I will reount it very briefly. And it is a good review for everyone.

The Hebrew people had been slaves in Egypt for 400 years. God called Moses to free his people from slavery. He did it through a series of ten plagues through which he tried to convince Pharaoh to free the Hebrew people and let them go to the Promised Land. Each plague grew in severity and intensity. They were things like frogs, gnats, boils, hail, and locusts. The tenth and final one was the death of all the firstborn in Egypt. It was the last resort due to the hardness of Pharaoh’s heart. But God provided a way of escape from this death sentence. God gave instructions to slaughter a lamb for a meal. Take the blood of the lamb and put it on the doorposts of their home. The people within that home would be protected from death. The doorway to liberation was painted, you could say, in the blood of the Lamb.

This imagery might feel a little strange to modern people because most of us (except for farmers) are not used to slaughtering our own animals for food. Our meat comes in neatly wrapped in packages in the supermarket. Most of us do not get our hands dirtied by the blood of the animals that we consume. But blood was a part of everyday life for ancient peoples and especially shepherds, the occupation of the Hebrews. The slaughter of animals was common for all ancient peoples, whether they were hunters or farmers. We modern sanitized Americans need to get over our squeamishness over blood in order to relate to the power of this spiritual image in Scripture.  The Passover Lamb was the lamb of God which was the symbol that God used as protection for his people. It was also the means by which he freed his people from bondage.

Not only is this true of the Passover lamb, but the sacrificial system of the Old Testament instructed that the priests offer lambs as the daily sacrifice at the temple. Every morning and evening, a lamb was sacrificed for the sins of the people (Exodus 29:38-42).  So the phrase Lamb of God had great symbolic meaning. It meant protection from death. It meant liberation from bondage. It meant forgiveness of sins.

All of this is seen by Christians as fulfilled in Jesus Christ. Christ was killed during the feast of the Passover in Jerusalem. In the Gospel of John Christ dies at the same time as the Passover lambs are being slaughtered. In the other gospels, he dies at the time that the daily evening sacrifice of the lamb was being made in the temple. The Lamb of God is a powerful image of what Christ does for us. Some people get really hung up on the whole idea of death and blood. It all seems so violent and even primitive. The idea of animal sacrifice is offensive. To describe Christ as some type of sacrifice is more than some people can stand. But we need to remember that freedom always involves sacrifice.

One of the best analogies that we can make these days is the sacrifice that folks in the military make for us. We all know the sacrifice that servicemen and women make every day. We use the word sacrifice for this because it cost them so dearly. We know that many men and women have laid down their lives in battle. Many men and women have laid down their lives in the wars that our nation has fought to win and preserve our freedoms in this country. Many Americans have laid down their lives for people in other countries that they might also be free. That was true in Europe in WWII, but more recently in the Iraq war that the Iraqi people that they might be free, and for the Afghan people that they might have the opportunity for freedom. Whether those countries will now step up and continue on the road to human rights and democratic freedom is up to them and still to be seen. But the American blood that was shed for them is a genuine self-sacrifice.

That is a good way to understand the sacrifice of Jesus. The animal sacrifice idea worked for people 2000 years ago. It is certainly true and it is biblically accurate in that historical context. But we no longer sacrifice animals, and the concept does not connect to many people nowadays. But the military sacrifice does connect to people on an intellectual and emotional level. And there is a biblical precedent because the Messiah was expected to be a military leader in Jesus’ day. And in the Book of Revelation he is portrayed in this manner, as commander in chief on a white horse leading his army. So it is a biblical metaphor. Some people have a difficult time with the military metaphor also, but I can’t help that.

Think of Christ as a spiritual warrior who died in a spiritual battle. He laid down his life for us. Think of Christ as a warrior of nonviolence who gave his life so that people could be free from the fear of death and from bondage to sin. When understood in this way, the title Lamb of God is a powerful title. 

II. It is not the only title used in our gospel lesson for today. John the Baptist also calls Jesus the Son of God. It says in our passage in verses 32-34. “And John bore witness, saying, “I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and He remained upon Him. I did not know Him, but He who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘Upon whom you see the Spirit descending, and remaining on Him, this is He who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.’ And I have seen and testified that this is the Son of God.”

In this passage John is referring to his experience at Jesus’ baptism. Last Sunday was the date for the remembrance of the baptism of Christ, but it is referred to in our passage again for today. Jesus came to John to be baptized by him. As John was baptizing Jesus he witnessed the powerful presence of God. As Jesus came up from the river Jordan, John saw the Spirit of God descending upon Jesus like a dove and remaining upon him. Then John declares, “And I have seen and testified that this is the Son of God.” 

To call Jesus the Son of God is an extraordinary statement. We don’t really understand how extraordinary it was at that time and place. It was a revolutionary statement both politically and religiously in those days. You could be separated from your head for calling someone this title. And John would be later beheaded but for a different reason, for challenging King Herod.

Today we call people children of God and it doesn’t really mean hardly anything. It is just a way of saying that we are all special in God’s sight or to declare the sacredness of human life. Back in the first century the term Son of God was a declaration of divinity. The only human in the Roman Empire allowed to be called the Son of God was Caesar. The title was stamped on Roman coins along with Caesar’s image. There was a Caesar cult connected to the emperor’s divinity. To call anyone else but Caesar the Son of God was equivalent to treason against Rome. This was the charge brought against Jesus at his trial. His interrogators were trying to get him to admit that he was the Son of God.  Such a confession would be equivalent to confessing to treason and be grounds for the death penalty. For the religious  leaders at the time to claim to be the Son of God would also be considered blasphemy and also grounds for the death penalty under religious law.

It is still grounds for the death penalty under Sharia Law in extremist Muslim countries today. If a Muslim declares that Jesus is the Son of God and converts to Christianity it is called blasphemy. Such a person can be executed in many countries today. In America we have religious liberty. We Christians declare Jesus to be the Son of God in our songs, prayers, and sermons, as I am doing today. But do we really take this confession to heart?

For us to call Jesus the Son of God is not just a religious statement about his divine nature. It is not just a doctrinal confession. To really believe that Jesus is the Son of God is still a controversial political statement. We live in a very politicized climate in our nation today. Democrats and Republicans are at each other’s throats. Congress repeatedly gets up in knots and unable to get much done. Politicians fight over budgets and Obamacare. People get very agitated over politics, especially every four years.

To declare that Jesus is the Son of God is a political statement today as it was when Caesar was emperor of Rome. To believe that Jesus is the Son of God is to say that Christ has authority over the nations on the earth and over our nation. That is why I call it a revolutionary statement. It is a challenge to powerbrokers and those who sit in Congress and in the White House and on judicial benches. Jesus is not called Lord of lords for nothing. He is not called the Judge of all the earth for nothing. It means that all earthly authority and power is under his ultimate authority. It means there is a higher standard of morality than majority rule.

I am not talking about an earthly Christian theocracy.  That has been tried and failed. I am not talking about Christianity as the official religion of the land. I am a strong believer in the separation of church and state and freedom of religion for people of all religions. I am speaking to us who call ourselves followers of Jesus as Lord, who in actuality follow political leaders and political systems and political ideals more than we follow the ways of Christ and his kingdom. I believe that politics has taken on the function of a religion in many people’s lives. It has become a substitute for God, God’s Law and the gospel in many people’s lives, including many Christians’ lives. To call Jesus the Son of God is to challenge the idolatry that is at the heart American political life – the idolatry of human political and economic power that seems to acknowledge no restraints besides itself and no authority higher than human authority.

III. There is one last title for Christ that I want to mention briefly. It is the term Rabbi. Verses 35-39 say, “Again, the next day, John stood with two of his disciples. And looking at Jesus as He walked, he said, “Behold the Lamb of God!” The two disciples heard him speak, and they followed Jesus. Then Jesus turned, and seeing them following, said to them, “What do you seek?” They said to Him, “Rabbi” (which is to say, when translated, Teacher), “where are You staying?” He said to them, “Come and see.” They came and saw where He was staying, and remained with Him that day.”

We know the term rabbi today as a title for a Jewish religious leader. In this passage it is actually explained to us by the gospel writer that it means teacher. But that is not completely accurate. The ending i makes it possessive. It literally means “My teacher.” It is a personal profession of faith. In the story, two of John the Baptist’s disciples heard John call Jesus the Lamb of God, and it says that they followed Jesus. That means they stopped being disciples of John the Baptist and they became disciples of Jesus Christ. To call Jesus Rabbi meant in that time and place that Jesus was your master.

This is the title I recommend to you this morning. We can talk about titles for Jesus in an impersonal and objective sense. But this title makes it personal. It was personal for these two disciples, one of whom we learn in this passage is Andrew. The titles for Jesus should be personal for us as well. To call Jesus the Lamb of God is to talk personally about being freed from bondage, sin and the fear of death. To call Jesus the Son of God is to make a statement about his divinity, and just as important about his Lordship over the world and over our lives. To call him Rabbi means that he is our personal teacher whom we follow as disciples. That is who Jesus is to those of us who call ourselves by the name Christian. 

New Year Blessings

Ephesians 1:3-14

There is a hymn, which unfortunately is not in our hymnal, otherwise I would have had us sing it today. The refrain goes: “Count your blessings, name them one by one, Count your many blessings, see what God hath done!” The first Sunday of the New Year is a good time to do blessing counting. Today is Jude and my 40^th wedding anniversary, so I am especially grateful for the blessing of Jude in my life and for our marriage. That is #1 for me. When we count blessings probably at the top of all our lists is family and friends. I know that not all of us have perfect families, especially extended families, but I am so grateful for family and for friends. We will also likely think of material blessings. Even though we know it may sound materialistic to count material blessings, the blessing of a degree of financial security with adequate food, shelter, clothing, and things like that really is a blessing. Every one of us in this nation is blessed materially beyond imagining compared to many other nations and peoples, and especially when compared to the situation of most people in the history of the world.

Health also is a big blessing, even when we are having some health problems, the life expectancy we enjoy compared to past generations is amazing.  I know there has been a lot of hullabaloo about Healthcare this year with the roll out of Obamacare.  I know that we could do better in this area compared to other industrial countries, especially when you compare what we spend on our care in our country compared to other countries. But I am still very grateful for the medical care that we have in this time and place, compared to what people have had to deal with through most of the history of humankind and in so many places of the world today. I am also grateful for this town and state. I am so grateful for this nation. Again, I know we have problems as a country. But I am so thankful for the human rights and liberties that we enjoy in this country. I am grateful for those who served in the armed forces paid the ultimate price to win and preserve these freedoms. You get my point here. There are so many categories of blessings. We could go on and on about the blessings every one of us has. And it is a good exercise at the beginning of a new year.

Our epistle lesson for today speaks about spiritual blessings and so that is what I want to concentrate on this morning. Our scripture lesson starts off with the word: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing.” I am going to be counting spiritual blessings this morning. I could go on and on with these also. But I am going to limit myself to three spiritual blessings mentioned by the apostle Paul in our lesson from Ephesians.

I. First are the blessings before we were born. Verses 3-6 of our lesson say: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved.”

This is a truly amazing passage. And it is not talked about very much. It clearly says that we were blessed before the foundation of the world. The word translated world here is cosmos, a word we normally use for the entire universe. The earth is dated at about 4.5 billion. Scientists date the beginning of the universe at about 14 billion years, give or take a few million. Before the earth was formed, even before the universe was formed, we were blessed. It says God “blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ.”

This idea is very difficult to get our minds around. How could we be blessed before the creation of the universe – before we even existed? How could we be blessed before the human race existed, before planet earth existed? To be honest with you I am not sure what this means. I have studied what biblical scholars and theologians say this means, but I don’t think they know. I am not sure that the apostle Paul even knew what he meant when he penned those words by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. But it says that we were “in Christ” before the foundation of the world. Ponder that. Wow! Again I don’t know what that means, but it clearly mean that my life is much bigger than I thought it was.

It says God “blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world.” This passage is where theologians get the idea of predestination. It even uses the word in verse 5 “having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will.” People start arguing about election, fate and destiny and free will and all that. Most people outside of Baptist circles don’t know this, but the Southern Baptists are in a big controversy now between Calvinists and the more traditional Baptists in that denominations, and one of the issues is this doctrine of election or predestination. I don’t argue about such things. I think that here we are entering into an area of mystery. But at the very least it means that we are known by God from the very beginning, long before we were born. God says to Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations."

The purely naturalistic understanding of human beings is that we are soulless animals, nothing more than self-conscious primates who accidently arose on this planet. We are born and die and that is it. This passage is saying we are much more than that. We are somehow in Christ, who is himself in God. Who we really and truly and eternally are is more than the brief time span of these human bodies and minds. This is a blessing of God which I don’t even understand. And it say we have been “blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ.” Every blessing that Christ has, we have in him.

Many people go through their earthly lives without any sense of a larger meaning and purpose. They do not know why they were born and are not at all sure there will be anything of them that survives death. That is the legacy of the philosophical materialism that is the predominant worldview of our age. This statement of scripture, if it is true, and I trust it is, means that the blessing of our lives is greater than the brief span of our earthly lives.

II. Second we have the blessing of forgiveness. Verse 7-8 “In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His grace which He made to abound toward us in all wisdom and prudence….” The Christian gospel focuses on forgiveness. Different religions of the world focus on different aspects of human experience. The Judeo-Christian tradition, which is based on the Old and New Testaments, focuses on forgiveness. Some people do not like that emphasis. Some people accuse Christianity of being preoccupied with sin, guilt, shame, punishment, and judgment. So they reject Christianity outright, or they reinterpret Christianity to eliminate these uncomfortable aspects. They turn the gospel into a psychological self-help program designed to boost self-esteem.

The reality is that guilt is a part of human experience. It is not pathological. It is a natural response to doing something wrong. Guilt is found in every culture in some form. Every culture has a sense of right and wrong, a moral law that is understood as built into human nature. There is some form of the Ten Commandments in every culture, and most would say that morality is built into the fabric of the universe. We can’t just pretend that this feeling of right and wrong, good and evil does not exist. We have to deal with it.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ deals with it. The central purpose of the gospel is to free us from the consequences of sin. Christianity does not encourage feelings of sinfulness, guilt and shame. It accepts them and present and seeks to eliminates them. The good news of the gospel is that we no longer have to be bound by guilt. We no longer have to feel shame. We no longer have to worry about judgment or punishment. We can be set free from that! Sin is really negative soul-killing stuff. It knocks the life and heart out of you. Some distorted forms of Christianity seek to keep that negativity alive and use it for religious and moral manipulation. That is pathological! But that is not the gospel of Christ.

The gospel is complete freedom from that. It is liberation. Our passage here calls it redemption. “In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His grace which He made to abound toward us….”  The word redemption comes from the world of slavery. It refers to a slave being set free. Traditionally we call it salvation. A better translation is liberation or freedom. Those are concepts that we American care a lot about. We value political, social, economic and religious freedom. Christ gives us spiritual freedom. The apostle Paul goes on to say that how God accomplished this is a mystery. The next words in verse 9 are: “having made known to us the mystery of His will….” The heart of this mystery is the Cross. “In Him we have redemption through His blood….”  This reference to blood points to the death of Christ as the means and symbol of this liberation.

Theologians try to explain exactly how the death of the Son of God on the Cross accomplished this liberation. They propose theories of atonement. They try to explain this mystery with theological systems. Some of the theories are very complicated. Some are better than others. Some of them are pretty bizarre. None of them are satisfactory to me. I have never read a theory of atonement that holds up to serious scrutiny. Some of them seem to give God a split personality. Some describe God in such a way as to make him appear schizophrenic, sadistic or even masochistic. I understand why so many people are repelled by Christian preachers and their theology. Some interpretations of the Cross present such an angry vengeful Deity that any sensitive person would be repelled by it. I am repelled. Too many theories of the Cross compromise the essential nature of God as perfect unconditional love.

If you want an airtight theory on how we have forgiveness through the death of Christ you will not hear it from me. I am not saying there isn’t one. I just haven’t found one that seems faithful to the whole testimony of Scripture. I believe that at its heart the Cross is a mystery. But it is a divine mystery that is effective in setting us free. Somehow the perfect sacrificial love of God in Jesus Christ demonstrated on the Cross frees us.

If a surgeon saves us from heart disease through a heart transplant, it is not important that we understand exactly how the surgery was performed. It is not necessary that we have extensive medical knowledge of the heart, heart disease and open heart surgery. It is only important that the surgeon has this knowledge. And that we have faith in that doctor enough to be put out and laid open on an operating table. It is not important to me to know the details. What is important is that we are healed through the surgery and that we have new life because of the Great Physician. It is also good to be grateful to the organ donor who died that we might live. That is how I approach the Cross – by faith in the Great Physician and grateful to the one who died that I might live. This is a metaphor, but it is helpful metaphor to communicate the truth of the sacrifice of the Cross and the blessing of spiritual liberation that we have through the death of Christ.

III. The third blessing this passage speaks of is the Holy Spirit. 13 “In Him you also trusted, after you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation; (that is what we were just talking about. Then he goes on) in whom also, having believed, you were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession, to the praise of His glory.” The Holy Spirit is the everyday living proof which confirms the truth of the gospel. The Spirit confirms that what we have believed is true. The passage speaks of the Spirit as a guarantee.

It is nice to have some evidence that what we believe is really true. People can believe in any crazy thing they want to and there is often no way such beliefs can be proved or disproved. That is the way it is with religion. A lot of people believe a lot of weird things. People think that we Christians believe a lot of weird things. How to do we know we are not deceived? How do we know we are not off our rocker, deceived by a religion that has no basis in reality.

God gives us a guarantee. That electronic gadget you got for Christmas is guaranteed, at least for a while. It comes with 30, 60, day, maybe even a six month or one year guarantee. God gave us a lifetime guarantee. It is the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is God.  Not God far away in a distant heaven. Not God theorized in the mind. God experienced in our lives. The passage says that “having believed, you were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession, to the praise of His glory.” God is to be experienced. Not just in worship or in prayer, but every day, every moment of every day. Through faith in Christ God indwells us. We can live in daily relationship with God. We can walk in the Spirit, be led by the Spirit, live in the Spirit. This is the daily experience of eternal life. Eternal life is now. this present experience of divine life is a guarantee “until the redemption of the purchased possession, to the praise of His glory.” That is talking about our death. At our death the promise of eternal life is fulfilled. It comes full circle. We were blessed in Christ with every spiritual blessing before the foundation of the world. And that is fulfilled when we depart this world and return to Christ who is our eternal life… “to the praise of his glory.”

Twas the Day After Christmas

Matthew 2:13-23

The Sunday after Christmas is an awkward time. Our society has already forgotten about Christmas and is already gearing up for New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. Christmas is past. But on the Christian calendar Christmas just starts on the 25^th and goes for twelve days, the 12 days of Christmas. That is why we are still singing Christmas songs in the worship service. I am pulled between the two calendars. I want to be faithful to the Christian observance while not being oblivious to what people are thinking and feeling in our society. What most of us are feeling is that things are starting to get back to normal. They will not really get back to normal until after New Year’s Day. But the family Christmas celebrations are over. We probably not have taken down the tree and decorations yet, but there is a sense that the holidays are nearing an end.

What is left of Christmas after the guests have gone home, the presents are put away and the leftovers are eaten? What happens after Christmas? In the gospel lesson for today we have the story in the Gospel of Matthew of what happened after Christmas. It is very informative and helpful to see what the characters in the Christmas story do after Christmas and what God does after Christmas.

I. First, God still speaks after Christmas.  Let’s look at the Wise Men. They are barely mentioned in our reading for today. The first line of the reading says, “Now when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream.” The “they’ referred to are the Wise Men. Their story is in the first twelve verses of chapter 2. It clearly says there that the Wise Men came to Bethlehem at some time after Christmas. It says in 2:1 “Now after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, saying, “Where is He who has been born King of the Jews? For we have seen His star in the East and have come to worship Him.”

How long after Christmas the Wise Men came is up for debate, but I will not debate it here. It is clearly after Christmas. Even though in the Nativity Scenes we tend to crowd the wise men, angels and shepherds all together, as if they all appeared at the same moment, the gospel story does not describe it in that way. The Wise men clearly traveled to Bethlehem and worshipped the Christ child after Christmas.

As such they are an example for us. Christmas is not the end of the worship of Christ. For many people Christmas is the beginning and end of their religious experience. It may be the one and possibly only time they might come to church to worship. It used to be Christmas and Easter were the two occasions, but Easter is not the holiday it used to be, even though from a Christian and biblical point of view it is the more important of the two holidays. But our culture does not promote Easter the way it promotes Christmas. The Easter bunny runs a distant second in popularity to Santa Claus. So for many people Christmas - especially Christmas Eve - may be their only worship experience all year. And most Americans do not even observe Christmas in a religious manner.

But in the Scriptures the worship of Christ continues after Christmas. Christmas is only the beginning. The Wise men probably started their long journey from the East after Christmas and arrived long after Christmas day. Therefore they are a model for us. Christmas is just the beginning of a new year lived in worship and service to Jesus Christ.

God still speaks after Christmas. God spoke to the Wise men after Christmas. After they had met and worshipped the Christ child, God spoke to them in a dream warning them not to go back and report what they knew to King Herod. Verse 12 says, “Then, being divinely warned in a dream that they should not return to Herod, they departed for their own country another way.”

God spoke to Joseph after Christmas. We see that in our reading in verse 13 “Now when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream, saying, “Arise, take the young Child and His mother, flee to Egypt, and stay there until I bring you word; for Herod will seek the young Child to destroy Him.” God spoke to Joseph after Christmas.

In both of these examples God spoke to protect them and especially to protect the Christ child from harm. I will talk more about King Herod in a moment. He is the villain of the story. But for now I want to emphasize the protection of God. The purpose of God speaking and leading the Wise Men and Joseph was protection.  This is a demonstration of the love of God.

There is a hymn we sing at Christmastime. “Love came down at Christmas, Love all lovely, love divine. Love was born at Christmas. Star and angels gave the sign.” This divine love is overshadowed at Christmas in the waves of sentimentality that surround the holiday. But this is clearly the meaning of the holiday. God sent his only begotten Son to earth at Christmas out of love for us. When God speaks to us, it is in tones of love. Not sappy sentimental love. It is not just a feeling that brings tears to our eyes. It is strong courageous love. This is love that protects, love that saves. Love that costs something.

God still speaks after Christmas. The gospel lessons in these Sundays after Christmas will quickly go from the birth of Jesus to the teaching ministry of Jesus. God spoke through Jesus after Christmas through his parables, sermons and miracles. God speaks still today in love.

II. Second, Evil still acts after Christmas. Our gospel lesson includes the story which is called The Slaughter of the Innocents. When King Herod discovered that the Wise Men had deceived him, he became furious and ordered his soldiers to go into Bethlehem and kill all the children under the age of two in an attempt to kill the Christ child. He saw this infant Messiah as a threat to his own rule, just like the young North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un saw his uncle as a threat and had him executed this month.

We know too much about the slaughter of children in our American society. We repeatedly hear on the evening news examples of some crazed gunman, usually a young man, who goes into a school somewhere and shoots children and teachers before turning the weapon on himself. The slaughter of innocents happens today. It does not stop for the holiday season. The shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown CT happened during the holiday season last year. The recent shooting in Colorado happened a couple of weeks before Christmas. Evil does not take a holiday.

Therefore our vigilance against evil cannot take a holiday. I do not know the solution to gun violence. It seems to me that almost all of these young men who did these terrible shootings used guns that were purchased legally. These were not illegal weapons, so it seems to me that the solution to this problem involves much more than gun legislation. I was reading an article that reported that these much-publicized mass killings account for just 1 percent of all murders nationally. We are talking about a culture of violence in our country. And to be honest it is not just our country. There is a culture of violence in the world. In many countries it takes the form of civil war, international war, organized crime or government violence against its own citizens. There is no easy solution to this problem.

It is not just about violence. It is about evil in the hearts of men. Evil will not be restrained by laws. Evil is by nature law-breaking. The apostle Paul talks about this in regard to the moral law of God. He says that the Law does not stop people from doing wrong. In fact he says there is something in us that rebels against law. If it is wrong, we want to do it. If you have any doubts about that being part of human nature, spend some time with my grandsons. If you say, “Don’t do that!”, then that is exactly what they want to do. That is why there will always be bad people doing bad things. Evil does not take a holiday because we spend a day celebrating the Prince of Peace. There will be still be King Herods and Bashar al-Assads and Kim Jong-uns.

Likewise suffering, illness and death do not take time off for the holidays. I wrote a blog a couple of weeks ago entitled “A Funeral at Christmas” about recently going to Pennsylvania to conduct the funeral of a friend. I mentioned in the blog my memories of the death of my father at Thanksgiving thirty years ago and the funeral of my grandfather the next year on Good Friday. Death does not take a holiday, regardless of the play and film by that name.

Our problems do not take a holiday just because the calendar turns to December. In fact financial problems might be worse when people get their credit card bills in January. We might be able to momentarily forget our troubles for a day of celebration, but the day after Christmas they return. Problems, suffering and evil still are present the day after Christmas.

III. Third, we still have to respond to God the day after Christmas. In our gospel lesson, the Wise men heeded the dream and returned to their homeland by another route. Mary and Joseph heeded God’s message in the dream and fled to Egypt. Then a couple of years later the story says that an angel appeared to Joseph once again in a dream and told them to return to Israel to Nazareth. And they obeyed. After Christmas we have to listen to God and obey.

One issue I need to address in this scripture is dreams. In the gospel of Matthew the post-Christmas story is filled with dreams. God speaks to the Wise men and Joseph primarily in that manner. And it seems like angels populate these dreams. It raises the issue of dreams today. Does God speak to us in dreams? To be honest I do not know. I believe that God spoke to the Wise Men and Joseph through dreams. And we see this elsewhere in scripture. Joseph the patriarch in the Book of Genesis was a famous interpreter of dreams. God spoke to Jacob in the dream of Jacob’s ladder.

But God has never spoken to me in a dream. And when people have told me that God has spoken to them in dreams, I confess I am a bit cautious about interpreting such dreams as signs from God. I am not saying it doesn’t happen. I am just saying that it has never happened to me. Perhaps the Near Death Experiences that people have these days are a type of dream in which God is speaking and giving them a glimpse of heaven. But that is the closest thing like this that I know of.

I hear God’s voice in other ways. I hear it through Nature. I hear it through Scripture. I hear it through conscience. I hear it through intuition. I hear it through the Holy Spirit. I hear God speaking through his people. That is how I hear God speaking today. But the fact remains that God speaks still. He spoke to the Magi. He spoke to Mary and Joseph and he speaks to us.

If God does not speak to us today then our religion is just a memory of God speaking in the distant past. That is not my religious faith. I believe that God speaks today. We have to discern God speaking to us today. There are a lot of false voices and false prophets today just like there have always been. It takes some spiritual discernment to distinguish between the voices that claim to speak in the name of God today. To discern the authentic voice of God takes wisdom, which comes from God and from time and experience of a living relationship with God. But the more we grow to know the Spirit of Christ the more we recognize his voice.

Jesus says, “14 I am the good shepherd; and I know My sheep, and am known by My own…. 27 My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me.” He says, “the sheep hear his voice; and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. 4 And when he brings out his own sheep, he goes before them; and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice. 5 Yet they will by no means follow a stranger, but will flee from him, for they do not know the voice of strangers.”

God speaks today. Christ speaks today. But there are also a lot of other voices clamoring for our attention. But if we know Christ, we will recognize his voice and follow him. That is what Joseph did. I am sure that Joseph had lots of dreams in his life, but he did not pack up his family and move to Egypt every time he had a dream. He knew the difference between the voice of God and the voice of his own unconscious mind. When he discerned the voice of God, he responded in obedience.

We have to respond today. We have to be open to hear the voice of God, discern the voice of God, and then obey the voice of God. Not just on the holy days and in the holy seasons but after Christmas. After the Christmas carols have long ceased to be played and sung, we are to still hear the voice of God speaking to us in Jesus Christ. And we respond in worship, service, and love. 

The Sign of Immanuel

Isaiah 7:10-16  •  Matthew 1:18-25

It is one of the most well-known of all the OT prophecies concerning the birth of Jesus. “Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign: Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and shall call His name Immanuel.” It is the basis of the Christian doctrine of the Virgin Birth. It is sung in hymns like “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” which we sang on the first Sunday of Advent, and the short chorus “Emmanuel” which we have been singing every Sunday in December as an Introit. It is a wonderful prophecy, and I want us to explore it this morning.

I. First let us look at what it originally meant when it was spoken by the prophet Isaiah more than seven centuries before Jesus was born. Most Christians recognize the famous words of the prophecy but few know the context in which it was originally spoken and what it meant at that time. The year was 734 BC. It was a time of trouble in Jerusalem. The land of Israel was divided into two kingdoms at this time which were warring with each other. It was kind of like our country in the mid- nineteenth century. America had a civil war back in the 1860s and our country was broken into the north and south, the Union and the Confederacy. The same things happened in the Holy Land, although in their case the land was permanently divided into north and south. There were two kingdoms. The north was called Israel with its capital in Samaria, and the south was called Judah, which had its capital in Jerusalem.

At the time when this Immanuel prophecy was spoken the two parts of the Holy Land were at war. The northern Kingdom of Israel had allied itself with the country of Syria. Syria and Israel were plotting together to attack and conquer Judah. The king of Judah was named Ahaz. He was afraid. So the prophet Isaiah came to him. This story is in in the first nine verses of Isaiah chapter 7 before our reading for today. God told Isaiah to meet King Ahaz by the aqueduct and to take his son with him. So Isaiah did so. Isaiah told the king not to be afraid of these two nations who were gathering against him. He says in 7:4 “Take heed and be quiet and do not be afraid of these stubs of smoking firebrands.” He is saying that they are not a great fire that is going to consume Judah; he likens them to two smoldering pieces of firewood about to go out.

He goes on to prophesy that the northern Kingdom is going to be destroyed, therefore King Ahaz should not worry about it. That is where our scripture for today comes in. Isaiah told King Ahaz to ask for a sign from God to confirm this. Ahaz said he did not need a sign from God. But God wanted to give him a sign anyway. So he said, “Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign: Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and shall call His name Immanuel.”  That is the part we all know, and the part that is quoted by Matthew in the gospel story about the birth of Jesus. But the Immanuel prophesy continues. Isaiah said, “Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign: Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and shall call His name Immanuel. Curds and honey He shall eat, that He may know to refuse the evil and choose the good. For before the Child shall know to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land that you dread will be forsaken by both her kings.” (7:14-16)

Isaiah is saying that a young woman shall have a son and he shall be literally named Immanuel.  By the time this child comes to the age when he can discern good from evil, which was considered to be the age of twelve in Hebrew culture, when a Jewish boy went through his bar Mitzvah and officially became a man – by the time this boy named Immanuel was twelve years old, the two kings and nations of Syria and Israel that were coming against Ahaz would both be destroyed by the nation of Assyria. That is what the Immanuel prophecy originally meant.

It is not important that we get all the historical references straight. What matters is that this Immanuel prophecy meant something different when it was first given in the eighth century BC. It was spoken into a specific historical setting and was meaningful for the people of that day. The name Immanuel means God With Us. The original message of the Immanuel prophecy was that God is with us in the hard times. That was true in the days of the prophet Isaiah, and it is true today.

It means that during those times when our world feels like it is falling apart, God is with us. When we feel threatened by circumstances beyond our control, God is with us. When we feel surrounded by enemies, God is with us. When we are weighed down by grief, God is with us. When tragedy strikes, God is with us. God is with us at all times, even and especially in the worst of times. That is the original meaning of the Old Testament prophecy concerning Emmanuel.

II. Now let’s look at what it meant in the New Testament. Our gospel lesson talks about a stressful situation that was happening in the lives of Mary and Joseph in the first century. They were engaged to be married. But before they came together it as found that Mary was pregnant. Pregnancy outside of marriage would be no big deal these days, but back then it was a very big deal. Furthermore Joseph knows he is not the father of the child, so that adds a whole other dimension to the dilemma. If something like this happened today the couple would both appear on the Jerry Springer show, or maybe they would appear on Dr. Phil to work out their issues, but not back then. It says that Joseph was a nice guy and he did not want to cause problems for Mary, so he was going to quietly end their engagement.

But the night before he was going to announce the cancelation of their wedding, Joseph had a dream. The passage says, “behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take to you Mary your wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit. And she will bring forth a Son, and you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins.” Then the gospel writer Matthew comments on this saying, “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.”

Matthew applies the Immanuel prophecy of Isaiah to this situation. But Immanuel is more than just God with Joseph and Mary during a difficult time in their personal lives. The prophecy is fulfilled in their lives in a special way. It happens in the form of the Virgin Birth. In the OT prophecy, the Hebrew word used by Isaiah can simply mean young woman, and not necessarily virgin. But the Greek word used in the NT clearly means virgin. So this adds a new dimension to this prophecy. This is where Christianity gets the doctrine of the Virgin Birth, that Jesus was conceived supernatural manner.

This doctrine is controversial for some people. Some people get all bent out of shape when you start talking about things that appear scientifically impossible. Virgin births seem to fit into that impossible category. Although they really aren’t impossible when you study the subject. Virgin births – the scientific name is parthenogenesis – are known in the animal world. Parthenogenesis occurs naturally in some invertebrate animal species and some vertebrates (e.g. some reptiles, fish, and even birds and sharks.) This phenomenon was popularized by the movie Jurassic Park, when the all-female population of dinosaurs suddenly began reproducing without any males around. But this is not science fiction; it is science.  Parthenogenesis has been induced artificially in fish and amphibians. This type of asexual reproduction has even been induced in mammals – in mice and rabbits.

So if scientists can prompt virgin births in animals in the laboratory, why is it so unbelievable that God could have done it in Mary’s womb? Can’t God do at least as much as scientists? Humans share most of the DNA of these other mammals. It is just a matter of switching on the right gene that we already have in our body. If God wanted to make a point that this little baby was unique, what better way to do it than a virgin birth? God is not breaking the laws of nature in the Virgin Birth, but using the laws of nature. So I don’t have a problem with the Virgin birth. I figure that nothing is impossible for God. Certainly not something like this. That is what the angel Gabriel told Mary when he told her about the Virgin birth. 

But the more important point being made by this doctrine is not biology but theology. Matthew is saying that something unique in the history of the world was happening in the birth of Jesus Christ. This is what the Virgin Birth points to. If we get hung up on the idea of the Virgin birth we will never see what it is pointing to. The prophecy of Isaiah says it is a sign. A sign points to something beyond itself. The Virgin birth points to something much more important than a biological phenomenon. It is about a theological phenomenon. It points to the much more important doctrine of the Incarnation. God became flesh in Jesus of Nazareth.

This is the really controversial statement. People will make grand general statements like “We are all children of God.” “We are all sons and daughters of God.” In a certain manner of speaking this is true. The Bible speaks in such terms about us. But it singles out Jesus saying he is the “only begotten Son of God.” Something more was happening in the birth of Jesus. To explain what it means to call Jesus “only begotten Son of God” would take more than a single sermon. But for now I want to say that it means that God was with us in a unique way in Jesus Christ. That is what we celebrate at Christmas. We are saying that this birth that we celebrate on December 25 was unlike any other birth before or since. God came to dwell with us 2000 years ago in Jesus Christ.

III. My third point is what this Immanuel prophecy means for us for us in practice today. It is one thing to debate whether the Virgin birth could have really happened biologically. It is another to talk about what it means theologically. But in this third point I want to address what it means practically. I believe that all doctrine is practical. Theology is at the root spirituality. It has to do with our personal spiritual experience of God.

The Immanuel prophecy is about us experiencing God with us. That is what the name Immanuel literally means, and that is what it points to in our lives.  Christianity is not about holding all the correct doctrines or beliefs. It is about experiencing God. The prophecy of Immanuel is about experiencing God present with us. Specifically it is about experiencing God with us in Jesus Christ. After his resurrection Jesus said, “I will be with you always, even unto the end of the age.” Christmas is about God being present with us in the physical person of Jesus of Nazareth. But Jesus is no longer physically present. But Christ is still spiritually present. The gospel says that Christ is present with us in a couple of different ways.

He is present with us as the Spirit indwelling us. Christianity says that God’s Spirit indwells us. If we want to experience God, we need to go no further than our own hearts. The spiritual journey is an inner journey. I have been on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. I have visited the holy sites connected with the life of Jesus. I have visited several times the site of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem. In fact I am more familiar with that place than any other place in the Holy Land because we lived just outside of Bethlehem for three months. It is a spiritual experience to kneel at the spot where Jesus was born. But Jesus is not there in Bethlehem any more than he is in any other place. Jesus is experienced as Spirit within those who love Him. The only pilgrimage we have to make is the inner pilgrimage into our heart of hearts. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Christ. And the Spirit indwells us. And we can know Christ directly by going within through prayer and contemplation.

There is another way that we can experience Jesus as God with us. That is in community. Jesus also said, “For where two or three have gathered together in My name, I am there in their midst." That does not mean he is not with the individual when he/she is alone. It means that Christ is experienced in a different way when the followers of Jesus gather together in his name. In other words we experience Christ not only by ourselves within ourselves but also in others. Something spiritual happens when we gather together for worship, when we gather for prayer, or when we gather to talk about Christ in the study of Scripture. Christ is experienced in community.

Experience of the presence of Christ makes Christmas real. I know Christmas is also about family and friends and music and giving all those wonderful things. But it is primarily about Christ – not Christ in theory, but Christ in our experience. We know God with us in Jesus Christ. That is the meaning of the prophecy of Immanuel. That is what the sign of Immanuel points to.

What’s Your Theme Song?

Isaiah 35:1-10; Luke 1:46b-55

If your life had a theme song, what would it be? Would it be Hallelujah? Or would it be “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen?”  Would it be “Let it Be” or “I will Survive.”? "Comfortably Numb" by Pink Floyd or “You got a friend in me" by Randy Newman. What would your theme song be? Mary, the mother of Jesus, had a theme song. She wrote the song herself. Actually it was inspired by the Holy Spirit. Mary first sang the song to her cousin Elizabeth. Both of them were pregnant at the time. Elizabeth was six months pregnant with John the Baptist, and Mary was barely pregnant with Jesus. Mary took a trip into the hill country of Judea to visit her cousin. As soon as Mary entered the house, the baby in Elizabeth’s womb leaped in her womb. Elizabeth, inspired by the Holy Spirit, proclaimed that the baby in Mary’s womb was her Lord, the Son of God. Mary responds by singing a song.

Her song is known as the Magnificat, and it is our gospel lesson for today in the Gospel of Luke. It is Mary’s theme song, and it has two parts. The first is about her soul magnifying the Lord. The second part is about her spirit rejoicing in God her Savior. Does Mary’s song apply to us? Could we honestly sing Mary’s song? Can we make her song our own? Each of us have songs that connect at a deep level in our lives. They are our favorite songs. We pick these songs – or they pick us – because they resonate with lives on a deep level. Let’s see if Mary’s song resonates with our lives.

I. The first line of Mary’s song is “My soul magnifies the Lord” That is the theme of the song. Can we honestly say the same thing of our lives? Do our souls magnify the Lord? What does this mean – to magnify the Lord? It means to be a magnifying glass for the Lord.  My oldest son asked for binoculars for Christmas. He is a naturalist and does a bit of bird-watching.  His old binoculars got wet and broken, and he wants a new pair. It is hard to get any gift idea out of him, so I when he mentioned this I jumped on it. I did some research online and found that binoculars can be very expensive. They run into the thousands of dollars. I was not going to pay two or three thousand bucks for his Christmas present. But there were so many varieties of even less expensive binoculars that I asked him to choose. He went online to binoculars.com and found the 2013 award winning pair for only a little over $100, which is more in my price range. That is what he is getting for Christmas.

Binoculars magnify. Mary said that her soul magnifies the Lord. That means that by looking into her soul – through her soul - she can see the Lord clearer and bigger. It also means that people who look into her soul can see the Lord clearly. Is that true of our lives? When people look into our lives – into our souls – can they see the Lord clearly? Can they see the Lord magnified in our lives? If our answer is “No” or “Not very well,” then perhaps we should address this spiritual issue.

First, we have to identify our soul. We have to locate it. Most people don’t even know their own soul. People are out of touch with their own true spiritual nature. They live as if they were bodies or minds or emotions or some combinations of these. In the Bible the soul is our true self. The Bible does not say we have a soul; it says we are a soul. It is who we really are. I wrote a blog recently inviting people to look into their own soul. With a little direction we can identify our soul, our true spiritual nature. All it takes is looking in the right direction in the right manner. It takes some prayer and time, but it is not difficult to identity the soul that lies at the heart of our being under our psychological self. It is the still quiet place deep within us that nothing in the world can touch.

Once we have identified the soul, it is likely we will have to dust it off. If you don’t use your soul regularly it is probably pretty dirty. I was dusting in my house recently, those high places that Jude cannot reach. In our second floor bedroom we have high ceiling. We have a post and beam house and so we have rafters, and cobwebs collect way up on the ceiling and in the corners. So I was standing on our bed the other day with my long-handled duster trying to reach those cobwebs, so I would not have to look at them any longer while lying in bed.  When I was up there, I was amazed at how much dust was up there out of sight. Dust on the rafters and on the top of the picture frames. So I dusted, and Jude was sneezing for the next 24 hours.

There is likely dust on your soul. You might have a dusty soul. If you haven’t used your soul recently it is likely very dirty. If the lens of a binoculars or a magnifying glass is covered with dust we will not be able to see through it. It will not magnify anything. It certainly will not magnify the Lord. So the first thing we need to do after identifying our soul is clean it off.

How do you do that? Everyone knows you don’t clean off your eyeglasses or camera lens with your fingers. That will just smudge it and make it worse. You blow on it to get dust off. If the dirt is more substantial it takes some lens cleaning solution and tissue. In the spiritual life our soul is cleansed by the Holy Spirit, which is the Breath of God. “Breathe on me, Breath of God,” the hymn says. Cleanse my soul. Only the Spirit can do this work.

We cannot see the holy God with impure eyes. God has to do the work of cleansing in our souls. Our part in it is confession and repentance, and making amends to people if necessary. If we are going to magnify the Lord, the magnifying lens of our soul needs to be crystal clear, and only God can do that. Just like we cannot perform heart surgery on ourselves, so we cannot perform soul cleaning. This is the grace of God. He is the great Physician, the Supreme surgeon. He needs to do it, but we need to ask him. Ask him to open you up and clean you up - to do whatever is necessary to clean off your soul so that it is one again operational and can do what it was designed to do, which is to magnify the Lord.

The purpose of our lives is to magnify the Lord. That is supposed to be the theme song of every one of our lives. Most people’s lives sound more like a country song – lost love, wounded hearts and wrong choices. Or maybe your theme song is about being misunderstood or missed opportunities. Maybe it is a sad song about loved ones who have died and illnesses endured. That does not have to be the song of our lives. These elements of life are real. They can be mentioned in some of the stanzas, but the refrain of our life’s theme song, needs to be that God is magnified in everything that happens in our lives.

Our souls are a magnifying glass. If the magnifying lens of our soul has been cleansed by the work of Christ in our lives, then it can do its work. Astronomers had no clue of the billions of galaxies that were out there in space until we put the Hubble telescope up in orbit. There, above the haze and grime of Earth’s atmosphere, it could see clearly. It magnified our sight into the far depths of space. It transmitted to us a universe rich in color and motion, beautiful galaxies doing dances through space. It takes your breath away to see what human beings could never see before. In the same way it takes your breath away to look through that Hubble telescope which is the soul, your true nature, deep within. Look into the world through the lens of your immortal soul and you will see God. Your religion will no longer be based on blind faith, but on faithful sight. Your soul magnifies the Lord.

And your soul will magnify the Lord for others. There are some people who shine with the glory of God. That is why ancient paintings used to picture halos around the heads of saints. That light of the glory of God shone through them. Our lives can magnify the light of God’s presence to others. The purpose of our lives is not just so we can know God. It is so that others can know God. Others can know God when they can see God clearly in and through us. People think that proclaiming the gospel of God is about words. It is not. It is about the quality of our lives. Words can be a part of that, but if our lives do not coincide with our words we are seen as hypocrites. There is nothing Jesus hated more than hypocrisy. Our lives – our actions, our demeanor, our tone of voice, the expression on our face and in our eyes – these are what communicate the Spirit of God to others. The Holy Spirit of God who dwells in us is magnified through our souls and translated into speech and action in our lives. And people see that. That is how we magnify the Lord.

II. The second part of Mary’s song is to rejoice in God. “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior.” If the soul had a color, its color would be joy. The soul is actually a rainbow of colors including love, peace, compassion, patience, gentleness. But the one that Mary focuses on in her song is joy. Different people have different spiritual qualities that dominate their spiritual life. The dominant spiritual quality of Mary’s life was joy.

How wonderful it must have been for Jesus growing up – to have a joyful mother! No wonder he turned out so well! We all know what our own mothers were like. If we gave it some thought, we could probably identify one quality that best describes our mothers. The quality Jesus would have said described his mother was joy. It was her theme song. “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior.”

How can we have joy as a dominant note in our own lives? How can we make Mary’s song our song? How can we sing, “my spirit rejoices in God my Savior?” First, we have to know God as Savior. We have to know God as Savior before we can rejoice in God as Savior. Mary said, “my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior.” She did not say God my Creator. I am filled with joy when I am surrounded by Nature and feel overwhelmed by the beauty of nature that reflects the beauty of God as Creator. But that is not what Mary is singing about. She is singing about God as her Savior. She is talking about the salvation that was to come about through the infant in her womb at that very moment.

A lot of people these days don’t like the idea of God as Savior or Jesus s Savior. For them it has negative connotations. It presupposes that they need saving. Some people don’t like that idea. They don’t think they need saving. Jesus ran into people like that all the time. They thought they were fine just the way they were. They do not think they need to be changed, at least not in a fundamental manner. A person that does not need to be saved will never know the joy of God as Savior. They will never sing along with Mary, “My spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior.” To rejoice in God a Savior means that we first admit that we cannot do this life all by ourselves. We need the grace of God. Only then can we know the joy of God.

Finally notice that the word is rejoice. It is an interesting word. It starts off with the prefix re. That means again. Re-joy. Joy again and again. This is not a fleeting experience of happiness. It is not a past event that we look back on fondly. This is a repeated joy. Re-joy. Re-joice. Joy can be the dominant note of our lives over and over again.

What is the most common emotion that you feel? What do you feel most often during the day or during the week? Is it sadness? Is it boredom? Is it frustration? Is it anxiety? Fear? It can be joy! I am not talking about fits of giddiness. I am not even talking about having everything going just right so that you will be happy. I am talking about deep abiding joy - the gift of joy given to us by God the Savior that produces praise of God. That was the keynote of Mary’s life and it can be the theme of our lives as well. As the hymn Blessed Assurance says, “This is my story this is my song, praising my Savior all the day long.”