A Christmas Present - Advent Day 18

Tidings of Comfort and Joy

Isaiah 40     ¹Comfort, comfort my people,  says your God.  ²Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and proclaim to her that her hard service has been completed, that her sin has been paid for, that she has received from the LORD's hand double for all her sins.  ³A voice of one calling:  "In the desert prepare the way for the LORD; make straight in the wilderness a highway for our God.  ⁴ Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low; the rough ground shall become level, the rugged places a plain.  ⁵And the glory of the LORD will be revealed, and all mankind together will see it.  For the mouth of the LORD has spoken."  ⁶A voice says, "Cry out."  And I said, "What shall I cry?"  "All men are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field.  ⁷The grass withers and the flowers fall, because the breath of the LORD blows on them.  Surely the people are grass.   ⁸The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God stands forever^{."  9}You who bring good tidings to Zion, go up on a high mountain.  You who bring good tidings to Jerusalem, lift up your voice with a shout, lift it up, do not be afraid; say to the towns of Judah, "Here is your God!"  ¹⁰See, the Sovereign LORD comes with power, and his arm rules for him.  See, his reward is with him, and his recompense accompanies him.  ¹¹He tends his flock like a shepherd:  He gathers the lambs in his arms and carries them close to his heart; he gently leads those that have young.  

 

II Corinthians 1:3-5      ³Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, ⁴who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.  ⁵For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows.

When?  When will it ever end?  This pain in my back?  This aching loneliness?  This dull boring job?  Having to learn all this useless information?  When?  When will it end?  Some of us may have been spared the anguish of that question, but I believe most of us have know the agony of “when will it end.”  We know the feelings of the question.  

Isaiah offers the power of comfort.  Comfort does not answer the question of when it will be over.  Comfort has the power to sooth the agony of wondering and even the power to extinguish the need to ask “when will it end.”  The comfort of Isaiah is not the comfort of sympathy.  It is not the effort to speak some soothing word during a difficult time.  This is not the impotent phrase we might say trying to comfort someone.

Comfort, real comfort is something that is given.  Comfort is something that happens.  Real comfort is an event in the soul.  Real comfort is a kind of deliverance before deliverance comes.  Have you known that deliverance before deliverance comes?

Comfort is this inner awakening of the soul that Jesus spoke of when he said to his disciples, “I will give you the comforter, the Holy Spirit, who will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you” (John 14:26). Comfort is the inner awakening and power that Paul spoke of to the church at Corinth.  

Comfort is this deliverance before our deliverance.  It is this inner awakening of our soul.  During the rush and busyness of Christmas time a small bit of comfort continues to reach me.  Something happens and I realize “It’s all a gift.  My life, my marriage, my children, my opportunity to serve this church, my abilities.  It is all a gift.”  

Can we receive the gift of comfort?  What will it take to get our attention?  Does it take a megaphone of problems, pains and pressures or do the problems, the pains, and pressures of life tend to drown out the Word of God to you and me?

What will it take to get our attention?  “Cry…a voice says cry.”  Maybe that is it.  Maybe a baby’s cry will get our attention.  A baby’s low cry has the power to shatter the darkness of the soul that believes God cannot or will not do anything about it.

From a sermon preached by Henry Dobbs Pope
© Rhonda Hinkle Mitchell

A Christmas Present - Advent Day 17

The Hope of the Peaceable Kingdom   

Psalm 72:1-7      ¹Endow the king with your justice, O God, the royal son with your righteousness.  ²He will judge your people in righteousness, your afflicted ones with justice.  ³The mountains will bring prosperity to the people, the hills the fruit of righteousness.  ⁴He will defend the afflicted among the people and save the children of the needy; he will crush the oppressor.  ⁵He will endure as long as the sun, as long as the moon, through all generations.  ⁶He will be like rain falling on a mown field, like showers watering the earth.  ⁷In his days the righteous will flourish; prosperity will abound till the moon is no more.

Isaiah 11:1-10     ¹A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.  ²The Spirit of the LORD will rest on him - the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding, the Spirit of counsel and of power, the Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the LORD - ³and he will delight in the fear of the LORD.  He will not judge by what he sees with his eyes, or decide by what he hears with his ears;  ⁴but with righteousness he will judge the needy, with justice he will give decisions for the poor of the earth.  He will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth; with the breath of his lips he will slay the wicked.  ⁵Righteousness will be his belt and faithfulness the sash around his waist.  ⁶The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them.  ⁷The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox.  ⁸The infant will play near the hole of the cobra, and the young child put his hand into the viper's nest.  ⁹They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.  ¹⁰In that day the Root of Jesse will stand as a banner for the peoples; the nations will rally to him, and his place of rest will be glorious.

Do you ever stop to think that beneath the decorations of Christmas is the barren world of winter?  That may sound a little pessimistic, but that is what Isaiah saw when he looked out at his world about 700 years before the birth of Christ.  Israel was decorated with prosperous times.  But he saw that this kind of society would not be able to withstand an on-slaught of the Assyrian army.  The barrenness of spirit would soon become the reality of the landscape.  The beautiful nation of Israel, lush like a tall forest, would soon become nothing but a land of stumps and eroding soil.  Isaiah saw a nation decorated with prosperity, but barren underneath.  That is fairly easy to see, but Isaiah saw something else as well.  Even as he saw the prosperous nation becoming like a barren forest, he also saw something happening in the stumps that were left:  “a shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.”

From the stump of Jesse, from the lineage of David, a small sprig comes to life, and this small sprig would grow into the peaceable kingdom in which the beast in the hearts of all humanity is changed, and where human beings and all of nature are living in contentment and respect and peace.  The peaceable kingdom would come from the life and work of a Person, a descendent of David, the son of Jesse.  That person is Jesus.  We see in Him “the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding, the Spirit of counsel and of power, the Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the LORD.”

Jesus had a way of taking accepted truths like the importance of love and making it blaze with life and meaning.  He quoted the Bible, as did many.  But on his lips the scriptures stabbed people awake to the reality of God and to the truth of their own fallen state.  He had an unbounded hope in what God could do with the most hardened human being, but he was utterly realistic about the power of evil in our life.  He saw no rosy future for his followers but He talked with complete confidence about the triumph of love and the final success of his truth.  He allowed the best of religious people and the most educated, sophisticated people of Roman law to put Him to death.  It looked like a martyr’s death.  But it wasn’t. It was part of a plan.  And it was confirmed by the reality of His resurrection and the vitality that came to the once broken disciples

Opinion polls say that a lot of people do not have a very high opinion of the church and church folks.  But we also have that small, small, tiny sprig of life and hope.  And the good news is that despite our faults, our failings, and our fallibilities, many of us can say, “Jesus has made a difference to my life.  He has brought a measure of peace to my soul, to my relationships, and to my convictions.”   It is just a small sprig of life and power and hope that we are offered.  If we are taken in by the decorations of our society we will miss it.  If we are the pessimist who sees only the barrenness of life, we will miss it.  If we submit our life to Christ, we will find it.  

From a sermon preached by Henry Dobbs Pope
© Rhonda Hinkle Mitchell

A Christmas Present - Advent Day 16

And Mary Pondered These Things                       

Isaiah 9:2-7     ²The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned.  ³You have enlarged the nation and increased their joy; they rejoice before you as people rejoice at the harvest, as men rejoice when dividing the plunder.   ⁴For as in the day of Midian's defeat, you have shattered the yoke that burdens them, the bar across their shoulders, the rod of their oppressor.  ⁵Every warrior's boot used in battle and every garment rolled in blood will be destined for burning, will be fuel for the fire.  ⁶For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders.  And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.  ⁷Of the increase of his government and peace there will be no end.  He will reign on David's throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time on and forever.  The zeal of the LORD Almighty will accomplish this.

Luke 2:15-20     ¹⁵When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, "Let's go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about."  ¹⁶So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger.  ¹⁷When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, ¹⁸and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them.  ¹⁹But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.  ²⁰The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told.

 “The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen.”  Do we feel like the shepherds? Are we full of praise and glory and gratitude for a wonderful Christmas season?  Later we read that “the Wise Men, being warned by an angel, returned by another way.”  Are we feeling like the Wise Men?  Do we think there must be another way to do this Christmas thing?  Here is the centerpiece response to Christmas: “But Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart.”

I want us to practice this unique and central response to Christmas.  The Greek word for ponder literally means “to bring together”.  The word pictures a person bringing together bits and pieces of a puzzle to see the whole thing and to make sense of it.

The difference between worrying and pondering is faith.  Pondering asks questions of God even if we know there are no answers.  Pondering allows different thoughts to pass through our mind and heart until the right one hits home.  It is not aimless but focused, and something significant usually comes to us from pondering.  And if Mary is our example, pondering is one way we nurture truth in the depth of our soul.  Pondering is the way we let something sink.  It is the way we let reality reach and take root in our soul.

Certainly we want to ponder the birth of Jesus.  The birth of Jesus says that there is a new fact about our life.  Jesus was Emmanuel.  This is what people experienced then and experience now.  Jesus is Emmanuel, the presence of God in our world.  Jesus is Emmanuel.  God is with us in life with all its vitality and vulnerability, with its joys and with its pains, with its routine days and unusual moments, its loves and its conflicts, its triumphs and its tragedies, its noble and its shabby conduct.

God is present and God has no illusions about the ambiguities and flaws that mar our humanity.  For God is present not simply to comfort, but to confront and to conquer the human heart that has lost faith and trust in God.

Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us to confront the pretensions of religion with the real life call to trust God completely with our life and with our death.  Jesus is Emmanuel, God present with us in events that still confront and conquer.  Trust is the opposite of trying to be in control.  Emmanuel, God with us, to confront our own tendencies to be in control rather than to trust God completely.

From a sermon preached by Henry Dobbs Pope

© Rhonda Hinkle Mitchell

A Christmas Present - Advent Day 15

Where is Bethlehem?      

                                        

Micah 5:2-5a    ²"But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from of old, from ancient times.  ³Therefore Israel will be abandoned until the time when she who is in labor gives birth and the rest of his brothers return to join the Israelites.   ⁴He will stand and shepherd his flock in the strength of the LORD, in the majesty of the name of the LORD his God.  And they will live securely, for then his greatness will reach to the ends of the earth.  ⁵And he will be their peace.  When the Assyrian invades our land and marches through our fortresses, we will raise against him seven shepherds, even eight leaders of men.

Matthew 2:1-5     ¹After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem ²and asked, "Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews?  We saw his star in the east and have come to worship him."  ³When King Herod heard this he was disturbed, and all Jerusalem with him.  ⁴When he had called together all the people's chief priests and teachers of the law, he asked them where the Christ was to be born.  ⁵"In Bethlehem in Judea," they replied, "for this is what the prophet has written…”

Writing before the birth of Christ, Micah prophesized, “But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from of old, from ancient times.”  Even then Bethlehem was a place rich in memories.  It was the ancestral home of Rachel, and Ruth and Boaz, and most importantly the birthplace of Israel’s greatest king, David.  But the Bethlehem Micah spoke to was then a place of chaos and confusion.  The armies of Assyria had destroyed much of northern Israel and rumors of the brutality and news about the coming threat had the people already feeling afraid and beaten and broken.

Even so, Micah saw a better day, and that better day came in the birth of Jesus.  The Bethlehem where the prophecy was fulfilled was a place of noise and confusion as people literally fought for a place to stay.  The streets were filled with the curses and complaints of the people, Roman swords, and the hidden daggers of Jewish Zealots.

It was in to this Bethlehem that Jesus was born.  And the good news of Christmas is that Christ is still born into the Bethlehems of our own chaos and confusion, our strife and stress.

One shall come forth who is a ruler.  And we see Jesus ruling over the circumstances of His life.  His life was tainted by scandal but He called it good.  He lived under the shadow of a Cross and called life abundant.  He was surrounded by the confusion of His disciples and called them friends and committed to them the responsibility to carry on his work.  And the hope of Bethlehem is that this ruling work will come to our life and this shall be peace.

Jesus confronts our priorities that have gotten all twisted and out of shape.  He straightens out some of our thinking.  He suddenly places a conviction in our hearts, that despite the way things appear and the way we feel, He is still in charge.  And this shall be peace.  It is His rule in our life that brings peace.  Peace is not some sweet feeling that drops out of heaven on us.  Peace comes from the rule of Christ as He rightens our life.  The rule of Christ brings peace, not only for us, but Micah says He shall be great to the ends of the earth.  The rule of Christ that we experience in our own life is meant to be given and shared.  The world needs it and we need it, because if the rule of Christ does not reach the chaos and confusion around us then the chaos and confusion have a way of shrinking our hope.

Have we allowed the confusion and chaos of our times to shrink our own hope down to nothing more than desire of our own private happiness?  If that is all we seek, we will not find or experience that ruling rightness of Jesus.  As we give away the rule that we have found, we receive back a re-orientation of our life in a way that brings peace.  And literally millions of people, for over two thousand years, whether they be wise or simple, sophisticated or crude, respectable or disreputable, well educated or unable to read, in this baby born in Bethlehem have found One who is a Ruler, who feeds with the strength of God, who displays majesty in the mundane, and they find true security and real peace.

From a sermon preached by Henry Dobbs Pope

© Rhonda Hinkle Mitchell

A Christmas Present - Advent Day 14

Christmas Complaints        

Malachi 2:17 – 3:2     ¹⁷You have wearied the LORD with your words.  "How have we wearied him?" you ask. By saying, "All who do evil are good in the eyes of the LORD, and he is pleased with them" or "Where is the God of justice?"  ¹"See, I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me.  Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come," says the LORD Almighty.  ² But who can endure the day of his coming?  Who can stand when he appears?  For he will be like a refiner's fire or a launderer's soap.

Luke 1:68     "Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel, because he has come and has redeemed his people. "

Whoever said, “Tis the season to be jolly” has obviously never shopped for Christmas, never realized that Santa does have to live on a budget.  It’s a season when we complain about being busy, about the commercialism of Christmas.  And perhaps the most prevalent complaint, though usually uttered silently, is the feeling that the reality of Christmas does not live up to all the glitter and the hype.  If we are slow to admit we are complainers, many of us would at least admit to having been disappointed in God.  If we have ever truly trusted in God and depended on God, we have also probably been disappointed in God.  Maybe we have tried to turn over a new leaf and start back to church and thought our life would get better, but it only seemed to get worse.  Maybe we have asked God to heal someone and they died.  Maybe we have asked God for some small help and it seemed like all we got was the silent treatment.  Or maybe we have tried to lead a good life and feel it has gotten us nowhere.  We know that God is not at our beck and call to do what we demand, but still we wonder, and maybe we do complain.

The negative side of complaining about God is that complaining tends to focus our attention “out there” on what God is or is not doing to others, or the way He is failing to deal with our fallen world.  Focus on the failure of others numbs us to the self-righteousness in us so that we do not recognize the secret delight we take in complaining.  Let’s face it, it feels good to complain, to be innocent when others are guilty, to be right when others are wrong.  It feels so good and makes us so miserable.  A kind of self-righteous rot sets into our soul.  A spirit of dissatisfaction begins to taint even some of the best things that happen to us.  But if we are going to complain, God is probably the best one to take our complaints to.  God may grow weary with our complaining but He does not dismiss the complainer. 

Malachi’s message is this:  You complain that God is not just.  You will discover that God is just in the way he deals with you.  Your complaints will be answered, not in the way God deals with others, but in the way God deals with you.  In Jesus, God came to deal with us.  He came, not as a force to be feared, but as a baby who was revered.  He came to offer us His life.  He came not asking “do you agree with me”, but “will you discover the truth by serving me.”

Jesus did not come simply to comfort us, but to confront us.  And people who find themselves confronted by Jesus say again and again that they were confronted not only by judgment but by mercy as well.  And in my own experience, I remember thinking during the early days of my addiction “God is going to punish me for this.”  But never in my wildest dreams did I think God would punish me by sending me to a treatment center.  Is that justice?  In effect, Malachi says “You will learn about the justice of God in the way God deals with you.  Behold, I am sending a messenger.  I am sending a Lord.”

When we are confronted by Jesus, we become fed up with pettiness.  We are repulsed by our self-centeredness. We are intolerant of phoniness.  Though God’s love will not let us down, neither does it let us off.  In Jesus, the love of God has a caring and a confrontive quality.  We take our complaints to the Source and the Source deals with the real source of complaint in us.  Telling God our complaints enables us to be done with the idolatry of our hurts and our frustrations, our gripes, and our grief.

Behold, I send my messenger.  Maybe that is all we can say to one another and do for one another.  We can be a messenger to help one another know that in the frustrations and annoyances of our life, in the unanswerable injustices that we see, God is there.  And more importantly, God is here.  He is dealing with us.  He is opening the eyes of our soul so we discover the truth we celebrate at Christmas.  He is Emmanuel, God with us.

From a sermon preached by Henry Dobbs Pope

© Rhonda Hinkle Mitchell

A Christmas Present - Advent Day 13

A Life That Lasts

John 12:20-26    ²⁰Now there were some Greeks among those who went up to worship at the Feast.  ²¹They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, with a request.  "Sir," they said, "we would like to see Jesus."  ²²Philip went to tell Andrew; Andrew and Philip in turn told Jesus.  ²³Jesus replied, "The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.  ²⁴I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed.  But if it dies, it produces many seeds.  ²⁵The man who loves his life will lose it, while the man who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.  ²⁶Whoever serves me must follow me; and where I am, my servant also will be.  My Father will honor the one who serves me.

I John 2:15-17    ¹⁵Do not love the world or anything in the world.  If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.  ¹⁶For everything in the world—the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does—comes not from the Father but from the world.  ¹⁷The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever.

Into this wonderful time of year filled with gifts, hugs and homecomings, decorations and doughnuts, Santa Claus and singing choirs, John seems to sound a sour note, “Do not love the world or the things in the world…for the world passes away.”  If it is a sour note, it is also a true sound.  For we know that the goodness of Christmas will end.  The decorations will come down.  People will return to the regular routine.

The world passes away.  It may be a true note, but somehow it sounds out of sync.  The world is here for us to enjoy.  We need to celebrate life.  We need to savor its goodness.  That is the gospel being proclaimed today.  But, has all of our concentration on the enjoyment of life really given us an enjoyment of life?  Or has it made us more demanding?  More spoiled?  Actually less satisfied by the fleeting pleasures of life?  Could it be that by grasping at the goodness of life we not only rob ourselves of the good gifts of life but of something more as well?

“The world and its desires pass away,” John says, “but the man who does the will of God lives forever.”

John is saying that if we are always grasping after the fleeting goodness of this world, we may miss the more permanent gift God has for us.  It is the life of His Son.  For it is this life that abides forever.  “The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever.”  We do the truth, John says, and we discover the truth.  We cannot think our way into this life that abides forever.  We can discuss it, and debate it, and make motions about it, and sing about it, and celebrate it.  But John says we do not discover it until we do it, until we do what God in Jesus Christ has commanded us to do.  “Little children, let us not love with word or with tongue, but in deed and truth.  We will know by this that we are of the truth, and will assure our heart before Him” (I John 3:18-19).

There are several ways of entering into this experiment of doing the will of God to discover the truth.   One way is to ask ourselves a simple question about our behaviors and our decisions: “will Christ be glorified.”  We can justify our behavior and decisions by what the Bible says, or by justice, or even love.  But I believe we will come closer to truth by asking “will Christ be glorified.”

“The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever.”  Christmas is about the eternal life of God invading our world in the life of Jesus.  The Eternal stoops to the temporal, the Holy to the human.  Christmas announces once again that we are upheld by a mystery we cannot see, sustained by a power we cannot control, challenged by a goodness we cannot attain, redeemed by a grace we never imagined. 

By doing the will of God we find the Christ that is in Christmas.  By living as if Christ is Lord we discover the life that abides forever.  The Christmas season will pass, but the life Jesus came to give abides forever.  In the midst of the passing season may God give us the lasting joy as we seek to do the will of God.

From a sermon preached by Henry Dobbs Pope

© Rhonda Hinkle Mitchell

A Christmas Present - Advent Day 12

Have You Been Born Yet?

Galatians 2:15-21   ¹⁵"We who are Jews by birth and not 'Gentile sinners' ¹⁶know that a man is not justified by observing the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by observing the law, because by observing the law no one will be justified. ¹⁷"If, while we seek to be justified in Christ, it becomes evident that we ourselves are sinners, does that mean that Christ promotes sin? Absolutely not! ¹⁸If I rebuild what I destroyed, I prove that I am a lawbreaker. ¹⁹For through the law I died to the law so that I might live for God. ²⁰I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. ²¹I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!"

Galatians 3:1-6, 13-14, 22-27    ¹You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified. ²I would like to learn just one thing from you: Did you receive the Spirit by observing the law, or by believing what you heard? ³Are you so foolish? After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort? ⁴Have you suffered so much for nothing—if it really was for nothing? ⁵Does God give you his Spirit and work miracles among you because you observe the law, or because you believe what you heard? ⁶Consider Abraham: "He believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness."  ¹³Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: "Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree." ¹⁴He redeemed us in order that the blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus, so that by faith we might receive the promise of the Spirit.  ²²But the Scripture declares that the whole world is a prisoner of sin, so that what was promised, being given through faith in Jesus Christ, might be given to those who believe. ²³Before this faith came, we were held prisoners by the law, locked up until faith should be revealed. ²⁴So the law was put in charge to lead us to Christ that we might be justified by faith. ²⁵Now that faith has come, we are no longer under the supervision of the law.  ²⁶You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, ²⁷for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. ²⁸There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

This Christmas season I want us to remember that the Jesus who was born in Bethlehem of Judea came into this world to be born into each of us.  The heart and soul of the Christmas season is that it is about our heart and soul.  For Paul the Christian faith was more than a code of conduct or a form of worship.  Christianity was first and foremost a life that had happened to him.  “It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me,” he would say repeatedly.

There was among the churches in Galatia a group of people who were teaching that Christianity was merely a higher form of Judaism.  They taught that Jesus correctly understood the laws of Moses and the prophets and should be followed as the best way of obeying the laws of Moses and the prophets.  Jesus was offered simply as a life to be followed rather than as a life that was real, intimate and indwelling in the life of the people.  Have we, in our minds, reduced the Christian faith to a philosophy of life to be learned, to a compendium of wise advice to help us cope with life, to a political plan to solve society’s problems, or to a magic spiritual potion that will heal our bodies and spare us problems?  Jesus can help in these ways, but if we look to Him in only these limited ways, we are simply playing with dolls instead of giving birth to new life.  Christianity is first and foremost a life that is given and received.  So we recognize the importance of Jesus’ words to Nicodemus in John 3:3, “You must be born again,” or literally, “You must be born from above – a life beyond”.  Christianity is first and foremost a life that happens, and it happens by faith.  This faith is a confidence in God.  We call it faith and not confidence because faith is a confidence in spite of. 

Sometimes I think that some of us retreat from the risk of faith by holding on to what we call a simple faith.  But what we really mean is a comfortable faith where we feel we have pretty much learned and know all that we need so we hang an invisible but very clear sign on our life that says, “Do not disturb.”  Birth requires the disturbance of our comfort if we are going to discover the gift of new life.  If some of us retreat into a simple faith, others of us retreat in to a sophisticated faith.  We want the certainty of the latest knowledge, the surety of the most recent discovery for the Bible or from science, from the most recent poll, or the latest guru of educated religious thinking.  We find it very difficult to live in learned ignorance, and to wait for the living truth to be given and to develop in our soul as well as our mind.  Birth is not only uncomfortable.  It can be agonizingly slow in coming, and very unpredictable.  A retreat to a simple faith or a sophisticated faith can both shut out a living faith.  If we can answer it honestly, it may help to ask honestly, “Am I resisting the gift of that life?”

From a sermon preached by Henry Dobbs Pope

© Rhonda Hinkle Mitchell