December 24

December 24, 2008

Good News of Great Joy
a sermon on Luke 2.1-20 for Christmas Eve
by David C. Mauldin
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Mobile, Alabama

Now, my friends … we are down it to. This is it. This is what it is all about: the Christmas story. Caesar and his census, Joseph and Mary’s journey to Bethlehem, the birth of Jesus, the angel’s message, “Glory to God in the highest,” the shepherds, and all that. This is the highest and holiest moment of the busy holiday season. You may be hosting a large family, with meals to cook and presents to open—lots of fun. You may be alone tomorrow. You may be happy, miserable, or indifferent. This may be the best, or the worst, Christmas of your life. All of that is secondary. In this moment, we have all—all of us in our different circumstances—heard the Christmas story. This is Christmas. Once again God’s truth breaks into our lives. Just for this moment, all the other noises fall silent, and we hear the baby’s cry and the angels’ song. Everything else falls away; it disappears. One thing only remains of any importance: unto us is born this day, in the city of David, a Savior who is the Messiah, the Lord.

This is good news of great joy for all people. All people includes you. Great joy for you! Joy is different from happiness; for one thing, joy is more stable and lasting. Joy is much more than a vague feeling of well-being, a warm thought, or the so-called Christmas spirit. Joy goes far deeper than “Merry Christmas.” Joy is not the feeling you get when your favorite Christmas song plays at the mall or you unpack ornaments that remind you of Christmases past. Joy is a life-giving fountain welling up in the depths of your soul. It is the relief and elation that comes from knowing God has taken the world in hand, he has shown up in person, and he is going to make things right. Joy is knowing you are in his hand, and he will not let you go.

The best part of Christmas, the only really essential part, is hearing these words. You hear again the old familiar story. The words pour over you like water in a hot shower when you are exhausted and dirty. You bask in them. “In those days …” the passage begins, and you are there. This is not something that happened a long time ago to people you don’t know. This is about you. It makes more difference to your life than anything in today’s newspaper.

The Christmas story is a lot of things. For starters, it is true. When I call it a story, I do not mean it is a fable. I mean it is something that happened. Do I really believe that? I do. Can I prove it? Not really. I can’t make the kind of historical case for Christmas that I can make for the resurrection of Jesus. But because I believe Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the Living God, true God and true man, Savior and Lord, I find it easy to trust Luke about the birth of Jesus. Belief in God may be hard. Belief in Jesus as fully human and fully divine may be harder still. But once you have that faith, what’s so amazing about the rest of it? Which is harder to believe: the message of the angels or that they sang it to the shepherds? Obviously the message, because it means so much.

Do you know what I find hardest to believe about the Christmas story? That God loved us enough to come to us! If I didn’t believe in the cross and resurrection of Jesus, I would never imagine that God would condescend, humble himself, empty himself, to become one of us, and be born to a poor family in humble circumstances. The virgin birth? That’s easy, once you believe in a God who created the world out of nothing. A virginal conception would be easy for that kind of God. But that such a God would love us, rebellious and wicked though we are? Absolutely fantastic!

Yet that is exactly what the angels said: They announced the birth of the Messiah, the Savior, the Lord—who had come to straighten out our mess and do for us what we could never do for ourselves and give us hope. “Glory to God in the highest,” they sang, “and on earth peace among men (meaning all human beings) whom he favors, or in whom he takes pleasure.” Different translations render this last part very differently because the Greek is a bit difficult. It says, “on earth peace among men …” and then there is a single noun that means “pleasure” or “favor.” It is obvious that God is the one who favors or takes pleasure, and men (human beings) are the object of his affection. This absolutely astonishes me. Why does God persist in loving us? Why is it his pleasure to save us? That’s just who he is!

So the Christmas story is true, and if you have faith, you believe the Good News and so you have the great joy. The Christmas story is also strong medicine. Some people want it to be a decoration, a symbol of the season that warms the heart a little but doesn’t turn our lives and our values and our comfortable ways of looking at the world upside down. They want a little comfort, a little joy. But God does not offer medicine in small doses. The Great Physician aims, not to keep the patient comfortable, but to cure us. It’s all or nothing. You believe or you do not. You give yourself freely and completely to God or you rebel against him. You worship the baby in the manger or refrain from acknowledging his authority. There are no half measures: for example, admiring Jesus as a great human being and teacher and therefore celebrating his birth as a happy occasion for the human family. You can do that if you want, but all it means, ultimately, is that you do not believe the angels, for then Jesus is not the Savior, and his birth is not Good News of great joy for all people. Or, another half measure that doesn’t work: celebrating Christmas as a symbol of peace and goodwill with Jesus on the sidelines. “No need to be religious, but we ought to be nice to one another, and isn’t Christmas a fabulous symbol of that?” Drive into the Wal-mart parking lot, walk around the mall, or read the newspaper if you want to refute this silliness. We don’t need an excuse to be nice to one another; we need new hearts. No partial measures, no small doses will do. We need the full treatment, to become in Christ a new creation.

Christmas is true, and that makes it strong medicine. We need a Savior. God would not take the trouble if it were unnecessary. The angels sing of God’s love in sending the Savior, but the unsung assumption (unsung because this is the part we already knew) is our desperate need.

The Christmas story is also a reminder that God is in control and he is working out a plan. I love the way the story begins. Caesar Augustus, adopted son of Julius Caesar and now emperor of Rome, calls for a census. Caesar proclaimed himself the giver of peace. He claimed to be the Savior of the world. He called himself lord. He thought he was in control. Yet what was his peace but oppression? What did his salvation look like? Well, Rome did establish a measure of security and build some good roads. Caesar kept piracy down. But the cost was taxes, servitude, and crosses. And of course, he had no answer to our deepest needs. Only God does. Caesar thinks he is in control, but God is really the one moving the pieces from the shadows. Caesar’s scheme accomplishes the purposes of God and brings the Son of David to the city of David to be born.

The account Luke gives is so matter-of-fact, we might forget how weighty this moment was. God had been laying the groundwork for the birth of the Savior from long ages past. I am thinking not only of his promises given here and there across the centuries and cherished by the faithful from generation to generation. I am thinking more of how God guided his people and worked in them, in the lives of ordinary men and women. The faithfulness of God proved itself. His plan came together. His promises came true … there in Bethlehem.

God was in control then. He is in control now. Life may seem chaotic and out of control. For us it is. All our efforts, like Caesar’s, to bend reality to our wishes fail. Yet God is in control.

The Christmas story is true, it is strong medicine, it is a comforting reminder, and it is good news of great joy. Our deepest hopes and fears find their answer in the baby born of Mary. It has been suggested that people in the ancient world feared death more than anything else, people in the Middle Ages feared sin and judgment the most, while we in the modern world fear meaninglessness above all else. We dismiss sin as an antiquated idea, and we try our best not to think about death; yet we are haunted every moment by the fear that nothing really matters, everything is meaningless. There is no big story that explains all our little stories, no grand narrative that my little life is a part of. That’s the chief problem of the modern world. We have all this wonderful technology, but we do not know what life is for. Of course, the other problems are our problems too. We may try not to think about death, but sooner or later it confronts us. The death rate is still one per person. To ignore our mortality is to put our head in the sand. The same with sin, really. People who want to do away with the concept of sin still believe the world is messed up. Who can deny that evil and injustice are real in our world? And if they are, but you don’t believe in sin, isn’t that like admitting there is a problem but arrogantly refusing to admit you are part of the problem?

Our fear about these things, our hopes for something more, something different—these find their answer in Jesus. He is the Messiah, the Savior, the Lord. He saves us from our sin and from death, and he gives life meaning. Everything worthy of your fear, he conquers. Your highest hopes, he fulfills. This is good news of great joy. We all have a lover’s quarrel with the world. We all feel discontented, and this is true whether you are so poor you lack the necessities of life or so rich you are chronically bored or comfortably middle class. We desire more because God made us for more. He made us for himself, for heaven, for love. We should feel a gnawing discontent because he made us for more than the existence we live. The Christmas story is good news of great joy because the birth of Jesus is the invasion of earth by heaven. God loves us, and he has not left us alone. We are not forever denied those deep longings of our heart. He came to rescue us. This happened on the cross and by his resurrection, but his birth was more than just one more step leading up to the main event. His birth was the moment Almighty God entered his creation as one of his creatures. It was as if the author of history wrote himself into his own book as a character. That’s a way to think about it that I find helpful, anyway. He showed up, and we are not alone. Our lives have meaning. There is a grand narrative that my life fits into. Death is not the end. Because of Jesus, we have more than we ever dreamed of, not less. For these and so many reasons, the Christmas story is good news of great joy for all people.

Finally, the Christmas story is an invitation. Those who do not know Jesus are invited to place their faith in him. Believe the angel’s message: this baby is the Savior of the world, which means your Savior too—and your Lord. Those who do believe and who belong to Jesus Christ are invited to worship and adore him. You know his love. You love him. This is a time to express that love. This is one reason we have the Lord’s Supper on Christmas Eve. Through it he gives himself to us and we give ourselves to him. What we do at Christmas goes beyond celebration, because Jesus is alive, and he is with us. We celebrate him. We enjoy him. We love him and worship him.

That is Christmas, and it is for everyone. Everything else is a distant second. Therefore, whatever your circumstances may be, I invite you to love and worship Jesus, the Savior of the world. Amen.

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