« November 2003 | Main | January 2004 »
December 28, 2003
Jesus Became a Toddler Too
Jesus Became a Toddler Too
Psalm 98 / I Samuel 1: 10-24
Luke 2: 21-40
December 28th, 2003
Three days ago we celebrated Jesus’ birth. I propose this morning we remember that Jesus became a toddler too. Why? You’re wondering.
We pass so quickly from Jesus’ birth to His life as an adult. The story of Jesus is like the story of Samuel, who springs from being a little boy into a prophet. Why does the Bible hide the childhood and young adult years of its important people?
The Gospels tell us very little about Jesus’ childhood. Jesus was taken to the Temple when He was eight days old to be circumcised and given His name. The law of the Jews required this. In the Temple Mary and Joseph met an old man, Simeon, and an old lady, Anna, who recognized that this little baby boy was “the Lord’s Christ” or Messiah, and “the redemption of Jerusalem.”
What greatness already hovers over little Jesus. A favorite Christmas carol has us sing “no crying He makes” in the manger scene in Bethlehem. Why not? Every baby cries. It’s good for the lungs. It gets the arms and legs moving—good exercise. But not the baby Jesus, the carol has us sing. Maybe no crying in the Temple either—unlike our grandson at his baptism, when he set up a furious howl.
Then we read of a moment when Jesus was twelve years old. His family went from Nazareth to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover. When the celebrations were over Mary, and Joseph headed back home. They looked around. “Where’s Jesus? No Jesus to be found. In a panic they went back to Jerusalem. Where was He? What responsibility they had to protect this Son whose life had greatness written all over it! For a moment it seems as though Jesus is like most kids on the cusp of becoming a teenager!
Not so, Luke tells us. This moment of tension in Jesus’ earthly family life illustrates that it was His heavenly Father who was really important. Mary scolds Jesus, “Son, why have you treated us so? Your father and I have been looking for you anxiously.”
Jesus’ reply sets things straight. “Wrong Father, mother.” Why were you looking for me? Did you not know?” or as the wonderful old King James Version puts it, “Wist ye not that I must be about my father’s business?” Mary and Joseph mistakenly “wisted” that Jesus’ life was more ordinary than that. He should have been the kind of twelve year old who sticks with mom and dad in a crowd so he wouldn’t get lost and so they wouldn’t worry.
But when you and I read this, does it seem that Jesus was very much like most twelve year olds? Take away the answer Jesus gave to Mary’s question and He seems like most of us were at that age. Budding teenagers have their own agendas. In the terrible twos we discovered the words “me” and “no.” In the terrible teens those two words grow up, and grow horns. We parents joke about how hard it is to have teen-agers. Teenagers joke about how hard it is to have parents. Jesus turned twelve too.
In the Epistle to the Hebrews it seems that the picture of Jesus gets set straight. There we read “he had to be made like his brethren in every respect.” Jesus is able to sympathize with our weaknesses because he was tested in every respect as we are.” Don’t idealize Jesus’ testing, as though it was always like when He went into the desert for forty days at the start of His ministry, to be tempted by the devil.
What stages of life are more of a test to a child than when he is learning to walk, learning the meaning of “no,” and to move beyond howls to words? Then when junior hits twelve years old, the seams of life seem ready to burst. Conflicts of will between parents and children are daily, sometimes it seems, hourly events. Jesus was tested in every respect as we are.
Hebrews impresses this on us still more forcefully. It tells us that Jesus, the pioneer of our salvation, was made “perfect through suffering.” I don’t think this means only the suffering of the cross. I don’t think this means only the kinds of suffering that resulted from bad people responding to him badly. I think we are to understand that Jesus’ life was hard like the your life sometimes, and mine.
Somehow, Jesus came to all those little moments of testing—the temptation to tell a lie to get out of a jam, the temptation to get mad and take a swing at someone in the school yard, the temptation to sass mom and dad—without actually telling a lie, or punching a classmate, or talking back to His parents. That is, the tense moments came and Jesus too faced two choices.
I wonder, was Jesus tested by discouragement or self-doubt? Did he think as most of us have that he didn’t look very good? What one of us as a teenager doesn’t think we’re ugly? The moments of Jesus’ life were filled with the same tensions that our moments are.
In the Gospel song we sing, “Jesus knows our every weakness, take it to the Lord in prayer.” How did He know our every weakness? How? By watching us? No, Jesus had lab training. He went through the lab of life.
It feels scandalous to think of Jesus being tested as we are tested. How careful our Christian ancestors were in making sure we kept straight that Jesus was God made flesh. How hard it is to imagine God-made-flesh really being tempted! But there’s another angle to this.
Testing stretches us to see how we will handle the sacredness of life. You idealize Jesus’ life, because He was God-made-flesh but have you accepted the sacredness of your life? We ponder what God gave us in Jesus, that perfect God-man. But have you pondered what God gave in creating you?
Then, think more broadly still about testing. Think of the identity crises you have gone through. Why do I exist at all? What shall I do with my life? Maybe you weren’t a great student, growing up in a town that idealizes great students. You postpone the decision what to do with your life by going to college. But then you graduate and must decide. Few people end up doing what they thought they would do early on. Many people have no idea what to do. Facing the unknown can be fearful. As a young man, what fears did He have about His future? Jesus at one point admitted that he did not know the future. I wonder if Jesus’ sense of mission in life suddenly clarified after His baptism when the Holy Spirit came on Him.
Our greatest questions go well beyond career decisions. You wonder as you date someone if this is the one to share your life. How can you know? How can you see ahead to know what this person will be like in the very ordinary life of the home, after the romantic feelings of courtship have been tested as the promises people make at weddings summarize—“for better, for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health—until we are parted by death.”
Jesus didn’t face the question of whom to marry (or did he? Maybe he did and realized he could not marry.) He faced all the same kinds of questions you and I face. This lets us know two things, first, that Jesus understands, and second, that it is pertinent to ask, “What would Jesus do?” You and I find guidance from the answers that come to that question.
But there is still more to recognizing that Jesus became a toddler too. Paul writes that God’s plan was to unite all things in Jesus. All things? What does that mean? And what does Jesus’ becoming a toddler have to do with that?
A second century Church father from France proposed that it means that Jesus became what we are in order that we might become what He is. What we lost in Adam’s fall, we regained in Jesus’ obedience to the Father. In fact, Jesus went through all the stages of life, from birth to death, in order to recover every stage of life. He became the Pioneer of our salvation. He led the way.
Jesus went through all the stages of life, and then took on Himself all the guilt of all the sins we have made in the various stages of life. When we trust in Him, God already sees us as though we are like Jesus. The purpose of life then, for you and me, is to live out our gratitude. Following Jesus is not a tedious task of trying to be perfect, but a process of saying Thank you to God.
But there is a second larger pertinence to Jesus becoming as we are—that is, really here. This larger pertinence is that with Jesus really present, He uses His Divine power to holds all things together. Jesus keeps the world from spinning out of control.
Do you wonder, as I do, what keeps the world from simply exploding? With all the nuclear arsenals, and biological weapons to contaminate the world’s water and air, and with all the hate and mistrust, what holds things together? Jesus holds things together. “Though the wrong seem oft so strong, God is the ruler yet.” Jesus holds the reins of history so that no Alexander the Great, or Emperor Augustus, or Attila the Hun, or Adolph Hitler conquers the whole world. Somehow Jesus, the Son of God, even causes earthquakes in Iran, or hurricanes in Bangladesh, or mudslides in California, or tornadoes in Indiana to have good long-range effects.
At the moment, if we are at the center of a disaster, it hardly seems so. But there is a picture far bigger than you and I can see. Again I borrow from the Apostle Paul’s clear view of this, “Our lives are hid with Christ in God.” “Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ.” Nothing. “In Him all things hold together.” All things. All things! God is not limited by my inability to understand. That’s why it is wise to trust God.
God not only created everything. God experienced personally our life. So God understands. You can trust God with your life. You say, “I’m just a child and feel life is pretty scary outside my home.” Jesus was a child and so He understands what you’re going through. You say, “I’ve got to choose what I’m going to do with my life, and I’m frightened.” Jesus says, “I was a young person too.” You say, “My name is Schmidt, and I’m nearing the end of my career, and I’m afraid.” Jesus says, “I came to the end of my career. Follow me.” You say, “I see that life is nearing the end, and I am afraid of declining health.” Jesus says, “I suffered death before you. Trust me.”
You say, “The world is falling apart at the seams: war, earthquakes, brutal dictators, dreadful diseases, unspeakable poverty, terrible injustice. Jesus says, “I hold everything together. Nothing, absolutely nothing can separate you from the love of God that I have in measureless supply.”
Next Thursday it will be 2004. 1984 was twenty years ago. We made it past that fearful year. What will the new year bring? For you? For your little ones? For America? For the world? We don’t know. But Jesus knows in detail the stuff of life, and of this world, and we may safely trust Him for the unknown tomorrows.
Not only this. But Jesus is moving life along to a happy end. People will become like Him. The world will become again as God intends. This is our hope. This is our trust, our confidence in God.
Let us pray: O God, our Father, thank you for sending your Son to be born a holy child in the tiny town of Bethlehem. Thank you that he not only died for us, to save us from our sins, but lived for us, that we may follow him. Help us to do this, thankfully, trusting he will show the way. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
December 21, 2003
The Glory of the Virgin Mother
The Glory of the Virgin Mother
Psalm 29 / Isaiah 7: 10-16
Luke 1: 26-38
December 21st, 2003
Each year at this time, for some years, I have thought aloud before you about Mary, the Virgin mother of Jesus. I do this for three reasons.
First, the two Gospels that tell of Jesus’ birth tell us remarkable things about Mary. Were similar things said of the Apostle Paul, we’d sound them loud and clear.
Second, I have reacted against the fear and even hostility to Mary prevalent for so long among Protestants. We have thrown out the baby with the bathwater. How wrong it is that Mary should be a victim to the division in the Western Church, the Reformation!
Third, we desperately need to hold before us worthy models. How often we hear the term “role model.” Few of us shape the contours of our lives according to principle. We copy models that flash before us by the media who are always on the hunt for celebrities. Who are our models, our icons? Who are yours? Mary the mother of Jesus deserves a good, strong look.
Let’s look more closely at these three reasons for thinking of Mary. First, compare what the Gospels tell us about Mary and what Acts tells us about St. Paul.
Luke, the author of the Gospel and the book of Acts, tells us that the angel Gabriel came to a virgin engaged to a man named Joseph from the house of David. This angel was an archangel, a dean among these celestial servants of God. The angel greeted Mary cordially. “Hail” –– our old Bibles read. “Greetings!” our new Bible reads. This is how we remember the angel’s words. When you read the English word, “Hail,” you probably think of “Hail Caesar,” and “Heil Hitler,” as though it was a greeting that treats the person as Divine. But it was only a polite and cheerful greeting. We don’t really say anything quite like it. Maybe, “Be happy!” “Good cheer!” What the angel said was a bit more than “Greetings!” would be like what Gabriel said.
Indeed, maybe we should greet each other this way because we are fortunate and need to remember it. Not, “how are you?” a question to which we don’t seriously expect an answer—and probably would not wait to hear. But “Good cheer!”
When Luke tells us how the Lord greeted Saul of Tarsus, it sounds very different. No “Good cheer to you, my fine fellow!” He was not a fine fellow. Perhaps we should note that it wasn’t Gabriel but the Lord Jesus who surprised Saul as he was on his way to Damascus to persecute followers of Jesus. The Lord said to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”
What a contrast between what the Lord said to Saul and what the angel said to Mary. How different Saul was at the start from the “saint” we remember as the Apostle Paul.
But supposing Saul had been a different kind of man to begin with and Acts had told us that an angel of the Lord appeared to Paul and greeted him as Gabriel greeted Mary. Just suppose Saul was chosen for his important job because he began so well early. I wonder how often this cheerful encounter between earth and heaven would be cited as evidence that we should think not only about the Jesus Christ whom Paul proclaimed, but of Paul’s worthiness to preach the Gospel.
We remember Abraham was called a friend of God, and we honor him for this. But we’ve not thought this way about Mary of whom the angel said, “O favored one”—in heaven.
Then, look what the angel Gabriel said to her. He said, “The Lord is with you.” Not, “The Lord be with you,” as many Christians say in the exchange of greetings when they take the Lord’s Supper. But, “The Lord is with you.”
The Lord is always with us, we might well say. We can’t escape his presence. But how many would you and I greet and say, “The Lord is with you” as an expression of admiration. This is what the angel meant. It’s as though Mary were coming to an interview with an employer, and she heard the owner of the company say, “I know how respected you are.”
A few verses later we read, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.”
In the Bible that Christians read for more than a thousand years, all of this was translated a bit differently. In this familiar translation the angel said, “Hail, full of grace--have gratia plena.” And then, “you have met with favor from God.” What became of the angel’s greeting shows how important that our translations mean as nearly as possible what the original form of the Bible means. No doubt when Jerome translated this passage he was influenced by the growing veneration for Jesus’ mother. The veneration showed in the “translation.” This is a kind of risk all modern translators of the Bible encounter too.
Generations of devout Christians read that the angel said to Mary, “You are full of grace.” And from this they developed ideas about Mary that seemed to follow from what the angel said. If she was full of grace, that means she must have been perfect. Perfect from the start, in fact. No original sin. And it went on from there until in 1950 Pope Pius XII proclaimed that Mary went bodily to heaven without having to wait for the general resurrection of the dead at Jesus’ second coming.
All of these strong things that were said about Mary were an attempt to unpack the meaning of what Christians read in their Bible—“Hail! Full of grace.” Even though grace means undeserved favor, to be called “full of undeserved favor” is pretty good. The rest of us need favor but none of us get full of it. We receive the goodness of God as a gift. Not Mary. The goodness of God somehow filled her to the very brim, from her immaculate conception until her bodily assumption into heaven. Devout Bible readers thought “full of grace” meant all of this.
But the original form of the Gospel tells us only that the angel said, “Be happy! Favored one.” And that’s plenty good to have an angel say to you.
When we read about the Apostle Paul’s choice of Timothy to work beside him in spreading the Gospel, we learn that Timothy had a good reputation. This is part of how we think of this young man whom Paul encouraged and gave high responsibility. Why not recognize this in Mary, Jesus’ mother?
Second, it’s too bad that Mary was a victim of the Reformation that started our heritage as Protestants. In an excellent article in Christianity Today about Mary, Timothy George recently reported that priests brought a statue of Mary to John Knox, the ardent Scottish Reformer, grandpa of us Presbyterians, when he was chained as a galley slave. They told him to kiss the statue. He responded, “Trouble me not; such an idol is a curse; and therefore I will not touch it.” Protestants who share this strong antagonism to Mary coined the term “Mariolatry,” which means Mary – idol – worship.
When we see how Mary grew in peoples’ imagination, from the Gospel’s picture of a humble peasant honored by God, to a Mother with a crown on her head sitting just below her Son, and then to a Mother sitting on a throne above her Son, and then as the One who keeps her angry Son from destroying the earth by pleading her maternal rights—redeeming the world from His vengeance, we suspect that the pious thinking got carried away. Mary needed Jesus to die to redeem her from her sin as much as we do.
But I take to heart the caution that all of us need to remember that F.W. Robertson told his congregation many years ago. “It is a principle that no error has ever spread widely that was not the exaggeration or perversion of a truth . . .and the first step toward dislodging error is to understand the truth at which it aims.”
What is this truth? The truth about Mary is that when she discovered that God had chosen her for a very hard task, she accepted it. To be pregnant outside of wedlock in those days was to risk being stoned to death. Walter Wangerin is no doubt right in describing how Joseph must have come to realize his beloved fiancée was pregnant. He knew he was not the father of the child. He saw the changes in her form. He felt a bulge in her abdomen when he hugged her. How could he trust his dream, in which the angel told him the baby was conceived by a special act of God? Maybe it was like a lot of dreams, “or bit of undigested beef.” But he trusted an angel actually talked to him in the dream. Things would be said of her by people that were not true. How could people imagine a virgin giving birth?
When she learned that sorrow would come to her as a result of being mother of this holy Child, Mary accepted it. When the Gospels show us glimpses of Mary, she doesn’t always get things right, but her mistakes are due to honoring her Son. She trusts Jesus to change an embarrassing problem at a wedding reception into cause for rejoicing—his first miracle. She once seemed to presume her Son should come because she was waiting for Him, and must have been troubled when Jesus said, “Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother.” I wonder what Mary thought when Jesus said this. We don’t read that she responded, “Watch your tongue, junior!” This, too, Mary pondered in her heart. Look at how humble and trusting Mary was. Not quickly offended. Who matches her in all the rest of Scripture?
Third, we desperately need to hold before us models worthy to be thought about in shaping our outlook on life. Look at the “celebrities” flashed before. How unglamorous is the private life of most of them. We hear the words, “role model” often. Why? Because, like it or not, the images flashed before us all plant in our minds role models.
How many little boys watch the taunting and gloating that football heroes do on Saturday or Sunday afternoon after scoring touchdowns, or making a tackle that hurt. They learn that it’s cool to gloat and taunt. How pleasing the Colts’ Marvin Harrison is in his humility. How many little girls watch how pop stars dress and copy them! They watch their “relationships” with either boys or other girls and get ideas about how to behave.
Where did all of us get the idea that it is only natural to want to have as much money as possible and to live as luxuriously as possible? We copy what we see. We see without realizing who we’re looking at. Mary is worth looking at deliberately. Don’t be misled by the passive, pathetic portraits of many Renaissance painters.
We refer to Mary as “the Virgin Mary,” because Jesus was conceived in a special way. This is not because there is anything wrong with the way every other woman become a mother. In fact, Matthew tells us that Joseph “knew her not until she had born a son.” This suggests that after Jesus was born, Joseph and Mary shared the kind of joy God intends husbands and wives to have, and probably had other children.
But it is not beside the point for us to notice in our day when sex has become simply a means of pleasure or like a handshake or a hug, that sexual intimacy needs to be saved for its rightful place in life. We are painfully aware of how sexual intimacy outside of marriage has caused disastrous harm in the spread of STDs, and in the process, planting suspicion in peoples’ minds about the diseases that might lurk in the one they will marry. Many babies are born who do not deserve the stigma of being born out of wedlock, or worse, are unwanted. Things have simply gotten out of hand. Something very wonderful God has given to us is being desecrated, and it’s spreading incalculable harm in many ways. That Mary was a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus reminds us that God’s plan for us was that marriage is the right place for sexual intimacy. Restraint may be the finest way to display affection, when the laws of God come up against our strong feelings. Mary and Joseph loved each other, but they loved to obey God first.
But there’s more than this about Mary. She was not merely resigned to being a Mother of a child who would bring her sorrow at how He would be treated. She was actively a participant in Jesus’ life. We see her not only caring for Jesus tenderly as a baby, we see her at the foot of the cross. We see her at the beginning, then at Cana of Galilee, and at another time in between, and finally at the cross. All of this suggests how closely she followed Jesus. Yet we don’t usually think of her as a follower of Jesus, a disciple –– as was Mary Magdalene, or Mary of Bethany.
Her special relationship to Jesus never in the Gospels becomes a reason for being treated in any special way. Mary is genuinely humble, and not in the least touchy. What a blessing it would be to the Church to have us all study Mary’s reserve, her participation in Jesus’ life, her humility, and her untouchiness.
It has been said, “Christianity is not a spectator sport,” but for how many is Christianity essentially that. It’s a badge to wear, a name to claim. What role might you be playing in the outworking of Jesus’ way in this world? When you think of your gifts, your talents, your personality, what good might happen if you offered yourself to God and said, “Use me.”
Mary’s humility stands out as the most noticeable feature of her character. She reflected the humility of her Son. Of Him Paul wrote, “He emptied Himself. He humbled Himself. He became obedient even unto death.” What boundaries have you drawn around yourself and said, “Thus far and no farther.” “Don’t step on me.”
Mary’s humility was not weak and spineless. Her humility was part of her awareness of her place in life. Her dignity as the God-bearer, as the One to bear in her body, and then to give birth from her body the Savior of the world gave her a purpose she accepted. What value does Mary have for you as you think of her acceptance of her role in life and your accepting your role as reflected in your gifts?
Then, last, I want to emphasize that Mary did not so value herself because of her role that she expected to be treated with special deference. She ponders in her heart what once Jesus said to her that suggests disrespect. “My brothers, sisters, and mother are those who do the will of God.” The Gospel story would read quite differently if Mary promoted her special place in Jesus’ life as a reason she should be treated in a special way. Would that we might see removed from church life, from family life, and from society the inclination to be easily offended? Perhaps we should think that Mary “forgave” Jesus and others when they forgot who she was. Or maybe Mary didn’t have any ideas to begin with of “who she was.” She was just the handmaiden of the Lord. But in this she found plenty of purpose and a good self-image.
So I put before you Mary, the mother of Jesus, whom the Gospels lift up before us as a person worthy to be noticed. Don’t look down on her because overly enthusiastic Christians, reading a Latin translation over many hundreds of years, made more of her than is right. We desperately need to look at some worthwhile models for living. What little we know of Mary is as good as we can find. Let us honor and observe Mary, who was a follower of her Son, even before He was born.
Let us pray: O God, you gave us your Son, born of the Virgin Mary. We thank you for Jesus. We bless you for letting us know of His mother too. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
December 14, 2003
The Gift of the Shepherds
The Gift of the Shepherds
Psalm 30 / Jeremiah 31: 10-14
Luke 2: 8-20
December 14th, 2003
This morning we will be ordaining deacons and elders to serve the Lord specially here at Faith Church. It is a good time to remember the shepherds, the first human beings to report the story of Jesus. Jesus, the first deacon, was “the good Shepherd.” You who become deacons and elders today are shepherds beside me. I am a shepherd, a pastor. It is important that shepherds be faithful. It is vital to have shepherds who are grateful, who have not forgotten the wonder of the Gospel. In becoming a shepherd you become a part of a remarkable story.
Anyone who reads the Christmas story in the Gospel of Luke is fascinated with the role the shepherds play. At first, all they do is get excited when the angel startles them at night, and then show up at the manger. Then they do what most of us do when we see something that grabs us, they went and talked about it. So, what’s the big deal about that? Somehow, we think there is more to the shepherds. And I want to explore this a bit in the coming minutes.
We don’t know how many shepherds there were. Walter Wangerin suggested there were three, one named Simon. Why three? Well, three is an important number in the Bible. You know. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Three in the Christmas story, Joseph, Mary, and baby Jesus. Three wise men. Three kinds of animals--sheep, donkeys, and oxen. So, why not three shepherds. Pretty nifty, a motif!
But this is the kind of subtlety that literary folk look for. You and I are touched by less subtle things. Here are some of the reasons why I think shepherds were there when Jesus was born.
First, we remember that King David, in whose family line Joseph was born, began life as a shepherd. The prophet, Samuel, anointed the shepherd boy to be king of Israel. Thus he honored shepherds at the start of a story that was much bigger than the life of David. David wrote the beloved shepherd psalm, no doubt in wonder, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.”
Second, we remember that the prophets of Israel were referred to as shepherds. Long before Isaiah and the classic prophets, Moses was a shepherd. He was tending sheep when God spoke to him from the burning bush, telling him to lead his people out of Egypt. When he got them out, he chose seventy under-shepherds, like deacons and elders, to help care for them in the wilderness. Israel was Moses’ church. He was pastor. Israel was like a flock of sheep. The church is a flock of sheep too.
The 95th Psalm reminds us “we are the people of God’s pasture, the sheep of His hand.” Isaiah the prophet reminds us how ordinary sheep we are. “All we like sheep have gone astray.” It was the prophets who were God’s under-shepherds to keep and often to bring back the straying sheep of Israel. No wonder then that shepherds knew first about Jesus.
In our OT reading this morning, the prophet Jeremiah reminded us of this great theme. God “will keep Israel as a shepherd keeps his flock.”
Jeremiah echoed the sweet promise of Isaiah, “God will feed his flock like a shepherd, he will gather the lambs in his arms, he will carry them in his bosom, and gently lead those that are with young.” Over and over again the Bible reminds us of shepherds.
Maybe this is why shepherds at Christmas. Maybe this was why shepherds were the first to tell that Jesus was born.
We think of all this when we ponder the place of shepherds in the Christmas story. But shepherds had lost their luster in the time that Jesus was born. This is a third impression of shepherds.
When we look at the cultural climate when Jesus was born, shepherds were no longer seen as little replicas of the Lord, or of Moses, or of Israel’s great King David, or of the prophets. They were seen for what they were, dishonest fellows as apt to rip you off as anything. A little piece I read in a recent Christian magazine reminded me that shepherds were near the bottom of the heap in social status. They often tended flocks belonging to someone else, and would steal newborn lambs or kids. The rabbis forbade buying wool or goat’s milk directly from the shepherds because you’d probably be buying stolen goods. They weren’t allowed to testify in court because their word was not trustworthy. What a change from the glorious image shepherds once had!
Why shepherds then? Don’t we try to up-date our illustrations as we go along? Maybe God was redeeming, buying back the shepherd profession by choosing them to be the first to see the baby Jesus. They would have pride of place in the Christmas story, as Mary Magdalene gets pride of place in the Easter story.
For reasons I don’t know, Mary Magdalene got a reputation in the Church of being a pretty bad woman before meeting Jesus. Maybe you read the Newsweek article a couple weeks ago that challenged this view of her. But something happened in her life that made her stand out in her love for Jesus above everyone else. Maybe Jesus trusted her when others did not trust her. Maybe Jesus accepted her when others despised her, and she never forgot. Maybe she was forgiven much, and she realized it, and so she loved Jesus much because of it. Everyone else failed Jesus—all his disciples, his closest friends. But Mary Magdalene stuck closer than a sister.
Mary saw that Jesus was more than an interesting and unusual rabbi. Maybe when she met him, her life was in a tailspin. When Jesus cared for her, she found her life coming together again, and she was grateful. Without gratitude Christianity dissolves into a system, just a religious system. Mary Magdalene became a model of gratitude for all of us who are apt to forget that gratitude is rightfully the first response to Jesus. Mary was there last at the cross and she was the first at the tomb on Easter morning. She immediately told the disciples.
Maybe God did for the shepherds what Jesus did for Mary. He honored what they had been and what they could be by entrusting them with the Good News of Jesus first. They would be grateful because they knew they were needy. The trust God placed in them lifted them above the place to which they had fallen. Trust is redeeming. Gratitude is transforming.
God’s plans make sense. Broken people who are made whole are grateful. Grateful people tell of their gratitude. God chose despised shepherds for a reason. That chilly night, when the lonely shepherds huddled together, taking turns keeping watch, God interrupted their ordinary, miserable little lives by honoring them first. God’s order of things is opposite ours. We check out the credentials first. That’s not God’s way. He chooses people we would not choose. He honors people we would not honor. Either God or we are mixed up.
God wanted the neediest people of all to hear first that a Savior was born. Only those who know they are needy find interest in the term “Savior.”
“Savior” has become a religious term for a lot of people today. It is possible to say “Jesus is Savior and Lord” and have it mean less than to say, “Abraham Lincoln was president.” Lincoln evokes such beloved images in us—his humble birth, his Gettysburg Address, his Emancipation Proclamation, his tragic assassination. He did so much to shape what is best about the idealism of being American. While to say “Jesus is Savior” may evoke very little in you. Unless you think you need a Savior, what does it matter that Jesus was “Savior?”
Maybe the Shepherds didn’t know what this new-born baby would save them from, but they had a lot of things they hoped he might save them from—from their dangerous hard job, or from the oppressive Romans. They didn’t like being typecast as dishonest, grubbing out a living in a way that made people despise them. How good to find a Savior!
The shepherds were the first ones to spread the word about Jesus. Sometimes they are thought of as the first missionaries—just before the Samaritan woman, another despised person who wondered at Jesus’ kindness to her. At the beginning the shepherds did what Jesus told his twelve disciples to do at the end—“Go into all the world and proclaim the Good News.” Why did God chose the least believable kind of people to tell such important news?
We make important announcements where it will have most effect. Let reporters from the Journal and Courier be present when a large gift is announced to Purdue’s building program. Let reporters from the Indianapolis Star be present when I announce I’m running for governor. Let the cameras of CNN, NBC, ABC, and CBS be present when I announce for the presidency. Why? Because these will get the message out, and their stature as the media’s big guns will call attention to my importance.
Why start with dishonest shepherds to get an important story going? We probably wouldn’t have, but God did. And people listened. Luke says that everyone who heard wondered at what the shepherds told them.
What does “wondered” mean? Maybe people wondered because it seemed odd for shepherds to show up in the market place excited about the birth of a baby. Excitement for whatever reason attracts attention. They were not public speakers, but they spoke with animation, and people wondered that maybe it was really true that angels appeared to them the night before, and that they’d seen a newborn baby of extraordinary significance.
The response that should come whenever people hear the Gospel is wonderment. How strange the Gospel is. A baby born to a virgin mother? A loving Jesus, beloved by thousands of common people tortured to death by crucifixion? He didn’t deserve that. Imagine this Jesus becoming alive again on the third day afterward! Imagine this Jesus coming again to reclaim a broken and fallen world? What a strange set of ideas! If you and I tell this story right, it has to produce wonder. If you and I tell it matter of fact it will produce no wonder at all. It will be less interesting than about anything you could say because what is more boring than religion?
Religions in all their variety are a hodge-podge of superstitions perpetuated by people on the make, hoping to build a private empire, or to goad folk to fork over their hard-earned money. One of the earliest Christian documents written after the Twelve Apostles died warns that if anyone comes around saying he speaks for Jesus and then asks you for money, have nothing to do with him.
What the shepherds said had no mercantile interest to it. In amazement they said, “We heard angels tell us a Savior was born in Bethlehem. We went there. We saw the child. A child was this savior! Seeing this child struck us like we’ve never been struck before.” There was excitement in their faces. There was joy in their hearts. There was conviction in their voices. People wondered at what the shepherds told them. Maybe the shepherds’ wonder, their amazement was the gift they brought to the world. They offered their wonder at the manger, where we imagine the only gifts were the gold, frankincense and myrrh of the Magi.
We never hear of the shepherds again. I don’t even know legends about them. The church was very creative in its legends, but they didn’t make up any about the shepherds—that I know of. We don’t know how their lives changed after the first Christmas night. Did they change as Ebenezer Scrooge changed? Did they become honest, starting the transforming of their profession? That would make a good story.
All we know is what the shepherds did that night, and this is enough. Poor shepherds heard, were amazed, went to see, then went to tell. They produced wonder in all who heard them. You are my friends, my fellow Christians. Hear the story as though you’ve not heard it before. Be amazed. Come closer to see. And if your heart is stirred, when you say anything about it from your heart, people may wonder at what you say. Wonder is so productive and so rare. It is how God begins the work of changing the human heart.
You who are elders and deacons, and who will be ordained to this shepherding task, join with your forebears in the Christmas story. You who have heard the story, join the shepherds. Come, see the thing that God has brought to pass, and the babe, lying in the manger. Be amazed. What you see will still produce wonder if your heart has been stirred that all of this was for your sake, because you need it. Gratitude and wonder are a potent mix, a terrific potion for healing a wounded soul.
Let us pray: O Lord God, thank you for the birth of Jesus that first Christmas night. And thank you for letting the shepherds know first. And thank you that telling what they saw produced wonder in those who heard. Help us to wonder too. We pray in the name of the infant Jesus’ name, who then died, and rose again for us. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
December 07, 2003
Did Jesus’ Heredity Matter?
Did Jesus’ Heredity Matter?
Psalm 89: 1-4, 19-37 / I Samuel 16: 1-13
Luke 2: 1-7
December 7th, 2003
Every year we remember that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, the City of David. He was born there because His mother and Joseph were told to go there by a Roman governor. It was census time and no matter how inconvenient, if this was your birthplace, you had to go back home to be registered. Bethlehem was Joseph’s birthplace. He was engaged to Mary. Though they had not been intimate, Mary was expecting a child. It was a special act of God in her that was explained beforehand to them both. To be engaged in those days was equivalent to being married, legally speaking. Since Bethlehem was Joseph’s birthplace both of them had to go there to be registered.
So in a remarkable unfolding of the plan of God, a great good came from a great inconvenience to an unmarried young woman who was due to bring forth a child. Joseph, a kindly carpenter from Nazareth, had to be in Bethlehem be exactly at the time when Mary was about to give birth to a son. Bethlehem was called the city of David, but it was really only a very tiny little village. And so we are introduced to a very interesting and important byway in the story of the heredity of Joseph and Jesus. Or was it a byway?
The prophet , Micah, who lived 800 years before said something about Bethlehem as he longed for God to keep a promise He had made to King David. “O Bethlehem Ephrathah, who are little to be among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days.” The attention focused on tiny Bethlehem. Why insignificant little Bethlehem, smaller than Otterbein? Because this was the little village in which a shepherd boy named David had been born a thousand years earlier. Here would be born a baby “whose origin is from of old, from ancient days.” What an odd thing to say of a baby.
Lois read for us about the shepherd boy, David, and Bethlehem. God told Samuel, the great prophet to go to Bethlehem to choose a replacement king for King Saul. King Saul hadn’t the heart to lead Israel. God saw what nobody would have guessed, that in the fields outside Bethlehem a fine looking lad had a heart that pleased God.
This shepherd boy went on to be Israel’s greatest King, King David. We read in the 89th Psalm God’s promise to David. “I will establish your descendants forever, and build your throne for all generations . . . like the moon [your throne] will be established for ever; it shall stand firm while the skies endure.”
But after King David died, things didn’t go well for Israel. It was divided by civil war. Then both parts of the divided nation were taken into captivity, one after the other. While the descendants of David kept on coming, there was no king that anyone could see in Jerusalem. Surely most of David’s descendants had no idea their forbear was a great king. No one kept track of niceties like this in exile. What happened to God’s promise to David?
Time rolled on sadly for the descendants of King David. Joseph, a craftsman, the husband of the Virgin Mary, was born in the same city as his famous ancestor, King David. I wonder if he knew he was a descendant of the great king, or just from the tribe of Judah. If he did, it must have given him little joy when he traveled south from his home up near the Sea of Galilee to his ancestral village for the census. What good did royal heredity do him? He had no idea that a great plan was unfolding in his awkward situation. He mostly wondered, “How can Mary stand to be jostled by that donkey ride sixty long miles down to Bethlehem?” But they made it—in the knick of time. And a baby was born to her in a stable outside a little inn in Bethlehem. Matthew tells us that Joseph named the baby “Jesus.”
Part of the oddness and importance of this story is that Joseph was not Jesus’ father. Joseph was from the same tribe as King David, the tribe of Judah, but Mary seems to have been from the tribe of Levi. Mary’s cousin, Elizabeth, was wife of a priest, and priests could only marry women from the tribe of Levi. So Jesus was not physically from the tribe of Judah. Legally he was from Judah, but by birth he was not. All of the promises of the Old Testament pointed to the man who was Jesus’ legal father, but Jesus physical descent did not come through King David. What’s going on? It is as though God is writing a mystery and is distracting us with a diversion in the plot. All eyes turn to the physical seed of David. No one guesses how God will bring the story’s plot to conclusion.
Two things are going on, I believe.
First, I remember God’s promise to an ancestor even farther back than King David, Abraham. “In your family all nations of the earth would be blessed.” God loved the whole world, and not just the family of Abraham or David.
Second, it was important to show how this blessing of the whole world was provided within a framework of God’s promise to King David. His legal family line carried the promise that would be fulfilled for the whole world.
The Bible tells us a lot about the family lines that led up to Abraham and then that came after him. Genesis 5 tells us about the family line between Adam and Eve, our first parents, and Noah. Then Genesis 11 tells us the line between Noah and Abraham. We then see how the family story narrows down to the descendants of Abraham’s grandson, Jacob. It begins to seem that God only cares about one little fork in the genealogical tree from Adam, the children of Jacob, grandson of Abraham.
But as the story unfolds we see that things don’t go well with the descendants of Jacob. In fact, they are scattered from their homeland. Most people who were born from the Jewish heritage forgot what tribe they were from. This forgetfulness was a needful part of the unfolding story.
Really only one tribe was important to the story, the tribe of Judah. Why Judah?
We look back at the blessings Jacob gave to Judah on his deathbed way back when they were still in Egypt. Jacob said to his sons, “The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet, until he comes to whom it belongs, and to him shall be the obedience of the peoples.” All the sons gathered around their father’s deathbed must have wondered what that meant. It was an important thread in God’s weaving the tapestry of history.
None of us can see the thread of God’s work. We always see outward things. God’s work takes place usually behind the scenes.
More than a thousand years later the pertinence of that cryptic promise came about. In a tiny village in the south of Palestine, a baby was born to a young Jewish woman, engaged to a man born into the family line of Judah. And this baby boy was Jesus. The Apostle Paul looked at Jesus and remembered the words of Isaiah the prophet, “To him every knee will bow, and every tongue confess that he is Lord.” He held the scepter of which Jacob spoke, a scepter with gracious authority over all nations, not just over Israel.
One of the reasons we keep track of genealogies is to find out where we come from. But there is another aspect to keeping track of bloodlines. If you happen to come from a distinguished bloodline, there is an element of pride you have in it. When the royal family of England checks out potential wives and husbands for its children, they look to see their ancestry. Prince Philip of Greece was suitable for Queen Elizabeth II because he was descended from Queen Victoria. If you or I have a famous ancestor, we may casually bring it up in a conversation. We’re proud of it.
But nobody can claim Jesus as her ancestor, and everyone can. Because his Father was not from one family, but from the One who created all families of the earth. In a way the birth story of Jesus is a commentary on John 3: 16. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever trusts in him may have eternal life.” Jesus was Mary’s firstborn son, but he was God’s only begotten son. That is, Jesus was the only person on earth born by a special act of God. So Jesus could be a blessing to all the nations of the earth. No nation, not even the Jewish people, can lay special claim on Jesus. Every nation can. Jesus came to be a blessing to all people. John writes in his Gospel, those who receive Jesus are born [spiritually], “not of bloods . . . but by the will of God.” Jesus was born the same way physically.
Whereas a lot is told us about Joseph’s ancestry, nothing is written about Mary’s. Both Matthew and Luke give Joseph’s descent, Matthew from Abraham, and Luke from Adam. But none of the Gospels tell us anything about Mary’s forbears. One of the Apocryphal Gospels tell us her mother was Anna, and her father, Joachim. But this is only legend.
There is a reason for Jesus’ mother being this otherwise unknown girl who happened to live in the town of Nazareth. Isaiah, the prophet, asked, “As for his generation, who shall declare that he was cut off from the land of the living?” He wrote of Jesus, who would bear in his body the sins of the world. He was related to everyone and nobody that anyone could identify.
He was like the mysterious King Melchizedek mentioned in the Book of Genesis. He is called “priest of the God Most High.” The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament quotes the psalm that refers to this mysterious king, without genealogy and without descendants, and tells us that this was none other than Jesus, who came to Abraham at a weary moment in his life. These things sound strange and mysterious to us, but face it, how could God’s blessing of the inhabitants of this troubled world seem anything but mysterious?
But the point is not mysterious that you and I are to understand. God used the people of Israel, and one family in this nation in particular, to carry the blood line by which the promise to Abraham would be fulfilled. But when the time came to give this blessing, to give us Jesus, suddenly the human heredity mysteriously disappears. Why? Because if Jesus’ heredity didn’t disappear, then God’s blessing could have been uniquely claimed by the Jewish people. The blessing was for everyone, not just for the Jews.
The blessing of Jesus plays out for everyone in many ways. Paul tells us, “In Him all things hold together.” What does Paul mean by “all things?” I believe Paul is writing not just about great things, like the universe, but about the very details of your life and mine. Your life, whoever you are, whether rich or poor, of noble birth or of humble birth, regardless of your race, regardless of whether life is easy or hard for you now, holds together in Jesus.
Jesus could not be claimed by Mary’s family in any unique way. Furthermore, the reason why Jesus did not get married, as a recent popular novel has proposed, is that if Jesus had got married and had children, they could claim special favors as descended from him. Instead, God has adopted you and me, if we have trusted in Jesus, so that God sees you and me as brothers and sisters of Jesus. Nobody can claim Jesus as father, but in Him, all have the right to call Him “brother.” We are, as Paul puts it, “heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.”
We sometimes hear the plea, “Keep Christ in Christmas.” Folks, you can’t keep Christ out of Christmas, try as you may. How wonderful it would be, if at this Christmas time, when your heart is tenderized by the beauty of sights and sounds, that you would pause and humbly begin to acknowledge all of your life holds together in this Jesus. Trusting in Jesus means seeing all of your life’s importance in terms of this Jesus whom your Creator mysteriously sent to make your life hold together. If this is true, give your life to finding and doing what pleases Him.
Your life and mine is like a vapor, a bit of steam that arises from a teakettle and dissolves in the air. But if your heart, the center of your life finds its deliberate focus in Jesus, there is purpose to your vaporous life. You will not dissolve in the thin air.
As we gather around the Table this morning that commemorates the purpose of all of this of which I’ve been speaking—that this child of Mary and God should die in order that we may live, bow and quietly, humbly open your heart and determine to make Jesus become the focus of your life. Let us pray: O Lord God, our Creator and friend, thank you for sending us Jesus. Help us to receive him. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)