Where the Light Comes From

     This is the sign of a good sermon. It makes me write things down-- not notes exactly, but thoughts triggered by the content. Good books do this to me too. In this sermon about the Magnificat, Pastor Bill started out talking about the fluff that surrounds Christmas, like the feel-good songs about chestnuts and sleigh bells and home for Christmas that never mention Jesus. He plays them for his granddaughters, and they dance. Sweet.
     Did you know the Japanese decorate for Christmas as extravagantly as Americans, even though they have one of the smallest percentages of Christian believers in the world? So what do they have? Sparkly stuff, warm feelings, lights, fun. Scraps. Like crumbs under the table. Nice, as far as they go, but still scraps. 
     Mary's soul "glorifies the Lord." His glory is more than light. It's the essence of His being, which is real and dense and inexhaustible. (Cue Handel: "And the glory,the glory of the Lord, shall be revealed.") What surrounds that glory, what emanates from it, is beautiful and pleasant. In God's economy, even the scraps can be beautiful. Ice floes in Alaska have a stunning heart of ethereal blue that transfixes the eye. They are scraps that fall from the glaciers. Seashells riot with color and shape. I can't resist picking them up and taking a few home. They are scraps left over when their inhabitants die. 
     The ice floe melts. The shells I can keep, but what if I'd never seen the sea? And what if I'd seen all the Christmas lights, but never knew the one from Whom all good things emanate? Ultimately the sights and sounds are only disturbances in the air, and if that is all I know, then I have nothing. I can grab at more and more and more, but it has no more substance than the air. There is one who is the prince of its power. He wants us to focus only on the images and never on the real. "Don't look for the source. This is all there is," he insists. 
     No. Follow the light, the music, the joy, the love, the dancing children. Here is the source, the one true Lord, born a baby in Bethlehem and laid in a manger. Very God of very God. The light of the world. Jesus. 

A Series of Providential Events

 First came a note from a young man we've known since he was a wee thing. He's come to birthday parties and assorted young-people hangouts at our house, he's cut our grass, and we've taught him in Sunday school. We've watched him become a leader and always tried to encourage him. He wrote us a thank-you note. How many recent college grads do that? My husband handed it to me on the way home from church. I could scarcely get through a sentence without saying "Awwwww" and pressing the card to my chest. What a gift!
Then I was walking through Publix, snapping up the last requirements for Christmas dinner, and saw a young man walking toward me on the arm of a woman I suppose was his mother. He may have had a syndrome with a name, something that gave him small stature and an oddly triangular face that came to a wedge shape at the front. A web of thoughts zipped around my mind: "Poor fellow. It must be hard for him to connect with other people. But good that these days his mother takes him out instead of hiding him away. And there's a human being in there." I smiled at him. As I passed, he reached out and squeezed and patted my arm. The next thing I did was look up and say, "That was one of Yours, wasn't it?" What a gift!
Hanging around in the kitchen, my granddaughter Anna said, "You wanna hear what would be awesome?" Just to be silly, I said, "Nah, I hate awesome." She said, "But then you'd have to hate yourself." I hugged her. What a gift!
Cars? Diamonds? You can keep 'em. I'll take these things any day. 

Life, Death, Christmas

Christmas was a little death for Jesus. Not a theme you want to highlight in the kids’ pageant, but it’s a conclusion I couldn’t avoid in Wednesday night Bible study as we discussed some similarities in circumstances surrounding His birth and His burial.

Jesus allowed Himself to be a baby, helpless in the hands of His parents, who wrapped Him tightly in strips of cloth and laid Him in a manger (a feeding-trough bed for the One who became the bread of life.)  At His death, His friends wrapped Him tightly in strips of cloth and laid Him in a tomb, a cave carved in the rock. Many believe the stable of His birth was also a cave. One of the gifts the Magi brought was myrrh. Joseph of Arimathea used many pounds of myrrh and other spices in Jesus’ grave wrappings.

We celebrate in December, but if the shepherds were out in the fields, it may well have been spring, when lambs destined for sacrifice in the temple were born, the time of the Passover. How fitting that the Lamb of God might have been born at the same time. When the shepherds, lowly workers, heard that the Savior was born, they ran all the way to Bethlehem to find Him. What the angels told them was true! They went home rejoicing. When the disciples heard that Jesus had risen from the dead, they ran to the tomb. An angel told them that He was no longer there. Everything He had told them was true! Men who had been in hiding, beaten and terrified, now became brave, willing to be martyred for their risen Lord.

Prophecies, angelic announcements and portents in the sky heralded both His birth and His death. Each was a pivotal moment in human history, and each saw Jesus moving from one world to another. We talk about His entering Heaven in glory, but we don’t talk so much about what it meant for the eternal Son of God, creator of the universe, second Person of the Trinity, to leave that perfect realm in the first place.  Angels (at the sight of which, humans are often terrified, or tempted to worship) praised and honored Him continually, covering their faces in humility. In our realm, people would call Him crazy and try to push Him over a cliff. In the end, they crucified Him.

It’s in Philippians 2, how God Himself took the form of a servant, humbling Himself in obedience, even to the point of death on the cross. He left honor and power and prerogatives behind. Omnipotent God became a man. That’s a little death. Hebrews 10:5 shows us that He knew from the beginning what He faced. “When He came into the world, He said ‘… a body You have prepared for Me… I have come to do Your will, O God.’” And human beings would be “sanctified  through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.” A little death, a new life. An earth-shaking death, new life for millions. Now that's a gift.

Merry Christmas to Me

A pair of leaves atop a twig twirled in the air like a toy helicopter. It was shady, but a beam of sun spotlighted this bit of fall (in December, in Florida) as I drove past. I marveled at the momentary spectacle, staged, apparently, just for me. People often say when they gaze at the expanse of the night sky that it makes them feel “small” or “insignificant,” but I react to stars and sunsets and mountain  ranges just as I reacted to that tawny whirligig: thanking God for putting it all in place just for me.

Think a lot of myself, don’t I? Well, not exactly. I’m undeniably a crummy sinner, and nobody owes me a thing, but the Creator of the universe is like a dad to me. He’s adopted me, made me an heir and promised me the world. Now, that’s significant. He created nations and families and individuals, including some who left their home countries for America, and put them all in the right place at the right time to produce me. Long before that, He decided to love me, save me from my own flaws, and make me part of His kingdom, sensed dimly for now, but one day to be splendidly realized on this earth.

As a loving father, He sent His own Son to make it all sure. He was born on the earth, the event we celebrate at Christmas. He was crucified to pay our debts and redeem the whole world from the curse placed on it after Adam’s sin. He rose again from the dead to prove that He is God, that death has no more power over His people. No more power over this person. Me. That’s quite a gift. That’s mighty significant. I owe Him a mighty long thank-you note.

Listen, Annie, Listen

    I like Annie Lennox's Christmas album so much, I've bought more than a dozen copies to give to friends. She says in her liner notes that she grew up singing the traditional carols, that they've "accompanied" her life. But, somehow, she sings them splendidly without actually listening to them. I know she doesn't hear them because she writes that "the word Christ... could just as easily be 'Buddha' or 'Allah.'" No, Annie, it really couldn't.

    "Carols tell ancient stories," she wrote. Truly, they tell only one story, very specific in detail and quite impossible to equate with the tale of any other religious figure. Angels who were present at the creation of the universe "now proclaim Messiah's birth," the advent of the Anointed One, the Christ, the One on Whom God's Spirit descended like a dove, and of Whom the Father said, "This is My Son." This happened to Jesus when His cousin John baptized Him. It happened in a particular place and time, and to no one else. 

    Generations had awaited His appearance, "promised from eternal years." They knew He would be born to a virgin. They knew He would be born in Bethlehem. Prophets reminded them of the promise, and they encouraged each other to remember and hope and watch. Even in Babylon, "the East," wise men, magi, awaited His birth. Men of their office, taught originally by Daniel, chief of the magi, had passed the prophecy down through four centuries. They knew when to start looking, and they followed the brilliant light in the sky. It led them to the Child, "the King of Israel."  "Il est ne', le divin Enfant;" does anyone sing such a song about Buddha or Mohammed? Did any king send soldiers to kill them in infancy? Which of them came as "God with man... now residing"? Which of them "with His blood mankind has bought"? 

    We still sing these carols because Jesus sacrificed Himself on the cross to pay for our sins and to redeem the world. The songs are not about an ideal or a force or a principle. They are about a Person, the God/man, Who was born, lived, died and rose from the dead to purchase our way into a perfect world filled with the "love and compassion... empathy, harmony and respect for each other" that Annie Lennox and so many others long for. We can't do it on our own. He has done it for us. So we keep singing the story, the amazing, beautiful, incredible, impossible story,  because it is real. Because it is true. Annie? Everyone? Do you hear?