No Time Like The Present Series

As far back as I can remember, I’ve known about Jesus. Everyone one of us here probably grew up hearing about Jesus, am I right? We heard about Him in church, in Sunday School. We listened to sermons about Him. We read about Him in the Bible when we got older.

But here’s the thing … even if you didn’t grow up in a Christian home, you heard about Jesus … somehow … somewhere. Whether a person is a Christian or not, they know the name of Jesus. They know something about Him … even if it’s only from the familiar, often-told “Christmas Story” in the Gospels. They’ve heard about Joseph and Mary. They know that the inn was full and that Jesus had to be born in a manger or a stable and why. They know that there were some angels and shepherds involved. Maybe they know about the magi and their gifts … maybe not.

I mean, it’s pretty hard NOT to see pictures or depictions of the Christmas story this time year, am I right? From shows and movies on TV … songs on the radio … manger scenes and cut-out figures on front lawns … Christmas cards depicting the birth of the Holy Christ child in a manger surrounded by Mary and Joseph and animals and angels and shepherds and three magi or wise men … which is why what I’m about to ask you to do might be … well … impossible … even if you have a really, really good imagination.

I want you to try and imagine what it was like to live before Jesus was born. What would you know about God? What would you picture? What would come to mind? Since our roots are in the Jewish tradition, we would see God as huge … all powerful … omnipotent … and, most of all, holy.

We would picture Him as a column of fire or a tornado. We would picture Him as a fierce thundercloud covering a mountain or filling the Temple … His voice so loud that it sounded like thunder and earthquakes and a thousand waterfalls all at once. To look upon Him … to see His face … is more than our human minds can handle. To come into His holy presence was fraught with fear and grave danger.

When God brought His people to His holy mountain to enter into a covenant with them, they had to be consecrated. They had to wash their bodies and their clothes … remove any filth or impurity in order to be able to stand in the Presence of a Holy God. Even then they could only stand at the foot of God’s holy mountain. If they so much as touched it, they would die … and if anyone died on God’s holy mountain the people could not go on to the mountain and retrieve their body … just as they couldn’t go into the Holy of Holies to retrieve the priest’s body but had to pull it out using a cord tied to the priest’s ankle. Like the people before God’s holy mountain, the priests had to fast, sacrifice, and bath for weeks to purify themselves before they could enter God’s Presence in the Holy of Holies … a very fearful and possibly fatal thing to do. When Moses asked God if he could see His face, God denied his request, explaining: “no one may see me and live" (Exodus 33:20). Wow! Understandable … but still, wow! … amen?

Sometimes it’s easy to think of God as distant … somewhere way “up” there … far removed from any of the worries and woes that we mortals have to struggle with here on earth. We picture God as somewhere “way up there” in some place that we can’t see or reach … like the heavens or a mountain top or behind a curtain in the Holy of Holies.

What does God … immortal, omnipotent, and eternal … know of our lives? How can Yahweh … El Shaddai … Adonai … relate to what we puny little human go through down here? What does God know about having an empty belly and no money to buy food? What does God know about lying awake at night worrying about paying the bills? What does God know about being afraid? What does God know about being sick or in pain? What does God know about being lonely? What does God know about the pain of losing a loved one? What does God know about being sore and bone-tired from working in the fields all day or guarding sheep all night? What does God know about being oppressed and discriminated against? What does God know about being chased out of town because you’re weird or different? What does God know about being mocked and ridiculed for His belief? What does the great and all-powerful God in Heaven know about any of this? How can the Great “I AM” relate to us or what we go through here on earth? [Pause.]