Tonight, I’d like to share an autobiographical account written by a man named Steve Hugo about his childhood and his next door neighbor.
For as far back as I can remember, I always treated Old Man Jones, my neighbor, in the worst ways. Each April 1st, I had the "burning paper bag with dog poop in it " tradition, and even though Old Man Jones never fell for it, he still had a gross pile to remove from his front stairs! He always knew that it was me, and always said, without anger in his voice, "Someday, you’ll be sorry. "
His driveway was next to ours and in the winter, I always shoveled our snow onto his drive, giving him twice the work. He never did get a snow blower, but when I was 12, just before a blizzard, one appeared in my driveway, with a note saying, "You might need this! " I could now delight in blowing all the snow from my driveway, and most of my front yard, onto Old man Jones’s car. I would even cut a wider than needed path for my mom’s car just to put more snow on the dinosaur’s driveway. (That’s what my mom always called him: "the Dinosaur.") He always knew that it was me and always said without anger in his voice, "Someday, you’ll be sorry. "
I keyed his car more than once. When I discovered the mint 1969 Mustang Mach series car that always stayed under a thick canvas cover, kept for someone, I quickly sought to learn how many pumps of my BB rifle it took send the metal orb through its windows. It took all ten allowed pumps. He knew that it was me and said without anger in his voice, "Someday, you’ll be sorry. "
Between my vandal’s rifle and slingshot, most of his home’s windows had to be replaced at one time or another, not to mention the battered aluminum siding that still bears the myriad of little dents. He never complained about the shattered bird feeder or the constant supply of dead squirrels, sparrows, cardinals and whatever else winged its way into his yard. I do remember the tenderness that he buried the vermin with, though. I can’t recall how many times he had to take his cat to the vet to remove a pellet from an infected wound, but I do remember that he always knew that it was me, and always said, without anger in his voice, "Someday, you’ll be sorry. "
At Christmas-time he used to set up lots of lights around his house that looked like virtual BB magnets, which they were. A plastic manger scene was the prime target one year, and stayed on the relic’s front lawn until I shot the baby’s face off. He knew that it was me and said without anger in his voice, "Someday, you’ll be sorry. "
There was this room in his house that I would look into sometimes when the old man was away. It was the kind of room that I would have loved to have, if my mom could ever get a real job. It was just like one of those "Good Housekeeping” kid’s bedroom that everybody is supposed to want. I always figured that Jones was on the loony side, and this "keeping a cool room for a kid he didn’t have " thing was the final proof that I needed of his senility. I never shot that window out.
My mom and I never much in the money department, but every year, on Christmas, a couple hundred dollars worth of cool stuff was left on my doorstep with "Merry Christmas" and my name written on each carefully wrapped gift. (That’s where the BB gun came from, along with a great target setup, which was never needed with the shooting range next door.) My mom, too hung over each Christmas morning to get me up early enough to meet the Gift Bearer, said that the stuff probably came from my grandfather, whom she hadn’t cared to talk to or see since long before I came around. There had been some long remembered fight over his "interference" in her affairs, of which there were many. I had never seen him and really didn’t even know or care where he lived, so long as the goodies came.
One Christmas, I got up early on my own because I thought that I might want to see what my ancestor looked like, not to mention that I was hoping for BB’s from my benefactor, ’cause Old Man Jones had just gotten a new bird feeder with "unbreakable " glass in it, and my Daisy was calling my name before the sun was up.
I was still rubbing sleep from my eyes, when I heard a soft shuffling on the porch. As I quietly opened the front door, the rising sun reflected off of an armload of carefully wrapped presents, in silver and gold paper, each with "Merry Christmas" and my name written on it. The arms were still holding the gifts, but the face was hidden by a tall package. The obscured gift bearer was unaware that I had opened the door, until he carefully put the gifts down. Startled, Old Man Jones stood up stiffly and with moistened eyes and broken voice said, "Merry Christmas."
"Someday" had come, and Old Man Jones could have never been more right.
Even those who fail to recognize the significance of the incarnation of Jesus would probably agree that this account of Steve Hugo’s life reflects the “spirit of Christmas” – whatever they might believe that to be. But as I first read that account, I was struck by how many parallels that there are between that account and a parable that Jesus told less than one week before He went to the cross. Mark records this parable in chapter 12 of his gospel account:
1 And he began to speak to them in parables. “A man planted a vineyard and put a fence around it and dug a pit for the winepress and built a tower, and leased it to tenants and went into another country. 2 When the season came, he sent a servant to the tenants to get from them some of the fruit of the vineyard. 3 And they took him and beat him and sent him away empty-handed. 4 Again he sent to them another servant, and they struck him on the head and treated him shamefully. 5 And he sent another, and him they killed. And so with many others: some they beat, and some they killed. 6 He had still one other, a beloved son. Finally he sent him to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ 7 But those tenants said to one another, ‘This is the heir. Come, let us kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.’ 8 And they took him and killed him and threw him out of the vineyard. 9 What will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the tenants and give the vineyard to others. 10 Have you not read this Scripture:
“‘The stone that the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone;
11 this was the Lord’s doing,
and it is marvelous in our eyes’?”
12 And they were seeking to arrest him but feared the people, for they perceived that he had told the parable against them. So they left him and went away.
Mark 12:1-12 (ESV)
For most of us, this is not a passage that we usually associate with Christmas. We normally read the account in Luke that describes Mary and Joseph going to Bethlehem to give birth to Jesus and the associated activities of the shepherds and the angels. Or we read Matthew’s account of the magi visiting Jesus, probably a couple of years later, to worship Him and present gifts. Or, like we did last year, we focus on the first chapter of John where he describes how God became flesh at the incarnation.
And for the most part, most of the world doesn’t really even mind us giving attention to those events. In most places, it’s still OK to have a display of a manger scene in public places or to put up decorations that include angels. For most people, that isn’t very threatening, because it seems pretty harmless to focus on a cute little baby in a manger with shepherds and animals gathered around.
But in this parable, Jesus not only reveals the reason and the need for the incarnation, He also very clearly points out our role in that process and our need to make a personal decision about how we are going to respond to God based on the incarnation of Jesus. In fact, many people today are just like the religious leaders to whom Jesus addressed this parable. They fear what will happen to them, so they just flee.
In this parable, the tenants of the land are not all that different than Steve Hugo. Because they were not thankful for the gifts they had been given, they became greedy and even persecuted the servants of the one who had given the gifts. Jesus is obviously referring here to the prophets who God had continuously sent to His people throughout history. Not only had those prophets confronted Israel about their sin, but they also consistently gave evidence that God was going to send His own Son as a servant who would take away their sins. But the people continually rejected those servants and it was if God said, “Someday you’ll be sorry…”
So finally after this had gone on over and over, the owner of the vineyard sent his very own son. But rather than respecting that son, the tenants decided that they would make out even better if they just killed the son and then they would inherit the entire vineyard. But they quickly discovered the folly of their own plan. Someday was now here and they were indeed sorry because they ended up with nothing.
You see, in a sense, all of us here tonight are Steve Hugo. All of us are those tenants. Although God, in His goodness, has kept showering us with good gifts, we have all chosen at some time or other to reject the Giver of those gifts. Rather than doing things God’s way, we chose to do them our way. The Bible calls that sin.
So God sent us one last gift, the most precious gift of all – His very own Son. Jesus humbled Himself and left the glory of heaven and came to this earth and became human flesh in the most humble form possible – that of a helpless little baby. But that baby grew up and lived a sinless life and then willingly gave up His life on the cross to pay the penalty for our sin – for that choice we have made to do things our own way rather than God’s.
If we just relegate the incarnation, the act of God becoming flesh, to the birth of a little baby in a manger, then it really doesn’t require us to do anything with that event. But that birth was only the beginning of a process in which God provided us with what Paul calls an “indescribable gift”. And when we look at the entire process that merely began with the birth of Jesus in a manger in Bethlehem over 2,000 years ago, we are faced with the most important decision we will ever make in our life – are we going to accept the gift that God has provided for us?
Since it is God’s gift to us, God gets to make the rules about how we need to accept that gift. Paul sums up what is required in his letter to the church at Rome:
if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.
Romans 10:9 (ESV)
There are two requirements that Paul lays out in this verse. First, He says that we must believe that God raised Jesus from the dead. In other words, we must move well beyond the birth of a baby in a manger and embrace and trust in the entire process that saw Jesus live a sinless life, give up His life on the cross for our sins and then rise from the grave to prove His power over death. We must accept God’s gift to us, not on the basis of our own good works, but rather on what Jesus did for us through His death and resurrection.
Secondly, He says that we must confess Jesus as Lord. The word Lord there means “master” or “boss’ and the idea here is that we give Jesus control of our lives. That implies that we have to acknowledge that we have sinned by doing things our own way rather than God’s way. It means that we need to be genuinely sorry for that sin and that we repent of that sin. To repent of our sin means that we’re not just sorry, but that we’re committed to doing everything we can not to engage in a lifestyle of sin. And the only way we can do that is to yield the control of our life to Jesus.
You see, Old Man Jones was right. Someday, we will all be sorry. If we choose to be sorry right now and repent of our sin and commit our lives to Jesus, then our sorrow will be the catalyst that will lead us to spend eternity in the presence of God, starting right here and now. But if we ignore that sorrow right now, we are going to experience something far worse, just as we saw in the parable of the tenants. If we fail to receive the gift that God has provided for us through His Son Jesus, then we will be excluded from His presence and cast into a place of everlasting punishment. And that sorrow is not something that any of us want to experience.
