Takoma Park Baptist Church, Washington, DC, Nov. 30, 1986, Advent I
One comic strip character aspires to be a writer. His crowning ambition is to write the definitive novel, the bestseller to end all best sellers. And so time and again he sits down at his typewriter, poises his paws (must be awfully hard to type with paws) and begins his inspired writing, “It was a dark and stormy night …” And after so brave a beginning it seems it is not long until he bogs down in a morass of garbled language never able to finish, never able to get anywhere with his story.
But never fear, he will be back; tune in this time next week, for once again the inspiration will strike, the motivation to write will hit, and he will stick a clean sheet of paper in his typewriter, poise his paws, and out it will come again, “It was a dark and stormy night …” But of course the outcome is once again predictable; with the same old beginning, you will get the same old trite, schmaltzy stuff. He needs, more than anything else, a new beginning. There has got to be another way to begin the great American novel, the novel to end all novels, than the hackneyed line, “lt was a dark and stormy night --”
There are times, many times, in our lives, when nothing less than a new beginning will do. There are all sorts of situations in which you and I find ourselves where the only real answer is to start over, to make a new beginning, because once you start with the premises you've been starting with, your course of action is already set, it's already determined. And even though you think that you can start from the same old point one and take a different tack on some problem, it just won't work. What you did at the very beginning determines what will happen thereafter, and so if you don't make a new beginning, you will just keep on ending up in the same mistakes, in the same dead-end roads.
Since we began by thinking about writing, let me illustrate my point by telling you what it's like to sweat great drops of blood over sermons sometimes. Sometimes I look at that text and that basic idea that I outlined weeks or even months ago, and I say, Well, whatever did I have in mind? What could I possibly have expected to do with this idea, with this concept? But I will bravely sit down with pencil and paper and Bible and commentary, and dig in. Well, a couple of hours later you could walk into my study and think there had been a snowstorm; wads of paper scattered to the four walls, reams of discarded beginnings pitched off to the side. When you're being creative you don't worry about mundane things like garbage cans. Fistfuls of my thinning hair scattered among the ruins like autumn leaves, and finally the only thing that will redeem the mess I'm in is to make a new beginning. Sometimes the only thing I can do is to say, in effect, Lord, when you gave me that idea, if it was you who gave it, then you needed to give me the three points and a poem too, because this is just not working. I need a new beginning, because I'll never make anything worthwhile out of the bits and pieces of the old beginning.
I have an idea that many of you have come to junctures in your lives in which it became clear to you that you needed to make a change, a radical change, not just a cosmetic one; a deep-rooted change, not just a superficial one. And essentially it was that you knew that without a new beginning, without starting over, you would end up in the same old pointless rut as before, you would end up in the same old unproductive track. A new beginning was called for.
And so, for example, some decide on a career change. Some see that the job in which they have invested themselves is going nowhere. There is no excitement in it, no vim and vinegar, and so a fresh start is needed. Maybe that means more education, maybe that means retraining. For one friend of mine, that meant leaving his work and living in Thailand for a year, doing something for someone who really needed him, getting his mind and heart ready for a new beginning.
Others see that they need to renegotiate a relationship. Others recognize that the way things have been going with that husband, that wife, that son or that daughter, well, as our cartoon character’s novel would put it, "It was a dark and stormy night!" And so it becomes clear that just trying to build on the way that relationship has worked in the past is so pointless, fruitless that the time has come to say, You and I are going to get honest with one another, you and I are going to re-examine and restart our relationship. Dismiss as much as you can from your memory and your assumptions the way we have been; let's start over, let's begin again. And of course, as many of you know, that’s risky business. When you start over, when you attempt a new beginning in a relationship, it's risky; you may get a divorce out of that. Or you may get somebody running away from home. All kinds of risks are possible. But you may also get exactly what you wanted, exactly what you needed: a new beginning.
The Christian Gospel is a message of a new beginning, of a new beginning made necessary because our old beginning, glorious as it had been, still kept on bogging down in the same old problem, the same tired issues. God had created us, according to the Scriptures, in His image and after His likeness, and the Book of Genesis pronounces his verdict on what he had made: That's good, that’s very good! We were off to a brave and grand beginning. Says Shakespeare's Hamlet, “What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god!” Our Creator got us off to a noble beginning; but the witness of the Scripture is also that each of us has found that we made some mistakes, and we just cannot get off the dime, we just cannot get away from our false starts.
I need not be cryptic anymore; let me speak plainly about all this. We call it sin. Sin is that element in human nature that keeps on hanging us up, keeps on robbing us of our potential, keeps on destroying the finest and best of our efforts. You see, at the heart of the Christian idea of sin is the truth that tells us we cannot just fix this one our own. We cannot look at our lives, and say, well, I'll try to do a little better. No, that won't get it. We cannot deal with the hard-core reality that sin is simply by saying, well, I will clamp a few disciplines on myself, I'll cut down on my drinking and I'll watch my language and I'll get to church more often. No, that won't do it. That won't deal with sin because all those things are simply attempts at starting with the same old beginning and trying to patch it. “It was a dark and stormy night," but you will always bog down if you begin there. You will always bog down and fail if your approach to your life, your sin, is just to patch it up, fix it. No, I say again, there are times when nothing will do but a new beginning. There are times when nothing is sufficient but a fresh start, a new beginning.
And so our God, infinite in mercy, unbounded in love for us, seeing the mire and mess in which we keep on getting stuck, has provided for us that new beginning. Our God, who made us at the outset good, very good, by the word of his creative energy, but who then gave us freedom out of his love for us and had to watch us misuse and abuse that freedom, has spoken his creative word again. And the name of that word, the name of that new beginning, is the Christ, the word made flesh. Listen: In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God; He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through Him, and without him was not anything made that was made.” Words of mystery, words of awe, saying to us that at the very heart of God from the outset of recorded time there was the intent to offer us a new beginning. Our God, you see, acted to lift us out of the tangled world we would create. He planned a radical, decisive act, knowing that the depth of our sin and the intensity of our problem would not permit quick fix solutions. No, here is a radical, far-reaching response. Listen again: The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. The word, God' s creative word, by which heaven and earth and man and woman came into being, has himself taken on our flesh, invaded our time and space, comes to share life as we know life, but to do more than that as well, far more. He comes to offer us a new beginning. He comes as the word made flesh, God's creative energies packaged in a way that we can grasp, a way that we can touch and handle, see and hear. God's word made flesh becomes for us the model, the example, the initiative, from which a new beginning can be born.
Once I was trying desperately to build something: a cabinet, I believe. And I was getting nowhere fast. I had a concept down on paper, and on paper it looked fine. But I just could not translate it into wood, I could not get it to fit right. And when I was just about to give up on it – because after all, I had tried from the same premises, the same old beginning, which was the only one I knew, so many times, but it had never worked out. But then I found that a friend had built a very similar cabinet; the differences were many though it was similar. His cabinet stood straight and tall; mine sagged here and drooped there, a sorry piece of work. His cabinet was strong enough to hold almost any weight; mine would have collapsed under the weight of six feathers and a paper plate. His cabinet looked neat and tidy; mine you wanted to cover with contact paper to hid the hammer dents and the bent-over nails. And you know what? I found that it was not that I had followed my plans incorrectly; it was that I needed a new plan, a new beginning. And it was not that I needed somebody to tell me how to build a cabinet; I needed somebody_ to show me, some master workman who could teach me by letting me follow him, build after him, build with him. There are times, many times, in our lives, when not only do we need new beginnings, but we need for someone to model those new beginnings, someone to live them out in front of us.
The word became flesh. God's will for us became concrete, definite, visible; and the little letter of John says it so well” That which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with out hands – this life was made manifest, and we saw it and testify to it.” We know, we know that the new beginning is real. We know that the word made flesh is authentic. It's happened, right here, in our midst. In our history. It's no mirage, it’s not just mythology, and most of all it's not just pep-talk. It's a full human life, lived out as we must live ours out. When God wants to show us what a new beginning is to be, he does not send more paper directions; we already have those. None of this insert Tab A into Slot B stuff. No, God sends us not more words, but a life; not more directions, but a model; and more than that, too – a redeemer, a life living out its love in so self-giving a way that we cannot possibly miss it, we cannot conceivably misunderstand. The word made flesh, our flesh, a new beginning.
When the FBI uses an informant, and gets from him valuable information that leads to the arrest and conviction of serious criminals, sometimes the informant is taken to a new area of the country, is given a new name and new papers, is started over. In effect, the old life is canceled out and set aside, and the authorities say to someone, Now, in light of all that has been, in light of the dangers you face because you cooperated with us, we are going to provide you with a whole new beginning. Forget your old name; we have a new one. Forget your past mistakes; they are forgiven. Forget the relationships you built in the past; we are setting you up with a whole new network. It is, for you, a new beginning.
But the Lord Jesus Christ goes one better. A new beginning that is more than cosmetic, more than skin deep. A new beginning that offers life instead of death, power instead of futility, purpose instead of floundering, and, best of all, a new beginning that brings us out of the sins of the past and that plants right square in front of us, where we can see and touch and taste and hear it, the word and the will of God made flesh.
If anyone be in Christ, he is a new creation. Old things are passed away, behold all things are become new.
It was a dark and stormy night – yes it was, but as the Advent of our Christ draws near, we will begin to speak of bright and star-filled nights and we will hear of a sun-drenched morning at an empty tomb – the word made flesh brings a new beginning.
