Love in Advent
1 Corinthians 1:24-25
Sermon for Advent IV - Love in Advent - By Rev. Matthew Parker - December 21, 2003
An unusual survey was done a few years ago, Participants in the survey were asked this question.......what 3 word sentence would you most like to hear or have said to you ? The top three answers were 1. I love you.....2. I forgive you.......3. Supper is ready. How does that relate to Advent? Listen and I’ll tell you.
This last advent before Christmas is Advent IV, and the focus is love. Love in advent. And we’re here to talk about God, because, contrary to nearly everything we hear in the world around us, Christmas is about God first.
But there is one very good question that is rarely ever asked, especially in church. How can we possibly say anything about God? Isn’t it arrogant to assume that we can? God is so great as to be unknowable, is He not? How can we ever hope to aspire to learn anything about God.
Isn’t that like a microbe or an ant trying to figure out and explain a human? Isn’t that just downright impossible? My answer might surprise you. My answer is yes...it is not possible for us to know God, it is not possible to learn anything about Him. Other than what he reveals to us.
You see God is actually not interested in remaining hidden. It is true that He is too great to comprehend, too beautiful to look upon, to complex for humans to figure out. That’s not something he’s tried to do...it’s just a fact of His nature, it’s who he is. And so when we are wise we don’t try to figure God out. We wait. We wait for God to reveal Himself.
Humanity waited for a very long time for God to reveal himself; while we were waiting...we weren’t just waiting,unfortunately, we were imagining. We were creating in our minds what God should look like, what He should do. God’s chosen people, Israel, while they were waiting, imagined that if God was going to do something, there would be a warrior come from God.
An Anointed One who would bludgeon the enemies of Israel. That’s the downside of imagination. Imagination is a very, very good thing. But when we imagine God, apart from the way He chooses to reveal Himself, we imagine what we think we want God to be. And then a funny thing can happen. Our idea of God starts to look a lot like us. He starts to think just
like us. And we run into big, big problems.
Well...what is God? God is one. There is none other beside Him. Who is God? His identity is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Holy Trinity. Holy Trinity is another name for God. Always was and always will be. How do we know that? We sure didn’t figure it out using our ingenuity. We know it because God revealed it. Where did God reveal it? In His book.
In His Word. That’s where we learn everything real there is to know about Christmas.
Let me tell you a story. A very, very good story. God had a dream. A waking dream, for our God does not sleep. God had a dream. Human dreams often come from lonely places, or unjust situations, or poverty or lack. But God was not lonely. God had a dream that didn’t make up for any lack in Him. Before anything that was made by God was made, The Father,Son and Holy Spirit enjoyed perfect communion, perfect togetherness, perfect joy in their unity. Before anything that was made by God was made, God was not concerned about justice.
There was perfect rightness and equality and fairness within the Trinity. No need for righting wrongs. No need to fight for what was right. And there was no poverty or lack. No need. Nothing incomplete. Within the Holy Trinity there was all wealth, all satisfaction, all peace, all love. Perfect love. God was and is and evermore shall be love.
But something caused God to have a dream, to desire more. It wasn’t His joy that caused this, it wasn’t his wealth and satisfaction that caused Him to desire more. It wasn’t peace that motivated Him. It was love. Enfolding love, welcoming love and embracing love. God dreamed, and so a cosmos was created, and galaxies and planets. And one planet in particular among the planets capable of sustaining life. And of course life was created in animals and fish and microbes.
And God made one life form in particular among the others. He made one life form in his own image. A creative mind, a sensitive heart capable of giving and receiving love, a life that could aspire to things beyond survival. Humankind was created, male and female, in God’s image, to be with God. To enjoy Him, to do good, to love. Simply put, God wanted to
share with humanity what He enjoyed in the unity of the Trinity.
And to be truly made in God’s image, humankind had to be free. A robot who could only do what he was told to do wouldn’t be in the image of God since God was free. And since God was free He made humankind free, in His image.
This is part of the story of Christmas. Before the manger, before the wise men, before the virgin, God was free, and in his freedom he made you and me.
And with this freedom, we didn’t do so good. Humans rebelled, and fought, and created all manner of evil and injustice, poverty and lack. And with that freedom we chose to blame God, to accuse him of not caring, when it was us who didn’t are. To accuse Him of malice, when it was us who were malicious.
We accused Him of just not being fair. When it was us who, truly, were not fair but rather really very selfish and self-seeking. And so we shut Him out. God, who is our very life, our Creator, the One who made us to walk with Him in the garden. We said no to him being God so that we...us...we could call the shots. Be our own god, thank you very much.
And then this season. When the need for deliverance from the evil we created ourselves was so strong, when the expectation conjured in the mind’s of humans was God’s mighty delivering hand, when we wanted violence to overthrow violence, death to be avenged through more death, when we prayed for our enemies to be vanquished by a sovereign, righteous deliverer,
a baby arrived.
A helpless, dependant bundle of need...arrived. On our doorstep. On humanity’s front porch. And it was God. Revealing Himself perfectly for the first time in the Christ child. That is Christmas.
We often want to very quickly move on from there. Let’s just stay with the baby Jesus long enough to maybe gawk a little, coo a little...and then move on to something more significant about Christ...like after His baptism and into his teachings and miracles. But I invite you to stay a little longer with me in the manger. Let’s pause and reflect.
Why would God do that? Why would he choose to come to us as a baby? He had an unlimited number of options before Him of how he could touch the world. He could have in a second been born to obvious royalty...that would be fitting. A great king in a line of kings. Jesus was after all in the line of king David.
From that position of power and influence he could been taken more seriously. Jesus had a hard time being taken seriously by some people. From a position of strength he could have more easily persuaded people. But no, he didn’t choose to be born in a palace with glimmering gold and sapphire surrounding him. He chose to be born in other circumstances.
He could have instead come exactly as Israel as expecting him to come. He could have matched their expectations and not risked being missed. He could have been the great conquering deliverer who showed off his bravado on the field of battle and then taught as he taught. That would have been impressive. Fireworks and great CGI battle scenes like Lord of
the Rings. I’d a been impressed!
The alarming thing about lingering a bit longer in the manger with the Christ child is that it becomes uncomfortably clear that God preferred weakness. He preferred helplessness. He preferred being held in the arms of Mary, the young girl whose existence He determined, a young lass who he himself brought into being. He preferred completely turning the tables around, completely altering the normal and proper sequence of life’s events. The Creator, in the Christ child, became a created being. What!?!
Admittedly, when you think about it, this is all pretty weird. I don’t fault anyone for going, “Whoa!...How can this be?!?”
Well, everything we know about Jesus we know because it is revealed in the Bible. What else does the Bible have to say about this?
“... To those whom God has called...Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength”. 1 Cor 1:24-25
“To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. Therefore I will boast all the more gladly
about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong”. 2 Cor 12:7-10
“Brothers (and sisters), think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.
He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things--and the things that are not--to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him” 1 Cor 1:26-29
Ok. So there’s a pattern here. God sees weakness as strength. God sees power in humility. God’s own power is made perfect in weakness. That is the complete opposite of the way we think apart from God.
And so we have...the Christ child. Lingering in the manger. And he did linger there, because he was a real person, a true human being who grew slowly in the presence of his mom and step-dad, and in the presence of God His Father. And although it’s good to tarry with the Christ Child, we know that He grew. He grew up to be the man Jesus. The fully human, fully God person who would reveal to us the thoughts of God, the heart of God.
All the fullness of God is now in the man Jesus who walks the streets of Jerusalem, who is tried before Pilate and unjustly condemned. The Christ child grows up to be the one who now suffers for our sakes on the cross; motivated and spurred on and incarnating the mighty love of God, Jesus dies on the cross.
And He defeats death and triumphs over the grave. And all our hope and purpose and love are somehow bound up in His whole magnificent life. Born in abject poverty, in a vile, stinking stable. Humble. Weak. Yet so incredibly powerful and world-changing in his passionate love for humankind, for you, for me.
David Yeago, a respected New Testament theologian, says this: “Jesus was God’s own Son whose surrender for our sakes is decisive evidence of God’s all-conquering love for us. Jesus did come to conquer. He came to conquer our hearts...to win us over.” “The fruit of Christ’s work is the lifting up of human beings into the life of God”, Yeago says. We are
“siblings by grace of the son of God”
J.I Packer, in his book, Knowing God, said this: “There is tremendous relief in knowing that His love to me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me, so that no discovery can disillusion Him about me, in the way I am so often disillusioned about myself, and quench His determination to bless me.
“There is, certainly, great cause for humility in the thought that He sees all the twisted things about me that my fellow-men do not see (and I am glad!), and that He sees more corruption in me than that which I see in myself (which, in all conscience, is enough). There is, however, equally great incentive to worship and love God in the thought that, for some
unfathomable reason, He wants me as His friend, and desires to be my friend, and has given His Son to die for me in order to realize this purpose”.
I started off tonight by telling you about this unusual survey from a few years ago. Can you recall the top three answers to this question...What 3 word sentence would you most like to hear or have said to you ?
The answers were 1. I love you.....2. I forgive you.......3. Supper is ready.
Well, tonight, God has three, three word sentences to say to you.
There are 1. I love you. 2. I forgive you and 3. Supper is ready. Won’t you come and join in the Lord’s Supper.
Let us pray.
God we thank you that you dreamed. We thank you that in Jesus Christ we are invited to share in Your life. May we each honour the Christ Child this Christmas as we linger with him in the manger. And may we also seek to share with many others this love that you have shared so graciously with us. We ask this for Christ’s sake, in whose name we pray. Amen
