Sermon – “Always Winter, Never Christmas”
Scripture – Isaiah 40
There is a strange phenomenon that is happening in the world today. Two unlikely groups of people have gotten together and are excitedly talking about the same thing! It’s strange that Hollywood and the Evangelical church are excited about similar topics. A couple of years ago when the “Passion” was released it was surrounded by an enormous controversy with the Church on one side and much of Hollywood on the other, but in just a couple of weeks another movie will be released that both Hollywood and the Evangelical church are excited about. For months I have been receiving promotional material, outreach ideas, articles in my ministry journals, and just this week a CD of promotional materials all centering on the upcoming release of the movie based on C.S. Lewis’ book: “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.”
Entire articles have been devoted to promoting this movie. Websites have been set up to provide sermon ideas based on it. Even your own pastor has gotten caught up in the excitement. I plan to attend the movie so that I can see it on the big screen and not my usual wait for it to come out on DVD! “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” has held a particularly soft spot in Eloise’ and my hearts for several years after having watched our son Aaron play the part of Aslan the lion in “Narnia” a musical based on Lewis’ story. I recently read the book and have purchased the entire “Narnia” series.
C.S. Lewis has been called the twentieth century’s greatest Christian philosopher, theologian, and fantasy writer. One of his best friends at Oxford University, and one of the men which God used to bring Lewis to faith was J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of the fantasy allegories known as “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings.”
While not an actual portrayal of the history of salvation, one could go to the Bible for that, Lewis wrote the “Narnia Chronicles” as a portrayal of good versus evil and the need of salvation from evil, and he used the Chronicles as his tool to do that. Narnia has become a fantasy land for both child and adult and with the release of the movie should prove to make a great impact on people’s knowledge, understanding and need for faith in Christ who has indeed overcome evil.
As we begin this advent series we’re going to look at a world that frequently lives without hope, too little peace, seldom joy-filled, and lacking in love. James Thurber wrote: “Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation,” a good description of a life without hope, peace, joy, or love. Lewis portrayed a world like that as a place where it is “Always winter and never Christmas.” However, given global warming and good old American greed, we might well come up with a new quote, “Always Christmas and never winter!” Long before Thanksgiving the stores were decorated to the hilt trying to squeeze every dollar they can from a world using commercialism as their antidote for our hopeless, peaceless, joyless, and loveless lives.
Everywhere people are looking for hope. They try to find it in themselves, in outside sources, and in every imaginable and some very unimaginable ways! We live in a world that’s filled with terror on every side. The twenty-four hour news channels broadcast doom and gloom every hour on the hour and half-hour. War and pestilence crowd our world. Devastating storms, earthquakes, and tsunamis shatter any sense of comfort. There are places where jobs are so scarce that there’s little hope for sustaining any meaningful employment. In short, we live in a world that could well be described as having “Always winter and never Christmas.”
Author Dean Merrill speaks about the hopelessness many (even Christians) experience. I quote: “…too many battles are popping up all at once. Sex education, homosexual rights, abortion, pornography, children’s rights, women in the military, no fault divorce – the list runs on and on, and nobody has enough energy or time enough to tackle them all. Our only choice is to hunker down in silence and hope the storms don’t do too much damage to us personally…Christians…quickly go on to state that the odds of improvement really are hopeless. They would like to improve America’s moral climate, but realistically they don’t see a ghost of a chance, so they elect to save their energy.” (Dean Merrill, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Church,” Zondervan Publishers, Grand Rapids, © 1997, pg. 49) Sounds depressing, doesn’t it? It would be enough to wring out a “Bah! Humbug!” from the jolliest of people! A world that’s always winter and never Christmas could use a little hope!
A hopeless world is a sad world. A hopeless life is often seen as a life not worth living. If things keep going as they are, it’s going to be an awfully blue Christmas! Yet hope is one of the golden words often associated with this time of the year. How can that be? How can we experience hope in a world so far gone?
Isaiah’s world was not all that different from ours and he was able to preach it to his. His ministry took place during a time when earth-shaking events were taking place. He ministered in the city of Jerusalem during the reigns of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezzekiah. That’s exactly when the Assyrians were rattling their sabers! Let’s not forget where in the world Assyria was located! Their capital city was Nineveh, part of which lies within the city limits of modern day Mosul, in Iraq! God would use the godless citizens of Nineveh to chastise his people. Isaiah saw those current events and knew from God that they were leading to the consuming Day of the Lord. He could see those coming events as clearly as if they were just happening around the corner from his pulpit!
The general theme of the first thirty-nine chapters of Isaiah was preaching about that coming disaster. And then, as if he had enough doom and gloom, Isaiah switched gears and started preaching comfort and hope. It is such a radical shift that many Biblical critics contend that the prophet Isaiah did not write the entire prophecy, and that the end of the first Isaiah came in chapter thirty-nine and that the second one started writing in chapter forty and following. I’m not going to get in on that debate this morning; it’s sufficient to say that I believe that those critics are incorrect in their thinking.
Isaiah was telling his audience that even in times of disaster there is hope, hope for those who wait for the Lord. But even in ancient Palestine, waiting is such a drag! God made promises that took over five hundred years to be fulfilled. As a preacher I’d begin to wonder if what I was saying was indeed the truth! God’s Word tells preachers as well as congregations: “If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the LORD does not take place or come true, that is a message the LORD has not spoken. That prophet has spoken presumptuously. Do not be afraid of him.” (Deuteronomy 18:22)
In our “Have-it-your-way” right now kind of world, five hundred years is a very long time. We get impatient if we can’t get it by next week! But in God’s time frame, five hundred years is merely a blink of the eye! “The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.” (2 Peter 3:9) But the question we have to ask is this: “Does waiting five hundred years for a promise to be fulfilled make it any less true?”
We list our hope in the work that we do. Calvinists are especially good at that. We can easily condemn people with words that sound so Scriptural: “You have not, because you work not for it!” I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating again: My mother’s favorite verse during blackberry picking time, “He who does not work does not eat.” Her exegesis of the text would be, “If you pick not the blackberries, you eat not the pie!”
Our text tells us to be patient. It says: “Those who hope in the LORD,” or as another version reads: “Those who wait on the LORD.” I’m not real big on word studies, but knowing that there are two versions of this verse I went to the source, to the Hebrew, and looked up the word “Hope,” found the reference to our verse, and then found the Hebrew word that matched it. This is the description of the meaning of this one little word: “Those who qawa in the LORD…” (qawa: to hope in; to hope for, wait for, look for – hope in…look in hope,…waited patiently for, waiting, (or) waiting eagerly.)
But isn’t that what hope really is? Christmas is one of those times when we all hope, wait eagerly for, or wait patiently for something, isn’t it? We don’t hope or wait patiently for something we already have. The very nature of the word “hope” is that we’re longing for something. We’re waiting. When it comes time to open Christmas gifts we have a rule in our home. There’s no touching any gift under the tree. Once it’s under the tree, there’s no picking it up, no shaking it, no rattling, poking or prodding it. You may look at it, but you are not allowed to touch it until the time we open gifts. Is this cruel an unusual punishment? Not really. We have worked at instilling a sense of hope. Besides, what fun is there in knowing what everything is two weeks before the party?
When the children in Lewis’ story entered the wardrobe and came to a land where there was “always winter and never Christmas,” there wasn’t much hope. Because of the never ending winter, “Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone.” If we lived in a world that was always winter and never knew the hope of spring, never knew that spring was even possible, we would be living very hopelessly. Lewis writes beautifully what the very beginning of hope for Edmund (one of the children in Narnia), a boy caught in the clutches of the witch is like. He wrote: “All round them, though out of sight, there were streams chattering, murmuring, bubbling, splashing and (in the distance) even roaring. And his heart gave a great leap (though he hardly knew why) when he realized that the frost (of the never-ending winter) was over. And much nearer there was a drip-drip-drip from the branches of all the trees. And then, as he looked at one tree he saw a great load of snow slide off it and for the first time since he had entered Narnia he saw the dark green of a fir tree.” (C.S. Lewis, “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” Collier Books, New York, © 1950, printed 1970, pg. 114) That’s what hope is like; being in the dead of winter, knowing that summer will arrive; being in the centuries before Christmas, knowing that Christ will come!
But there’s nothing the devil would rather do than snatch hope away from us. And Lewis writes about that as well: “But (Edmund) hadn’t time to listen or watch any longer for the witch said:
“‘Don’t sit staring, fool! Get out and help!’
“And of course Edmund had to obey.”
There’s nothing the Devil would rather do than take away our hope. He doesn’t want our strength renewed. He doesn’t want us soaring like eagles. He wants us to get tired. He would rather see us down in the landfill than up on the mountain top.
That’s what Christ-hope counteracts. He brings renewed strength. He breaks the power of our hearts of stone and gives us hearts of flesh destroying winter and bringing a new spring. He pumps new energy through our veins and we eagerly run to do his work. He has us soaring like eagles instead of scratching with chickens!
In many ways our life is like a little league baseball game in which a man approached a young boy and asked the kid what the score was. “Eighteen to nothing, we’re behind,” he replied.
“Oh, I’m sorry, I’ll bet you’re discouraged.”
“Oh, no,” replied the young boy, “we haven’t even gotten up to bat yet!”
To the ancients winter may have seemed cold and never ending, but they shouldn’t have been discouraged, winter ended and Christmas came. And we live on the Spring side of winter. Always winter and never Christmas could be discouraging, but Christmas comes and with it the hope of the world is born; and when the hope of the world is born, we bask in the light of God’s grace! Amen.
