In the song of Zechariah (father of John the Baptist) the Scripture says he was filled with the Holy Spirit and prophesied: “Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel, because he has come and has redeemed his people. He has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David (as he said through his holy prophets of long ago). . . to show mercy to our fathers and to remember his holy covenant, the oath he swore to our father Abraham” (Luke 1:67-73). Zechariah, in this song called “The Benedictus,” correctly saw that what God was doing, was not an isolated incident in the history of the world, but wonderfully connected to a process and plan which God had been carrying out from the beginning. It was not something new, but a continuation of what God had always been up to in the world. God’s plan in the beginning was always to create for himself a people with whom he could share his life. We begin to see this most clearly in God’s relationship with Abraham. God comes to Abraham and does something with him that becomes the norm for God establishing a relationship with someone — he establishes a covenant.
A covenant is not just a mutual agreement between two people; it is not like a legal contract. It was a binding agreement where the parties involved committed themselves to each other and the terms of the covenant under pain of death. It created a binding relationship between them. The covenant was based on the character of the persons involved. God’s part of the promise was that he would fulfill the covenant and redeem his people by bringing his Messiah into the world, and this Messiah would bring God’s people back to him and give them new hearts. As he said, “This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time, declares the Lord. I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people” (Jeremiah 31:33).
Christmas was the fulfillment of God’s covenant with his people. He was bringing to pass what Zechariah now understood: God had come to redeem his people, raise up the horn of salvation and fulfill his holy covenant with Abraham. There are several surprising things about a covenant. And the first is: This means that God is relational. Sometimes we think that since God is God, he does not need anybody. I would suggest to you that because God is God, because he is perfect, he needs people. So the closer to God and the more like him we become, the more we need other people. It’s the nature of a perfect and holy God to be in relationship — so should it be with us. This is why God longs for us. It’s why he puts up with us. The Bible assures us: “As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him; for he knows how we are formed, he remembers that we are dust” (Psalm 103:13-14). If our relationship with God depended on us, there would be no relationship, for we tend to run and hide from God. We are sinful and unfaithful, and want to avoid relationships. We fail to keep our commitments. But God makes himself vulnerable, and opens himself up to a relationship with us. This is why he says over and over again that he wants to be our God, and wants us to be his people.
But over and over again God’s people reject him, and want to be independent of a relationship with him. You will remember that Jesus grieved over Jerusalem, saying, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing” (Matthew 23:37). This kind of God was seen as strange by the people who worshiped other gods and goddesses. Their gods delighted in dominating people. They were full of intrigue and cruelty. They loved to punish their subjects. They had to be appeased. The better ones were merely distant and aloof. But here is a God who is in constant pursuit of his creation. Jesus said, “The Father himself loves you because you have loved me and have believed that I came from God. I came from the Father and entered the world” (John 16:27-28). What this means is that God is not content to stay in his world and leave us alone. He was not willing, as some like to say, to wind the world up like a clock and walk away. This is not an impersonal god, this is a God who is intensely personal and relational. Solomon was overwhelmed by the intimate love of God when he prayed, “O Lord, God of Israel, there is no God like you in heaven above or on earth below — you who keep your covenant of love with your servants who continue wholeheartedly in your way” (1 Kings 8:23).
In one of our home groups one week someone shared how many years they had been in church and never had a personal relationship with God. They taught Sunday School, came to church, helped other people, but never had a personal relationship with God. Before, it was all about keeping the rules and doing what was right. Now, they said, they have come to know God in a personal way and it has made all the difference in their life. They see things in a whole new way. That is the point, and to miss the fact that God wants a personal relationship with you is to miss the core of the Christian faith.
The second important thing we need to understand about Christmas and covenant is: This means that God is faithful. This is one of those things we think we understand and believe, until a time of testing comes, which forces us to wait on God. We are placed in a situation where we have to trust the faithfulness of God. Then it becomes more than just a phrase which people repeat to each other. What we do not understand is that God is faithful regardless of what other people do or do not do. The Bible says, “If we are faithless, he will remain faithful, for he cannot disown himself” (2 Timothy 2:13).
One of the interesting things we notice about God’s covenant with Abraham is how one-sided it was. The common practice of making a covenant in that time was to take a few animals (In Abraham’s case: a goat, heifer and ram, along with a dove and a pigeon), and cut them in half from head to tail. The halves were then placed in such a way as to form a path between them. The parties making a covenant with each other would walk the path between the pieces, and in effect say, “If I break the terms of this covenant, so may this be done to me.” The animals were then prepared and eaten as a covenant meal. Both parties would commit themselves to the covenant in this way. But what is interesting in the covenant with Abraham is that only God walked the covenant path between the animals. The Bible says, “When the sun had set and darkness had fallen, a smoking firepot with a blazing torch [representing the presence of God] appeared and passed between the pieces” (Genesis 15:17). Abraham is never said to have walked between the pieces, and the reason is that Abraham could not keep the terms of the covenant. This would have to be a unilateral covenant. So even if Abraham and his descendants did not keep their side of the covenant, God would keep his. The Bible says, “He remembers his covenant forever, the word he commanded, for a thousand generations, the covenant he made with Abraham, the oath he swore to Isaac. He confirmed it to Jacob as a decree, to Israel as an everlasting covenant” (Psalm 105:8-10).
And our relationship with Christ is based on a covenant. His body — the Lamb of God himself — was torn and broken, and we eat the covenant meal as we partake of communion, and we remember that God has bound himself to us in covenant love. This is our faithful God. The Bible admonishes us: “Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful” (Hebrews 10:23).
The news carried the story a few years ago of a faithful father. James Kim was an editor for CNET. CNN reports: “On November 25, 2006 the Kims had begun a drive home to San Francisco, California, after a Thanksgiving vacation in Oregon. They missed a turn and found themselves stranded in snow and lost on one of Oregon’s treacherous mountain roads — an area that is rarely plowed during the winter. At some point, James Kim tried to back up the car to where there was less snow to block them. But snow was falling so fast and furiously that he had to open his door to see, authorities said. Over the next few days, the snow and rain fell unrelentingly, Kati Kim told searchers. The family ran the car sporadically to keep warm as temperatures dipped below freezing at night. After running out of gas, they set a spare tire on fire and eventually burned all four tires for warmth. When the weather let up briefly, they burned magazines and driftwood.” But after waiting a week for rescue, James Kim got out of the safety of the car and began to walk to get help for his family. His desire to save his family, and his faithfulness to them, cost him his life.
I went on CNN’s blog site to see what people were saying about this story. The blog was in response to the question: “What would you do in the same situation?” A former Air Force Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) Instructor, sent in what has been called the rule of threes: “You can survive 3 weeks without food; 3 days without water; 3 hours without shelter; 3 minutes without air, but not three seconds without hope.” We have hope because of Christmas, and we not only survive, but we thrive, because we have a faithful father who has sacrificed his life in order to save us and bring us out of the mess we are in.
The third thing that we need to understand about Christmas and covenant is: This means that God is on the move. Some of the religions of the world believe that the history of the world is cyclical, that is, it just keeps happening over and over. It’s sort of like Groundhog Day on a cosmic scale. We just keep doing it over until we get it right. There is no real purpose or destiny to life. It all ultimately ends in a puddle. One of the religious symbols of Eastern Religion is a snake (or dragon) eating its own tail. It’s meant to show the endless cycle of life, but it also shows their view of the futility of life. The snake is named Ouroborus — “tail swallower.” For these religions, life is a vicious cycle. You would think that these people would realize that this cannot go on forever, and that at some point you are going to come to the end of it. These are philosophies of pessimism and despair.
It is like C. S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe where the White Witch has frozen Narnia. Mr. Tumnus tells Lucy that it is now a place where it is “Always winter, and never Christmas.” But Aslan (the lion representing Christ) is on the move, and Narnia soon will turn to Spring. There are still battles to be fought, but the White Witch will be vanquished and Narnia will once again be a place of warmth and joy, and the true princes and princesses of Narnia will be recognized for who they are.
Just because we cannot see it or understand it does not mean that God is not very much on the move. He is excitedly and expediently working out his plan. The writer of Ecclesiastes says, “He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end. . . . I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it. God does it so that men will revere him” (Ecclesiastes 3:11&14).
The Christian faith teaches that history is headed somewhere. God is up to something. There is meaning and destiny to life, and God is in charge of it. There is a loving God at the heart of the universe, and we are the objects of his love. God is not sleeping on a cloud somewhere, he is watching over us. The Bible says, “For the eyes of the Lord range throughout the earth to strengthen those whose hearts are fully committed to him” (2 Chronicles 16:9).
The gospels are full of Jesus’ admonitions to be alert and watchful, and the reason is that God is on the move. He does not act or come when we expect. He comes at an unanticipated hour. Jesus said, “It will be good for those servants whose master finds them watching when he comes” (Luke 12:37). He says in the book of Revelation, “Behold, I come like a thief!” (Revelation 16:15).
We prefer a god who does the expected and is predictable. We would like a god we have some control over, or at least one we can figure out. But this God breaks out of all our boxes. He is all about making good his promises and fulfilling the covenant that he made with us, and he will use whatever means are at his disposal, which means he just might do anything at any given time. “This is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘In a little while I will once more shake the heavens and the earth, the sea and the dry land. I will shake all nations, and the desired of all nations will come’” (Haggai 2:6-7). And so he has — and will.
Hardly anyone expected the coming of Messiah when he came. A covenant fulfilling Christmas was not running through their minds. But the Lord announced his plan to a virgin named Mary. The Lord assured a peasant named Joseph. The skies opened and the angels came, and Jesus pierced the night air with a baby’s cry. It seemed like such a small thing, but it was God’s thing, and it changed the world.
Henri Nouwen said in an article in the New Oxford Review: “I realized that songs, good feelings, beautiful liturgies, nice presents, big dinners, and many sweet words do not make Christmas. Christmas is saying ‘yes’ to something beyond all emotions and feelings. Christmas is saying ‘yes’ to a hope based on God’s initiative, which has nothing to do with what I think or feel. Christmas is believing that the salvation of the world is God’s work, and not mine.”
Every year we watch The Polar Express video with our grandchildren. It is the story of what it means to have childlike faith. It is not only a journey to the North Pole, but a twelve-year-old boy’s journey from doubt to belief. In the movie, the boy struggles with his belief in Santa Claus. He is in bed on Christmas Eve wishing that Santa was real, but becoming more cynical as the minutes tick by. His doubt is growing, but he is still listening for the sound of the bells on Santa’s sleigh. Suddenly, he is awakened by the thundering arrival of a train pushing back the snow in his front yard. It’s the Polar Express. As he walks outside, the boy is greeted by a conductor, who asks, “Well, are you coming?” He has a choice: to go or stay, but he reluctantly boards the train, but with a jerk the train begins the trip to the North Pole, where Santa will present the first gift of Christmas. The boy continues to be skeptical during the train ride, even though he is on a magical journey. He is deciding whether to believe, or not believe. At one point he even pinches himself hard, thinking it must only be a wild dream. There are some salient moments in the film. At one point, the conductor says to the boy: “It doesn’t matter where you’re going; what matters is deciding to get on.” Near the end, the conductor punches his ticket and hands it back. The boy looks at the ticket and sees that the conductor has punched out the word “BELIEVE.” He now believes, because he has seen with his own eyes, but the conductor reminds him: “The most real things in the world are the things we can’t see.” When he arrives back home he crawls back into bed, and on Christmas morning, one of the things he unwraps is a bell from Santa’s sleigh. His parents cannot hear the beautiful chiming of the bell, but he can, because you can only hear the bells of Christmas by faith.
Jesus says to us, “Well, are you coming?” It doesn’t matter if you understand everywhere you will be going, it is a journey of faith, and the important thing is whether you decide to get on board. He invites us to get on the train, but the decision is ours. Nothing can stop Christmas, not even death. No one can stop Christmas, even by their doubt and unbelief. But no one can enjoy Christmas unless they believe.
Rodney J. Buchanan
December 16, 2012
Amity United Methodist Church
rodbuchanan2000@yahoo.com
