“Who’s the Messiah?” - December 17, 2017

John 1:6-13

            We do not know that Jesus was born at this time of year.  Chances are that he wasn’t.  In fact, when people with a chip on their shoulder against Christmas (sometimes against Christianity itself) get on a roll, they will tell you that this time of year was a big one for the Romans, who whooped it up with a festival they called Saturnalia, and for the pagans of northern Europe, who had midwinter festivals where they lit fires and brought evergreen branches into their houses and told stories involving mistletoe and elves.  They point out that the Church decided to create its own competing festival incorporating a lot of these practices, as if that somehow undermines the validity of the holiday.

            I’d answer that the point of Christmas as we observe it is that God came to earth in Jesus and was born as one of us, and that alone is worth a party.  Since we don’t have an exact date, why not December 25?  It’s as good as any other, and better than some.  After all, for us it is the darkest time of the year, and it is in the darkest times that we are most aware that we need him all year long.  There would be nothing wrong with people in Australia or anywhere in the southern hemisphere saying that they need to observe in in June for the same reason.

            Of course, there are those who enjoy the trimmings but who don’t really go beyond that.  We all know a lot of those folks.  In one of his little-known poems, “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees”, T.S. Eliot says,

“There are several attitudes towards Christmas,
Some of which we may disregard:
The social, the torpid, the patently commercial,
The rowdy (the pubs being open till midnight),
And the childish — which is not that of the child
For whom the candle is a star, and the gilded angel
Spreading its wings at the summit of the tree
Is not only a decoration, but an angel.” 

Muslims, who consider Jesus a prophet, but not the messiah and definitely not the Son of God, see no problem in celebrating his birth as we would see no problem celebrating Martin Luther King Day or Washington’s Birthday. 

            And then there are the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who do not believe in the Holy Trinity.  They do not believe that Jesus was the Son of God, or that God lived in him.  They claim that Jesus was an angel, a messenger sent from God.  So, understanding perfectly well that what Christians celebrate is that Jesus is Emmanuel, God-with-us, they will have nothing to do with even the outer trappings of a midwinter festival, since those go back to the pagans.  What a shame!  They both deny the meaning at the heart of the holiday and the joy at the edges. 

            (On a related side-note, there’s a story that’s too good not to tell.  When the Council of Nicaea was debating these matters in the year 325, there was a man named Arius, who had led a lot of people into the belief that Jesus was only a created being, a sort of super-angel, and not fully divine, and kept insisting that it would be wrong to speak of him as we do of God the Father.  One of the other bishops there became so exasperated that he stood up, walked across the room, and slapped him in the face, for which assault he was thrown into jail and stripped of office.  That man’s name was Nicholas.  Now he’s called St. Nicholas.  In other words, the major opponent of Christmas was once punched out by the man who became Santa Claus.)

There are better ways to do things.  Theology should not be settled in the boxing ring.  In fact, God’s humility in Jesus entire life models that so thoroughly that Christian joy in God’s coming to us in Jesus, that we celebrate all the time, is wide enough that it can be shared with others who don’t share its true source. We recognize a Messiah, a Savior, who is determined, not to go out and seize happiness and blessings for himself, or even for his wider circle of friends or his own nation.  He doesn’t turn his righteous anger loose on his detractors or his persecutors. He brings, even to his enemies, and at his own infinite expense, the blessings of God for those who have nothing: no joy, no hope, no sense of a future, no expectations, no love.  The gospel of John puts it this way:

“The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.  He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.” [John 1:9-16]

            When the Romans celebrated their festival of Saturnalia, there was a tradition that during that time the masters would become the servants and the servants would become the masters.  I try to picture that happening without both sides of that having in the back of their minds, “This is not going to last, and just wait until everything is normal again.”   But when God, in Jesus, took on the role of a servant it was done to recognize the servant as his child, a member of the household of God, a citizen of heaven with dignity greater than an angel’s.  As the great theologian Athanasius taught, “God became like us that we might become like God.”  In the Messiah in the manger, we can see humility and glory side-by-side, and thanks to him we can experience and even share that eternal glory while still acknowledging God’s rule over us and over the whole world.

            This doctrine of the Incarnation, the embodiment of God in Christ, is complicated.  That’s why we express it always as “both-and”.  Jesus was both divine and human.  Jesus is both eternal and born within time and space.  Jesus is both equal to and obedient to God the Father.  Jesus both embodied the Holy Spirit and sends the Spirit to indwell his Body, the Church.  He has both come to us on earth and ascended into heaven.

            And thanks to him, we who are sinners, the same people John the Baptist called a “brood of vipers” are also open to a far brighter future – for that matter, a brighter present – than the world tells us or can even imagine, because

“to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born not of blood or of the will of the flesh, or of the will of man, but of God.” [John 1:16]

Friends,

“No ear may hear his coming,

But in this world of sin,

Where meek souls will

Receive him, still

The dear Christ enters in.”

Consider this season itself an altar call, not summoning us to God, but to hear that God has come to us and asks to settle in, that we might share our lives with him so that he may share his life with us.