Community Church Sermons

The First Sunday After Christmas, Year C - December 31, 2000

"Reaching For The Invisible God"

John 1:1-18

The opening lines of Howard Thurman's famous Christmas poem well-describe where we need to find ourselves today - at the start of a new year - and one week after the warm wonderful-ness of Christmas Eve:

When the star in the sky is gone,

When the Kings and Princes are home,

When the shepherds are back with their flocks,

The work of Christmas begins.

And there is great wisdom in these words of Howard Thurman for, as we draw ever closer to next week's dramatic conclusion of the Advent/Christmas season, it becomes more and more apparent that the end of Christmas calls us to begin a new endeavor. Thurman describes it this way:

To find the lost,

To heal the broken,

To feed the hungry

To release the prisoner,

To teach the nations,

To bring Christ to all,

To make music in the heart.

I once had a friend who openly questioned why any parent in their right mind would bring their children to church. To him, church is where people learn to replace rational thinking with believing in irrational things. It is where people switch a healthy sense of self-esteem with a crippling kind of self-doubt It is where compassion toward others is transformed into loveless judgment and intolerance. Furthermore, my friend argued, church is where people are taught to depend upon useless myths, serving only to provide a psychological crutch for putting up with the difficult complexities of life.

And yet, one day, when we were talking about this dilemma of his - just after I had returned with a group of spirited teenagers from a mission/work trip up in the Cumberland mountains of Tennessee - I asked him if he might reconsider. Then I shared with him about how our kids had expressed their faith in Christ by spending a week living among and getting to know the people who live in the little mountain hollow where we worked - how they had helped build a house and do some repair work - how they had seen with their own eyes the reality of true poverty, and come to a better understanding of what poverty is - and, most importantly, how they had come to believe that the people among whom they had lived and worked for a week were, in many ways, blessed by God and, in some cases, far richer than they were. And I asked my friend why he wouldn't want his own kids to have a church-experience like that?

And he didn't know what to say.

You see, most people don't really understand Christianity. Most people don't really understand the Church. And most people don't really understand Christmas!

They get so caught up with stars and angels, with their own religiously-related psychological struggles, and with occasional local manifestations of religion-gone-bad that they sometimes miss the whole point! For the heart of the matter is that:

When the star in the sky is gone,

When the Kings and Princes are home,

When the shepherds are back with their flocks,

The work of Christmas begins!

And make no mistake about it. The work of Christmas is this:

To find the lost,

To heal the broken,

To feed the hungry,

To release the prisoner,

To teach the nations,

To bring Christ to all,

To make music in the heart.

Now, who in their right mind, would be opposed to that? These are the very things we long for in life. Why, if you and I were to make a list of the ten most important values we want in our lives, you would discover that each of the values that are most important to you lies at the very core of why Jesus came.

You say you want to find your way through the royal mess your life has become? Jesus came to find the lost. You want to pick up the pieces from a disastrous relationship in which another person has shattered your heart into a million jagged shards? Jesus came to heal the broken. You say you've lived a good portion of your life, but you find yourself feeling empty, still hungry for whatever it is that makes people feel full and whole? Jesus came to feed the hungry. You say you're an alcoholic and you have no power to break the cycle? Or a person whose memories of past tragedies won't let you go so you can have joy in the present? Or that you are a spouse who can't love your wife or husband anymore because you long ago lost the desire? Why, Jesus came to release the prisoners. You say you're taking care of people whose needs are greater than your own strength and ability? Why Jesus came so that they can have a Christ to help them, too. You say you're tired, and burned out, and frustrated by life, and by other people - and that makes you one big crabby pain-in-the-butt to everyone you meet? Why, Jesus came to bring music back into the hearts of people like you!

The Gospel-writer John is interested in helping us to personally experience this kind of faith - the kind that actually has a positive and healthy impact upon your life, and upon the lives of others. And here, in the beautifully written first chapter of his Gospel, John tells us that the reason we miss out on this exciting kind of faith is because God has run into a problem with the world, and we have run into a problem with God. Listen to what John tells us in verse 10:

He was in the world, and the world was made through him, but the world didn't know he was there.

Perhaps we would better understand this passage if we personalized the verse. Imagine that St. John is speaking directly to you:

God is in your life. You would not be you were it not for God! And yet, most of the time, you don't even know God's there!

There's a story about a journalist assigned to the Jerusalem bureau of his newspaper. He gets an apartment overlooking the Wailing Wall. After several weeks, the journalist realizes that whenever he looks out at the Wailing Wall there is this old Jewish man standing there, praying vigorously. The journalist wonders if there might be a publishable story here. So he goes down to the wall, introduces himself to the man and says: "You come every day to the wall. What are you praying for?"

The old Jewish man replies: "What am I praying for? Well, in the morning I pray for world peace. Then I pray for the unity of all people. Then I go home, have a glass of tea, and come back to the wall in the afternoon to pray for the eradication of illness and disease from the earth."

The journalist is moved by the old man's sincerity and persistence. "You mean you have been coming to the wall to pray every day for these things?" The old man nods. "How long have you been doing this?" The old fellow becomes reflective and then replies: "How long? Maybe twenty, twenty-five years."

The journalist is flabbergasted. "You mean you have been coming to the wall every day for twenty or twenty-five years to pray for world peace, the unity of people, and the eradication of disease?" The old man nods. The amazed journalist finally asks: "Well, how does it feel to come and pray every day for so many years for these things?" The old Jewish man replies: "How does it feel? Why, it feels like I’m talking to a wall!"

And maybe that's how it feels to you, too. Like when you're talking to God it's like talking to a wall.

Philip Yancey has written a new book entitled, "Reaching Out For The Invisible God". And one of the important issues Yancey raises is the fact that we human beings have a difficult time relating with God because we can't see him, or hear him, or all the time measure his response to our prayers. And so we develop this sort of cockamamie theology that God is "up there" rather than "down here."

This is why when we speak of the Kingdom of Heaven, we think of a place with clouds and harps - not of a present political reality that will be established right here in which the world finds peace, the poor are truly lifted up, and justice extends to all. This is why we sing, "In heaven there is no beer, that's why we drink it here," underlining our belief that God's world is a lot different than our world. This is why we have so many jokes about people running into St. Peter at the Pearly Gates when they die. Like the one I heard a short while ago about a man who heard that, when you go to heaven, you can bring one precious possession with you. And so, when he died, this man had the pockets of his suit filled up with gold so he could take his fortune with him. And when he gets to the Pearly Gates, St. Peter asks him if he brought along a prized possession. And the man reaches into his pockets and pulls out all this gold. And the angels burst out laughing, and St. Peter gasps and says, "You brought PAVEMENT?" (Because, you see, the streets of heaven are paved with…..gold!).

But the streets of the cities in which we live are not paved with gold. Our streets are filled with potholes, and crime, and homeless people, and funeral processions, and people going to work, and life as it really is.

But John wants us to know that our streets are also filled with something else!!

God is here! Among us! Even though we can't see him!

So what does God do to overcome this problem of invisibility? John writes:

"(So) The Word became flesh and dwelt among us… and we saw his glory …"

The invisible God made himself visible to the world in the form of a human baby, who became an adolescent Jewish boy, who grew into a young traveling preacher who loved the loveless, forgave the sinful, lifted the lowly, healed the hurt, and spoke of a new Kingdom he is building bit-by-bit, piece-by-piece, and person-by-person - not "up there", but "right here" on earth. A Kingdom in which, when it is complete, people will see God face-to-face, and in which life is joyful, and peace reigns, and justice flows like a river, and the tears are wiped away from every eye. And this young traveling preacher loved humanity so much that, even though he was rejected and killed by us, he used his own death as the means of destroying the sin that keeps God invisible to our lives! This is what the invisible God made visible in Jesus Christ. And this young man - the invisible God made visible to us - offers that life to everyone and anyone who will receive it.

And this is all you have to do: Come and meet Jesus.

I once heard about a man whose whole life fell apart in the span of about one year. His marriage fell apart because he was more devoted to his job than to his wife. His 15-year old daughter, who lived at home with him became pregnant, and when he exploded in her face over her mistake, she packed up a suitcase and ran away from home. His college-aged son never came home either because his dad had always been too busy for him. And the business he had built from the ground up came crashing down all around him when the negligence of his partner led to a devastating product liability judgment against them.

And then, on top of all that, the man was diagnosed with an advanced form of bone cancer.

In lonely desperation, this man sought religion to help him through the disaster. But religion offered no answers. He tried self-help books, but they did not come close to dealing with the abyss into which he was slowly but surely sinking. Then he turned to the bible.

Genesis. Exodus. Leviticus. Numbers. Deuteronomy. There was nothing there for him. He did not need dietary laws and genealogies. He needed healing. And it wasn't there to be found.

Then, one day, he happened across the Gospels, and began to read the story of Jesus. It struck him that the Jesus he was reading about was far different than the Jesus he remembered as a Sunday School student decades ago. This Jesus was involved in the lives of real people - people experiencing divorce, and separation, and alienation, and illness, and disappointment, and - even death. And as he read about Jesus, he became transfixed on his life and teachings.

In the process, he somehow forgot all about why he had come to the bible in the first place - to find a cure for the cancer. Instead, he found himself drinking in Jesus' words, examining the way Jesus related with people, studying in minute detail how Jesus faced his own death.

Three months later, when the cancer claimed his life, he was found in bed, surrounded by notebooks full of the beautiful things he had discovered about Jesus.

And the most remarkable thing of all is that when they gathered at his funeral, there in the front row sat his wife, and his daughter, and his grandson, and his son, and even his business partner. And each one, in turn, rose to tell a story about how, in the last several months, their lives had been touched by the gift of grace through this man. Each had received a letter, a phone call, a visit - and in those shared experiences, he had made confession and requested forgiveness. He gave forgiveness, and let the past be put to rest. He said things he'd never said before, but he really needed to say - expressions of love and pride and hope for the happiness of each one. He had even, in the last months, taken to helping a little elderly woman who lived in the apartment across from his. She was housebound, and without a family. Each day, he made some sandwiches and brought them across the hall. They sat and chatted for hours over lunch.

And she sort of summed it all up in a letter that was read at the service by this man's son. It read in part, "When Jack showed up at my door, it was as if Jesus himself had come to have lunch with an old lady." And Jack's son echoed the sentiment. "There was something different about our dad in the last months of his life. It was like you could see God in him."

When you come and meet Jesus for yourself - and immerse yourself in his life, his teachings, his relationships, his story - you can't help but change. Because when the invisible God becomes visible to you, you become God's visible expression to others! And the words of Howard Thurman run true:

When the star in the sky is gone,

When the Kings and Princes are home,

When the Shepherds are back with their flocks,

The work of Christmas begins!

To find the lost,

To heal the broken,

To feed the hungry,

To release the prisoners,

To teach the nations,

To bring Christ to all,

To make music in your heart!

As this New Year begins, may you meet the invisible God by reaching out to meet the visible Jesus! And may the work of Christmas begin - through you!