Community Church Sermons
January 7, 2007
The First Sunday of the New Year
Luke 3:21-37
Listen to this Sermon!
Welcome to the day after!
Yesterday marked the official end to the Christmas season! For Christians, the season begins four Sundays before Christmas and stretches out to twelve days after Christmas. And on the twelfth day of Christmas… we celebrate something much more important than our true love giving us a partridge in a pear tree. The twelfth day of Christmas is a feast day called Epiphany, and that feast day was held yesterday. I imagine you all had epiphany parties at your homes!
Epiphany commemorates the arrival of the magi, bearing their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. It is called “Epiphany” because the word means “manifestation” or “illumination” – like a spotlight suddenly illuminates an actor on the stage. But what is illuminated with the arrival of the wise men from the East is the wonderful truth that the birth of Jesus is a gift to the whole world – not just to the Jewish people, but to all people, everywhere!
And that’s quite an epiphany - especially in this world of ours that is so sectarian, parochial, nationalistic, and divided into camps of right and wrong, good and evil, true believers and infidels.
Jesus is the sign of God’s unbounded love for every man, woman and child in every time and every place. Christmas represents God’s arms flung wide open to all people everywhere!
Which is why I couldn’t quite fathom the hostile reaction of many Christians around here to Governor Bredeson’s Christmas card.
If you were not here when the “scandal” hit the airwaves, let me give you a brief recap. Our Governor often includes some of his original artwork on the cards he sends and this year the art on the cover is of a photograph he took while touring in Afghanistan. It is a picture of a pensive young Afghan girl – a Muslim. Inside the card, the message reads: "May the peace and joy of this Christmas season be with you and your loved ones throughout the coming year. While it may seem odd to put a portrait of a young Muslim woman on a Christmas card, this Season reminds us that He loves His children most of all. May the miracle of Christmas help bring peace to this young woman and her wounded land. ”
The reaction of many Christians was swift:
A Nashville pastor, interviewed
by The Tennessean newspaper, said:
"If on Martin Luther King Day, you sent a picture of a
Klansman and said Martin Luther had a dream that this guy would one day get
along with the people he's trying to kill, I'm not sure the African-American
community would handle that very well," … "Christmas is about Christ.
Put a picture of the Savior on our card."
(This pastor) – the newspaper said - has been vocal ever since he
heard about the card:
"We have to understand that we have a problem between our
culture, their culture, the religions possibly. And I think Christmas ought a
be kept pure at this time," …
Christmas ought to be kept
“pure.”
Wow. What an anti-Epiphany
epiphany!
Christmas ought to be kept
“pure.”
Perhaps we need to arrange for
some in our Christian family to go and straighten out God on this matter. A
Muslim girl on a Christmas card? Why that makes about as much sense as putting
the picture of a Jewish girl on a Christmas card!
What? Mary was Jewish? And
Joseph was Jewish, too?
Aren’t they on Christmas cards?
And if you know anything at all about the shepherds of the day, you know they were hardly models of good churchmanship! But they’re on Christmas cards, too!
And what about these WISE MEN FROM THE EAST?
Why they show up on Christmas cards all over the place! Not only that, but the magi appear right in our churches - in every Christmas pageant we’ve ever been to, swaggering down the aisle in bathrobes and with gold-painted cardboard crowns on their heads, and singing: “We three kings of Orient are, bearing gifts we traverse afar…”
Magi. From the word “magoi” which means “magician.”
From the East - the place where the most bitter enemies of the Jewish people reside.
Gazing into the sky - consulting astrological charts to learn that a new king has arisen in Judah. Following a star - practicing a form of magical astrological religion that was common in “the East” – and completely forbidden in the Bible.
Not the kind of people you’d expect to find on Christmas cards!
But Christians today say Christmas ought to be kept “pure.”
Why?
It wasn’t very “pure” the first time around!
God, for some reason, chose to fill up Christmas with all sorts of “impurity” – a pregnant teenaged girl whose baby was not her husband’s, people who didn’t have time for God, people who believed in other gods and practiced the wrong religions, lived in the wrong places. And yet all these “impure” human beings, God – with the help of angels and stars – miraculously brought together on one cold dark night to be the witnesses of the birth of Jesus – and proclaimers of the message that God loves EVERYONE!
And if the arrival of the magi is not enough to prove it, one of the first stories about Jesus in the Gospel of Luke drives the point deeper.
Did you enjoy listening to the genealogy of Jesus as much as Bart seemed to enjoy reading it?
Genealogies
are not our favorite things to read in the Bible. But they are very important.
Genealogies were used to establish the legitimacy of property rights as well as
the authority of leaders. And so in the genealogy of Jesus we discover that his
family tree was a blue-blooded lineage indeed, including people like King
David, giving Jesus the inherited right to be seen as King of the Jews. And
further back in Jesus’ family tree are Jacob and Isaac and Abraham, the
founders – if you will – of the Jewish people. And the deepest roots of all in
the family tree of Jesus are described by the notables mentioned in the last
few verses of the genealogy – …Noah, the son of Lamech, the son of
Methuselah, the son of Enoch, the son of Jared, the son of Mahalalel, the son
of Kenan, the son of Enosh, the son of Seth, the son of Adam…the son of God!
The family tree of Jesus! Pretty impressive, don’t you think?
But as most of you who have worked on your own family genealogies know, all you have to do is give your family tree a pretty good shake, and all the nuts and fruits start falling out!
Oh, we all love to talk about the King David’s in our family, but not so much about the horse thieves, the swindlers, and the cowards. Most often, we pass right over the names of those kinds of people – just like we might quickly pass over the names Obed and the Boaz in Jesus’ genealogy.
…David,
the son of Jesse, the son of Obed, the son of Boaz…
Obed was the child of Boaz. His mother was a woman named Ruth. And Ruth is not the sort of person you’d expect to find in the genealogy of the Jewish Messiah. Ruth was not Jewish. She was a Gentile. She was from Moab, and Jewish men were forbidden from marrying Moabites. In fact, people from Moab were explicitly prohibited from entering the assembly of the Lord. You can read that law in Deuteronomy 23:3.
But there is Ruth right there in the middle of Jesus’ family tree!
She is the hated foreigner who gave her life in love to helping her Jewish mother-in-law Naomi get along when they both lost their first husbands. Ruth is the one who spoke to poetic words, “Entreat me not to leave you or to refrain from following you, for where you I will go, where you lodge I will lodge. Your people will be my people, and your God my God. Where you die I will die and there will I be buried.”
Beautiful words of commitment spoken by this foreign woman named Ruth – and often read today in many marriage ceremonies - and eloquently quoted a while back by none other than our own Jane Puckett.
Bob Puckett, you know, once served a church in frigid Buffalo, New York. But after a few years, he managed to escape! He and Jane returned to the balmy south to serve the Community church in Norris, Tennessee. Well, one day a few years later, Bob got a letter from that church in Buffalo, asking if he’d come back. Bob called Jane on the phone and read the letter, wondering how she would feel about such a move. Jane said:
“Well, I’ve
always been like Ruth – “Whither thou goest, I will go”…but I ain’t gonna
whither back to Buffalo!”
However, Ruth DID whither back to Judah – in direct contradiction to Deuteronomy 23:3 – and she ended up marrying Boaz, a fine Jewish man who should have known better than to marry someone outside his race – and they had a baby, Obed, who was the grandfather of King David, and the great-great-great-etc.- grandfather of Jesus!
Skeletons in the closet! Impurity!
And that’s not all. This Boaz guy who married Ruth the forbidden foreigner has a skeleton of his own! He was the son of a very famous woman in the Bible. He was the son of Rahab, the Canaanite prostitute who took in the spies before the battle of Jericho.
Impurity!
Like your family tree, Jesus’ family tree had its share of nuts, fruits and very embarrassing people!
Why do you suppose God arranged it to be so?
Could it be that God knows that we human beings love to divide ourselves from others? That we hold ourselves above other people, and distinguish ourselves as somehow being better than everyone else? Could it be that God knows we have this propensity to be racist – and sexist – and practitioners of phony-baloney my-God-is-better-than-your-God religion? Maybe God knows that we humans see the speck in our neighbor’s eye long before we notice the log in our own, and maybe God understands that sin has so invaded our lives that we would even dare believe that something as lovingly inclusive as Christmas must be kept pure from little Muslim girls!
Maybe God inserted all that impurity into the family tree of Jesus, and into the Christmas moment itself, so that you and I would never be comfortable with a religion that limits the love of God to just some of us. Maybe God included all those defective people in the Christmas story and all those skeletons in Jesus’ family closet so that you and I would become outraged when religious people start calling for “purity” – just like religious people called for purity in the Christian Crusades – and in the arianism of Nazi Germany – and in Islamic fundamentalism today.
Maybe God put all this “trailer trash” into Christmas and Jesus’ family tree so that we would come to know that God’s ways are not our ways, but that God’s way IS a better way than the way we have done it.
And maybe God has a hope that you and I will somehow figure out ways to love little Muslim girls and boys just like God figured out a way to birth his love into the life of a little Jewish girl long, long ago.
Maybe God is
saying to us, “Help me make a family tree in which EVERYONE is included!”
What an epiphany that would be!