Community Church Sermons
December 18, 2005
The fourth “R” in our sermon
series “The 4 R’s of Advent” is receive.
Do you remember what all 4 R’s stand for? Have you been paying attention? Repent. Reconcile. Rejoice. And Receive.
The most important “R”, to my way of thinking, is this fourth one. Repentance, reconciliation, and rejoicing can lead you right to the very doorstep of Christmas, but receiving is the key that unlocks the door into the Jesus experience.
In today’s Gospel lesson, the angel of the Lord informs Mary she’s going to have a baby. What a surprise! I know I’d be surprised! REALLY surprised! In today’s world, it’s sometimes shocking just to have a pregnancy test bring you that kind of news! So we can only imagine what it must’ve been like to hear it from an angel! And given the circumstances of her life – poor and unmarried and soon-to-be-ditched by her boyfriend – we can well understand what a difficult message it was for Mary to hear!
And yet, at the end of the story, Mary stares down her own fears and misgivings, and makes a momentous decision: “May it be to me as you have said.”
Mary receives Christmas.
This is true of all the characters in the Christmas story. Each one had to receive it in their own way. Joseph – the boyfriend – runs for the hills when he finds out Mary is expecting. Not his baby! Not his responsibility! Not his fault Mary apparently cheated on him! But just at the point Joseph is ready to break off the engagement, an angel of the Lord comes in a dream. “Don’t be afraid, Joseph, to take Mary as your wife. The child she and you will bring into the world will be holy.”
So what will Joseph do?
Well, in a similar way that Mary said, “May it be to me as you have said…”, Joseph also receives Christmas.
So do the shepherds in the fields. So do the magi in the east. Each one has to take a close look at the message and then decide for herself or himself whether or not they will join Mary in the sentiment, “May it be to me as you have said…” – and receive Christmas.
Christmas hinges on this 4th “R” of Advent.
Coincidentally, on this 4th
Sunday in the Season of Advent, we light the Love candle on our Advent Wreath.
And I can think of no better way to describe the key ingredient of entering the
experience of Christmas than by saying Christmas is found when you receive
God’s Love.
But you’ve got to be careful about what it means to receive God’s Love!
May I ask you a question today? Have you received Christ? Have you received God’s love into your life? Have you received Christmas?
My first reaction is to say, “Of course I’ve received those thing. After all, I’m a Christian!!” And I can probably point to the precise moments when it happened – when God and God’s love became real to me and I accepted it for myself. In the Christian Church, we have a great fascination for marking the moments when we receive the Lord.
But that’s not the kind of receiving the Gospel is talking about today.
My best boyhood friend Dennis Astrella and I went forward one night at an evangelistic crusade and received Christ. We did it, quite frankly, to keep ourselves from going straight to hell! That afternoon we had gone over to Slattery’s 1941 House restaurant and enjoyed a great meal of cheeseburgers, fries and a Coke. But then, when no one was looking, we snuck out the door without paying the bill! And we ran – we ran all the way down the street – all the way to our neighborhood – we ran all the way home – all the way to our bedrooms – all the way to under the covers! And now, we were running lickety-split as fast as we could down that aisle to the altar before our sins caught up with us. We wanted to receive God’s love before we got God’s wrath!
Mary, on the other hand, received in a different way. The Gospel story shows us that for Mary, receiving God’s love did not mean believing that God was angry with her and she’d better do something to escape wrath, but rather coming to believe that God REALLY LOVED HER JUST AS SHE WAS!
Have you ever heard Mary’s song in Luke 1?
My soul magnifies
the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
For he has looked with favor upon the lowliness of his servant.”
No one in the world of that day was lower than a girl. Girls had no standing, no voice, no place in society, no value except as a piece of their fathers’ property. Were she to be raped or killed, her father would be paid for the loss, just as he would be paid for her hand in marriage to a man who took her primarily to keep his house and bear him sons. Girls were nothing to the world – less than nothing, really.
But to God….!
Do you realize how utterly revolutionary it is that the Christian Faith begins its story with God partnering with a GIRL (of all people) to bring forth the salvation of the world??? What an unbelievable concept that a girl could be the hero! In what other religion do you find THAT? And can you understand how utterly unimaginable it was that someone as lowly and sin-stained as this unmarried, pregnant girl named Mary could actually come to believe that maybe – just maybe - God LOVES people like her?
You see, to receive Christmas is to receive a whole new concept of God’s love. And it’s not the concept of God’s love most Christians practice today.
God looked into the life of a
little pregnant girl and saw the most blessed woman who ever lived! That’s what
Mary’s song says: “From now on all generations will call me blessed!”
But how do you think most Christians today look at pregnant teenagers, and
unwed mothers, and the children they bring into the world? Do you think
Christians today see people like that in terms of blessing, or in terms of
their sin? How does the Church today look at the lowest among us? As people of
God’s favor, or as mere sinners?
To receive Christmas is to do something really radical! Are you up to it? To receive Christmas is to reject what is not Christmas, and that includes rejecting what the Christian Faith has become to many – a religious movement that seems to exist solely to hang guilt around the shoulders of people, to point out what is wrong with everyone else, and to empower itself by dividing the world into camps of those who are truly God’s people and those who are not God’s people.
And yet the Christmas angels sing out just the opposite song – that we are ALL GOD’S PEOPLE – even little pregnant teenaged girls – even irresponsible boyfriends – even people who work in the fields and don’t have time to go to church – even people who are our faraway enemies and who practice forms of religion very different from our own.
God’s people – Mary, Joseph, Shepherds, Wise Men, you, me, your neighbor, our enemy, the most upstanding citizen, the most down-and-out derelict – God’s people ALL!
And loved!
Bob Puckett is reading Matthew Fox’s controversial book, “Original Blessing.” Before it was published in 1983, Fox was a Dominican priest. After it was published, he wasn’t a Dominican priest anymore! Why? Because Fox challenged the Church’s teaching on original sin, demonstrating among other things, that such a doctrine did not exist in the Church until 400 years after the life of Jesus. More importantly, Fox asserted that the idea of original sin does not exist in either Judaism, or the early Christian Church. It doesn’t exist today in Eastern Christianity. And yet the idea of the pervasive sinfulness of human beings passed down from one generation to the next has become the filter through which many Christians and much of the Church today look out at people and at the world around us.
Fox writes that a true study of Scripture reveals that the operative principle of God’s relationship with humanity is not our original sin, but our original blessing! According to Genesis 1, God created a GOOD world with GOOD people, and even though we human beings rebel against God and fall into sin, there is a spark of GOODNESS that remains alive within us. Meister Eckhart, the 13th century Christian mystic – who was also a Dominican by the way – described it as the spark of the soul. He wrote that, hidden in all of us, is “something like the original outbreak of all goodness… something like a brilliant fire that burns incessantly. This fire is nothing other than the Holy Spirit.”
Original blessing.
How is Mary described in the song of Luke 1? Not as a sinner! But as a blessed woman!
How hard it is for those of us who grew up in some parts of the Church to know that we are good and valuable and richly loved. And how hard for those of us who were taught to see ourselves first and foremost as fallen sinners to treat others as good and worthy of love and respect.
Fox writes, “What a difference it makes to teach our children that they are blessings first and “sinners” only second. So much low self-esteem, internalized oppression, and violence to self and others rule our society forcing bouts and binges of addictions ranging from bulimia to consumerism. One therapist I know told me she hands out copies of this book to all her clients because she has come to realize how many problems arise in the psyche from toxic religious messages.”
To receive Christmas is to reject the toxic brand of Christianity that is so pervasive in our land today. And it is to go way out on a limb where many modern Christians are afraid to go.
But Mary went out on that limb, believing that even a non-person like herself was a blessed person to God. Joseph is out on that limb, too…and so are the shepherds…and so are the wise men…and they are thumbing their nose at religion that has nothing to offer but condemnation and guilt, and a salvation that is more about escaping the fires of hell than it is about discovering the original goodness and blessing of our lives by a God who loves and values even the least among us.
To receive Christmas is to take up a new faith – a new and different Christianity than the one many of us grew up with. Many of us here today have lived under the shadow of the old time religion of fire and brimstone, of judgment and rejection, of God’s disdain for sinners and anger toward the world. It will probably take us the rest of our lives to get over it and eel off all the layers of harm that phony religion has done to us and our world.
But today YOU can take the first step into the faith of Christmas.
You can receive it! Believe that you are a good person, and God loves you! And come and follow Jesus, and bring the gift of blessing and love to every person everywhere!
The message of this Christmas faith is “Peace on earth! Good will toward all!”
May it be to us…as God has said!