Christmas and the New Family
Sermon
Reading The Signs
SERMONS FOR ADVENT, CHRISTMAS AND EPIPHANY (SUNDAYS IN ORDINARY TIME)
When Wilbur and Orville Wright completed their historic flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903, they sent home a succinct telegram. In minimum words it reported that their venture had succeeded, and concluded, "Home for Christmas." Whether they knew it or not, their achievement had ushered in a new age. Along with that, their "coming home" announcement might seem very mundane. But any of us who have longed to go home for Christmas will understand that the two subjects of the telegram were of equal importance. Not to world history, of course, but to the members of the Wright family.
Christmas is a family day, no doubt about it. Those who are without a family, or who cannot see their family fully joined together, almost hate to hear the word. Single people or those estranged from family sometimes say that Christmas is the loneliest day of the year. What could be worse, after all, than to be without family on the traditional family day?
Let me hasten to say, therefore, that I am not going to talk about blood, marital, or adoptive ties this day. I am not even talking about the circle of friendship. The family about which I wish to speak is that new family which came to birth on Christmas Day. It is a family to which all of us can belong if only we desire to do so; and its potential for joy and fulfillment is almost unlimited.
You will find the story in our Scripture of the day - the opening verses of the Gospel according to Saint John. I don't know that there are any three or four paragraphs in all of literature with the sustained beauty, elegance, and power which can be found here. No actor is skilled enough to read them with proper power, and no preacher can hope to explain them adequately. Only through the Spirit of God can we begin to touch a fair measure of their grandeur.
"In the beginning," the inspired writer says, "was the Word." It doesn't seem a likely way to introduce the Christmas story; but John is anxious for us to understand that Christmas had its beginnings long before Joseph and Mary, and in a place utterly beyond Bethlehem. He wants us to realize that the One he is about to introduce was always with God, possesses the same divine nature, and that eternal part of God became one of us human beings in order to save us from our sins.
Thus John is still in the first paragraph of his story when he reveals the conflict which exists in our world. This Word is the light of our human race, he says, but the light has to shine in darkness. After all, what is light for, except to overcome darkness? But the very existence of darkness tells us there is a battle to be won.
How much of a battle? This: though "the world was made through him, yet the world knew him not." (John 1:10) He is the Grand Playwright who appears in the middle of his own production; and the amateur actors don't recognize him, don't sense that the words they speak are of his giving, the costumes they wear of his designing and making.
John says, "He came to his own home, and his own peopie received him not." (John 1:11) There are few verses in the Bible more extraordinary and more wrought with tragedy than that one. He is rejected by those to whom he belongs, and who in turn belong to him.
As the Gospel of John tells the Christmas story, Jesus was not only shut out of the inn to which Joseph and Mary came, he was shut out of his home. It is shocking that Christmas, the great season for homecoming, began with our Lord shut out of his home!
But the story doesn't end there. Jesus came to his own home, and accepted rejection there, in order that he might establish a new home for our human race - that he might begin a new family. I shall dare to call it the true Holy Family.
The details are given to us in the twelfth and thirteenth verses of this first chapter of John's Gospel. "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 nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God." A new family is about to come into existence - a family born of God.
We need some background to appreciate and understand what is happening. The Old Testament Scriptures tell us that God gave our human race an utterly beautiful start by setting us in a garden of perfect delight. But we human beings rebelled against God, and chose to listen to the voice of the intruder - sin. As a result, we became a wayward race. By creation we were the children of God, but by our own choice we became the children of this earth; in the classic language of the Scriptures, we became the children of the devil. The Bible doesn't really give us any middle ground. If we do not choose to follow God, we have only one alternative. We may call that alternative by a number of less offensive names; but in the final measure, if we reject God we become the children of destruction.
When you stop to think of the condition of our world, that isn't too hard to believe. The daily headlines demonstrate how given we are to destruction. War, hate, prejudice, pornography, hunger, poverty: these words are the language of destruction, and they seem to dominate our human scene. It's a far cry from Eden. Something has gone violently wrong.
The major part of the Old Testament tells us of God's continuing efforts to bring this wayward planet back to himself. It is a story that concentrates on a chosen people - the Jews - who are meant to be the special channel for God's working; and on God's efforts to help that people fulfill their calling.
And at last, in what the apostle calls "the fulness of time," God sends forth his Son. Christmas is God's ultimate effort to bring our world back to himself. He seeks to restore Eden by way of Bethlehem.
It is also by the way of the family. God wants a relationship with us human beings which is beyond king and subject; he is our Father, and it is that relationship which he wants restored. When we receive Christ we become children of God, brought back to our rightful place in the Holy Family.
Someone once said that this verse - "as many as received him ... he gave Power to become children of God" - could well have been placed at the very beginning of the New Testament. It would be the key to all that follows in the Gospels, the Epistles and even in Revelation; because the climax of the whole biblical story is a kind of family reunion in eternity. And it is the explicit summary of what Jesus was sent to do. He came not simply to teach or to be an example, but to do what he alone could do: prepare the way for you and me to become children of God.
The Bible wants us to realize that this is God's achieving. We must be born, the writer says, "not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God." I'm not sure that we can distinguish particular meanings for each of these phrases; perhaps it's primarily that the writer wants us to understand that there is no other factor involved than the purpose and power of God. If we are to come into a renewed relationship with our Heavenly Father, it will not be by our human efforts, our struggling for acceptance, or our admirable deserving. It will be God's doing. God alone can bring about this marvelous reunion.
And it is a reunion. It is not that we are strangers to God. Rather, we are prodigals who have left home and now need to be restored to the family. We all have that divine breath which came to the human race at creation, when God breathed into the creature of clay the stuff of divine life. Now it is a matter of our coming back into the family which is rightly our home.
There are many times when you and I need to remember that our rightful human place is in the family of God. I must tell myself this, for other people, in those instances when I despair for someone's inhumanity and degradation. Whatever that human being may seem at this moment to be, no matter how debased or unlovable he may have become, he is still someone whose original family ties are with God. I dare not give up on any human being; because he or she has the potential, by God's action in Jesus Christ, to rejoin the heavenly family.
Nor dare I give up on myself. On those days when I look at myself more harshly than I would ever look on any other human being - and when I can see no measure of worth in me because I am obsessed with hell's estimate of unworth - I must remember that my eternal roots are in the family of God, and that God wants so much for his family to be whole that he sent Jesus Christ to give us the power to become children of God. This is a word to throw in the teeth of despair, self-loathing and unreasoning fear. It is a word to speak to hell itself.
The key to this transformation, John tells us, is in our believing; specifically, the promise is to those who believe on his - Christ's - name. It is in accepting Jesus Christ for who he is that you and I can become what we were meant to be. This is not as mystical a thing as it first seems to be. Whoever is Lord of my life has power over it. If I choose to believe in despair or materialism above all else, they will rule me. But if I believe in Jesus the Christ, he gives me the power to become a child of God. We belong to that which we believe. That's why our believing is such a powerful thing.
It is by this believing that we receive the power - or the right, as other translations put it - to become the children of God. Believing releases us to take advantage of what is already possible. When the prodigal son was in the far country, languishing in the pigpen, he was in fact a son of his father, but it was doing him no good. It was not until he believed that there was an opportunity in his father's house - an opportunity he underestimated - that he rose up to go home. He would have died in the pigpen if he hadn't believed enough to leave it. In his rising up and leaving, he received the power to become, effectively, his father's son.
So the Christmas story is a family story. Not because some of us remember happy family celebrations, and not because some of us will have such celebrations this season, but because Christmas makes possible the renewed family of God. Because of Christmas, the power is available for us to become the children of God, and for the family of God to be restored.
G.K. Chesterton probably said it as well as anyone since the writer of John's Gospel. Chesterton is known to many as author of the Father Brown mystery novels, and to others as a passionate defender of the Christian faith. In his poem, "The House of Christmas," Chesterton first describes the state of our human souls:
For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done.
We are all "strangers" on this planet, as long as we are estranged from God. Even when we are in the midst of family and friends - surrounded by the familiar appointments of home - we feel some unexplainable homesickness. Why? Because, as Chesterton says,
We have hands that fashion and heads that know,
But our hearts we lost - how long ago!
How long ago? Back at the earliest part of the human story, when we began wandering from the Father's house.
But God has made it possible for us to return. Chesterton recalls both the language of the Gospel of John and the rejection which Joseph and Mary experienced at the Bethlehem inn. So he rejoices:
To an open house in the evening
Home shall men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome ...
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.
God, in Jesus Christ, became homeless at Bethlehem so that you and I and all the human race might have a home. In sublime love, our Lord accepted rejection in order to bring the family together again. This is the Holy Family of Christmas: the family which you and I make with the Heavenly Father. Welcome home, this Christmas [Eve / Day]!
Christmas is a family day, no doubt about it. Those who are without a family, or who cannot see their family fully joined together, almost hate to hear the word. Single people or those estranged from family sometimes say that Christmas is the loneliest day of the year. What could be worse, after all, than to be without family on the traditional family day?
Let me hasten to say, therefore, that I am not going to talk about blood, marital, or adoptive ties this day. I am not even talking about the circle of friendship. The family about which I wish to speak is that new family which came to birth on Christmas Day. It is a family to which all of us can belong if only we desire to do so; and its potential for joy and fulfillment is almost unlimited.
You will find the story in our Scripture of the day - the opening verses of the Gospel according to Saint John. I don't know that there are any three or four paragraphs in all of literature with the sustained beauty, elegance, and power which can be found here. No actor is skilled enough to read them with proper power, and no preacher can hope to explain them adequately. Only through the Spirit of God can we begin to touch a fair measure of their grandeur.
"In the beginning," the inspired writer says, "was the Word." It doesn't seem a likely way to introduce the Christmas story; but John is anxious for us to understand that Christmas had its beginnings long before Joseph and Mary, and in a place utterly beyond Bethlehem. He wants us to realize that the One he is about to introduce was always with God, possesses the same divine nature, and that eternal part of God became one of us human beings in order to save us from our sins.
Thus John is still in the first paragraph of his story when he reveals the conflict which exists in our world. This Word is the light of our human race, he says, but the light has to shine in darkness. After all, what is light for, except to overcome darkness? But the very existence of darkness tells us there is a battle to be won.
How much of a battle? This: though "the world was made through him, yet the world knew him not." (John 1:10) He is the Grand Playwright who appears in the middle of his own production; and the amateur actors don't recognize him, don't sense that the words they speak are of his giving, the costumes they wear of his designing and making.
John says, "He came to his own home, and his own peopie received him not." (John 1:11) There are few verses in the Bible more extraordinary and more wrought with tragedy than that one. He is rejected by those to whom he belongs, and who in turn belong to him.
As the Gospel of John tells the Christmas story, Jesus was not only shut out of the inn to which Joseph and Mary came, he was shut out of his home. It is shocking that Christmas, the great season for homecoming, began with our Lord shut out of his home!
But the story doesn't end there. Jesus came to his own home, and accepted rejection there, in order that he might establish a new home for our human race - that he might begin a new family. I shall dare to call it the true Holy Family.
The details are given to us in the twelfth and thirteenth verses of this first chapter of John's Gospel. "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 nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God." A new family is about to come into existence - a family born of God.
We need some background to appreciate and understand what is happening. The Old Testament Scriptures tell us that God gave our human race an utterly beautiful start by setting us in a garden of perfect delight. But we human beings rebelled against God, and chose to listen to the voice of the intruder - sin. As a result, we became a wayward race. By creation we were the children of God, but by our own choice we became the children of this earth; in the classic language of the Scriptures, we became the children of the devil. The Bible doesn't really give us any middle ground. If we do not choose to follow God, we have only one alternative. We may call that alternative by a number of less offensive names; but in the final measure, if we reject God we become the children of destruction.
When you stop to think of the condition of our world, that isn't too hard to believe. The daily headlines demonstrate how given we are to destruction. War, hate, prejudice, pornography, hunger, poverty: these words are the language of destruction, and they seem to dominate our human scene. It's a far cry from Eden. Something has gone violently wrong.
The major part of the Old Testament tells us of God's continuing efforts to bring this wayward planet back to himself. It is a story that concentrates on a chosen people - the Jews - who are meant to be the special channel for God's working; and on God's efforts to help that people fulfill their calling.
And at last, in what the apostle calls "the fulness of time," God sends forth his Son. Christmas is God's ultimate effort to bring our world back to himself. He seeks to restore Eden by way of Bethlehem.
It is also by the way of the family. God wants a relationship with us human beings which is beyond king and subject; he is our Father, and it is that relationship which he wants restored. When we receive Christ we become children of God, brought back to our rightful place in the Holy Family.
Someone once said that this verse - "as many as received him ... he gave Power to become children of God" - could well have been placed at the very beginning of the New Testament. It would be the key to all that follows in the Gospels, the Epistles and even in Revelation; because the climax of the whole biblical story is a kind of family reunion in eternity. And it is the explicit summary of what Jesus was sent to do. He came not simply to teach or to be an example, but to do what he alone could do: prepare the way for you and me to become children of God.
The Bible wants us to realize that this is God's achieving. We must be born, the writer says, "not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God." I'm not sure that we can distinguish particular meanings for each of these phrases; perhaps it's primarily that the writer wants us to understand that there is no other factor involved than the purpose and power of God. If we are to come into a renewed relationship with our Heavenly Father, it will not be by our human efforts, our struggling for acceptance, or our admirable deserving. It will be God's doing. God alone can bring about this marvelous reunion.
And it is a reunion. It is not that we are strangers to God. Rather, we are prodigals who have left home and now need to be restored to the family. We all have that divine breath which came to the human race at creation, when God breathed into the creature of clay the stuff of divine life. Now it is a matter of our coming back into the family which is rightly our home.
There are many times when you and I need to remember that our rightful human place is in the family of God. I must tell myself this, for other people, in those instances when I despair for someone's inhumanity and degradation. Whatever that human being may seem at this moment to be, no matter how debased or unlovable he may have become, he is still someone whose original family ties are with God. I dare not give up on any human being; because he or she has the potential, by God's action in Jesus Christ, to rejoin the heavenly family.
Nor dare I give up on myself. On those days when I look at myself more harshly than I would ever look on any other human being - and when I can see no measure of worth in me because I am obsessed with hell's estimate of unworth - I must remember that my eternal roots are in the family of God, and that God wants so much for his family to be whole that he sent Jesus Christ to give us the power to become children of God. This is a word to throw in the teeth of despair, self-loathing and unreasoning fear. It is a word to speak to hell itself.
The key to this transformation, John tells us, is in our believing; specifically, the promise is to those who believe on his - Christ's - name. It is in accepting Jesus Christ for who he is that you and I can become what we were meant to be. This is not as mystical a thing as it first seems to be. Whoever is Lord of my life has power over it. If I choose to believe in despair or materialism above all else, they will rule me. But if I believe in Jesus the Christ, he gives me the power to become a child of God. We belong to that which we believe. That's why our believing is such a powerful thing.
It is by this believing that we receive the power - or the right, as other translations put it - to become the children of God. Believing releases us to take advantage of what is already possible. When the prodigal son was in the far country, languishing in the pigpen, he was in fact a son of his father, but it was doing him no good. It was not until he believed that there was an opportunity in his father's house - an opportunity he underestimated - that he rose up to go home. He would have died in the pigpen if he hadn't believed enough to leave it. In his rising up and leaving, he received the power to become, effectively, his father's son.
So the Christmas story is a family story. Not because some of us remember happy family celebrations, and not because some of us will have such celebrations this season, but because Christmas makes possible the renewed family of God. Because of Christmas, the power is available for us to become the children of God, and for the family of God to be restored.
G.K. Chesterton probably said it as well as anyone since the writer of John's Gospel. Chesterton is known to many as author of the Father Brown mystery novels, and to others as a passionate defender of the Christian faith. In his poem, "The House of Christmas," Chesterton first describes the state of our human souls:
For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done.
We are all "strangers" on this planet, as long as we are estranged from God. Even when we are in the midst of family and friends - surrounded by the familiar appointments of home - we feel some unexplainable homesickness. Why? Because, as Chesterton says,
We have hands that fashion and heads that know,
But our hearts we lost - how long ago!
How long ago? Back at the earliest part of the human story, when we began wandering from the Father's house.
But God has made it possible for us to return. Chesterton recalls both the language of the Gospel of John and the rejection which Joseph and Mary experienced at the Bethlehem inn. So he rejoices:
To an open house in the evening
Home shall men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome ...
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.
God, in Jesus Christ, became homeless at Bethlehem so that you and I and all the human race might have a home. In sublime love, our Lord accepted rejection in order to bring the family together again. This is the Holy Family of Christmas: the family which you and I make with the Heavenly Father. Welcome home, this Christmas [Eve / Day]!
