Creekside Church Sermon of December 27, 1998 "Christ is Born! Now What?" Matthew 2:13-23	Guest Preacher This Week: Nelda Risden Church Member
Send this sermon to a friend

I must confess that I'd already had occasion to sense that such a silly ploy might fly with the good Dr. Cummins. Let's flash back to the first session of class. We were given a sheet listing the dates of the classes and the names of the 6 books to be reported on in each session. Dr. Cummins proceeded to read off each book title assigning a volunteer to read and report on it. I quickly scanned all the titles and saw on the list this very book I'm holding now-THE AMERICAN FRONTIER by William Gee White and none other than D. Duane Cummins himself.

My mind was working at warp speed and in a matter of mere nano-seconds, I came to one of many possible conclusions. Someone had to read and report verbally on the Prof.'s own book. That someone, if the report is done well, stands the chance of making a big time impression and getting said Prof. in that someone's corner for the rest of the semester. Furthermore, I concluded that everyone else in the class had by now come to the same conclusion and that all would be ready to wave their hands high the instant he read that book title.

Mentally, I imposed one further conclusion on the group, that none of us wanted to be the one assigned to that particular book because none of us believed we could give a report good enough to impress the author. But we also did not want to be left looking like we had something against reading his book, I decided, so I determined that we had all by now calculated that the odds of being the one called on in a sea of 30 or so waving hands were minimal and worth the risk.

Having concluded all of my conclusions on the subject, I figured I had to take the risk along with everyone else. So when Dr. Cummins read off "THE AMERICAN FRONTIER", my eager hand shot up in the air. I glanced around to see...all the other students virtually sitting on their hands for fear the Prof. might interpret even a twitching finger as a desire to volunteer. Evidently my mind had worked so fast, none of the other had any idea yet what conclusion they should have reached and acted upon by now.

As the heat of my red face slowly faded away, I figured I'd better make the most of it and give it my best effort. I needn't have worried, even though the Prof. had me sit facing him no more than 4 feet away as I began my report. In only a few minutes, some particular reference that I made caught Dr. Cummins' fancy and he proceeded to use the entire balance of the hour and a half to tell us about his adventure researching the book out west on the Oregon Trail. I didn't say another word, and he was so impressed, he gave me an "A". That's why I had the courage to take the little orange longhorn to class.

That's a long story to illustrate a point, but it is representative of the fact that the way we make decisions is almost like breathing. It happens hundreds of times a day and we aren't even aware of most of them unless one goes bad or becomes life changing or life threatening.

Joseph was no different. We don't have a record of most of the decisions he made, but we do have a record of the most life affecting ones. We know he had made a decision to wed Mary and that upon finding her pregnant without benefit of marriage, he temporarily decided against it. Being the dreaming entertainer of angels that he was, he regained proper perspective and followed through on his earlier commitment to take Mary as his wife. It may well have been a life or death decision for Mary since a perfectly acceptable punishment for someone in her condition back then was death by stoning, a most extreme yet effective method of abortion.

Even if Mary wouldn't have been stoned, Joseph's choice certainly altered their lives in a radical way, as did Mary's earlier choice to say "yes" to God's messenger.

In today's text we find Joseph approached in another dream by a divine travel agent who gave him a command to move to Egypt. But even a command is no more than an emphatic choice. The options he faced were likely not very appealing either way. Become a fugitive in a foreign country or let his young son be slaughtered with the rest. He never seemed to doubt what the consequences would be nor what he needed to choose.

This dream follows the departure of the Magi who were warned in another dream not to return to Herod but to take a long detour to return home. Their decision to do so apparently bought the holy family some valuable time. It also bought a death sentence for dozens of harmless little boys, the "slaughter of the innocents" as it's known. This story is as gut wrenching as any in the Bible, so why would only Matthew choose to include it in his gospel? It's certainly not one that I would choose to include in my own account of the good news of Jesus Christ. It seems to make more sense not to include a story of an event that saved the life of the Prince of Peace thereby opening the door for Herod to mass murder dozens of toddlers. So just why did Matthew include it?

You may remember that a key purpose for Matthew's gospel was to demonstrate in any number of ways that Jesus was the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy. His target audience consisted of Jews. He was attempting to prove to them that Jesus was the Messiah because he was all that Old Testament prophecy said the Messiah would be. A phrase Matthew uses as often as 16 times and that David read twice in verses 15 and 23 of today's text is, "All this was done that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet saying..."

The flight of the holy family to Egypt is in a sense a reverse account of the exodus. Where God's people fled Egypt to escape cruelty and gain freedom, Jesus must now escape to Egypt for the same reason. Like Moses as a baby, Jesus escaped a death sentence by means of drastic action taken by his parents. Pharaoh first and later, Herod put out a contract on the lives of baby boys. Both Moses and Jesus lived in exile until they learned that the one seeking their execution had himself died.

One writer suggests that Matthew put the account of the slaughter in the story of Jesus' exile to illustrate that when he returns, Jesus will be taking on bigger fish than Herod. His sights will be set on Herod's "boss"-Death itself. (Commentary section of "Homiletics", Nov.-Dec., 1998)

Until this year I harbored the fantasy that Christmas was intended to be a feel-good time when suffering, tragedy and pain weren't supposed to intrude. That they often did intrude I was well aware, but I chose to view Christmas and its aftermath with a pristine perspective. I put the meaning of Christ's birth on a pedestal supported by nothing more than whatever emotional well-being I'd managed to maintain through the overindulgences of the season. I offset those with the mellowing effects of snow, Christmas music, lights and decorations, and the warm glow that remained with me temporarily after gatherings of family, friends and church. The end result wasn't much more than status quo, no better and no worse than before.

Events have gotten my attention this year like never before-events shaped by the choices people made seemingly without the benefit of God's guidance. Reminiscent of a book title, MEETING JESUS AGAIN FOR THE FIRST TIME, I began exploring the question of who Jesus is for me even before our Sunday school class began to study it this quarter. Thereby came the question, "Christ is born! Now what?"

God gave us a Gift-a super-colossal, one-of-a-kind, awesome, mind-boggling, heart-warming, non-returnable, it's-a-keeper, kind of Gift. The Gift that keeps on giving. The perfect Gift for someone who has everything, or thinks he does. God gave us His Son, His First Born, His Pride and Joy, His Hope for the future.

David's message last Sunday about God Himself becoming vulnerable had a powerful impact on me, and I thank him for it. Imagine how vulnerable you'd feel giving the most precious gift, your child, to humanity. Imagine what it would be like to love the rest of humanity so much that you would willingly give your child away as a gift to let the human race know how much you care. I'm not sure we are capable of imagining something that big, and for you smart alecs who are saying that there are days when giving your child away wouldn't be such a bad idea, I can sympathize. Having no child of my own, I've substituted in my imagination a super neat 27-year-old man who happens to be my nephew. I remember a time when he gave new and tortuous meaning to the phrase "terrible twos". But he became a kind, considerate, interesting person made doubly precious to me by various life circumstances, and I cannot wrap my feeble mind around the idea of giving him to all of you, much less the rest of human kind.

God may have been vulnerable but he wasn't stupid. He knew what we were likely to do with His Gift. He knew we might use him for a while, tire of him, and discard him after tearing him apart. He knew He was entrusting this most precious child of His to a world where even at Christmas presidents are impeached. Even at Christmas a woman 5-months pregnant with a 3-year-old child can be abandoned without warning by a stranger wearing the face of a faithful husband and loving daddy; a woman can be used, abused, and discarded by her own sister. Even at Christmas nations are bombed and young, personable, caring public servants are shot dead just trying to do their jobs.

Those events, some experienced only through the media, are what got my attention this Christmas. It takes an awful lot sometimes to get my attention. The message I got was that Christmas, Christ's birth, is as much, or more, about tragedy and pain as it is about happy times and feeling good. You see, Christmas was a failure for me if I came out of it without feeling warm, cozy and gooey about all the "feel good" highlights of the season. And of course by those standards, Christmas could not continue to measure up. So a number of years ago, it began to slide into the abyss of false expectations. The giving of the most precious, unique Gift ever given could never meet those expectations because they were too shallow and meaningless.

I COULDN'T RECEIVE THE GIFT.

I was looking in the wrong direction and with poor timing to boot. It's kind of like my bedroom which yesterday I dubbed the "Lost and Found Dept." (See Margaret, I told you I could make a sermon illustration out of it.) In my bedroom is a lot of, for want of a better term, stuff. Unlike the commercial where a now well-organized family whines in unison, "We need more stuff," I most assuredly do NOT. As a result, I am prone to lose things in there- little things mostly like earrings or pills, but not always. This week I lost two pairs of scissors. Every time I lose something I look for it for a while, then I relax because I know that as soon as I lose something else, I'll find what I lost today, just like I found both scissors while looking for something else. I just don't look in the right place at the right time.

At Christmas I've been gazing in the wrong directions and only glancing toward Jesus. He is in the heart of the bombings, the murders, the accusations of betrayal, the abandonments and the abuses. He is the one we bomb, murder, accuse, abandon and abuse. God knew that and gave him to us anyway. Jesus knew that and gave himself anyway.

What wondrous love is this? How shall we receive the Gift?

Will we try to receive Christ by making a list of bad habits we resolve to change? Now that Christmas is over will we sigh with relief that things can get back to normal and live 1999 as if nothing has changed? Or will we recognize that with Christ born anew in our hearts, nothing will ever be the same?

Did Christmas mean nothing more than a bigger credit card debt to pay off and hundreds of evergreen needles to excavate out of the carpet? Or did it fill your soul with such joy and gratitude that your New Year's resolutions can be jettisoned because you know that you have only one thing to change-that henceforth you will live as if your very life depends on Christ?

Of all the choices we make, this one is most critical. The lesson that Joseph's choices teach us is that we have to see past the lights, sounds, smells and warm fuzzies of Christmas celebrations that blind us to where Christ will be found-he's there in the raw grief of families torn apart by abandonment, abuse, infidelity and murder; he's there in the accusations, public humiliations, ruined reputations and mass destruction by people who, as Stewart Udall has said, "...confused power with greatness." And he is here in the torment of loss, the worry of making ends meet, the anxiety of declining health, the pain of separation, and the stresses of daily living that threaten to overpower our best intentions and engulf our weakened spirits. He's here just as he was in Bethlehem among the slaughtered innocents.

In the movie "City of Joy" Patrick Swayze plays a doctor who, unable to save a little girl's life, fled to Calcutta. Confronted with the overwhelming poverty and oppression in an area of the city know as the "City of Joy", his instinct is to run again. To a dedicated Sister Joan whose love and compassion for the poor is obvious, he intones: "I quit! I will not be invested in these people with their needs and their clinging and their desperation. It's just too damn painful!" Joan responded softly, "Maybe the world is meant to break your heart. From the moment we're born we're shipwrecked, struggling between hope and despair-all of us."

E. Annie Prouix wrote, "You think you can love without pain? Love without hurt? Love without rejection? Love without betrayal? If a bird with a broken neck could fly, what else might be possible? It may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery."

In his book LEAP OVER A WALL Eugene Peterson writes:

At the point that God's revelation becomes total and focused in Jesus, the Gospel writers take particular pains to make sure that we don't lose touch with the human. They insist on Jesus' real birth and real death, Jesus' eating of plain bread and speaking of plain words. But even so, it isn't easy to keep a grip on the human, for the birth was a virgin birth, the death was succeeded by a glorious resurrection, and there were a number of indisputably supernatural works that are a very natural part of the story. In the case of Jesus, human isn't just human.

The Evangelists' first task, of course, is to give witness that Jesus is God-with-us, "who for us and for our salvation came down from heaven."

The Gospel writers, having gotten us in touch with God in Jesus, now have to do their level best to keep us in touch with who we are in Jesus-our human selves. God doesn't take shortcuts to heaven, by passing our troublesome humanity; and we had better not try either.

The entire meaning of the incarnation is that God enters our human condition, embraces it, and comes to where we are to save us.

As we consider what paths we will take in the approaching year, Christmas confronts us with the same 3 options that the doctor in "City of Joy" faced. Paul Borthwick cited these: "You can run. You can watch. Or you can commit to getting involved with compassionate response."

How will we receive the Gift?

All of the sermons that have appeared in text form on our Web Site since August 1996 are available here in the On-Line version. Use the search engine below to find the sermon you want. You may search by date, sermon title, or content. The sermons are full-text searchable.

Sermon Search:



Exact phrase    All words (AND)    Any word (OR)