Saturday, December 25, 2010

Experience Hope This Christmas... In a Baby Born


Whenever I see one of those huge hummer-like vehicles parked outside a bank, I know it is delivering some serious coin. Occasionally I have watched as some big guys in uniforms with guns at their sides haul a heavy sack through the front doors. It doesn’t take much thought to know the bag is filled with a lot of money.

However, what would you think if you saw an old pickup instead of an armoured van in front of the bank and a young fellow in a T-shirt and blue jeans leaning against it? If you are like me, you might glance at it but then just walk on without any more thought. Here is how the fellow in the T-shirt and blue jeans described his experience in this true story [Roger Thompson, “Treasure in a Brown Bag,” Preaching Today, Tape 42]:
One day we got a call from Bank of America in downtown San Bernardino, and they were in a panic: “We've got to have some coin in the hour.” Well, all the armoured trucks were gone, and so Larry, my manager, backed his '49 Ford pickup into the bay. Now if Brinks ever finds out about this they're going to shoot this guy. We loaded $25,000 worth of coin in a '49 Ford pickup. That thing was dragging. That's over a ton.
Larry said: “Hop in. We're going up to B of A.”
We hopped. I'm in my T-shirt and blue jeans. We drove up to the front of the Bank of America, parked the truck, and Larry said, “Hang on, I'll go in and get the dolly, and we'll haul this stuff in.” I'm whistling, standing against this truck for twenty minutes. I don't have a gun. I thought, if anybody notices what is in this common-looking pickup truck, I'm a dead duck! Of course, you can't carry eighty pounds very far.
The treasure that people were walking by! But they didn't see it because of the commonness of the delivery people and delivery vehicle!
Every year we still carry on the custom of celebrating the anniversary of an ordinary birth in unusual circumstances – the birth of Jesus. He was delivered in the same way every other baby comes into this world. While we may wonder about how he was conceived – and that is one of the great mysteries surrounding Jesus – we don’t usually wonder about his actual birth. He came out of Mary as any other baby is born. Anyone walking by the stable that night and knowing a baby was being born might have wondered about the place of birth but not about the birth itself. It took some angels telling a bunch of shepherds and an unusual star in the sky to tell some Magi that there was treasure to be found in the simple birth of a baby called Jesus -- born in a little Middle Eastern town in a place where animals were housed. Otherwise they would have missed him.

We are now aware this baby grew to become a man whose life and teachings have influenced the world like no other. We could be somewhere else tonight but we are here in this place, perhaps because we sense that this particular baby called Jesus has treasure in him yet to be recognized by others who walk by – treasure yet to be discovered by us.

What is the treasure to be found in Jesus? Here is part of the treasure I have found.

In the Christmas story, we read of God’s love for the world. That’s Treasure Number One.

It intrigues me that Mary and Joseph did not pick the name of Jesus for their son. Most parents want to pick a name that is meaningful to them in some way. Instead, God picked a name for him that was significant to God! One of God’s angels told both Joseph and Mary separately to call the baby Jesus “for he will save his people from the condition and the consequences of their sins.” The name Jesus means “the Lord who saves.”

You see, Jesus is an expression of God’s character. Here is a good way to think about the way God works -- from creation to Incarnation to redemption, God’s work is an unfolding of God’s character. So we ask, What is the character of God shown in the Christmas story?

Like the creation of the Earth and the universe, the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus are also expressions of a most extravagant divine love. This is love that seeks beyond every river and mountain until the lost sheep is found. This is love that travels down any road of suffering and pain, of messy living and difficulties to find, to heal and to reconcile. This is love that will suffer and sacrifice everything on behalf of the beloved and that lays down his life for his friend. This is the same love that brought us into being in the first place. And in the tiny out-the-way village of Bethlehem, this same love enters into a new and more intimate relationship with human beings in the person of Jesus. “God so loved the world” that he sent Jesus so that every person who puts his or her faith in him will be reconciled to God and be brought to live with God forever. God’s extravagant love seen in Jesus: that’s the first treasure.

Treasure Number Two: We celebrate in Christmas that God became a person in order to enter into a personal relationship with human beings -- with us!

I am not embarrassed to tell you that I have a personal relationship with my wife. Our relationship is personal, intimate and loving. She loves me and wants me. I love her and I want her. Well, God also loves us and wants us for his own.

If I told you I had a “personal relationship with Jesus,” does that sound too personal and too intimate a way to express my response and devotion to him? Or to God? But the treasure of Christmas is that God became a person. In other words, our most intimate relationship with God is only possible because of the astonishing and seemingly impossible event we celebrate at Christmas: God entered into our human condition. God became one of us, capable of relating to us not merely as Creator but also as Friend in Jesus Christ. The truck driver who thinks of Jesus in the passenger seat as he rolls across the plains of Saskatchewan. The school teacher who asks Jesus for patience as she nears the end of the school day. The worker in the oil fields of Alberta who talks and jokes and argues with Jesus as he goes about his work. The disabled child who asks Jesus for the strength and courage to carry on. All of these people, whatever their background, give expression to a profound theological truth: God is not only the magnificent Creator who fashions the suns and measures the span of the heavens but also the compassionate Friend who dwells among the lowly, the humble, the contrite and the suffering.

With the coming of Jesus, we discover the treasure that our relationship with God is meant to be interpersonal. Not only is it characterized by worship and reverence but also by tender mercy and forgiveness, love and mutual understanding. With Jesus, we can know God and be known by God. With Jesus, we have footsteps in which to walk. With Jesus, we have the transformative presence and power of God with us even in our most human and most painful moments. And for that I am most grateful. God’s personal relationship with us: that’s the second treasure of Christmas that we can experience in Jesus.

Treasure Number Three: In Christmas we celebrate that God delights in using the small, the weak and the foolish things of the world to humble the great, the mighty and the wise. 

In his newest book What Good Is God? In Search of a Faith That Matters [Faith Words, 2010, pp. 184-186], author Philip Yancey tells a contemporary story that shows how the great and the mighty were humbled by the small and the weak. He wrote about the 2004 election in Ukraine in which the reformer Victor Yushchenko challenged the entrenched party and nearly died for it. On election day, the exit polls showed Yushchenko with a comfortable lead. But through outright fraud, the government reversed those results. Yancey wrote:
That evening the state-run television reported, “Ladies and gentlemen, we announce that the challenger Victor Yushchenko has been decisively defeated.” However, government authorities had not taken into account one feature of Ukrainian television: the translation it provides for the hearing-impaired. On the small screen insert in the lower right-hand corner of the television screen, a brave woman raised by deaf-mute parents gave a different message in sign language. “I am addressing all the deaf citizens of Ukraine. Don't believe what they say. They are lying, and I am ashamed to translate these lies. Yushchenko is our President!” No one in the studio understood her radical sign-language message.
[Inspired by that courageous translator, deaf people led what became known as the Orange Revolution.] They text-messaged their friends on mobile phones about the fraudulent elections, and soon other journalists took courage … and likewise refused to broadcast the party line. Over the next few weeks as many as a million people wearing orange flooded the capital city of Kiev to demand new elections. The government finally buckled under the pressure, consenting to new elections, and this time Yushchenko emerged as the undisputed winner.
Yancey further commented:
Our society is hardly unique.… [L]ike the sign language translator in the lower right-hand corner of the screen, along comes a person named Jesus who says in effect, “Don't believe the big screen -- they're lying. It's the poor who are blessed, not the rich. Mourners are blessed too, as well as those who hunger and thirst, and the persecuted. Those who go through life thinking they're on top will end up on the bottom. And those who go through life feeling they're at the very bottom will end up on top. After all, what does it profit a person to gain the whole world and lose his soul?”
In the birth of Jesus, whose young mother laid him in a manger, we see a God who delights in using the small, the weak and the foolish things of the world to humble the great, the mighty and the wise: that’s the third treasure of Christmas that should give most of us great hope!

Treasure Number Four: God showed us in Christmas what it means to give and to love. 

We human beings love to give gifts – to those who may be in need of some of the essentials of life, to those who are friends and especially to those who are family. Sometimes we even give for no apparent reason -- we give “just because.”

In the Christmas story, the Magi brought gifts to the infant Jesus. So it could well be said we give gifts at Christmas following the example of the Magi and their gift-giving. Yet the ultimate Gift-Giver in the Christmas story is God. In the first Christmas, God showed us what it meant to give. God did not give sparingly and selectively. God gave of himself in Jesus to the whole of humanity. God did not give from a distance as one song would want us to believe. God entered into the trenches with us, into the deepest pits of our fears and struggles and sufferings in order to be with us, to comfort us, to strengthen us, to heal us, to redeem us.

In setting aside his glory in coming into our world as a baby, God showed us what self-sacrifice means because of his great love for sinful humanity. When we give ourselves or sacrifice ourselves for others, when we enter into the trenches with one another, when we restore broken relationships and deepen the bonds of friendship and family, when we give even to those who have wronged us or failed us or disappointed us – when we do this, we are honouring the fourth treasure of love and giving that God showed us in Christmas.

Hear this piece of treasure from the heart of seven-year-old Bobby: “Love is what's in the room with you at Christmas if you stop opening presents and listen.”

My Christmas prayer for each of us is to listen well, to be open to God’s love, and to receive the hope, the joy and the peace God has for us in the birth of Jesus.

May this be so for you and for me -- and for the entire world. Amen.



Rev. Chris Miller
Christmas Eve, 2010
oympastor@rogers.com

OYM Oriole-York Mills United Church, Toronto
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Sunday, December 12, 2010

Experience Hope This Christmas ... In the Mysteries of God

I appreciate a good mystery. A story is called a mystery when the plot involves a crime or some other event that remains puzzlingly unsettled until the very end. Among the best writers of such mysteries, in my opinion, are authors such as Charles Dickens, Edgar Alan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, G. K. Chesterton, Ellery Queen, Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, Isaac Asimov, Earle Stanley Gardner, P. D. James, Ian Fleming, John le Carre and Ray Bradbury. You no doubt have your own list. Do you remember some of these mystery programs from the past: Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Columbo, Dragnet, Hawaii Five-O, Perry Mason, X-Files, The Avengers, Quincy M E, Rockford Files? Among my favourites today are Murdoch Mysteries, Doctor Who and NCIS (Naval Criminal Investigation Service). For me, there is a common approach I need to take for virtually all mysteries. I have to be open and not closed to all the possibilities inherent in the mystery. I have to be aware there is more to understand, more to experience and more to resolve in the story than what I may think at first. A mystery means I had better be careful not to make up my mind too soon, thinking I know all the answers already! 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer challenged our respect for the mystery in life itself when he wrote:
“The lack of mystery in our modern life is our downfall and our poverty. A human life is worth as much as the respect it holds for the mystery. We retain the child in us to the extent that we honour the mystery. Therefore, children have open, wide-awake eyes because they know that they are surrounded by the mystery. They are not yet finished with this world; they still don’t know how to struggle along and avoid the mystery, as we do. We destroy the mystery because ... we want to be lord over everything and have it at our disposal, and that’s just what we cannot do with the mystery.”
This morning we heard two passages from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke that are filled with mystery. This mystery challenges us to respect it and to honour it. That means we dare not dismiss it as if there were no mystery. My constant prayer is to allow the child in me to respond with awe to this mystery that holds and surrounds us with love and hope. 

Where is the mystery in these two passages? It is in at least three places. The mystery is in the conception of Jesus. The mystery is in the name of Jesus as “Saviour.” The mystery is also in the name of Jesus as “Immanuel,” which means “God with us.”

It was not a mystery to Joseph and Mary 2,000 years ago how a baby is conceived! (Nor is it to us!) Under normal circumstances, a baby requires a man and a woman to engage in a sexual relationship. But today there is also artificial insemination when a doctor intervenes! That’s what was so intriguing about how Jesus was born. Both Joseph and Mary knew that neither one of them had begun such a relationship with each other even though they were engaged to be married. Mary also knew she had not been with any other man at all. That was part of the struggle Joseph had at first when he learned Mary was pregnant. At first her pregnancy meant to him (and to anyone else who would find out she was pregnant before they were lawfully married) that Mary had committed adultery and, therefore, could be stoned to death as permitted by law. And even though Joseph properly married Mary, there still seemed to be some rumours whispered around the community that Jesus might have been born illegitimately. I am of the belief, however, that Mary was telling the truth even if it left her vulnerable to innuendo and gossip about her supposed misconduct. 

But both Matthew, Jesus’ disciple, and Luke, the physician and historian, would have believed both Joseph and Mary as well; otherwise, they would not have made themselves or Mary or even Jesus vulnerable to ridicule by writing matter-of-factly about these details of Jesus’ birth. Why draw more attention to Mary, Joseph and Jesus by adding these circumstances in writing? It only made the possibility of people believing the worst about Mary’s behaviour more widely known. Why would Matthew and Luke include this information in their Gospels unless there was something important here? Otherwise, it would only create an unnecessary embarrassment in the Christian community. 

Part of the mystery of Jesus’ birth is that the virginity of Mary was assumed by both Matthew and Luke -- and the Early Church. But the virginity of Mary was not their primary focus. They also did not suggest that this conception of Jesus was the most important thing about Jesus. It was simply a matter of fact to them – Luke telling of Mary’s experience and Matthew of Joseph’s experience with both accounts converging on this point. But, in fact, no other New Testament writer talked about the conception and birth of Jesus as being unusual. Most, like the Apostle Paul, focused on the death and the resurrection of Jesus as more significant for their readers. I appreciate theologian N. T. Wright’s observations about this mystery:
“But to those who have come to some kind of faith in the crucified and risen Jesus, whose minds are thus opened to God being uniquely present in [Jesus], there is a sense of appropriateness, hard to define, easy to recognize, about the story Luke and Matthew tell. It isn’t what we would have expected, but it somehow rings true.” [Tom Wright, Luke for Everyone, SPCK, Great Britain, 2002, p. 11.]   
Both Matthew and Luke clearly focused their attention on God’s Holy Spirit. It was the intervention of the Holy Spirit of God who caused Mary to be pregnant. Twice Matthew said she was going to have Jesus by the Holy Spirit. Luke recorded that the angel said to Mary: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you” and “God’s power will rest upon you.” So the birth of Jesus involved connecting humanity with the power of God’s Holy Spirit. With all that we experience about Jesus in the Gospels, does not this connection of the human with the divine “ring true” in our hearts and minds? 

The mystery is also in the name Jesus. The name “Jesus” is a Greek equivalent of the well-known Hebrew name Joshua. It comes from two Hebrew words that mean “Lord” and “save.” So when the choir sings the introit “Jesus Stand Among Us” at the beginning of many of our worship services, as a community of faith, we are calling on the “Lord who saves” to stand among us here, in this place, in his risen power!  

Christmas is about the salvation that God planned for humanity through Jesus. What does the Church mean when we say “Jesus saves”? Well, to be saved still normally means to be rescued from something, from some condition or from someone. And the Scripture teaches -- and the worldwide Church has taught for two millenniums -- that Jesus saves his people from the condition and consequences of their sins.

Throughout the Gospels, “save” is also very much connected to healing and justice. There is a wonderful sense that God’s saving work encompasses the whole of life. For instance, when the disciples’ boat was about to capsize, they wanted “salvation” [Matthew 8:25]. When Jesus was on the cross, he was taunted about saving himself [Matthew 27:40]. When Mary sang her song of praise (The Magnificat) in Luke’s Gospel, she declared God as her “Saviour” who would bring down the high and mighty, lift up the lowly, fill the hungry and send the rich away empty. The mystery of God again comes to the forefront in this complete reversal of fortunes. We merely have to ponder how God used the mystery inherent in a young peasant girl of no particular fame or fortune, from a small and insignificant village in the Middle East, to bear the Saviour of the world as a hint of what is to come. And, yes, there is the social justice message and ministry of Jesus on behalf of those who are oppressed and powerless and poor. And there is ultimate hope for those who experience more than their share of suffering in this life. As the Church, you and I are the heart, the hands and the feet of Jesus in the ways we care for those who are poor and on the margins of society.

But there is more than that when we talk about Jesus being the “Saviour” of the world. This kind of “saving” is something only Jesus could do. 

At the heart of the word “save” in the Gospels is the sense of personal salvation. Listen to Jesus when he says: “For whoever wants to save their own life will lose it; but whoever loses their life for my sake will find it” [Matthew 16:25]. That’s the hope of the remarkable mystery in realizing we cannot save or rescue ourselves, in accepting Jesus’ death on the cross for the forgiveness of our sins and in giving our whole lives to Jesus Christ in response.

As a researcher and physician, Francis Collins' credentials and accomplishments are well-respected in the scientific community. He headed up the Human Genome Project before serving as the director of the National Institutes of Health in the United States. In 2007 he wrote a New York Times best-selling book called The Language of God. It weaves together the story of his work as a world-renowned scientist and his journey from atheism to faith in Jesus Christ.

Although Collins is thoroughly committed to rational inquiry and the scientific method, God used a few people and the majesty of nature to cause Collins to consider the meaning and the mystery of Jesus Christ in his life. As a gifted medical student, Collins thought it was “convenient to not have to deal with God.” But, then, after one of his patients told Collins about her faith, she asked him: “What about you? What do you believe?” In Collin's own words, he said: “I stuttered and stammered and felt the colour rising in my face, and I said, ‘Well, I don't think I believe in anything.’ But that suddenly seemed like a very thin answer. And that was unsettling.” 

Then after a long period of searching, which included serious questioning of a pastor, reading C. S. Lewis and observing the beauty of creation, Collins finally responded to Jesus Christ. This is Collin's description of that life-changing encounter:
“I had to make a choice. A full year had passed since I decided to believe in some sort of God, and now I was being called to account. On a beautiful fall day, as I was hiking in the Cascade Mountains during my first trip west of the Mississippi, the majesty and beauty of God's creation overwhelmed my resistance. As I rounded a corner and saw a beautiful and unexpected frozen waterfall, hundreds of feet high, I knew the search was over. The next morning, I knelt in the dewy grass as the sun rose and surrendered to Jesus Christ.”  [Francis Collins, The Language of God (Free Press, 2007), p. 225]
My friends, this is experiencing the Christmas hope! This is coming to believe in the name of Jesus who was born to save us from the consequences of our sins so we can experience God’s amazing grace and forgiveness.  

The mystery of God is also in the name of Jesus as “Immanuel” -- “God with us.” Matthew wants us to connect the Virgin Mary with the young woman Isaiah the prophet speaks of in Isaiah 7:14: “The Lord himself will give you a sign: a young woman who is pregnant will have a son and will name him Immanuel.” Matthew says the son who is born to Mary “will make come true what the Lord had said through the prophet” [Matthew 1:22] and her son will be called “Immanuel,” meaning “God is with us”! 

Christmas is all about “God with us.” It is about the Incarnation. But “God with us” is more than simply a theological statement. Incarnation is God doing the really astounding and unthinkable! Incarnation is God taking humanity on himself by becoming human in Jesus of Nazareth. And “God with us” is more than that.

Immanuel – “God with us” -- is a promise. A promise given from the beginning of creation. A promise given to Abraham and his descendants. A promise of redemption expected throughout all the years of history. A promise now fulfilled in Jesus Christ.

Immanuel – “God with us” -- is redemption. God with us is good news – the gospel! The gospel story is that God has identified completely with humanity in order to redeem us. “Immanuel” (God with us) explains “Jesus” (The Lord who saves).

Immanuel – “God with us” -- is mission. If God is with us by sending Jesus the Son, the Son is with us we carry on the mission of healing, caring, loving our neighbours and calling people to ponder Jesus Christ for their lives.

You may not be familiar with Clarence Jordan’s The Cotton Patch Gospel. Jordan recast the stories of Jesus by bringing them to the life and language and culture of the mid-20th-century southern United States. Listen to how Jordan put Jesus’ words in the final verses of Matthew, Chapter 28: “As you travel, then, make students [disciples] of all races and initiate them into the family of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit [that’s baptism]. Teach them to live by all that I outlined for you. And you know, I am right in there with you -- all the time -- right to the [end].” 

Immanuel – “God with us” in a promise is the way Matthew begins his Gospel. He ends his Gospel with “Jesus with us in mission.” How full of hope is that for all of us!

The mystery of God calls us to ponder the mystery of Jesus. Romans 8:31 and 32 declares for the entire world to consider: “If God is for us, who can be against us? Certainly not God, who did not even keep back his own Son, but offered him for us all!”

We do not say our New Creed every week. But I have a sense it may be appropriate to say it together now – as a witness to one another that God is with us in the promise of redemption and Jesus is with us in salvation and through the Holy Spirit in loving mission for the world. Turn to page 918 in Voices United and please stand as you are able.

A New Creed

We are not alone,
we live in God's world.

We believe in God:
who has created and is creating,
who has come in Jesus,
the Word made flesh,
to reconcile and make new,
who works in us and others
by the Spirit.

We trust in God.

We are called to be the Church:
to celebrate God's presence,
to live with respect in Creation,
to love and serve others,
to seek justice and resist evil,
to proclaim Jesus, crucified and risen,
our judge and our hope. 

In life, in death, in life beyond death,
God is with us.
We are not alone.
Thanks be to God.

May this be so for you and for me.


Rev. Chris Miller
December 12, 2010

OYM Oriole-York Mills United Church, Toronto
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Sunday, December 5, 2010

Experience Hope This Christmas... In Christ’s Love for You

John 1:1-18 - read this text online here »

Almost every day as a hospital chaplain, I would sit by the bedside of someone who was going through a significant illness. Some were in rehab for a broken hip or leg. Some had ALS (known as Lou Gehrig’s disease). Some had Multiple Sclerosis. Some had kidney failure and were undergoing constant dialysis of their toxic blood. Some were stricken with cancer. And some were in palliative care. Some people were clearly in mental and emotional and spiritual distress. Others were in various places of depression. Some welcomed me to be with them and others waved me off when they discovered I was a chaplain. Some had difficulty accepting the presence of any kind of help let alone a person of faith like myself. A hospital patient once told me that I couldn’t possibly understand what he was going through. “How could you?” he said. “You have your health and I don’t. You go home to your family and here I am, imprisoned in my pain and suffering.” At the end of some days, my head almost touched the pavement as I dragged myself to my car. At some level in my spirit, I sensed the hospital patient was speaking truth. I was reasonably healthy and could go home to my family while he could not.

Then one day, I was struck with the pain of cellulitis in my lower left leg. Cellulitis is an infection and inflammation of the tissues beneath the skin. It is normally not dangerous unless it penetrates the deeper skin structures. But if it is not treated promptly and properly, it could enter the bloodstream and cause blood poisoning as well as infecting the bone. Then, not only severe suffering may occur but even death is possible. What started out for me as a local skin irritation, high fever, some pain, redness and swelling developed into severe pain and spreading infection, enough to put me into the hospital for six days and for me to experience acute pain for several weeks. I was even in a wheelchair and on crutches because of the difficulty and pain of walking. Thankfully, I regained my health. But I relearned something in those couple months of illness. What I knew in my head through my chaplaincy training, my heart learned again through personal suffering. I experienced once more the reality that, essentially, I live in the same room as my suffering hospital friends.

And, in Jesus, God has also lived in the same suffering world that we live in.

We heard this morning in John’s Gospel that “The Word became a human being and ... lived among us.” The older translation in the King James Version of the Bible puts it: “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.” I also appreciate the image in The Message Bible: “The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood.”

God loves our flesh. And God expressed himself, God even revealed himself, in our flesh -- in our skin-covered skeletal frame of bone and cartilage and muscle, with a pumping heart muscle and veins coursing with life-producing blood cells. God loves our humanness: our minds, our wills, our emotions and our spirits. Because God made us!

John 1:1-18 is John the Apostle’s defining statement about the astounding good news and hope of Christmas! John has embodied Christmas in one word: Incarnation. That is, the Word – the very Life and Light of God – became flesh, became a human being. The One who was known as the Word -- who existed in the beginning before the world was created – became flesh and came to live among us who are also flesh and blood human beings. John wanted his readers to understand that, at whatever point creation began, the One known as the Word already existed. And it was this Word -- who is the Life and the Light of God -- who became a human being just like us. And he was born in Bethlehem just over 2,000 years ago.

Why would the Word become human and live among us?

John says, because the Word, Jesus, is so full of grace, he keeps giving humanity the blessings of God -- the gifts of God -- gift after gift after gift, blessing after blessing after blessing. Not only then but now in our day as well. In John’s Gospel, grace focuses on Jesus’ character and personality. In Jesus we see grace expressing love and kindness – a loving kindness that actively cares for and seeks to help all those who need help and come to him. And all throughout his Gospel, John wants us to understand that this grace depends upon the character of Jesus, not on any merit in the people themselves.

Can you see “grace” in the following story? In his book Tattoos on the Heart [Free Press, 2010, pp. 26-27], Father Greg Boyle, pastor of an inner-city church in Los Angeles, California, for 20-plus years, tells the story of Rigo, a 15-year-old member of a local gang. Rigo was in jail getting ready for a special worship service when Boyle casually asked if his father would be coming. The following is a summary of their conversation:
“No,” he said, “He's a heroin addict and never been in my life. Used to always beat me.”
Then something snapped inside Rigo as he recalled an image from his childhood.
“I think I was in fourth grade,” he began. “I came home. Sent home in the middle of the day…. My dad says, ‘Why did they send you home?’ And cuz my dad always beat me, I said, ‘If I tell you, promise you won't hit me?’ He just said, ‘I'm your father. Course I'm not gonna hit you.’ So I told him.”
Rigo began to cry and wail and rock back and forth. Boyle put his arm around him until he slowly calmed down. When Rigo could finally speak again, he spoke quietly, still in a state of shock: “He beat me with a pipe … with … a pipe.”
After Rigo composed himself, Boyle asked about his mom. Rigo pointed to a small woman and said: “That's her over there…. There's no one like her.” Then Rigo paused and said: “I've been locked up for a year and half. She comes to see me every Sunday. You know how many buses she takes every Sunday?”
Rigo started sobbing…. After catching his breath, he gasped through the sobs: “Seven buses. She takes … seven … buses. Imagine.”
Boyle concluded his story with an analogy. God, as revealed in the person of Jesus, loves us something like Rigo's mother loves her son -- with commitment, steadfastness and sacrifice. We have a God “who takes seven buses, just to get to us.” All throughout Jesus' ministry -- his birth on that first Christmas Day, his meals with sinners, his healing of those who were sick, his death on the cross for our sins – Jesus showed us the heart of God, the God who will take a long journey of love to find us. And we really cannot fully comprehend the length of that journey God made for us. Another word for that kind of journey is grace!

Why would the Word become human and live among us?

John says because the Word is also full of truth – not only the truth that Jesus revealed about God but, more so, that Jesus himself was the true revelation of God. When John, in his Gospel, connects truth with Jesus, he wants us to understand that “what Jesus was shows completely what God is” [Newman, B. M., & Nida, E. A. (1993). A Handbook on the Gospel of John: Helps for Translators, UBS Handbook series (22). New York: United Bible Societies]. John said clearly in verse 18 of Chapter 1: “No one has ever seen God. The only Son, who is the same as God and is at the Father’s side, he has made [God] known.” Again like grace, truth may be better illustrated than directly stated.
A father was anxiously anticipating the premature delivery of triplets. For at least one of the babies, there was a definite possibility of being born dead. He said he will never forget the moment the doctor announced, “They are all alive!” Until they heard those words, he and his wife lived in total uncertainty. All of the wishful thinking -- even from certified medical professionals -- could not alleviate that uncertainty and turn possibility into actuality. The father said:
“I could believe all I wanted in a successful delivery, but I had no promise to rely on, either from God or the doctors, and the intensity of my believing had nothing to do with the state of affairs. My confidence developed entirely on the words that the doctor uttered”: [“They are all alive!]” [Michael Horton, The Gospel-Driven Life: Being Good News People in a Bad News World, Baker Books, 2009, pp. 123-124.]
You see, the gospel is good news – hopeful news -- because it speaks about events that actually happened, whether we are talking about the Incarnation (the birth of Jesus), the Crucifixion of Jesus or the Resurrection of Jesus. Our faith does not make the event true; rather, our faith embraces the truth. We see and embrace God when we place our trust in and embrace the Word made flesh – Jesus Christ.

Why would the Word become human and live among us?

Because God wanted us to know that he thoroughly understands human pain and suffering. God wanted us to know he is not distant or aloof from the human condition. That’s part of the good news and amazing hope of the Incarnation – of Christmas – that the Word became flesh and blood and spent about 33 years of human life on this Earth with us. And especially in his last three or so years of earthly existence, Jesus experienced in his own body what human pain, suffering and struggle against all kinds of adversity and difficulty feels like and means to us as human beings. One biblical writer, the author of the Letter of Hebrews, spoke about this identification of the human Jesus with us when he wrote: “We don’t have a priest who is out of touch with our reality. [No.] He’s been through weakness and testing, experienced it all -- all but the sin” [Hebrews 4:15, The Message].

The late Jesuit priest and writer Henri Nouwen possessed keen spiritual insight into the human condition. Because of his time in the L’Arche community [http://www.larche.ca/en/larche], he was also known as a compassionate caregiver for people with developmental disabilities. In his book Out of the Solitude, Nouwen made the following observation:
“What we see, and like to see, is cure and change. But what we do not see and do not want to see is care: the participation in the pain, the solidarity in the suffering, the sharing in the experience of brokenness. And still, cure without care is as dehumanizing as a gift given with a cold heart.” [Henri J. M. Nouwen, Out of Solitude (Ave Maria Press, 2008), pp. 35-36.]
But the reality of God becoming human in Jesus Christ – what the worldwide Church calls the Incarnation -- means God’s care is there for us and we can have hope even in our pain, suffering and brokenness. The reality of God becoming human in Jesus Christ means God shares in our experiences of suffering and brokenness. The reality of God becoming human in Jesus Christ means God will do whatever it takes to bring about, in time, justice and hope in a world we cannot control. The reality of God becoming human in Jesus Christ becomes even more real and moving for us when we also realize Jesus died for our sins and he defeated death for us by rising from the grave, giving us the evidence there is life after death for us too! And how hopeful is that!

A couple of years ago, our Wednesday morning small group studied Anglican theologian N. T Wright’s book Simply Christian. In it, he begins his chapter entitled “Putting the World to Rights” with the following personal story [HarperSanFrancisco, 2006, pages 3-13]:
“I had a dream the other night, a powerful and interesting dream. And the really frustrating thing is that I can't remember what it was about. I had a flash of it as I woke up, enough to make me think how extraordinary and meaningful it was; and then it was gone…. Our passion for justice often seems like that. We dream the dream of justice. We glimpse, for a moment, a world at one, a world put to rights, a world where things work out, where societies function fairly and efficiently … and then we wake up and come back to reality.”
According to Wright, our longing for justice “comes with the kit of being human.” But, unfortunately, although we all strive for justice, we often fail to achieve it. Wright goes on to say:
“You fall off your bicycle and break your leg. You go to the hospital and they fix it. You stagger around on crutches for a while. Then, rather gingerly, you start to walk normally again….
“There is such a thing as putting something to rights, as in fixing it, as getting it back on track. You can fix a broken leg, a broken toy, a broken television. So why can't we fix injustice. It isn't for lack of trying.
“And yet, in spite of failures to fix injustice, we keep dreaming that one day all broken things will be set right.
Wright then asserts:
“Christians believe this is so because all humans have heard, deep within themselves, the echo of a voice which calls us to live [with a dream for justice]. And [followers of Christ] believe that in Jesus that voice became human and did what had to be done to bring it about.”
Why would the Word become human and live among us?

Because, as John pointed out in Chapter 3 of his Gospel:
“God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him [the Son] may not perish but have eternal life.”
May this hope and experience be so for you and for me.

Rev. Chris Miller
December 5, 2010

OYM Oriole-York Mills United Church, Toronto
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