Christmas Pictures

[This homily was shared on the morning of Sunday, December 31, 2017 to a local congregation who was celebrating a Youth Sunday]

PRAYER – Father let your book live for us. Let us see you in it, let us see our Savior, and let us see ourselves as you do. Let the book live for us. In Jesus name, Amen.

Merry Christmastide. What a morning of blessings; isn’t always a blessing to have our young adults and our future young adults bring us the Word of God? Amen?

Friends, brothers and sisters, we are indeed blessed with multiple blessings this morning and by God’s grace, throughout this day. For in our readings and lessons for today, God has given us a panoramic picture, a series of snapshots, a gallery of pictures of His Good News, of the Gospel of Christ! We have only seen a few today, but there so many more pictures in God’s Word. We can categorize the pictures in this way – in the Old Testament we have prophetic pictures and prefigurements of Christ; in the Gospels, He is presented and gives substance to those prophetic pics; in Acts He is proclaimed and those pics shared, in the letters or epistles the good news of Christ is explained, and in the last book we receive the grand pic of revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ. So many pictures! John says in his Gospel that if all the pictures or accounts of  Christ’s earthly life were recorded, no book  could contain them all!

This trove of pictures of the Gospel about this Dynamic gift in Christ, is made special by the One giving it – God, And by those who are able to receive it, to value it, to know its worth, to treasure and ponder it. Not everyone is able to receive it this way. The apostle Paul knew the value of this gift of the good news, as he writes by the Holy Spirit in Romans 1:16, he says there For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation. He treasured this good news, he kept this picture close to his heart, and allowed it to work in him to the glory of God and our benefit.

We who follow Christ and who also treasure these pictures of the good news recognize that in Christmas we are reminded of our Father’s faithfulness, His everlasting love for us. A picture of that can be found in Genesis 22 – I encourage you to read when you get home. Because Jesus speaks to that picture, noting that it was fulfilled in Him nearly two thousand years after the picture was ‘taken’, and fulfilled in the same place, when he says what is recorded at John 3:16. Most of us know this scripture by heart, so I invite you to recite it now, to give words to that picture, how you learned it. “God….”

While the world takes the sense of Christmas as a one-off annual event, we who are followers of Christ are blessed to anticipate that each and every time we gather for Holy Eucharist we celebrate and remember Christmas in Christ's first advent, as we await his coming in glory.

The power of God for salvation contained in the multitude of snapshots in God’s Word, as noted earlier, will not be the experience of all persons to whom the Dynamic Gift of Christ is given, as today’s Gospel lesson  in John reminds us. The world could not receive Christ – even those of his own people, yet God graced those who would receive him with power to become His children, children who repeatedly reflect on the panorama of pictures in God’s Word. How are we using this gift of power?

As recipients of this power of God, we are blessed to recognize that we have something much more superior to what the world promotes as the ‘spirit of Christmas’, which despite the weeks of promotions, proves to be elusive and then fades after all the tinsel, shiny lights, are disposed of. Brothers and sisters in Christ, we know and we treasure – if you are listening say Amen – we know and we treasure that we who have accepted this dynamic gift of Christ as Lord & Saviour have been gifted with the Eternal Spirit of Christ, Emmanuel – Christ in us and with us. Amen? He empowers us to discern the many pictures of the good news, enables us to live like children of God in His power, to love like Christ – we can’t do it without Him! 

To understand Jesus’ depictions of that Spirit in John 14, 15, 16, and the pictures of who that Spirit is and what He does in us as explained in the letters to the Ephesians, Colossians, to the Romans - especially in chapter 8, and to the Galatians particularly at chapter 5 where we are given a picture of what it looks like to submit to His Spirit.

Brothers and sisters, these Gospel pictures and more have been given to us to treasure and ponder!

Speaking of pictures, how many of you have a smart phone – raise hands. Just about everyone. With our smart phones we are able to take a gazillion pictures. I have an android phone which has an app called Gallery where the pictures are stored. What app does the iPhone use? Ok. I don’t know about you but I run out of capacity to hold all the pictures I take but they are so precious – they are my memories. Thinking of precious pictures, can you imagine the scene there at the manger (Luke 2), of the shepherds visiting Mary and Joseph and gifting them with the revelation that they received personally from the angels and the overwhelming joy they experienced. We are told that Mary took those 'pictures,' those awesome accounts of this heavenly revelation and treasured them in the gallery of her heart. She didn’t  just store them, she pondered them and allowed them to work a faith in her – a faith that would help her endure tough times to come.

We have been gifted by God over the days, months, and years with so many pictures of His reconciliation plan – His Gospel and its operative power. If we would but close our eyes and see them with our hearts. Believers who have that Eternal Spirit of Christ, don’t worry – he has capacity enough to store all of those pictures for us in the gallery of our hearts. When we open our hearts, and allow the Spirit to sketch upon them God's saving Gospel those images dwell richly in us. Those Spirit-shaped images can work a faith in us for our tough times ahead. We are not just to store them like a museum collection that we keep covered up – we are to use & share these gifts from God with others, show them the pictures God has instilled in us. For them to see the power of that gift that the eternal Spirit makes operative in minds hearts our lifestyles, in our lives at work and in school, in our families. Not just at Christmas season but every day. At every gathering of God’s people. So that all may know and by God’s grace come to receive this Dynamic Gift in Christ that we treasure, to have their own gallery of pictures.. Amen? And Father…

Having 'IT' Both Ways...

“… The bottom line is this: if there is no God, if there is no life after death, then ultimately all of our ethical decisions are absolutely meaningless. That’s a true and inescapable conclusion. If we think about it, it’s the only conclusion we can reach if we have absented God from our thinking. The only alternative to an absolute ethic is a relative ethic. We cannot have an absolute ethic without a personal Creator.

To confess that God is Creator is to confess that we are not cosmic accidents, devoid of ultimate value. We came from somewhere significant and we are headed toward a destination of importance.” *excerpted from a publication by R.C. Sproul – “What We Believe”

We want to have it both ways. We want to not hear about God or hear about church and religion. We want to do our own thing and think/believe our own way – even if we do go to a church from time to time. We say that everyone should be allowed to do their own thing. We don’t want God or church or Bible shoved at us. But, we want good things and blessings. This perspective is not just owned by many youth and young adults – particularly as it relates to parents talking God and church to them, but also by adults of all ages. But… if everyone is allowed and encouraged to do their own thing, then if talking about God and ‘shoving religion’ is someone’s thing, then where is your argument? Why would it be wrong, then, for someone to want to talk to you about God? Why must they be barred from doing their ‘thing’ and you have the sole right to do your ‘thing’? Thus enters the contradiction. The reasoning breaks down quickly. As is referred to in the commentary above, if there is no absolute right or wrong as defined by a Creator God, who then decides what becomes right and what becomes wrong? 400 years of enslavement of African Americans in the U.S. other jurisdictions, along with the enslavement and devaluation of others, ought to teach a person what happens when relativistic perspectives, the ‘everyone is right’ belief are the ‘ethics’ that people adhere to. And yet, we conveniently push aside those realities or relegate them to a separate platform or deem them inapplicable in a conversation about relativity when they become personal.

 

If we deny that humans originate from God, are created in His image, and that they are of ultimate value as a result, then human dignity goes out the window. Again, 400 years of slavery in the U.S., and across the globe devaluation of persons to the point where they are considered property, or germs to be eradicated/exterminated, the recent racial battles become irrelevant if God is not the Creator Who imputes/places the ultimate value on human life – all human life regardless of what we may consider as a ‘viable’ life. If we are only going to assess life on the basis of our emotional feelings about what is right or wrong, which is where relativistic thinking gets germinated, then whose emotions are right?

You and I cannot have it both ways. Either God is God and is the Sovereign over all life, or he is not. Either He and what He says is the absolute truth, or he and his words are not, and we are not accountable based on them. We cannot have it both ways. Rejecting the absolute Sovereignty of God and His absolute truth leaves us in a no-where place of chaos.