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Great Is the Mystery of Christmas!

            In so many ways the story of the birth of Jesus is incredibly ordinary.  There’s nothing very strange about a teenage pregnancy, certainly not in our city.  A young man standing by the girl he loves even though she’s not carrying his child—there are fellows like that.  On the road with a due date looming?  Labor pains starting with no health insurance?  Stuck in a little town where nobody knows you?  Wrapping a baby in rummage sale blankets?  We know this story, although certainly not from our own experience.  Middle class people don’t know these stories from their own experience.  But these stories happen every year, every night, maybe even every Christmas.  They are ordinary stories, so ordinary that Mike Jacobs and Carole Meekins don’t waste good TV time reporting them.  And maybe that’s the reason why so many people love this story.  It is so sadly ordinary, so unhappily common, that it hits at the heartstrings and touches the emotions and awakens love and concern for the little Lord Jesus asleep on the hay.  Poor little Lord Jesus.  

            But there is more to the story of the birth of Jesus than St. Luke tells us.  There is more to this story than a census and a stable, more than swaddling clothes and a first born son.  What St. Luke tells is ordinary, at least on the surface.  What St. John tells us today digs beneath the surface and looks behind the ordinary.  In this Gospel, read in Christian churches all over the world on Christmas Day, the Holy Spirit has set down the foundation of the entire Christian religion.  These words are so profound and so powerful that our brows are going to furrow as we strain to grasp their enormity.  There is much we will recognize this morning, but very little we will understand.  Even if we possessed all wisdom and all knowledge, we would not be able to unravel the mysteries of this holy birth.  John will not explain here; he will proclaim here.  And when he is finished we will exclaim here, Great Is the Mystery of Christmas!

            Before John formed one letter or completed one sentence in this prologue to his Gospel, he made an assumption; he assumed that we and everyone else who read his words accepted that God is a reality.  He could have written, “In the beginning was God” but he didn’t write that.  “Everyone knows that,” he must have thought.  And he was pretty safe thinking that.  For as long as people have lived on this planet, on every continent and in every culture, they have recognized that there is a God.  Every hundred years or so some smart aleck challenges the assumption, and some people wave the “God is dead” flag for a while.  But then some tragedy strikes--like 9/11 or the crash of our economy--and God is back to being a reality again.  The trouble is, not everybody is very sure about who God is or where God is.  Some people have the idea that there are all kinds of gods; the ancient Greeks and Romans thought that way.  The people in Hindu India sense that God is in everything.  Christians, Jews, and Muslims have one God, and some people insist it’s the same God.  And then there are the people who don’t like taking sides since they’re not quite sure anybody has it right.  Polytheists, pantheists, monotheists, agnostics--they all pretty much agree that God exists, but to most of them, God remains a big mystery. 

            It has to be that way.  If God isn’t a mystery to us, then either God isn’t God or we are God.  But God is God, and so he stands at the mysterious edges of human understanding.  His ways and his thoughts are higher than human thoughts; his paths are beyond our tracing them out.  God is a mystery.  But now we come to a greater mystery.  God never intended to be a mystery.  No one can understand the mind of God; in fact, no one can see God and live.   But God did not create us human creatures with the plan to remain above us or apart from us.  And so--John tells it--and so: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  John has taken us to the far-away depths of eternity, way back there where no one has been and no one can go.  Way back there at the side of God, way back there before the worlds were, way back there before humanity existed or anyone counted time, way back there is the messenger of God. John called the WORD.  Note carefully that the Word here is not a message; this is not the Word of God that is the Bible.  John wrote that this Word is a messenger.  This Word is the spokesman for the Divine.  God thinks, and he shares what he thinks through the Word.   John makes it clear in his lofty Greek that the Word is not the same as God.  There are two entities in John’s Prologue: the Word and the God.  The Word is distinct from God; the Word is his own self and his own person.  But John makes it just as clear that the Word is not essentially different from God: the Word was God, John wrote. The messenger has the same stuff as the one who thinks up the message.  He is, as fathers of the Church have said and as we say, “God from God, Light from light, true God from true God.”  The Word is one being with the Father.  As they are the same substance, so they are of the same mind.  The Word was with God, John wrote.  God and the Messenger stood face to face in perfect agreement and in perfect love.

            This Word, this eternal Word, stepped into human history and carried out the plans of the Divine.  It is true enough thatin the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, but what God did, he did through the Word.  We know well enough how God created the world: And God said, Let there be light…   Here is the Word in action as the voice of God.  John is right to say about the Word: Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. God thought; the Word spoke.  And so it was in the long story of the Old Testament.  Often as not, when God had a message to share with saints or sinners, with kings and armies, he sent the divine Word to speak it.

            But now we come to a greater mystery: The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.  At a certain point in the human story--we call it Christmas--this eternal Word came down to earth and stayed awhile.  What he did is obvious; how he did it is a mystery: Who can explain this?  This eternal messenger of God, who was in the beginning with God, who was God, became fully human.  The fathers of the Church tried to explain the mystery by writing: “He is God, eternally begotten from the nature of the Father, and he is man, born in time from the nature of his mother, fully God, fully man, with rational soul and human flesh, equal to the Father as to his deity, less than the Father as to his humanity.”  I see the words here, but I don’t get how this works.  How can God who is limited by nothing become human and be limited by everything?  How can he who fills all things in every way be limited by the walls of his mother’s womb, or by the folds of swaddling clothes, or by the sideboards of a manger, or by the arms of Mary, or by the commands of Joseph, or by the wishes of the teachers of his youth?  How is it that he who has all things comes to depend on his mother for milk?  How can it be that he who is rich becomes poor? I don’t get this.  This is not ordinary.  St. Paul was forced to admit: Great is the mystery: Christ appeared in a body!

            But now we come to a greater mystery.  The Word was made flesh to save the world from sin.  We haven’t talked about sin yet this morning.  Sin is a dreary thing to think about on a Christmas morning, and we have visitors here and we want to make a good impression.  Besides, we’re focusing on the mysteries of Christmas, and sin is no mystery, not to us anyway.  We know all about sin; we’ve lived with it all of our lives.  I’m not going to publish a long list of sins here.  I’m not going to start pounding on the pulpit and ranting about sin.  We all know what we do wrong.  I’m simply going to say what we all know is true.  Sin is just a horrible problem.  No matter what our post-modern world says about there being no standards of right and wrong, the plain and simple truth is that our sins condemn us before God.  There is no way out of this dilemma, not if the way out depends on us.  We can explain and excuse, we can justify or ignore, but nothing takes away the hard reality that my sins are going to land me in hell sure as shootin’, and your sins are going to land you in exactly the same place.    

            The Word was made flesh and made his dwelling among us.   The divine messenger came down to our world with a message from the Divine.  The angel said it first: I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people.  Today in the town of David, a Savior has been born.  He is Christ the Lord.  The angel choir said it again: Peace on earth, good will to men.  Old Simeon said it next: A light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of your people Israel.  John the Baptizer said it next: Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.  And then the Divine Word said again and again: I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.  No one comes to the Father except through me.  Here is God’s plan to end the dilemma of sin.  Here is God’s way out of hell.  The eternal Word, the One who is truly God, came and offered perfect obedience to his Father in place of the perfect obedience we could not offer.  The eternal Word made flesh, the One who is fully human, carried our load of sin and died the death we deserved.  Listen: this was not pretty, this perfect life and innocent death.  It was humiliating and horrible, it was gut-wrenching and gruesome, it was unfair and unreasonable.  But in the life and death of Jesus we see what makes God really great and really good and really glorious.  By the life and death of Jesus, God forgives our sins.  In the cross of Jesus we, like St. John, have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.  

            But now we come to the greatest mystery of all.  The Word became flesh for me.  Way back there in the far-away depths of eternity, the divine Word saw me, Jim Tiefel, and he loved me.  Way back there in the stable in Bethlehem the Word became flesh because he loved me, Jim Tiefel.  Way back there, while he was obeying his father’s will in my place, while he was enduring my pain and my death, the Word who took the name Jesus was thinking of me, Jim Tiefel.  Way back there he had me in mind when he rose up his grave to assure me that God really did forgive all my sins.  For me!  He did that all for me!  Now there is a mystery, that Jesus should do this for me!  Are you ready for one more mystery, a mystery just as profound, a mystery that boggles the imagination, a mystery that blows the mind?  He did the same for you! 

            Will anyone say that any of this is ordinary?  Is it really matter-of-fact, too common even for the 6:00 news?  Will it conjure up nothing more than sweet cooing and crooning for the poor baby in Bethlehem?  If you remember your sins and carry their guilt, this is not ordinary for you.  If you know you will die and think about your eternity, this is not ordinary for you.  If your job is in jeopardy or your investments have tanked, if your best friends are gone or you’re lonely despite them, this is not ordinary for you.  Christmas may be a mystery, but it is never ordinary.  When all things were in quiet silence, and the night was in the midst of her swift course, the Almighty Word leaped down from his royal throne.  And he did it for you!  Amen.

Preached at Grace Lutheran Church, Milwaukee, WI (www.gracedowntown.org) on December 25, 2008

Services

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Mondays 6:30 pm

Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church | 1209 North Broadway Milwaukee, WI 53202 | (414) 271-3006

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