15 John testified about him, crying out, “This is the one of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me is greater than me because he existed before me.’”
16 From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace;
17 as the Law was given through Moses, so grace and truth came into being through Jesus Christ.
18 No one has ever seen God. God the only Son, who is at the Father’s side, has made God known. (Common English Bible)
“The First Christmas:
Recreating a Holiday’s Original Meaning,” Week Four
I
remember as a kid that meeting your sports heroes was just about the most
amazing thing that could happen, right after an all-day Power Rangers marathon
on television or pizza day at the school cafeteria. It probably would have
taken on even more meaning to me if I were not raised in the comfortable
circumstances that I was, but was instead this little boy on the very margins
of the world as an exile who idolized Barcelona’s Lionel Messi, whom Sports
Illustrated writes about here:
Six-year-old Murtaza Ahmadi,
an Afghan boy who rose to online fame by wearing a makeshift Lionel Messi
jersey made from a plastic bag, finally met the Barcelona star after months of
waiting. After a meeting was set back in February, and Messi sent along some
signed jerseys and a signed ball, the boy was forced into exile in May amid
threats from the Taliban. He emerged on Tuesday, alive and well, in the arms of
his hero.
It
is a heartwarming story, and yet even behind it, there are shadows that give
the adult version of me pause. Messi is accused of tax evasion in Spain, where
he plays his club soccer. The event was covered by the Qatari organization
dedicated to putting on the 2022 World Cup, a tournament almost certainly
awarded to them by bribing the FIFA executives who voted on where to host it.
As
an adult, I have long since learned that my fellow adults will often let me
down—and that I will often let myself down. It is why we need a fulfillment of
prophecy like Jesus, who, as John writes here in John 1, provides for us “grace
upon grace.”
This
is a sermon series for the church season of Advent, which is known pretty much
in every other context as “the Christmas season” or “the holidays.” Except it
isn’t the Christmas season: the twelve-days-long Christmas season (yes, just
like the Twelve Days of Christmas carol) begins on Christmas day and extends to
January 6, the traditional date of the Epiphany, when the Magi arrived at where
Joseph, Mary, and Jesus had been bedded down.
Advent
is meant to be a season of preparation, and not just preparing for the
Christmas dinner parties and the tinsel and ornaments, but a preparation for
the least material of all things: of divine life becoming human life. To help
us prepare for the birth of the Christ child this year, we will be revisiting
the work of John Dominic Crossan and the late Marcus Borg who, if you remember,
were the authors of The Last Week, a book I used as the template for my Lenten
sermon series a couple of years ago. The First Christmas represents their
sequel to The Last Week, and much as The Last Week sought to go verse-by-verse
through the Passion narrative and place it into its historical and
anthropological context, so too does The First Christmas deliver a similarly
thoughtful treatment of the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke.
We
began this series three weeks ago with an excerpt from the chapter “An Angel
Comes to Mary,” and then we turned to a passage from the book’s next chapter,
“In David’s City of Bethlehem.” Last week, we arrived at the next chapter,
entitled “Light Against the Darkness,” and this week we come to the chapter
entitled “Jesus as the Fulfillment of Prophecy,” which ends thusly:
(Jesus) is, according to
Matthew and Luke (and the rest of the New Testament) the completion of the Law
and the Prophets. He is their crystallization, their expression in an embodied
life. He decisively reveals and incarnates the passion of God as disclosed in
the Law and the Prophets—the promise and hope for a very different kind of
world from the world of Pharaoh and Caesar, the world of domination and empire.
That Jesus is the
Messiah, the Son of God, is not a fact to be proved, as if it could be the
logical conclusion of a syllogism based on the argument from prophecy. Rather,
to call Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God, Lord, and Savior, as the Christmas
stories do, is a confession of commitment, allegiance, and loyalty. To do so
means: I see in this person the anointed one of God, the decisive disclosure of
God—of what can be seen of God in a human life, the fulfillment of Israel’s
deepest yearnings, the one who reveals God’s dream for the world. This is what
it means to call Him Emmanuel and to affirm that Emmanuel has come.
For
Borg and Crossan, the truth of Jesus is not something that can be laid out in a
logical or mathematical proof, it is something that must be experienced and
understood in one’s bones before they say yes to God in a way that is indeed a
confession of commitment and loyalty to the divine.
But
it is a confession we ought to be able to make freely, willingly, and gladly
precisely because we do know that our human heroes are, in the end, simply
humans with all the attendant foibles, flaws, and pains that come with that
fragile state of being, a state of being so fragile that we do indeed need, as John says here in John 1, grace upon grace from the fullness of God.
And betwixt God's fullness and our hollowness, there arrives Jesus, the fulfillment of all our wildest expectations in our souls.
We
have our heroes, and it is right that we should have them. They light the way
for us, show us the way forward in how to be better persons and a better
people.
But
they are not perfect. Nor are they are not the fulfillment of prophecy that
Jesus was and is. Even our greatest heroes cannot, and would not, aspire to the
mantle of godhood. When Emmanuel has come, we mean a very specific and special
thing, that it is Jesus who has come to earth and will come to earth again.
Who
are we, compared to such goodness and greatness as that? It is so very easy as
a pastor but honestly, as any Christian who has been going to church for years,
for decades, to say that we know what and who Emmanuel does indeed look like,
and of course it is like those we most admire for their deeds, or their
politics, or their stories.
We
may see Jesus in our neighbors, we may see God in the stranger’s face, and it
is right that we should do so. After all, God made us in God’s own image in
Genesis 1. But we cannot allow that good nature to turn into us forming an
Emmanuel in our image, rather than the other way around.
For
Emmanuel represents not just a fulfillment of small slivers of prophecy, of a
verse here and a verse there, no, Emmanuel represents the fulfillment of an
entire history of prophecy, of centuries of a people waiting for and longing
for a Savior in the truest sense of the title—someone who would save them, and
save us.
That
is a God-sized task, to save an entire world. And paradoxically, that God-sized
spirit will have to take the form of a tiny baby first, who only after years of
nurture will grow into the Lord we seek.
We’re
one week away from Bethlehem, brothers and sisters. Stay devoted. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
December
18, 2016
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