(Preached on Sunday, December 27, 2009)
Sing a new song to the Lord; he has done wonderful things! … He will rule the peoples of the world with justice and fairness. -Psalm 98:1, 9
While so much of the celebration of Christmas, both sacred and secular, focuses on children – the babe in the manger, the little drummer boy, the littlest shepherd, Amahl and the Night Visitors, Santa Clause with all his toys for good little girls and boys – the impact of Christmas is much broader, more expansive, and more profound than a holiday celebrating childish realities. Children think of Christmas as being all about presents. And it is. But not those brightly wrapped items we tore into two days ago as we gathered around our family tree. Christmas is all about the greatest gift ever given – a gift which continues to have an impact and bring about transformation in the world over and over again, every day.
We have made it through Advent and are at the manger to celebrate the coming of God to earth in Jesus. The arrival of that child in the manger was the fulfillment of God’s divine promise for more than one child, or one family. This child was God incarnate who broke forth into the world through a particular family for the whole world! It is a story and an action with world-wide implications. That is why it is most appropriate this first Sunday after Christmas to reflect on the words of Psalm 98. This psalm inspired Isaac Watts to write the remarkable Christmas hymn, “Joy to the World.” Both psalm and hymn speak of God’s rule and the change it brings. When God comes to reign in our hearts, we are different people.
Christmas is about a change of heart. A changed heart is where new life begins. Dr. Christiaan Barnard of South Africa made medical history in 1967 when he was the first doctor to perform a successful heart transplant. Dr. Barnard said the initial request of his patient was to see the old heart. The surgeon complied with the request and brought the old heart to him in a glass container and let him hold it. After he looked at his old heart a few minutes, the patient said to the surgeon, “Doctor, thank you for taking away my old, diseased heart and giving me a new heart.” That is the gift and the promise of Christmas: the possibility of changed hearts, for us and for all people in the world, because of what God has done and what God is going to do.
We so very much need hearts to be changing this Christmas season. One preacher has described our world with these words: “This Christmas season finds us a rather bewildered human race. We have neither peace within nor peach without. Everywhere paralyzing fears harrow people by day and haunt them by night. Our world is sick with war; everywhere we turn we see its ominous possibilities. And yet, my friends, the Christmas hope for peace and good will toward all men can no longer be dismissed as a kind of pious dream of some Utopian. If we don’t have good will toward men in this world, we will destroy ourselves by the misuse of our own instruments and our own power. Wisdom born of experience should tell us that war is obsolete.” While those words very much describe our own age, they were first spoken by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. during his Christmas Eve Sermon in 1967.
Dr. King proceeded to offer a prognosis for changed hearts: “… if we are to have peace on earth, our loyalties must become ecumenical, rather than sectional. Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective. No individual can live alone; no nation can live alone, and as long as we try, the more we are going to have war in this world. Now the judgment of God is upon us, and we must either learn to live together as brothers or we are all going to perish together as fools… it really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever effects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality…”
This was not just wishful thinking on the part of Dr. King. Our hearts are transformed by the truth of Christmas, even in the midst of war. In December 1944 during World War II, American soldiers were stationed at the edge of Germany in Hurtgen Forest, anticipating what history records as the Battle of the Bulge. A heavy winter snow blanketed the forest and made any substantial movement on the part of the soldiers difficult. They were cold, discouraged, and bitter. Moving at a snail’s pace in their military vehicles, they noticed several German civilians trudging deliberately up the road ahead of them. After a while, a small, white-frame church became visible. The American soldiers could see the soft glow of lighted candles in the windows of the church. The German civilians opened the door of the church and there came drifting through the air the singing of those already inside. The soldiers then remembered it was Christmas Eve and forgot everything else as they joined both their voices and their hearts with those of the others, singing together of a great joy that had come to the world. That is the wonder and the power of Christmas. That is what the promise and the gift of Christmas can do.
Stephan Brown, in his book, If God is in Charge, tells a wonderful story about a young couple that says a great deal about the gift of Christmas: “She was eighteen and he was nineteen when they met. They fell in love, and one year later they were married. Some six years and three children later, she decided while standing before the kitchen sink with a pile of dirty dishes and with a pile of dirty diapers on the floor, that she just couldn’t stand it anymore. She took off her apron and just walked out the door. Sometimes she would call home to check on the children, and on those occasions he would tell her how much he loved her, and he would ask her to come home. Each time she refused. After a number of days, he hired a private detective to find his wife. The report said she was living in a second-class hotel in Des Moines, Iowa. He packed his bags, placed the children under the care of a neighbor, and took a bus to Des Moines. He found the hotel and made his way to her room. When he knocked on the door, his hand trembled because he didn’t know the kind of reception he would receive. His wife opened the door, stood for a moment looking at him in shocked silence, and then fell apart in his arms. Later, at home, when the children were in bed, he asked her a question that had long troubled him: ‘Why wouldn’t you tell me where you were when you called? You knew I loved you. Why didn’t you come home?’ She replied, ‘Before, your love was just words. Now I know how much you love me because you came.’”
God came! That’s the glorious gift of Christmas. Because of that gift, our hearts are made large by knowing God loves us enough to come to us as we are. In becoming flesh, God turned the human situation around and started history all over again. This Christmas, here at the manger, God turns our situation around and starts our history all over again. We are transformed.