"PUTTING GOD FIRST -
THE VIEW FROM WITHIN"
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
11.00 a.m., 24th December, 2000
It was one of the extremely cold mornings of this past week, so cold that for those of you who wear glasses, you know what I mean, that when you step inside a warm building, it takes you quite a time before you can see normally again. It was one of those cold and bitter mornings. It was my job and my privilege on that morning to visit one of the homeless shelters called Street City here in our beloved City of Toronto. I was going there to present a gift, to help, and to see if there was anything our Church could do to make Christmas a little brighter for those who live on the streets. And after I had delivered my message and delivered my gift, I walked out back again into the very cold and biting air. Outside Street City, there was a bench, and sitting on the bench there was a gentleman with a very large beard hugging a very hot steamy cup of coffee. He said "Good Morning, Padre" - clearly a man of military background. I said "Good Morning, and a Merry Christmas to you." He said: "A Merry Christmas to you, Padre", and then he started to look at me as if, somehow, he wanted to say something more. So I said: "Are you going to be all right for Christmas?" He said: "Oh, I'm going to be just fine, I think." So I just sat next to him for a moment and held a coffee in my hands to keep my hands warm and the two of us began to talk, and it was very evident after just three phrases that this man was from Newfoundland. So I asked him: "How long have you been in the great City of Toronto?" He said: "Eight days." I said: "Eight days…and what do you think of Toronto?" He said: "It's as cold as Hell." I said: "No, Hell's hot." He says: "No, that's Toronto, I hear, in the Summer." Typical Newfoundlander! Clearly his life had not been all that he had dreamt it would be, and his arrival in Toronto was not all that he had hoped it would be. And then we started to talk about his family that he had left behind, and we began to reminisce about Christmases past, and then he started to ask me questions about the Bible. And he says: "You know, Reverend, I am confused by a lot of stuff that's in the Bible. I must admit I really don't understand it." He said: "For example, my son came home from Sunday School a few years ago and he told me that Jesus can count every hair on our heads." And with a twinkle in his eye, he removed his baseball cap to reveal an entirely bald head, and he said: "Clearly God doesn't need to spend much time on me, does he?" I tried to explain the meaning of the Bible and he finished his coffee and I bid him adieu, and I walked over to my car, but I could see that after the conversation was over, there was a profound and a deep sadness behind the steam of his coffee and his long beard. And I drove away.
I think that there are many people who honestly, when they read the Bible, when they are confronted with the Christian message, are just like that man. They find it incomprehensible, hard to believe, and so they look down and they are dismayed. I think the opposite is also true. I think that there are people who have great wealth and joy in life; who have great pleasures and great security; but they similarly do not quite grasp and understand the power of the Christian Gospel message and the meaning of Christmas.
This week, I received one of the most meaningful e-mails that I have ever received, and it was actually from our Head Sexton, Art Belanger. In it, there was a series of montages, of beautiful Christmas pictures, and in front of each of these Christmas pictures, there flashed a message for the recipient. One of these messages said: "Do you know that if you have a roof over your head, that if you have a place to sleep tonight, then you are better off than 75% of the people on earth?" It went on and said, "Do you know that if you have money in your bank, and cash in your wallet, and change in your pocket, you are in the top 8% of the wealthy in the world." "Do you know that if you can go to church that Sunday morning that we call Christmas without a flood, or starvation, or a war, you are better off than 500 million people on this earth?" "Do you know that when you wake up on Christmas Day and you have more health in your body than you do sickness, you are better off than the millions who have passed away this past year and do not get to see this Christmas Day?" And then it concluded: "Don't you think this Christmas, you should take the time to thank God?"
In the passage that I have chosen from Luke's Gospel this morning, I have deliberately not chosen a Christmas text, you can hear those tonight. I have chosen a text which nevertheless, I feel, goes right to the very heart of the Christmas message. It speaks to the man who was sitting on the bench, it speaks to the affluent and the powerful, it speaks to the physically well and to the dying, it speaks to those who have greatness and those who seem to be the least. Because, it reaffirms over again that God is a God who cares for each individual, regardless of their status in life, or the nature of their existence. Jesus in these sayings, that are said to be from a source called Q, a selection of different sayings of Jesus, he says: "Are not five sparrows that are sold for two cents not forgotten by God? Are not the number of hairs on your head counted? Therefore don't be afraid, for indeed you are more valuable than all the sparrows." Do not be afraid, do not be afraid.
For this, my friends, seems to be the very heart of the Christian message. For the message of Christ coming into this world, for the Heavenly King arriving on this earth is an affirmation in an individual, in a child that indeed each and every single one of us is precious in the eyes of our God. That every single one of us, regardless of our state of being or life, is precious in the eyes of the Lord. The Christmas message speaks, then, of power, of this very reality. It does so by speaking of two major themes. And, My Friends, if we get nothing else given to us this Christmas, if we understand this and carry it in our heart and in our chest for the next 365 days, we will have received the greatest gift of all, the first of which is the affirmation of God's involvement in human life. Jesus uses the example of five sparrows, sold for two cents, or in Greek assaria? And that means that these were the cheapest, the most awful food that you could possibly have, the lowliest of all the things that you could own and worth only two cents. And yet, Jesus says that they are not forgotten by God. This, of course, is metaphorical language, but it confirms God's concern and love for the creation that he made; that even the finest, smallest and most insignificant things are important to the God who created them in the first place.
One of the things that I like to do before Christmas is immerse myself in the art and the literature that speaks of Christmases past. And, over the last couple of days, I have been reading through books that have some of the great art of the Christian tradition. One of them that I came across is one of the favourites from certainly one of the most spectacular of all the artists, Rembrandt. It is entitled The Adoration of the Magi. In this most beautiful painting of dark brown hues, with slightly silver highlights, you see the Child being held in the arms of Mary in the most beautiful moment. If you look carefully at the eyes of one of the Magi staring down at this child, it is with awe, and it is with wonder of God with us.
My Friends, that sense of awe and wonder of God with us is precisely that affirmation that God indeed came in order to tell humanity and to show humanity that ultimately He cares. This is a powerful word to the culture in which we live. A culture that sometimes tends to vaunt what I call optimistic humanism -- a belief that we are in charge of everything and that everything is our own destiny, and we make our own future and we hoe our own path and we set our own destiny in our own direction. It seems to me that over the last century the events at Birkenau, of Kosovo, of Rwanda, have shattered any real belief that somehow our own destiny is in our own hands and that when it is, it is benign. I agree with Elie Wiesel?, who wrote about his time when he was in Birkenau. He said: "Never will I forget the moment when they murdered my God and my soul, and turned my dreams to dust."
The century that is past tells us that for all our optimism, in ourselves there is a need for something more. As a result of that, it often leads to a second thing which is a sort of pessimistic nihilism: that humankind is free, that we are free from any attachments, are free from any creator, that we are free, therefore, from any need to love, free from any sense of right or wrong, any obligation to one another; that all we have as Jean Paul Sartre said in La Nausée is just nothing and emptiness, and that human beings don't matter; that we are, indeed, even free from guilt itself.
There is a lovely story told of a man who had died and he left no will, and so his widow was approached by the lawyer and the lawyer says: "You know, because your husband didn't leave a will, I need to know his last words." So she thought about it, and said: "I'm sorry, I can't tell you his last words." And he says: "Look, you don't understand, my dear, you really don't. You've got to tell me. There's no will. I have to know his last words." She said: "I'm sorry, I cannot tell you. I will not tell you his last words." The lawyer was insistent for the third time and said: "Look, Ma'am, this is serious. I don't know what to do with all his money if you don't tell me his last words." "Very well, then. I will tell you his last words. He says, you don't scare me. You couldn't hit a barn with that old gun." No guilt, eh, no guilt?
For that kind of nihilism, that kind of pessimism very often pervades the world in which we live and leads to a form of narcissism and of self interest. Well, the Gospel message is entirely different. The Gospel message is that God is involved in the world that He created. And if you look at the trajectory throughout the whole of the New Testament, from the moment of Christ's birth and incarnation to the parables that He told, to the sayings that he gave, to His love for people, for His concern for the dying Lazarus, for His reaching out to the forbidden man called Zacchaeus, to his love for the woman who was considered to be worthy of being stoned in adultery, to the very moment in which he died on a cross and forgave those that were with him - right the way through, entirely consistent in the New Testament, from birth, to death, to resurrection there is this affirmation that through this child God loves humanity.
But it goes further. It goes to a second point: That God is not only involved, God also invested in human beings. Remember who said the words of our text. It was none other than the Son of the High God, The Messiah. And it was He who said: "Are not the hairs on your head even counted?" Now, this is a ridiculous saying in many ways, a really ridiculous saying. By the way, I did not know this until recently, but blondes have more hair than brunettes. Did you know that? Yes, it's true. A hundred-and-forty thousand per the average head of a blond; a hundred-and-twenty-five thousand for an average brunette; and for those of us who are slightly red tinged, I am afraid to say, only ninety thousand, which is my excuse for losing mine a little sooner than some others! If you take it to that absurd level, of course you lose the point. The point is that even the relatively insignificant parts of us are of value to God. And we often don't realize how radical that was, particularly in the day and age in which he lived, in the Roman culture that dominated, the empire that swept from west to east. For the empire that had taken over his land life indeed was often cheap. Or the honoriestes, those who were the upper class, those who were able to participate in government, those who were able to go and leave the cities and go to their farms in the country, those that were able to get away. They were exempt from many of the punishments of the law of the day. The punishments of the law of the day for everyone else were things like being beheaded, like being burnt alive, like being crucified, like thrown to wild animals. Those are the sorts of things that ordinary citizens might suffer if they were found to be guilty. Even the collegia, the ordinary men and women who were the professional class, never mind the slaves that existed, could, in fact, just simply be removed and taken away. And despite a strict code of justice, life still, even in the Roman world and many of its outposts, was very cheap. So cheap it was, and so hated were the earliest Christians, that Pliny once called them the odium generis humani. In other words, they are the scourge of the human race. The Christians were considered such precisely because they valued life and worshiped God.
You see, My Friends, in that world, life was cheap, and the words of Jesus were radical. The religion of his day which often was perverted, which was not always faithful to what it should have been, was similarly dismissive of much of human life: If you were an outcast, you weren't allowed into the temple; if you were an adulterer, you were to be stoned - only, though, if you were a woman. The people who were poor and full of leprosy were not allowed to receive the blessings of the priest. And the people of the land were considered those who were not of the same class as the righteous. Life was cheap even then.
And so too, even in the culture in which we live today, there is a sense in which life itself is something that really, in a sense, may or may not be important depending on who you are. The State, for example, might determine that you are important and worthy of concern, but it's always a balancing act, is it not, in politics? And some people fall through the cracks. Even in the Church, even in the Church, we can sometimes become so consumed with religion, so concerned with minute details, with outward appearances, that we forget the true power of the Christian message and its love for God's children.
A couple of years ago, I was driving through central New Brunswick, and I came to a little village, and outside the little village, there was a rather unfortunate sign on the front of the church, and it said: "We care for you. Sundays 10.00 a.m. only." What a faux pas - it says so much sometimes, does it not? For the Church of Jesus Christ, the Word that Jesus spoke in Luke, speaks to us with power about the nature of our ministry. It speaks to us about the importance of remembering that the Christ Child came in order that human beings might live.
One of the last things that I did this Christmas period to prepare myself, was to read some poetry, and I turned to writings of the great T.S. Elliot. And T.S. Elliot has a wonderful poem called The Journey of the Magi. And really, it's a telling in poetic words of when T.S. Elliot himself became a Christian in 1927. He was like the Wise Men: He was wandering around looking for Christ. But he said that after it all, in a sense, he saw in Christ a birth, but that he also saw in Christ a death. He had a birth in the sense of God with Us, but a death to many of the things that he had previously held to be true. And in the closing words, he paints so graphic a picture of the Magi. He said we returned to our places, these kingdoms, but no longer at ease here in an old dispensation, with an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death. T.S. Elliot understood, then, that all the gods of this world, all the gods that come and go, gods that do not care for us as individuals, ultimately die before the One who was born.
That cold morning, after I had spoken to my friend from Newfoundland and I had got in my car and gone for a hot cup of coffee for myself, I had a pang of conscience, and I felt, you know, there is something that I did not say to him. I left him too soon. And so I got in my car and I drove quickly, as quickly as possible, back to Front Street. I tore down the street, and I parked my car and I looked at the bench, and he was gone, I had missed an opportunity to tell him that God loved him.
May we never lose that opportunity this Christmas.
Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.