"Hey Toronto! Did You Get What You Wanted?" 
The one gift we all can receive.
Sermon Preached by
The Reverend Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, December 26, 2004
Text: Luke 2:1-7
I overheard two women talking to one another in the line-up at a department store about two weeks before Christmas, and it was evident from the nature of the banter between them, and from their ages, that one was probably the mother, and the other was probably the daughter. They were talking to each other about what they would be purchasing for Christmas. The mother finally asked the daughter, “Well, what do you really, really want? Never mind all the baloney, give me the hard goods: What do you really want?”
I was eager to overhear what she had to say, and gave a particularly warm listening ear. The daughter simply said, “I would like hockey to be back on television Saturday nights.” Looking at the woman I thought, “Surely, that is what men want more than what women want, but I know that women love hockey too so, Stirling, just live with it.” There was a look of incredulity on the face of the mother, as well as my face. She said, “You want hockey back on television on Saturday nights! Why?”
The daughter replied, “Because I am fed up of playing board games with my husband on Saturday night. And board games is a very good name for them, let me tell you!”
Subsequently, I realized that this unfortunate woman did not get the gift she hoped for because the NHL lockout is still in effect. However for those of us who watched the Canadian juniors play last night, it was, to some extent, a balm to the soul.
I wonder what people really did want for Christmas, and whether or not they got it. I myself think Santa is a little cruel: I wanted a receding waistline and an advancing hairline, but unfortunately it went the other way. So, we do not always get what we want, according to those great philosophers of the 20th century, the Rolling Stones who sang, You Can't Always Get What You Want.
I think that is true for many people at Christmas: They do not always get what they want. But, let us just say that you did get what you wanted, and that you have everything that your heart desires: then this is the morning for us to think just a little more deeply. Let us say that you did receive materially what you are looking for, let us say for a moment that your heart's desires were fulfilled: Is there not something deeper, something more meaningful that the heart should pine for?
If the faith does anything, I believe it causes us to alter, refine, and question our wants. To make the wants of the heart a subjective thing, richer and more full than just what the eye can see or the hand can hold. When I ask you the question, “What did you want for Christmas and did you get it,” I hope there will still be within you a longing for something more, something that you have not quite found, something that is deeper. For it seems to me that the Christmas message and the Christmas faith is about refining those wants, to have not just what we want, but what God wants for humanity.
This morning, I want to look at this more clearly. What is it about the Christmas message that actually refines our wants, and makes us deeper and more sincere? To begin with, I want to look at what are ostensibly three particular, religious, philosophical views of God. I want to look at these because they lead us to the very depths that we desire.
The first of these is the extent to which God is remote. That is the dominant philosophy about God: that God created this world, but then to all intents and purposes, after having created it, decided he wanted nothing more to do with it. You can see this particularly in the writings of the 18th, 19th and even in the earlier part of the 20th century, with the likes of John Dewey and, to a lesser extent, Bertrand Russell, who wondered whether or not God, who created the world, had anything more to do with it. In fact, they believed what Protagoras, the philosopher, once said, that “man is the measure of all things,” and as the measure of all things, he is in a sense fulfilling God's role in the world - God is just the creator, and nothing more and the development of the world is in humanity's hands.
All of this was driven by the desire for reasonableness. What the mind could understand is the extent or limit to which we could give God credence and credibility. In other words, the mind might be able to reason that there is a structure to the universe, and because there is a structure to the universe, there must be a mind behind that universe, and we call that mind God: that which we know. We might believe in the immortality of the soul, and say that surely human beings must be more than water or bone, and human existence more than corporeal life as we know it; surely human life must be made up of something spiritual that goes on, and human existence is more than just these things.
These philosophers felt it reasonable to believe that there is a sense of morality in the universe, and that morality is the condition to which we should aspire. That there is a morality to the universe is reasonable, but where these people drew the line was the belief that God, who created the world, would have anything to do with it in the physical sense. The incarnation, the doctrine of the Trinity would seem remote and unreasonable to them. They see God as the original maker, and nothing more.
Another dominant philosophy is that what we experience here now is basically unreal, but that God in heaven is real. In other words, God is reality, and the world unreality. The ultimate purpose of life is to become lost in the reality that is God. We are really no more than drops of water in the ocean; our identity, our very being is not really that important, because what we now know is unreal. And when we become part of the great ocean that is God, then somehow we can find an immortality that goes on and on into the beyond.
Obviously, there is not much in the way of ethics in this, because our lives on earth really do not count that much, and the highest good is to take ourselves out of this world. You can see this in the Bhagavad-Gita, you can see this in the Upanishads - this sense of trying to become one with the universe, and take ourselves out of material existence. That is the highest good, if in fact we are to know God.
There is, however, a third option, a third view of how God relates to us. This is the God who engages the world, the God who not only creates the world, but also actually relinquishes the power, allows his authority to be eclipsed, and comes into the midst of this world in order to reveal his purpose and his will. This is the God, in other words, who really becomes involved in the life of his creatures, the God to whom we can pray directly, because we can express our concerns, knowing that he actually does care for us, actually is interested in our wellbeing, and actually is concerned about the history of the world.
I believe this third option is the message of Christmas. It is the message that we bring, for while the other views have their merit, and while there is something of truth in all of them, the fact is that the truth of the incarnation is the truth that gives you and I and the world a great sense of hope and engagement.
But God is not done with us yet! God's incarnation shows us that we have a down-to-earth God, who comes to us and transforms and changes even the way that we look at Christmas.
Some say that we really only enjoy Christmas because it is a break from the dreariness of ordinary life. It comes in the midst of winter, and it gives us a break, a shot of adrenaline when the days are at their longest and darkest. But I happen to have experienced Christmas in the middle of the summer when living in South Africa. I celebrated Christmas by the barbeque and by the swimming pool, and a heavy Christmas dinner is the last thing you want to have before you go swimming, let me tell you! No, Christmas is not just a break from boredom and dreariness, although in the north it certainly helps in that regard.
Northrop Frye has argued Christmas is so wonderful because it takes us back into our childhood, so that we stop and reminisce about Christmases past. It is not actually the Christmas now that adults really enjoy, it is the Christmases past that they relive. And there is some truth in what Northrop Frye has to say.
Others have argued that Christmas is really for us to make Jesus into a super human being, to have the highest form of good embodied in a super hero. There is an old Roman story that goes back many, many centuries, about the time the Romans took the biggest, most beautiful, muscular man that they could find, and painted him in gold, and had a great procession through the streets. This golden man was looking rich and elegant as they took him through the streets, when all of a sudden he started to collapse, and then fell over and died. (Of course, anyone who has watched the James Bond movie, Goldfinger, would know that if you paint somebody in gold, it will cut off any air going into the body, and the person will asphyxiate and die.) Even the superhuman of Rome, the most gorgeous, the highest, the best of creatures cannot survive when covered in gold, even though they look beautiful in glitter. Christmas is not about taking Jesus and lifting him somehow onto a high platform, above us all, as a superhuman,.
No, Christmas is about none of these things! Christmas is summarized in one of the most wonderful lines in the Gospel of Luke, a line that we read over and over, and to which we hardly give a thought: “When Cyrenius was Governor of Syria.” Now, if you think that this is a throwaway line that has no significance you would be wrong. Because Luke is trying to show that the Christ Child came at a time and a place hidden in history, and while the exact dating of Cyrenius as the Governor of Syria is always a debatable thing (did it happen in AD 3 or in AD 6?), the fact is Luke is showing that in a conquering situation in the very presence of the real world, God came into the midst of humanity “when Cyrenius was Governor of Syria.”
What Luke is telling us in his Gospel is that Christ became involved in the midst of a world at a particular time and in a particular place, and whether the names of those who are our governors now - Blair and Bush and Museveni and Gaddafi and Putin and Martin - the message is the same. This is the critical point: God is concerned, God continues to be concerned, and God will always be concerned for the welfare of the world he made.
One of the lovely things I have been able to do in talking to my Christian friends over the last two or three weeks is to see just how the ministry of Christ, the Son, becomes incarnate in the world. I was talking just a few weeks ago to a group of people who are working for peace throughout the world. They go into places like Hebron and Mosul and African countries, and are trying, by putting themselves in the path of danger, to bring peace among warring factions, so that they might get along. They put themselves in danger, treating themselves in a sense as God did in the incarnation.
I received an e-mail last week from a colleague who has been involved in AIDS in Africa, putting himself in positions of, physical danger, dealing with people so ill that one wrong prick of a needle, one accident could cause him to lose his life. Yet his passion is to bring the message to and save people who are at the point of death. The Christmas message is God incarnate in the world. The message of the Gospels is God's concern for the world. This is not a remote God, not a God who is real while we are unreal, but a God who breaks into our reality with his reality for the sake of the world.
My friends, this is the gift that keeps on giving. When all the lustre has gone off what we have been given; when the gifts have been put back in their boxes and wait, to quote Seinfeld, to be “re-gifted” at another, later date; or when they have worn out their usefulness and no longer seems like wonderful gifts; when all of that has come and gone, the gift of God's engagement and love for the world continues.
Boy, did that hit me this week! As many of you will know, last Sunday I was on a television program called Reach Out for Life. On the Monday morning after, I went, as I normally do, to my coffee shop and as I was lining up, I received a tap on the shoulder from a man behind me, who was wearing a toque and looking rather colourless. The man said, “Weren't you on TV yesterday?” I said, “Yes, that was me. I was the guy on TV.”
He said, “You seem like a happy man.”
I said, “Yes, I suppose I am a happy man, but at this time in the morning not as happy as at the time I was being interviewed!”
He said, “I need some happiness in my life,” and that of course was a leading question.
I said, “Why do you need happiness in your life?”
He said, “Between you and I, I have just undergone three months of chemotherapy, and I hardly know where my next ounce of energy is going to come from! I can barely stand. You have no idea how I need a little happiness in my life!”
That morning, I was going out to buy Christmas gifts - I was doing some late Christmas shopping - and all I could think of was that all the gifts we give and all the love that we exchange are wonderful, but somehow life, in and of itself, refines our wants. This man did not want any thing; this man wanted life.
When God gives that life, and when God in Heaven gave of himself and died for that life; when God, the Child, came vulnerably into the world to reveal that life; all of a sudden, not only do our wants change, but we can say, “Yes, when I look at Christ, what I really want has been given to me.”
In the dark days of the Civil War in the United States, when it seemed that all was lost, and when brothers were turning upon brothers, the great Longfellow wrote an incredible poem, titled Christmas Bells, that later became the words to a carol. He wrote it in the middle of the darkness and despair of the world, but he talks in it about hope. He says:
And in despair I bowed my head;
'There is no peace on earth,' I said;
'For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!'Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
'God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men.'
My friends, this Christmas, this is our faith, and what we must want is greater than what the hand can hold or the eye can see. What we must want is what Christ came to bring: the peace on earth, the love for one another, the hope of the world, and the life everlasting. So I ask you again, “Hey, Toronto! Did you get what you wanted?” For me, the answer will always be, “Yes!”
Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.