Sunday, December 17, 2017
Sermon Audio
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It was the day I thought the world had come to an end!  I thought it was my personal Armageddon!  I had just finished, almost to the very last footnote, the second chapter of my thesis, and I was feeling good, when suddenly the phone rang. I pivoted to the left and my elbow hit the keyboard. The entire chapter disappeared before my eyes.  Months of work, months of minute detail:  footnotes, everything, gone in the blink of an eye!  I thought I was going to die!  Not knowing how to reclaim it, I decided to reboot my computer; I pressed every single button on the keyboard in every possible way imaginable to no avail!  I decided that as everything was still fresh in my mind that I should write it all over again.  I started to type; I typed through the day, and I typed through the night, and typed through the next morning and the next day. Finally, I felt that I had captured the essence of it all, and I could edit it later.  
 
I returned to Toronto and spoke to my tech guy, J. R. about my situation, and he said, “Can I have your laptop?”  I gave it to him.  He pressed two buttons and voila!  It wasn’t lost!  It was in a remote and very obscure file that my elbow had saved it in.  But it was still there!  Needless to say, I was embarrassed, a little humiliated, and very relieved.  But then, I started to read the two and compare them.  What was fascinating was that the one written purely from memory was superior to the one that I had written originally. I had internalized everything, so it became part of me.  I knew what I wanted to say, and somehow I was saying it, as opposed to simply researching and putting it out there.  When I wrote it the second time, it was expressed in a much better way.  I think that internalizing, and making it my own was a positive and a powerful thing.  I think it applies very much to our experience as Christians of the Christmas period.  
 
The Christmas season is about memories, is it not?  Aren’t most of us being driven by a desire to repeat fond memories of the past?  Do we not have this emotional bond that evokes great memories and sentiments of Christmases past, particularly from our childhood or younger years?  Is it not part of us to recreate a memory, an atmosphere at Christmas?  Many of those are very joyful, very exciting memories, gifts that we have received, concerts that we have attended, and moments with loved ones that were precious.  We have these memories, and it seems we want to reclaim them, re-enact them, and relive them.  It is also what makes Christmas for many such a difficult time; a time of sorrow for the loss of loved ones; a time when some feel the “blue Christmas” that people talk about, because those fond memories are unattainable .  
 
Even more seriously, I believe we have a memory of the Christmas story itself, what I would call “the content of Christmas”.  For those of us brought up in the Christian faith, we have heard our text today from the Gospel of Luke many times.  We have heard Matthew’s rendition, we have heard John’s, we have heard references to the prophets before, and have recounted the story of the Nativity, and the events around the Christmas story. No matter how hard it is to biblically justify every single detail, we nevertheless repeat these stories over and over again.  For new Christians, it is perhaps less so, but for nearly everyone else there is this sense in which familiarity breeds, maybe not contempt, but ennui:  a sense we’ve heard it before, and are no longer excited, that there is nothing more or new to be conveyed.  We get it!  The story is old, we know the details, we’ve heard about the shepherds and the kings, Mary and Joseph, the stable and the angels. We’ve heard it all before.
 
When it becomes ordinary, it is not internalized; it does not become part of us; the story loses its power and Christmas loses its energy.  We forget its true meaning and simply rely on the memory of when it meant something to us.  I want to concentrate on a passage from today’s text that we don’t think about a great deal. It is the moment when Mary “treasured what she had heard and pondered it in her heart”.  I think for us to reclaim the power and the majesty of Christmas, we need to follow the example of Mary.  John Calvin captured this so beautifully in his Commentaries:
 
Mary’s diligence in contemplating the words of God is laid before us for two reasons:  First, to inform us that this treasure was laid up in her heart for the purpose of being published to others at the proper time; secondly, to afford to all the godly an example for imitation, for if we are wise, it will be the chief employment and the great object of our life to consider with attention those works of God, which build up our faith.
 
What Calvin is getting at is that we need to treasure Mary’s words as she treasures the words of God in her heart. We need to imitate her.  We need to contemplate and reflect on the words of God. 
 
What is it that we need to remember and internalize this Christmas?  What is it that we need to have in our hearts?  Well, clearly that Christmas, for all the spin and the wonder and the glory of the story, is about God.  It is God’s activity.  It is God’s event.  What we learn in this story, we learn of God.  What we see in actions is God.  What we reflect on in our hearts is God.  It is God’s story.  It is God’s unfolding message.  It is God’s incarnation.  It is God coming to us.  Mary would have pondered all of this.  She would have pondered the incredible, awesome power of what was happening in her life. After all, she had been told by the shepherds to, “Rejoice! There is joy, because a saviour has been born, a saviour who is Christ, the Lord, and this has happened in the City of David.”  Mary would have realized the awesome power of God acting in her life.  Can you imagine being in Mary’s place?  Can you imagine pondering in your heart the reality that this child, to whom you have just given birth, is none other than the Saviour and the Redeemer of Israel, the Messiah, Yeshiva!  This is the very Redeemer of God’s People!  This is the Lord of the Universe!  This is not an ordinary birth. This is the power of God.  Can you imagine then, wouldn’t you ponder, wouldn’t you treasure, wouldn’t you think about these things?  And, to think that in this child she is holding, there is the very grace and love and presence of God!
 
It is also a moment, as you can imagine, of incredible vulnerability for Mary, but it was also a profoundly vulnerable moment for God.  Frederick Buechner, in the wonderful book The Hungering Dark, wrote this about Mary and that moment.  This is terrific! 
 
Those who believe in God can never in a way be sure of him again. Once they have seen him in a stable, they can never be sure where he will appear or to what lengths he will go, to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation he will descend in his wild pursuit of humanity.  If holiness and the awful power and majesty of God were present in this least auspicious of all events, this birth of a peasant’s child, then there is no place or time so lonely or earth-bound but that holiness can be present there too.  This means we are never safe, that there is no place where we can hide from God, no place where we are safe from God’s power to break us and recreate the human heart, because it is just where he seems most helpless that he is most strong, and just where we least expect him that he comes most fully.
 
Mary pondered in her heart the very presence of the power of God himself, and she treasured it.  In the most vulnerable moment between a mother and a child, God was there.
 
This vulnerable God, this God who came in the presence of the Son, Mary’s child, has in fact challenged so many notions of what God is like throughout history:  The humiliated God, the vulnerable God who came as a child.  It is an affront to those who want to make God a God of the powerful and the mighty and the esteemed; not the lowly, and the vulnerable and the weak.  That is why I believe that Adolf Hitler was so offended by the notion of God becoming a child.  Hitler wanted to change the date of Christmas to December 21st to have another celebration he called, Yuletide, which means Christmas anyway!  He wanted to ban the singing of carols, because the carols were speaking of the Christ-child.  He wanted to remove the “Jewishness” of all that Christmas entailed.  He wanted to have, in a sense, another God; not the God of Bethlehem, not the God that was in Mary.  The powerful do that!  They lift up and create their own, because this God that Mary gave birth to was far, far more powerful and far more offensive to those who exalt themselves.
 
Why should we ponder it in our heart?  Why, as Calvin says, should we emulate Mary?  Well, we do so because there is this wonderful word – and I don’t quote Greek very often – but it is such a juicy word to describe thanksgiving.  It is the sort of word that you just want to throw out at a Christmas party, make yourself look kind of erudite, “Ah, samballousa!”  To ponder, to treasure.  Why should we bother pondering and treasuring this story?  Why should we internalize it, and why should it be part of us?  Because another meaning of samballousa is “to put everything together”.  What Mary did when she held Christ in her hands was to put it all together.  
 
At that moment, she had no idea what would happen to her son. Here immediate concern was the safety and protection of a child, like any mother.  But, over the years, she would have remembered putting together what she heard in her heart.  She would have remembered at the wedding at Cana when she asked Jesus to turn the water into wine and to bring the best wine out and he did so, she would have remembered that this was the Saviour, this was the Messiah:  “Look, this is the best wine!  That’s my boy!”  When he was on the mountain top and preached the incredible Sermon on the Mount, Mary would have listened, and she would have heard again that this was the Saviour and the Lord.  This is the person who would have seen Jesus healing the lame and the blind and identifying with the outcasts and the poor, and she would have gone:  “This is my boy!”  When he was being falsely accused and nailed to a tree between two common criminals, she would have seen the son that she had given birth to, and remembered what she had been told, that her son is dying to fulfill the messianic calling.  She would have heard that the tomb was empty.  She would have known about this, and she would have rejoiced, and said:  “This is the Risen Messiah!  This is God’s boy!”  She would have put it all together, and in putting it all together she would have remembered every moment in his life, exactly what she had been told by those shepherds.  
 
When you ponder it in your heart and put it all together, you realize that Christmas is not about anything else other than the birth of the very One whose entire life and death and resurrection and ascension we celebrate.  
 
The great social activist Ron Sider, who has influenced me greatly over the years, and who lectured last year at Acadia, wrote a book entitled, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, which changed my outlook many years ago.  Sider suggests that this treasure of Mary in her heart actually echoes another difficult story.  He says it echoes the story of when Jesus visited Martha and Mary (not the same Mary). In the story of Martha and Mary, Jesus goes to Martha’s home and she is busy cooking. She wants to create the right atmosphere, and be a good hostess to Jesus, so she spends all her time making sure that everything is ready and organized.  Mary, on the other hand, sits with Jesus.  She realizes that she is in the presence of the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of Mary, and listens to him and ponder his words.  Martha was busy doing her own thing and missed it all, whereas Mary understood the power of the moment!  
 
So many of us and so much of the world is like Martha.  We are running around trying to recreate memories.  We are trying to create an atmosphere, and an esthetic at Christmas.  We are concerned more about whether we have all our packing done and all our arrangements made than we are about the real power and meaning and purpose. And, like Martha, we miss Jesus when he visits.  We miss him and we lose the whole moment!  We miss the power!  We miss the glory!  
 
I am asked, I suppose you are asked, everyone seems to ask the question:  “Have you got everything ready for Christmas?”  What people are asking me is do I have all my gifts, have I remembered my wife, and my family?  Have I sent cards to my friends?  Have I gone to all the Christmas parties and done all the right things?  If that is the case, the answer is “Probably not”.  But, if you were to ask me, “Are you ready for Christmas?” I am thinking: “Am I ready for Christ?”  Am I ready to have Christ treasured in my heart?  Am I ready to ponder the message of his life and what he did?  Yes!
 
The contrast between the Martha and the Mary was so powerfully demonstrated to me this week that I almost reverberate with it.  I visited Sick Kids Hospital. When I went into the lobby it was full of energy.  There was a Tim Hortons, a gift store, there were people sitting around with gifts, selling things, getting ready for Christmas.  The lobby was a hive of activity, and right in front of the elevator, were people were selling magazines.  It was a vibrant and joyful place. It was incredible!  I took an elevator up to a room where two parents were sitting vigil, as they do all the time, with a very sick child.  The child was lying on the bed hugging her bear or bunny rabbit and has been sick for many months.   We held hands, said a prayer, and we left her in God’s hands.  I couldn’t help but contrast the power of the noise and the energy of what was happening in the lobby and what was taking place at that very moment in that room.  
 
When we held hands and prayed, I realized that if Christmas is not about the power or God, if it is not about the vulnerability of human beings, if it is not about God’s identification with us at our most vulnerable, if it is not about the glory and the joy of the Lord, then it is nothing!  But with it, and in it, and through it, it is the greatest treasure to place in our hearts!  Don’t you agree? Amen.