For Us and Our Salvation

Luke 2:1-5

December 12, 2021 • Mount Pleasant UMC

Dr. Steve Seamands tells of picking up the newspaper one Christmas Day and reading this notice on the front page: “In keeping with the Christmas spirit, only good news will appear on the front page.” And sure enough, on the front page that day was a story about the pope, another about one family helping a neighbor in need, and a picture of Santa Claus stretched out on a patio, resting after his long night. Turn the page, however, and there was the “rest of the news.” Freedom fighters in Cuba, a robbery in Chicago, a fire that killed a family, civil war in Africa and other assorted tragedies. The bad news didn’t go away; it was just hidden because it was Christmas. I understand the newspaper’s desire. Two different occasions stand out in my own experience. One time I was helping a women’s group plan their annual speaker’s calendar. When we got to December, it was suggested we have the director of the local homeless shelter come and share about their ministry, to which one very influential lady said, “I don’t want to hear about that at Christmas! I want to hear good things!” I think they went with a speaker about Christmas hats or some such thing instead. On another occasion, I had a pastor’s wife tell me that she refused to take communion on Christmas Eve. “I don’t want to hear about his death while I’m trying to celebrate his birth.” We have been culturally conditioned to think of the birth of Jesus as warm, fuzzy, nostalgic and picture-perfect. But here’s how Dr. Seamands responds to that idea: “Jesus, the Son of God, wasn’t born into a sentimental, good-news-only fantasy world. He was born into this world, our world, which was evil and dangerous then just as it is now” (Give Them Christ, pgs. 34-35). If you happened to see Christmas With the Chosen at the theaters, you got a sense of that. It was not a quiet, clean, silent night. In fact, the whole birth of Jesus was quite the scandal.

We forget that. Our nativity scenes are so sanitized that the story no longer shocks us. As I mentioned last week, one of the biggest surprises is that God fully become a human. In no other faith does a god humiliate himself by being born of a young woman in a backwater town. In no other faith does that god then die in a shameful way as an executed criminal. And yet, the Christian faith says that’s exactly the story of Jesus. It’s the story of incarnation, which is the idea we’ve been exploring this Advent season. “The Word became flesh,” John says, and he became flesh in a very particular place, in a very particular time, in a world that was just as evil and dark and frightening as ours is today. To get a sense of that world, we have no better source than Dr. Luke’s account of the nativity.

Luke set out to write “an orderly account” of the life of Jesus (1:3), so he is very careful to give us the details of the historical setting. “In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria)” (2:1-2). Now, I’ve got to tell you, some of those details (like the one about Quirinius) have had historians scratching their heads, but suffice it say there’s enough there to match what we know of secular history to pinpoint Jesus’ birth to 3-4 BC. Yes, the calendar is off by 3 or 4 years; that’s because it was calculated in 1582, and they simply didn’t have the historical records available that we do today. Nevertheless, it was a time when Rome was transitioning from a republic to an empire. Some call Caesar Augustus as the first Roman emperor, but others remind us that he kept the senate and gave lip service to the idea of elections throughout his life. He did have a pretty high opinion of himself, however. The name “Augustus” means “exalted one.” His father, Julius Caesar, had been declared a god of Rome, and so Augustus became known as a “son of god.” We know he was five feet, seven inches tall. He was considered to be handsome though his teeth were “small and few.” He was deathly afraid of being struck by lightning, and he carried a piece of sealskin in his pocket to protect himself. I’m not sure how that was supposed to protect him, but that’s what he did. A lot of times you’ll hear how Augustus brought peace to the known world, but he did it by being ruthless with his enemies. He was, in reality, “a bloodthirsty tyrant, close to someone like Hitler or Mussolini” (Card, Luke: The Gospel of Amazement, pg. 47). It was a time of upheaval, of increasing taxation to fund a growing empire, which tells us why there was a census going on. If you’re going to tax people, you have to know who and where they are. It was a “corrupt, confusing time” (Card 48), not that much different from our own. Jesus did not come into a “good news only” world. He was born into a dangerous, changing and often frightening world (cf. Keener, IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament, pg. 193).

Into a “bad news world,” Jesus came to bring good news. That’s what “gospel” means: good news. And not only did Jesus bring good news, Jesus is good news. He is flesh-and-blood good news, but that’s not easy for any of us to grasp. Fully God and fully human—it just doesn’t make sense. We can’t really understand it. So some say Jesus was just a great human being, totally dedicated to God, yes, but a human being nonetheless. He was like one of the prophets in the Hebrew Bible, anointed by the Holy Spirit, only maybe Jesus got a little extra Spirit juice. When he was baptized, these folks say, he was “adopted” by God. That’s what God was talking about when he said, “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased” (Luke 3:22). So, they say, Jesus was adopted or given an honorary title, “Son of God.” Not God, but close. Almost, but not quite.

Others believe Jesus was fully God, and not human at all. He “appeared” to be human from time to time, like when he ate or when he slept, but that was only an appearance, a disguise—God in a human costume. The issue is Jesus’ death by crucifixion. These folks cannot fathom how an all-powerful and all-knowing God would or could suffer pain and death on a cross. It would have been too humiliating for God to go through. So, they say, Jesus appeared to be human. Not human, but pretty close. Almost, but not quite.

Some people today, even some preachers, treat Jesus like a dispenser of wisdom, a sayer of sayings, a teller of stories. They take the stories or the sayings and convert them into modern wisdom. Others, along the same lines, determine which sayings of Jesus are authentic and which ones aren’t. When I was young in ministry there was a famous group called the Jesus Seminar which literally voted on which words Jesus supposedly said and which ones he did not. Because, you know, we get to vote on what parts of the Bible we want to accept and which ones we don’t. (In case you missed it, that was sarcastic. We don’t get to vote.) Jesus becomes a philosopher or a life coach, and his teaching is removed from the history and the culture it came from. That’s part of why I spend so much time teaching you the history and the setting of the Bible, because we can’t just grab these things out of thin air. Jesus came to a very specific time and place, and it wasn’t by mistake. God chose the time, the “fullness of time,” and the place for the incarnation to happen.

So there are these so-called “options,” other views of Jesus, but here’s the problem: “To get Christ wrong is to get God wrong” (Willimon, Incarnation, pg. 49). When we get Jesus wrong, the manger becomes a sentimental tale told once a year with a happy ending (don’t go on to the part about Herod killing the Bethlehem babies). The cross becomes an evil act done to Jesus and the gospel story becomes a tragic tale of just another good man whose actions brought him to a bad end (cf. Willimon 49-53). Is that what we gather here for—nice stories with happy endings? Or do we gather here because Jesus is the incarnate Son of God who is the only one who can save us from our broken and sinful world? I don’t know why you gather here every week, but the only thing that gets me out of bed every morning is the hope I have in Jesus, the eternal Son of God who loved me enough to put aside his glory, be born in a stable of a virgin, and ultimately give his life so that mine could be saved. A number of years ago Ted Turner famously said, “I don’t need anyone to save me,” and he’s not the only one to feel that way or even to say it. But I think the irony is that even in his statement, there is a recognition that we need saving. The world is broken and so are we. Nothing is the way it should be, and nothing within us can save us. It’s sort of like if you’ve fallen in a deep hole, you can’t really rescue yourself. We need someone outside of ourselves to come and save us (cf. Willimon 53).

One of the early and important creeds of the church says Jesus came “for us and for our salvation” (Nicene Creed, UMH 880). In other words, Christmas faith says God invaded our space to change the world. In this story, an angel named Gabriel (who stands in the presence of God, 1:19) visits a young virgin named Mary and tells her she will give birth to a child whose “kingdom will never end” (1:33). He will be called “the Son of God” (1:32) and he will be “holy,” set apart (1:35). In the first chapter of Luke there are all these songs; everyone, it seems, is singing praise to God for what is happening. But what’s interesting to me, and you can check it out, none of them sing about personal salvation the way we do. Certainly Jesus was sent to save us from our sins; the whole of the New Testament affirms this and Jesus’ own name means, “God saves.” But the mission Jesus came on was so much larger than you or me going to heaven. Jesus’ message, and the message the songs of Luke affirm over and over again, is that he came to save the whole world. Not just the people, but the whole of creation. He came to break the power of sin over you and me and the whole world. That’s why he was born. Mary sings of rulers being brought down from their thrones, of the hungry being filled with good things, and of God’s promises being fulfilled (Luke 1:46-55). Zechariah sings about enemies being defeated and the people being able to serve God without fear (Luke 1:68-79). And all of this will happen because this baby has come to offer forgiveness, to offer light, to offer mercy—to the world. What is promised in the birth of this baby is so much more than a free ticket to heaven. What is promised is the redemption of all of creation—a new world, a renewed world, a restored world. The incarnation is not just about a baby in a manger. The incarnation is about the all of creation made right, the way God intended from the start.

When the creed says Jesus came “for us and for our salvation,” it’s talking about the redemption of all of creation. As Bishop Will Willimon says, it’s not just personal; it’s cosmic (56). John didn’t write that Jesus came for our church friends and people like us. No, John wrote, “For God so loved…the world!” (3:16). Jesus came for the whole world. He came to save the whole creation. Into a dark and desperate world, a world where Herod and Augustus rule with iron fists, a world where people are seen as tools in the hands of an empire, Jesus came to set things to rights. Into our dark and desperate world, a world plagued with pandemics and politics, a world where injustice means some people are considered more valuable than others, a world where there are no easy answers despite what the politicians promise, into that empire-saturated world, Jesus comes to set things to rights. Two thousand years ago, he came in the flesh to set things in motion. These days, he calls you and I to be the ones who continue the work he began. Our incarnational faith calls us to incarnate the good news. It calls us to be Jesus for others by serving those around us and offering hope to a broken and needy world, the good news Jesus came to bring.

James was Jesus half-brother who knew him longer than many, and after many years of reflecting on what the message of Jesus was, he wrote this: “Faith, by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead…Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by my deeds” (James 2:17-18). Sometimes we get confused and say James is trying to affirm that Jesus saves us by what we do, but that’s not what he’s saying at all. He’s reminding us that true faith is evidenced by a changed way of life. If someone is a thief, and then says they have been saved by Jesus but keeps on stealing, they’ve not really been saved. Saving faith changes us. It has to. You can’t be in a relationship with the living God and not be changed.

So, here’s what I tell you often, something I will continue to remind you of: you cannot earn God’s grace. It’s called “grace” because it’s an unearned gift. We are not saved by our works, but we respond to our salvation by serving where Jesus calls us to serve. We live out the good news in practical ways and in those settings we often experience Jesus in profound ways. I heard about a pastor who visits the state prison in his town every single week, similar to the folks from our church who visit in our local jail and at the federal penitentiary several weeks out of the month. But this pastor would go every week and when asked why, he said, “I’ve not been given a great deal of faith. Belief in Christ does not come naturally to me. So I have to go where Jesus is. I have to be sure that I stay close to Jesus. I feel so much closer to our Lord and find his presence so much more believable in prison than at church” (Willimon 64-65). He found the presence of Jesus real when he was serving.

You see, living out the faith isn’t about singing songs and sitting in a pew. Worship is important; don’t get me wrong. Don’t go out of here telling people Pastor Dennis said Sunday worship isn’t important. It is; this is where we get refilled, but it is not the entirety of the Christian life. We’re called to take what we’ve received and use that energy to serve others. When Jesus described the last judgment, he talked about two kinds of people who will come before him. Those who served and those who did not. To those who are part of his kingdom, Jesus will say, “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me…Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” (Matthew 25:35-36, 40). We serve the way Jesus would serve and the world is changed. That’s the plan. That’s the unchanged plan for over 2,000 years, ever since a baby took his first breath of manger air in the tiny town of Bethlehem.

So last year on Christmas Eve, if you remember, we were not back in the building yet, so we met in the parking lot for a very cold—freezing, in fact—Christmas Candlelight service. Well, those of us on the steps were cold. Most of you were nice and warm in your cars. (No bitterness, here.) Anyway, we invited you to bring gift cards to the service and then at the end, you were sent out all over the city to places where people had to work on Christmas Eve and give away the gift cards to the ones we called “the night-shift shepherds.” This Christmas Eve, Lord willing, we will be back here in the sanctuary for a more traditional service, but just because we’re all nice and comfy and warm inside, I don’t want us to forget those night-shift shepherds. So I’m once again inviting you to bring some $5 gift cards, as many as you can deliver, and we’ll have some locations for you to take them to after each service. It’s a small token, a small way we can share the good news into the darkness of the world. We’re going to have some tags printed up that say the card is from the Jesus followers at Mount Pleasant Church and then you’ll take those out to wish people a Merry Christmas.

But that’s not the only way for us to live out the incarnation this season. What are you passionate about? What do you care about? Where in our world could the presence of Jesus make a distinct difference? You already know my favorite quote by Frederick Buechner is, “The worst thing is never the last thing.” You might have heard that one before! But my second-favorite quote is his definition of God’s calling. He put it this way: “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.” I thought of that again this last week when I was listening to a leadership podcast with Christine Caine. Christine is an internationally-known speaker and author and runs a nonprofit called A21 which fights against human trafficking. (A21 stands for “Abolishing Injustice in the 21st Century.”) On this podcast, she said she got started in this ministry by seeing posters at airports and other places about missing people, those who had been kidnapped into horrific situations. And she kept saying to herself, “Someone should do something about that.” Eventually, God reminded her that she had “the gift of gab” and so she decided that was God’s way of telling her to find a group and become their spokesperson. But no group existed that met her requirements, which caused her to realize that maybe God was calling her to step up (Craig Groeschel Leadership Podcast, No. 103). Passion plus world’s hunger equals calling.

Now, God is probably not calling you to fight against something as large as human trafficking, though maybe he is. I’ve kidded Rick that our Celebrate Recovery ministry needs to get ready for the arrival of the casino and the inevitable onslaught of gambling addicts. I kid, but probably so. Where in your community or in your neighborhood is God calling you? Maybe he’s calling you to join with those who go into the prisons to invite the incarcerated into new life. Maybe he’s calling you to work with children or youth, or in a food pantry. Maybe he’s calling you to visit the nursing home and sit with that widow who is so desperately lonely. Maybe he’s calling you to reach out to the single parent next door who just needs a real friendship or to that new mother who so badly craves adult conversation. Maybe that person you work with who is facing some health problems would just love to have someone offer to pray with them. Maybe these gift cards that we’ll deliver will spark something in you or start something in your neighborhood. I don’t know what God is calling you to, but I do know he is calling you and me to be the incarnate presence of Jesus, to make a difference for the sake of his kingdom in this broken and dark world. Remember our mission: to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.

The goal is for the good news, the gospel, to seep out into our dark world, and as it does, it will change everything. The time is long past when the world is going to come here looking for us. We are called, as Buechner said, into the places where the world is hungry and thirsty for salvation. It is, after all, a world not all that different from the world Jesus was born into. Dark, fear-ridden, uncertain and divided. Into that world Jesus came. God became flesh. For us and for our salvation, for the salvation and the transformation of the world, the Word became flesh. And he still does, through you and me. Where can you be Jesus this Christmas? Let’s pray.