This is the first Sunday of Advent. This
is the time in which we start to anticipate the coming of Christmas.
Some people, of course, have been anticipating that for
some time already. The stores have had Christmas stuff up for weeks
now. The Hallmark Channel started
showing wall-to-wall Christmas movies before Halloween. And of course,
the reason they do that is because people want to watch them. I know, from the friends I have on facebook,
that many people around here have been counting down to Christmas for quite a
while now.
And that’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with liking
Christmas. If you want to start celebrating it in October, that’s your
business. It’s not hurting me any.
I think, though, that when we start celebrating Christmas
that early, we need to be careful about just what it is we’re celebrating.
It can be really easy to get caught up in celebrating the trappings and
traditions of Christmas. We start
celebrating the colored lights and the carols. We start celebrating the
trees and the decorations. We celebrate
the nostalgia of past Christmases. We
get caught up in celebrating all the secular, feel-good aspects of Christmas.
And again, it’s not that celebrating those things is bad or
wrong. I love looking at Christmas lights, too. I mean, I don’t like putting them up myself,
but I’m glad when other people do so I can see them. I love singing
Christmas carols and seeing the trees and everything. I’m not trying to be a Grinch here. There’s nothing wrong with any of that stuff.
It’s just that we need to be careful not to stop there.
Because if we do, we reduce Christmas to just a warm, fuzzy feeling.
And there’s certainly nothing wrong with warm, fuzzy feelings, either--we
all need them sometimes. But if that’s all Christmas is to us, we miss
out. We cheat ourselves. We stop thinking about the amazing thing that
God did for us when Jesus Christ, the divine Son, came to earth.
So that’s going to be the focus of our sermon series over
Advent--the amazing thing God did for us. And we’re going to look at it
by thinking about just how it was that God decided to do this for us. We’re going to think about how God decided to
offer us a chance for salvation and eternal life by sending the divine Son to
earth, and all the things that went into God making that decision and then
following through on that decision.
What we’re going to start with is God making that decision
at all. How did it come about that God decided to send the Divine Son to
earth?
To talk about that, I think we first need to talk about the
trinity. As Christians, we believe in the Holy Trinity. God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy
Spirit. The three in one. God in
three persons, as the old hymn says.
Each person of the trinity separate and distinct, and yet each person of
the trinity fully God. God the Father is God, God the Son is God, and God
the Holy Spirit is God. And yet, there
is just one God.
If you find that to be a little bit confusing, that’s okay.
The fact is that we don’t fully understand how the trinity works.
We know that when Jesus was on the earth, he said things like “I and the
Father are one” and “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.” And
yet, while Jesus was on earth, he prayed to God the Father. And he said that after he left, God the Holy
Spirit would come. So again, the trinity
is three separate and distinct persons, and each is God, and yet there is only
one God.
I’m going through all this because somehow, in some way,
the three persons of God made the decision that one of them, God the Son, was
going to come to earth. The decision was made that God the Son would be
born to human parents, would grow up just like human beings do, would teach
people and heal people and serve as an example for people. And then, the
decisions was made that God the Son would die, taking the punishment that
should go to us for our sins. Also, the
decision was made that through that death, and by our faith in God the Son, we
would receive salvation and eternal life.
How do you suppose that decision came about? Were
there other options, other ways in which salvation could be achieved, that the
trinity considered and then discarded? Were there other possible ways by
which God might have given us the chance for salvation and eternal life that
the trinity decided were lacking something, that they would not work as well
for some reason?
Because this was quite a sacrifice for God, you know?
It was a sacrifice in a lot of ways.
For one thing, the three persons of the trinity together make up one
God. Our reading from John tells us that Jesus Christ, “the Word” as John
puts it, was with God the Father from the beginning. Now, for the first
time ever, there was a sense in which they were going to be separated. Yes, Jesus still had a very close connection
to God the Father while he was on earth, but I have to think it was not the
same. I wonder how that felt for the members of the trinity. To have one of them--God the Son--be
separated from the other two. That was
quite a thing. What an amazing thing for
God to do.
And then, to make the decision that one member of the
trinity, God the Son, would be born to human parents and live as a human being.
That’s quite a sacrifice, too.
That’s quite a comedown. And
especially when you consider that God the Son entered this world as a baby, the
most helpless, dependent form of human life there is. Think about
that. Going from being God, a member of
the trinity, to being not just a human, not just someone like you and me, but
someone who could not feed himself or protect himself or do anything for
himself. Someone who was totally dependent on human parents for
life. Again, what an amazing thing for
God to do.
And then, to make the decisions that this member of the
trinity, God the Son, would experience death. God would die. That’s quite a sacrifice, too. God had never experienced death. God understood death, of course--God
understands everything. But God is eternal. God had never experienced death--that’s what
“eternal” means. But now, God, in the
form of the divine Son, was going to experience death. God would
die. God would die so that you and I
would have the chance for forgiveness and salvation and eternal life. Again, what an amazing thing for God to do.
God would not have had to do any of that. God would
not have had to offer us forgiveness or salvation or eternal life at all.
God could’ve just given us the punishment that we, as sinners,
deserve. Or, God could’ve chosen some other
way to offer forgiveness and salvation and eternal life to us. That other
way might not have worked as well, but it would not have required as much of a
sacrifice on God’s part, either. God
chose to make all these sacrifices, and of course other sacrifices that we’ve
not even talked about as well. God did that for you. And God did that for me. God did that because the best way--maybe the
only way--for us to have the chance for salvation and eternal life was for God
to make all those sacrifices for us. God
did that out of the incredible love that God has for you and for me and for
every other human being on earth.
So I hope, as we approach Christmas, you will think about
these things. I hope you will “ponder them in your heart”, as we’re told
Mary did. Because if you don’t, if you
settle for just letting Christmas give you a warm, fuzzy feeling, you’ll miss
out. You’ll miss out on the amazing, incredible, awesome thing God did
for us. You’ll miss out on appreciating
how much God sacrificed for us. You’ll
miss out on the true miracle of Christmas--that God made sacrifice after
sacrifice so that you and I and everyone else could have the chance for
salvation and eternal life.
There’s nothing wrong with warm, fuzzy feelings. But
God did not come to earth in the form of the divine Son to give us warm, fuzzy
feelings. Enjoy the lights and the carols and all the rest of it. But don’t cheat yourself out of experiencing
the true miracle of Christmas. Be sure you truly do appreciate the
sacrifices God made for us. Be sure you
truly do celebrate what the divine Son came to earth to give us: the
chance for salvation and eternal life.
Because salvation and eternal life will beat a warm, fuzzy feeling every
time.
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