The Escape

(A sermon for the First Sunday after Christmas based on Hebrews 2:10-18 and Matthew 2:13-23)

What we have here is an escape story. The story tells of the escape of Joseph and Mary to Egypt; they took their infant son Jesus with them. They undertook the journey because an angel of the Lord had told Joseph in a dream that Herod the Great was going to try to kill Jesus. Although Joseph necessarily takes the lead, Jesus is the real center of the story. He is the true hero of the narrative that is unfolding.

It is important that the hero escape so that he can live his heroic life and perform his heroic actions. We are familiar with how this works.

In George Lucas’ epic Star Wars saga, in the midst of a bitter inter-galactic conflict that is also played out in the lives of individual protagonists, twins are born to Princess Amidala, who dies in childbirth. Their father is the powerful Jedi Anakin Skywalker who is in the process of becoming the Dark Lord Darth Vader and from whom the twins’ existence must be kept a secret so that he will not have the opportunity to corrupt them. So, the twins are separated and placed with families distant from one another in every way imaginable. It is very important to the story that Luke and Leia be protected because they are destined to grow up and be leaders in the fight for freedom from tyranny.

Some of us are more familiar with the Bible than we are with Star Wars, I imagine, so let me offer you a biblical example of another escape story. Whereas the infant Jesus was taken to Egypt for his protection, this hero was born in Egypt during a time when his people were being persecuted there. The family of Jacob had been in captivity in Egypt for 400 years. Explosive growth in the Hebrew population had caused the Pharaoh to issue an order that all newborn males were to be thrown into the Nile River. When Moses was born, his mother hid him in a basket which she placed in the Nile. There he was found by an Egyptian princess who raised him with his own mother serving as nurse to him. Moses, who escaped death at the hands of a threatened power, grew up to become the great liberator of the Hebrews.

Jesus also escaped death at the hands of a threatened power. Jesus also grew up to become the liberator of his people. Thus, the escape was necessary.

In each of these stories, though, there was collateral damage of the worst kind. It was of the worst kind because in each case children were killed. In the Star Wars story, it was young Jedi students. In the Exodus story, it was the male children of the Hebrews. In the story of Jesus, it was the children of Bethlehem. It is a troubling fact that children do suffer. It is even more troubling that children suffer because of the fears and ambitions of people in power; they often suffer because of the sins of grown people.

Jesus came into a world where tyrannical despots worked their will. He came into a world where people of all ages suffered. He, like Moses but in a way even greater than that of Moses, came to do something about it all, but it is the nature of things that the solution can bring with it more pain and suffering. And in the wonderful and terrible stories of the Exodus and the flight of the holy family to Egypt, we find children suffering.

Jesus came to share in the suffering of God’s children. But he also came to overcome the suffering of God’s children. That is part of the wonder of it all.

Try to imagine what it must have been like for Joseph and his family. They had to make the long and treacherous trek to Egypt and find a colony of Jews among whom they could live. Once there, they had to wonder what was happening back home in Judea. No doubt Mary continued to ponder these things in her heart and I imagine that Joseph did his fair share of pondering, too. When would they be able to go home? Would they be able to go home? And so it came to pass that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, started out his life poor and homeless and then spent some of his earliest days as a refugee.

So Jesus escaped the murderous intentions of Herod the Great but he did not escape the kinds of suffering and struggling that can and do come to us humans. As he grew into manhood and into the special calling that his Father had placed upon his life, Jesus did not try to escape the trials and testing and suffering that came with being the Son of God; to the contrary, he embraced such trials and testing and suffering and in embracing them defeated them. As the author of Hebrews puts it, it is because Jesus went through testing and suffering that he can help us when we are tested and when we suffer (2:18).

How remarkable it is that the Son of God came to Earth and went through the kind of tests and suffering that we encounter! This is a God who cares, who cares enough to walk beside us in all that we experience but who even cares enough to walk through it before us and ahead of us! In so doing he proclaimed the way of the Father (2:12) and showed us how to trust in God no matter what we are experiencing (2:13).

Yes, the infant Jesus escaped the murderous intentions of Herod. But in the end, he did not escape the murderous intentions of sinful authorities and other sinful people who wanted to take his life. He escaped at the beginning of his life; could he have escaped again? Yes. Indeed, the record indicates that he wanted to escape; recall his prayer in the Garden: “Father, if it be thy will, let this cup pass from me.” Surely the temptation to choose a way other than the hard way of the Father was one of the hardest tests that Jesus faced. As F. F. Bruce put it,

Time and again the temptation came to Him from many directions to choose some less costly way of fulfilling that calling than the way of suffering and death, but He resisted it to the end and set His face steadfastly to accomplish the purpose for which He had come into the world [F. F. Bruce, The Epistle to the Hebrews (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964), p. 53].

He chose to stay and to die because only in that way could he overcome death and thereby take away the one thing from the devil that the old enemy has to hold over us all. He embraced death so as to give us life. He embraced death so as to defeat all the realities that enslave us and that take the life from us.

Praise be to God for Jesus Christ who was tested, who suffered, and who died to open up the way of salvation for us and who also opened up the way to real life here and now for us.

For you see, in Jesus we escape the fear of death and the judgment of death. We do not escape the living of life and the suffering that comes with it, but that suffering and testing is transformed into an opportunity to bear witness to who Christ is in our lives. And we do not escape the privilege and responsibility of walking among and ministering to those who are suffering and dying all around us. As Lawrence Farris said, “In rapid and dramatic contrast to ‘the glory all around’ of Christmas, he takes his place where so many of his children live. And there should the church, his body, always be” [Lawrence W. Farris, Third Readings: The Gospels in The Lectionary Commentary: Theological Exegesis for Sunday’s Texts, ed. Roger E. Van Harn, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), p. 11]. We who have received Christ have escaped the clutches of sin and death. But we dare not escape our ministry to all those hurting people around us. Jesus overcame sin and death by holding them fast to himself. We help to overcome the forces that threaten to overwhelm our neighbors when we clutch our neighbors to our chests.

The poet John Guzlowski has written somewhat of what I am trying to say in his poem “What My Father Believed.” In that poem Guzlowski writes of the faith of his father, who spent time in a slave labor camp in Nazi Germany. In one part of the poem he writes,

My father believed we are here to lift logs
that can't be lifted, to hammer steel nails
so bent they crack when we hit them.
In the slave labor camps in Germany,
He'd seen men try the impossible and fail.

He believed life is hard, and we should
help each other. If you see someone
on a cross, his weight pulling him down
and breaking his muscles, you should try
to lift him, even if only for a minute,
even though you know lifting won't save him [John Guzlowski, “What My Father Believed,” from Lightning And Ashes. © Steel Toe Books, 2007. The entire poem can be read at The Writer's Almanac.]

We children of God don’t escape suffering. Those children in Bethlehem didn’t; we children of God don’t. Ultimately, though, suffering and death have been defeated by Jesus, who escaped death at the beginning but who embraced it at the end. Our joy is to live that truth and to tell all those around us of it. And it’s true—we can’t save anybody. But we can show them and tell them about the one who suffered and died to overcome what is tearing them apart and weighing them down.

We have escaped.

Therefore, you see, we dare not run away.

My BCS Predictions

There are too many college football bowl games. If they are going to have this many bowl games, then they ought to go ahead and have enough for every Division I Bowl Subdivision (abbreviated Division I FBS) school to play in a bowl game.

I haven’t watched too many minutes of too many games so far. Happily, though, we are almost through the preliminary bowl games (Emerald, Alamo, Texas, New Orleans, for example) and about to get to the ones that matter.

I confess that I am one of those people who spend the first day of the New Year watching way too much football. It’s a lot of fun.

Another complaint I have is that the bowl season now extends past January 1. I fondly remember having a pretty good idea when I went to bed late on January 1 who the national champion was going to be. This year, we have to wait until January 7.

All of that having been said, I want to offer two scores for each Bowl Championship Series game. In each case, the first score will be the score that I want to see and the second will be the score that I think will in fact result.

Rose Bowl

My hoped-for score: Illinois 35, USC 34
My predicted score: USC 41, Illinois 21

Sugar Bowl

My hoped-for score: Georgia 41, Hawaii 0
My predicted score: Georgia 48, Hawaii 24

Fiesta Bowl

My hoped-for score: West Virginia 45, Oklahoma 28
My predicted score: Oklahoma 35, West Virginia 28

Orange Bowl

My hoped-for score: Kansas 28, Virginia Tech 24
My predicted score: Virginia Tech 34, Kansas 14

BCS Championship

My hoped-for score: LSU 50, Ohio State 3
My predicted score: LSU 45, Ohio State 10

I also hope and predict that the SEC will go 9-0 in bowl games this year.

We’ll see!

White--or Black--or Blue--Like Me

What would it be like to have your skin turn a different color?

It does happen.

Recent news accounts have told of Paul’s Karason’s skin turning blue. Karason, who lived in Oregon until moving recently to California, drinks water containing colloidal silver. He believes that his skin turned blue not because he drinks that substance but because he applied it directly to his face. His skin condition, called Argyria, has been linked to the use of colloidal silver. Karason said that he moved to California hoping that he would find more acceptance there.

There have also been some recent news stories about the skin of a black man turning white. His name is Lee Thomas; he is an anchor and entertainment reporter for a television station in Detroit. He has a condition called vitiligo, which destroys pigment-making cells. Thomas has written a book about the experience called Turning White: A Memoir of Change. He shares his condition is with some 65 million people around the world and some two million in the United States.

I was born white. I know how to be nothing else. It is important, I believe, for me to try to understand how someone of a different race or from a different culture might see things. Many of our problems can be traced to the human tendencies to think that (1) everybody sees things the way we do or (2) everybody should see things the way we do.

I do not mean to suggest that all whites see things one way or that all blacks see things one way or that all Hispanics see things one way. That is certainly not the case. But it is also the case that we tend to be conditioned in some ways by our heritage and our culture.

It would be eye-opening if I could be of another race for just a little while. Indeed, it would be enlightening if all of us could have that experience. I wonder how race relations might change if everybody who is European-American could spend a few days being African-American and a few days being Asian-American. I wonder how they might change if folks of all any and every race could have such an experience?

What if we could expand on the concept? What if we could each spend some time being of different nationalities? How might things change if we each had to serve a term as a North Korean, as a Brazilian, as an Iraqi, or as a Russian? How might things change if our world leaders had literally to spend some time in each other’s shoes?

What if we could each spend some time being adherents of different religions? I don’t man just paying lip service to some other belief system but really, actually practicing other religions as true believers? How might things be different if Christians had to spend a few days being Muslim and if Muslims had to spend a few days being Christian? What if a Christian could be an atheist for a while and an atheist a Christian?

I was born white, I was born American, I was born Southern, and I was practically born Christian. Others are born in different settings. We err when we let our particular ways of viewing reality, even when those ways are shared with many other people, cause us to fail to try to understand and accept and get along with people whose experiences, background, and worldview are different.

It’s not that I want to be different than I am or that I want others to be different than they are. It’s just that I want us to stop letting our differences stand in the way of progress and peace.

I believe in the way of Jesus Christ enough to believe that Christians should lead the way in such rapprochement. I also believe in that way enough to say that we should be humble enough to follow the lead of others if we won’t lead the way ourselves.

I don’t want everyone else to be white like I am anymore than I want them to want me to be black or brown like they are.

I just want our common and shared humanity to matter more than our differing pigmentation.

Christmas Post at EthicsDaily.com

My post "The More Things Change, The More They Change: A Christmas Memoir" appears at EthicsDaily.com today.

I am grateful to Bob Allen for using it.

In the Meantime: Be Amazed

(A sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Advent based on Isaiah 7:10-16 & Matthew 1:18-25)

The key to having a legitimate experience with the Christ of Christmas may be to make this admission: “I don’t understand.”

That is because the human tendency is to think that in understanding something we have placed ourselves in a position to control and domesticate and use it for our own purposes.

On the other hand, you can stand in awe of something that you don’t understand. You can stand amazed in the presence of something that you don’t understand. Here is a paradox: in the case of Christmas, it is when you admit that you don’t understand it that you put yourself in a position to get it.

Indeed, there may be no admission that is more central to the life of faith than this one: “I don’t understand.” Wonder and amazement are prerequisite to faith.

There are so many things about the coming of the Son of God into this world that I cannot understand. With due respect to everyone here today, I doubt that you understand, either.

You can’t understand a virginal conception—but you can stand in wonder and amazement of the Savior who was so conceived. And you can “get” him—when you believe.

In the words of Philip Yancey,

The events of Christmas point inescapably to what seems like an oxymoron: a humble God. The God who came to earth came not in a raging whirlwind nor in a devouring fire. Unimaginably, the Maker of all things shrank down, down, down, so small as to become an ovum, a single fertilized egg barely visible to the naked eye, an egg that would divide and redivide until a fetus took shape, enlarging cell by cell inside a nervous teenager. [Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995), p. 36]

It’s too amazing to understand—but it’s amazing enough to cause you to stand in awe and then to believe.

You can’t understand the preexistent Son of God being born as a little, messy, squirming baby—but you can stand in wonder and amazement of the child who was born that way. And you can “get” him—when you believe.

As Brennan Manning put it, “God entered into our world not with the crushing impact of unbearable glory, but in the way of weakness, vulnerability and need. On a wintry night in an obscure cave, the infant Jesus was a humble, naked, helpless God who allowed us to get close to him.” [Brennan Manning, “Shipwrecked at the Stable,” in Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001), p. 187]

It’s too amazing to understand—but it’s amazing enough to cause you to stand in awe and then to believe.

You can’t understand the Son of God being born to two ordinary, common folks—but you can stand in wonder and amazement of the Savior who was so born. And you can “get” him—when you believe.

God entered our world not by coming out of the sky in clouds of glory but by becoming a little baby. He came not to the palace of the king or to the mansions of the rich—but to a poor working-class couple.

It’s too amazing to understand—but it’s amazing enough to cause you to stand in awe and then to believe.

You can’t understand the Messiah having a feed trough for a bed—but you can stand in wonder and amazement of the Messiah who was laid there. And you can “get” him—when you believe.

God entered our world not by coming into the places of comfort and power but rather by coming to the best simple place that his simple parents could improvise for him. When God made his way into the world he came not to folks who had it made but rather to folks who just had to make do.

It’s too amazing to understand—but it’s amazing enough to cause you to stand in awe and then to believe.

You certainly can’t understand a God who would love us so much that he would go so far to make himself available to us and thereby to show his love to us—but you can stand in wonder and amazement of such love. And you can “get” it—when you believe.

Listen to Brennan Manning again:

Do you think you could contain Niagara Falls in a teacup?
Is there anyone in our midst who pretends to understand the awesome love in the heart of the Abba of Jesus that inspired, motivated and brought about Christmas? The shipwrecked at the stable kneel in the presence of mystery. [Manning, p. 187]

Can we understand all of these Christmas truths? No. Can we explain them? No. But can we stand in awe and wonder before them? Yes. Can we believe in the Savior whose story they tell? Yes. Can the world of that first Christmas break into the world in which you are living at this Christmas? Yes.

That’s what happened to Imogene Herdman. Most of you have read or watched her story in The Best Christmas Pageant Ever by Barbara Robinson. Imogene and her brothers and sisters had never heard the story of Jesus. They went to church one Sunday because a schoolmate had exaggerated about the vast amounts of sweets that were doled out at Sunday School. There they heard about auditions for the children’s Christmas pageant. So, they muscled their way into the starring roles, with Imogene securing the part of Mary. The details of it all boggled the Herdmans’ minds. It’s more than an adult mind can grasp, after all, much less the mind of a child who hasn’t grown up with the story. At the end of the pageant, though, something of the truth of it all breaks in on Imogene. I think that something of the love of it all breaks in on her. And there she sits—still Imogene with her tough life and dirty face—with tears running down her face.

Did she understand it? No. Did she stand in awe at it and in amazement over it? Yes. Did she “get” it? Yes.

Perhaps we can think of it in these ways.

We are so small—so God became small in order that in our smallness we might know him.

We are so human—so God became human in order that in our humanness we might know him.

We suffer so—so God suffered in order that in our suffering we might know him.

Here in the meantime, in this time between the Advents, there is so much that we need to do. But at the beginning of it all, at the heart of it all, lies wonder, awe, and amazement.

So…be amazed—and believe. Take the leap of faith and believe in the God who came to our world in such simple but yet such amazing and paradoxical ways.

Be amazed—and repent. Turn from your life of self-centeredness and wandering and turn to the God who loves you that much.

Be amazed—and obey. Listen to God. Respond to God. Trust as he wants you to trust. Follow like he wants you to follow. Know his love like he wants you to know it.

But please, just let it come over you. Let the amazing grace and unfathomable love of God wash over you. Let the miracle of it all overwhelm you.

And be amazed.

A Few of My Favorite Things, Part Four: A Christmas Story

It was a Thanksgiving Day in the early 1990s. Our family had left the Turkey Day feasts of my extended family and had arrived at the lodge at Unicoi State Park just outside the faux Alpine village of Helen, Georgia. We checked into the lodge and ate a nice supper of hot dogs from a Circle K, which was the only place we could find open.

We settled in to watch the lighting of the Rich’s Christmas tree on television. It had been a long day and soon everybody but me was asleep.

I wanted to watch some television. As I engaged in that manly pursuit of channel surfing, a movie caught my eye. I had never seen it before. It was about a little boy’s pursuit of his ideal Christmas present: a “Red Ryder Carbine Action 200-Shot Air Rifle with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time,” as the boy described it. I struggled to suppress my laughter, not wanting to awaken my family. The next day I told Debra that she just had to see this film.

It was called A Christmas Story. The movie is based on the writings of humorist Jean Shepherd. It has really caught on since those days. The cable channel TBS has an annual twenty-four marathon airing of it. Just about everybody I know has seen it at least once.

The boy who wants the air rifle is named Ralphie Parker. Ralphie tries everything to let it be known how much he wants that rifle for Christmas. But everyone—his mother, his teacher, even the department store Santa Claus—tells him, “You’ll shoot your eye out!”

The movie, which, as one writer said, has no discernible plot, moves from one vignette to another, some of which happen in “real life” and some of which occur in Ralphie’s fantasies. Among those vignettes are such classic scenes as Ralphie’s brother Randy eating like “Mommie’s little piggie,” Ralphie fighting off Black Bart’s gang, Ralphie’s friend Flick sticking his tongue to a frozen flag pole, Mr. Parker’s “major award,” the consequences of Ralphie saying “Oh, fudge,” the “Scott Farkus Affair” (as it came to be known), and Chinese turkey.

And that’s just scratching the surface.

The tradition at our house is to watch A Christmas Story on December 23. It’s one of our favorite Christmas movies.

Now, some would point out that there is nothing of the true meaning of Christmas in this Christmas film. It is true that there is nothing here of the inbreaking of God into this world through the coming of the Christ child. There is much here, though, of the wonder of Christmas and of the joy of family. Such are universal blessings and they are to be celebrated as such.

So lighten up, mellow out, and have a good time with this fun movie.

The Ruffins do—every December 23rd!

A Few of My Favorite Things, Part Three: Christmas Tree Ornaments

The Christmas trees of my childhood were nice but unspectacular. My father would go cut a tree from the woods on his home place. We would decorate it with colored lights and with what we called “icicles” but what most folks would call tinsel.

My mother and I would engage in annual conflict over the icicles. She wanted them placed individually and rather daintily on the branches; I preferred to grab handfuls of them and lob them grenade-style onto the tree. Her way was better.

The ornaments on our tree for the most part held no special meaning. We would use boxes of round ornaments that were either red or gold. They were very round, very plain, and would have been very boring had they not been on the Christmas tree under which were all the presents.

I remember only two ornaments that were special in a personal way. One was the little green stocking that I mentioned in yesterday’s post; I still have it. The other was a snowman that I had made in elementary school out of flour and water and other ingredients. It lasted a few years but finally cracked up.

Things are much different in the home that Debra and I have established. We have no generic or boring ornaments hanging on our tree. We did in the beginning, but over the years we have built up a vast collection of ornaments, all of which mean something to us. To take them out of their boxes and place them on the tree each year is to relive the wonderful life together with which God has blessed Debra, Joshua, Sara, and me.

Some mark momentous occasions. Among those are the ornaments from our “First Christmas Together” in 1978 (celebrated in Macon, GA), Joshua’s first Christmas in 1984 (celebrated in Louisville, KY), and Sara’s first Christmas in 1987 (celebrated in Adel, GA).

Some recall the plays in which Joshua and Sara appeared. We have a pig ornament because Sara was in Charlotte’s Web, a hot rod because Joshua was in Grease, and Lucy and Charlie Brown ornaments because both of them had lead roles in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.

Some cause us to think about activities and interests that have been important to us. So, there is a “karate kid” because Joshua studied karate, a ballerina because Sara took dance, a Phi Mu ornament because that is Sara’s sorority, an I Love Lucy ornament because Sara loves that old TV show, and a Yellow Submarine lunchbox ornament (complete with a thermos) because I like the Beatles.

Some bring to mind institutions that have been important in our lives, including Mercer University, LaGrange College, and Augusta State University.

Some commemorate trips that we have made over the years: a Liberty Bell ornament from Philadelphia, a needlepoint egg from Cabo san Lucas, and Buckingham Palace Guards from London.

There are many others but you get the idea. Our Christmas tree ornaments tell the story of our life together. That’s why they are among my favorite things.