We’re grateful for the boys and girls in our congregation this evening. I want to begin with a riddle just for them. Boys and girls, what did Adam say to his wife on the night before Christmas?
The answer: He said, “It’s Christmas, Eve!” And, of course, it’s true. This is Christmas Eve. And what an exciting evening it is as you await the coming of Santa.
Of course this is the season for giving and receiving gifts. And the greatest Giver of gifts is God. Think for a moment about all the gifts God has given us—this beautiful world, people who love us and so much more! But our theme for this Christmas Eve is “God’s Greatest Gift.”
Let me begin with a story about Dr. Stanley Livingston, one of history’s most famous missionaries. Dr. Livingston had a medical condition which required him to drink goat’s milk. He was serving as a missionary in Africa.
One day Livingston was visited by a tribal king and he noticed that the king was eyeing Livingston’s goat. Suddenly Livingston felt led of the Lord to give the goat as a gift to the king. In return, the king presented him with the staff that he was carrying.
Later that day, Livingston confided in a friend, “I don’t know what I was thinking. How could I have been so foolish as to give my goat away? I don’t know what I shall do with this stick,”—referring to the staff the tribal king had given him.
His friend replied, “You don’t understand. That isn’t a stick. It is a scepter . . . a royal scepter. You don’t just own one goat. Now you own all the goats in the tribe.” And it was true. His new scepter allowed him to gather as much milk as he needed.
Pastor John Stevenson tells this story and then he adds, “The Lord has given us an inheritance [through our faith in Jesus Christ]. It is a scepter. And we have been walking around thinking that it is just a stick.”
God had promised Israel a Messiah and God was faithful to His promise. Unfortunately when God’s gift, this Messiah, came to God’s people, they rejected him. Rejection is a common experience in human life. It happens to all of us sooner or later. I read that actor Sylvester Stallone was rejected more than 1,000 times as he tried to peddle his script for a movie called Rocky. Imagine that you were a movie producer and someone handed you a script that would become a series of movies that would earn hundreds of millions of dollars . . . and you rejected it.
But we can understand. Any new project with the odds for a gigantic return requires risk. It requires a substantial investment before it shows a profit. So it is with an act of faith. Not very many people were willing to take a chance on a humble Galilean two thousand years ago. Why should they? After all, how could he be the Messiah?
For one thing he certainly was not born like a Messiah. Whoever heard such nonsense as a stable and a manger and shepherds and a star that moved through the sky, etc? You and I are thrilled to hear the story told each year, but to the people of Jesus’ time it was not the kind of advent they were expecting for their Messiah.
I suppose that is part of the magic of it all. God could have had his son be born in Caesar’s palace surrounded by pomp and splendor. But what a tiresome story it would have been. Yet after 2,000 years of telling the story, we never tire of hearing about the shepherds, and the wise men and the star that shone over the stable. God must get a great chuckle over his joke on humankind—we who are always impressed by outward appearances. The King of Kings born in a stable!
I was amused to read the story of Dr. Clement Moore. Dr. Moore was a member of a very somber profession. He was a professor of theology. In his writings he was especially fascinated with the Incarnation and sought to explain the deeper meanings of the Christmas event. Few of his deep, theological treatises on Christmas have survived, however. But something he wrote has survived.
One day he saw an old Dutch gentleman with red cheeks and white hair smoking an old clay pipe, and all of a sudden he was inspired to write a bit of verse for his children. So the theological professor went home and wrote these words: “’Twas the night before Christmas, When all through the house; Not a creature was stirring; not even a mouse . . .” (1) It is not for his theology that Dr. Clement Moore is remembered today, but for that bit of Christmas whimsy—“The Night Before Christmas.”
God showed a grand sense of humor wrapping all of the hope of the ages in swaddling clothes lying in a manger. Christ was not born like a Messiah.
And, to tell you the truth, he did not act like a Messiah. We like our leaders to look like leaders and to talk like leaders. We want them to project strength and toughness.
There was an article in Reader’s Digest years ago about a dictator that some of you will remember named Nicolae Ceausesou [chou-shes-koo]. For twenty-four years Ceausesou was the president of Romania and general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party. Things were not well in that troubled land during his reign. One reason was that the president was infatuated with himself. He turned his presidency into a personality cult. He referred to himself as “the great predestined man” as well as “the homeland’s hero of heroes.” The state-run press devoted half its newsprint to him, comparing him to Alexander the Great and Napoleon.
But the facts protested against such honors. In truth he was one of the most brutal dictators in the failed history of communism. When chronic food shortages were slashing through the tiny nation, the president commented that this was good for his people because they were overweight. Contrary to communist ideology concerning equality, the president and his family lived the lives of royalty. Indeed, they had bought up half a dozen palaces of former kings.
Before he visited a town, children hand-picked to greet him were quarantined for 48 hours so there was no chance of infecting him. Withered trees were painted green so as not to displease him. About fifty books were attributed to his authorship, ranging from agriculture to history to philosophy. His picture was posted everywhere. (2)
I have a feeling that this was about the way that King Herod acted. Herod, of course, was the king who wanted to kill the new-born Messiah. That is the way an absolute monarch almost always acts. After all “power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Isn’t it interesting, though, that the only king who has ever lived who did have absolute power humbled himself and became a servant?
How we are humbled by the life of the one and only true Messiah—he who was not above washing the feet of his disciples. He was not born like a Messiah. And he did not act like a Messiah.
He certainly did not die like a Messiah. Even as we celebrate his birth, we must anticipate the agony of his death. You may be familiar with the Holman Hunt painting which he called, “The Shadow of Death.” It is a painting of Jesus as a young man in the carpenter shop. The painting shows him rising from a cramped position where he is working and stretching his arms out to relax them. As he does this, he casts on the wall behind him the shadow of a cross. His mother, Mary, is standing nearby, and her face is filled with terror as she perceives that shadow. Hunt imagines her intuitively aware that her son will meet a tragic end.
It was an enormous obstacle to first century Jews to believe that the Messiah who was to deliver Israel from her enemies could die like a common criminal on a cross. In I Corinthians 1, St. Paul calls it part of the foolishness of God. God has confounded human wisdom so that no one can boast at having either the intelligence or the virtue to merit salvation. Only one thing saves us, the Scriptures remind us, and that is faith in the crucified Christ. You and I would not have done it the way God brought about our salvation. But even as we celebrate the joyous event of Christ’s birth we must be impressed that the King of Kings offered up his own life in our behalf.
Psychological therapist Richard Bandler tells about visiting a mental institution and dealing with a man who insisted he was Jesus Christ. One day Bandler walked in to meet with this man. “Are you Jesus?” Bandler asked.
“Yes, my son,” the man replied.
Bandler said, “I’ll be back in a minute.”
This left the man a little bit confused. Within three or four minutes, Bandler came back, holding a measuring tape. Asking the man to hold out his arms, Bandler measured the length of his arms and his height from head to toe. After that, Bandler left. The man claiming to be Christ became a little concerned.
A little while later, Bandler came back with a hammer, some large spiked nails, and a long set of boards. He began to pound them into the form of a cross. The man asked, “What are you doing?”
As Bandler put the last nails in the cross, he asked, “Are you Jesus?”
Again the man answered, “Yes, my son.”
Bandler said, “Then you know why I am here.”
Suddenly the man had a remarkable recovery. “I’m not Jesus. I’m not Jesus!” the man started yelling.
Bandler’s method of helping this man face reality may have been a little cruel, but his story does remind us that many have come through history claiming to be the anointed one, but few have been willing to pay the price that Jesus paid.
He was not born like a Messiah. He did not act like a Messiah. He did not die like a Messiah. No wonder his own people had difficulty accepting him.
In a Charlie Brown Christmas special, Charlie Brown just couldn’t get into the Christmas spirit. So his little friend Linus observed: “Charlie Brown, you’re the only person I know who can take a wonderful season like Christmas and turn it into a problem.”
For Jesus’ contemporaries Christmas was a problem. The babe in the manger wasn’t what they had expected. But for us, what a gift the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes has turned out to be! What a gift God has given us in the Christmas event!
Many years ago Samuel Beckett wrote a play titled, Waiting for Godot. The play is about two down-and-out fellows who spend their aimless time waiting for a character named Godot. One cannot help but speculate that “Godot” is a synonym for God, because the two tramps expect that when Godot comes, he will explain life to them and bring an end to their insignificance. Every day a child comes to them and informs them that Godot will not arrive until tomorrow. The sad joke is that Godot never comes.
Fortunately, God did not do that to Israel or to us. The long awaited gift has arrived in a babe born in a manger. He did not look as expected, or act as expected, or even die as expected, but in the wisdom and providence of God he did far more for us than we ever could have imagined. And there was only one reason for it all. He did it for love.
In 1980, on the day before Christmas, Richard Ballenger’s mother in Anderson, South Carolina, was busy wrapping packages and asked her young son to shine her shoes. Soon, with the proud smile that only a seven-year-old can muster, he presented the shoes for inspection. His mother was so pleased that she gave him a quarter.
On Christmas morning as she put on the shoes to go to church, she noticed a lump in one shoe. She took it off and found a quarter wrapped in paper. Written on the paper in a child’s scrawl were the words, “I done it for love.”(3)
The gift has arrived—wrapped in swaddling clothes. Somewhere in that manger/crib we can imagine a wadded up note that explains it all: “I did it for love.”
1. Steve Goodier, Quote magazine.
2. Paul Martin, p. 118ff.
3. Brennan Manning, Lion and Lamb (Old Tappan, N.J.: Fleming H. Revell).