A profusion of gifts stacked neatly under a green tree is one of the visions of Christmas. To young and old alike the fancy wrappings keep the real gifts hidden from the eyes of the would-be-beholders. If only the gifts could jump forth from the wrappings they would be free for us to enjoy! However that burst of freedom must wait until the signal is given; whether it be on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day morning. Then they are unwrapped, unbound, set loose. And what a grand time it is when that which is hidden become manifest!
Mankind lives too often under wraps. The paper that binds us is neither fancy nor colorful. And it seems as though we are as helpless to break out of the wrappings as those Christmas presents. There is an account of the raising of Lazarus which demonstrates the power of unbinding. Jesus calls him forth from the land of the dead with a loud voice. Lazarus does come out. This is the way it is recorded: "The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with bandages, and his face wrapped with a cloth. Jesus said to them, ‘Unbind him, and let him go.’ " Jesus was the power who could make it happen. But he gave to people the responsibility of unwrapping the man. He still does it that way.
Setting men free seems to be one of the major themes in our day. Man is pictured as being uptight, locked within himself, afraid of living on the growing edge. We attempt to convince people that I’m okay; you’re okay. We urge them to stay loose or in the language of the teenager, "let it all hang out." Free to be me echoes through the songs and verse of our day. All of this indicates that man has been wrapped up and the real gift of humanity within that package has not come forth and blossomed as it ought.
The late Dr. Paul Tillich, a theological giant, traced the anxiety of our age to three main sources: the fear of meaninglessness and lack of purpose in life, the presence of guilt, and the inevitability of death. These are the wrappings that plague us and often imprison the human soul. God’s power for unwrapping is available. He tells the people of God, "Unwrap them, and let them go." Jesus looked at his own mission in this frame of reference, "He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives" (Luke 4:18).
Many are tempted to say in the lines of Faust, "The end of everything is nothing." History seems to be a dead-end street with little meaning. This terrestrial ball on which we live seems to have developed into a potential firecracker. We are told that the two dominant world powers have enough nuclear missles stockpiled to assign 5,000 pounds of nitroglycerin (TNT) to every man, woman and child on the earth. On top of that we live with the suspicion that in the back rooms of the military complex they have even more subtle prescriptions for death ready to be dished up. There is ample cause for why people are running scared. The prophets of ecological doom say we are going to run out of fresh air and pollute ourselves into oblivion. And for those who suffer from a slight case of claustrophobia comes the news that the population explosion, if not checked rapidly, will eventually crowd us together into a suffocating squeeze comparable to an ant hill’s density of little creatures. And so we wonder. Should we just live it up today for there may be no tomorrow? Or should we pretend that man is going to live happily ever after? A novel by George Moore tells of some Irishmen during the depression who were given work building a road that led into a swamp; its only purpose was to provide employment. After a few days the men threw down their tools and refused to go on because, "for men to work and live they must have an end in view. The road to nowhere can’t be made even though starving men are employed at it."
It is true that where there is no hope in the future there is no power in the present. Now if God were dead, I would shake in my boots when I view our explosive world. But the Word of the Living God assures me that he is very much alive and my experience affirms it. God has not permitted this planet to slip out of his hands. God is not bankrupt in either resources or power. Man may have many words but God shall have the last word.
The night God invaded the earth through his Son the angels told us: "Fear not ..." God is here and he is working. Julia Howe in the Battle Hymn assures us:
He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before his judgment seat;
O be swift, my soul, to answer him; be jubilant my feet!
Our God is marching on.
In the midst of all the ugly protrusions of evil the flowers of God are blooming. His Kingdom is making new sounds and manifesting new growth. The meaning of oneness in Christ is starting to jell. The winds of the Spirit are not only carrying fresh fragrance but the seeds of cross pollination. A new breed of vital Christianity is developing across the globe.
This past winter I attended a Seminar on the Sea. The ship cruised on the Caribbean Sea. On Sunday we were docked at the Port of Spain on Trinidad. The ship’s passengers were comprised of Lutherans, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Roman Catholics and a sprinkling of others. So we all divided up and went to four main places of worship. My wife and I entered a large old Roman Catholic Cathedral. It appeared lonely and a bit dreary. Many thoughts from my childhood danced through my mind. They were suspicious thoughts for we grew up with the idea that Catholics would barely qualify as Christians. The service began. The liturgy was contemporary in English and scripturally oriented. The texts were read with simplicity and clarity. My spirit was beginning to move and it was being swept upward. The sermon eloquently glorified Christ. It seemed as though faith was shining forth from fellow worshipers. At the conclusion of the service a mighty organ and choir led us into, "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God." I had a hard time withholding a resounding "Shout of Joy." For an encore a frail little black man outside the cathedral took my hand in his and in his way pronounced a benediction of the Lord. Inside my heart was pulsating with warmth. There was being born a new sense of the Communion of the Saints. The old drawbridge was now lowered and the traffic of God’s good people was welcomed across. God seems to be saying today as never before, "Trust me ... trust my people ... hold hands and together we’ll shape the world." Purpose starts growing. Man starts risking the reach for he knows God is there.
And so in faith we trust God to put meaning into life. And trust transforms life. We begin to trust people, especially those of the household of faith. Therefore, we don’t have to always go around protecting ourselves for we are moving in the Father’s world and we should be at home with all his family. We can relax in the presence of the family and laugh and cry together. We can fail and be forgiven. We can shake off the masks and be ourselves.
When Sidney Lanier was in his mid-thirties he developed tuberculosis. He knew his life would be shortened. He went down to Glenn County on the coast where the climate was milder. Sitting there one day, looking out across the marshes, he wrote one of his finest poems:
"As the marsh hen secretly builds on the watery sod,
Behold, I will build me a nest in the greatness of God.
I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh hen flies,
In the freedom that fills all the space twixt marsh and the skies,
By so many roots as the marsh grass send in the sod,
I will heartily lay me a hold on the greatness of God."
The second wrapping from which I need to be set free is guilt. The Gospel at Christmas tells it clearly, "She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins" (Matthew 1:21). We can never discard the words like "sin" and "guilt." If we do we shall only have to manufacture new ones for them. Sin is pictured in the Old Testament as "missing the mark." God’s moral order has been violated. Man has fallen short of what he was made to be. And guilt always follows sin for they are brothers. And whether a man always feels guilt or not is beside the point. Man may violate God’s laws and might smother a sense of guilt by his denial of God or by his rationalizations. This in no way eradicates his guiltiness. I remember as a small boy my father cut down two large plum trees in our back yard. He cut them at ground level. From ground level they were gone ... no sight of them remained. However the following spring little plum shoots were breaking through the ground and pointing skyward all over the place. Guilt is like that. When God’s laws are broken and man attempts to just cover it up, he is foiled for guilt manifests itself in many ways and all are destructive.
We are responsible creatures. H. Richard Niebuhr once pointed out: "It is not enough to say we ought to be responsible, or our goal is responsibility. We are responsible." Walt Whitman once said, "I think I could turn and live with animals; they are so placid and self-contained." But we can’t. We are created in God’s image. Dr. Hobart Mowrer, a former President of the American Psychological Association writes: "The thing that most severly damages our capacity to love and be loveable is not neglect or rejection by others, but unacknowledged and unatoned personal guilt. Unresolved guilt is the enemy of love’s fulfillment and before it can be resolved, it must be acknowledged. We must assume personal responsibility for our attitudes and our behaviour." In Jeremiah it is said, "No amount of soap or lye can make you clean. You are stained with guilt that cannot ever be washed away. I see it always before me, the Lord God says" (Jeremiah 2:22, The Living Bible).
So people get locked-in whether they are aware of the wrapping of guilt or not. But God came to unwrap us. David sweated under his sin: "When I declared not my sin, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night thy hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. I acknowledged my sin to thee, and I did not hide my iniquity; I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord’; then thou didst forgive the guilt of my sin" (Psalm 32:3-5, RSV). At that point joy swelled up eternal in the heart of David. David was set loose to dance to the Lord again. And the promise comes to us: "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:9, RSV).
He breaks the power of cancelled sin,
He sets the prisoner free.
His blood can make the foulest clean
His blood availed for me.
There was an old apple orchard and in the center of it was a tree that had come crashing to the ground in the autumn of the year. The farmer was out there looking over the situation. He was asked if the tree was so loaded with fruit that it couldn’t stand the weight. He shook his head. He then picked up a piece of bark and showed how the tree had been ravaged by some insects over a long period of time. The tree had weakened under their attack. A slight wind was all that was needed to topple the tree. He was asked what he was going to do with the situation and his reply was short and quick, "Gather the fruit and burn the tree." Because of the redemption of Christ that is exactly what we can do. We can gather and keep the fruit of life and burn the sin and guilt. We can with Paul, "Forget those things which are behind and press forward to what lies ahead."
And God requests us to help unwrap each other from the oppressiveness of guilt. He has given to his church the keys of the kingdom. We can pronounce his absolution on one another. We can confess to one another. We can and must set each other free because Christ wants it that way.
William James, the late great psychologist, once said that, "The Lord may forgive our sins, but our nervous systems never do." To be sure guilt drives a hard bargain with our whole body function. When we submit to sin we do have to sit down to a banquet of consequences. But when God forgives, it is complete ... the books are wiped clean ... he has forgotten. We are decontaminated. Often people have a difficult time accepting this gift of God. It is at this point that the communion of saints, the people of God, must reassure each other of this fact by word and action. There needs to be a person-to-person unwrapping so the word of love and forgiveness becomes tangible. Then we shall know that not only God believes in us but others do also, and this is an essential part of the whole unwrapping process given to us mortals by God. Without question this has caused the birth of cell groups and group therapy.
The third wrapping from which I need to be set free is the fear of death. Death seems so final and so futile. I was made for life and therefore death is an alien, an enemy, a foreign intruder. I don’t like it. God agrees with this. Death came as a result of sin and because sin passed unto all men so also death. But God did not tolerate the reign of death. He sent his Son to die for the sins of the world and then he followed it up with a crashing crescendo of the resurrection. He met death head on and the Lord of Life was victorious.
But in an imperfect world death still lingers around. He has his brief say in the great play of life. However, his time on stage and his lines are very limited. He is no longer in the director’s seat. And after his little intrusion he can no longer get on stage again for God in his Kingdom will not allow it.
So we must accept this fact that we surely shall die. Then, through faith in the Risen Christ, we surely shall live. The late Senator Richard Neuberger is credited with the statement that until a man has learned how to die, he has not learned how to live. There is some truth there. While serving a parish in Wisconsin, it was my privilege to walk with a young man who battled cancer for two years. It started with a lump in his leg and an amputation was the result. He received a wooden leg and walked again. His spirit was indomitable ... his faith was growing ... his courage was displayed. But the body was doomed to cancer as it started spreading. Defeat was inevitable. A spiritual victory was, however, going to be wrestled from it. He ministered to his family and buddies from the battlefield of disease. He was only 28 but he knew God was going to set him at work in the imperishable sectors of his eternal kingdom. The night he said goodbye to us earthbound mortals he talked tenderly of the beauty of the Wisconsin countryside where he hiked and fished and hunted as a young lad. It had been God’s good earth and he had enjoyed it. But he was willing to let go of it for a better land. He was willing to say goodbye to his wife and children. Then this young man of 28 folded his hands and prayed the Lord’s Prayer. When he said, "Amen," he breathed his last. And at this time I am sure that the door of heaven opened and a little breath of heaven’s fresh air swept over many of those involved, strengthening them until their turn for the good journey arrives.
It is all just a matter of trusting God. Jesus said, "I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die" (John 11:25). He told us that he was preparing a place for us and therefore we should not let our hearts be troubled and uptight. When we were born there was a mother’s arms to enfold us and a mother’s love to uphold us. If an unborn child could think and worry, imagine the projected horror of being born into a strange world of sound and sight after resting so comfortably and securely in a mother’s womb. Well, if God so provided a mother’s love in his created order of thing, it is not so hard to believe that when we die he will be there with his arms of love to usher us into his new world. And he seems to tell us that we just haven’t really seen anything yet as compared to what awaits us.
I like a story by John Baille which tells of a dying patient asking his doctor if he could tell him what heaven would be like. The doctor fumbled for awhile with a reply and then he heard a scratching at the door and it gave him his answer. "Do you hear that noise?" he said. "That is my dog. I left him downstairs when I came over to see you and he has now climbed the stairs. He has no idea what is inside the door but he knows I am here and that is good enough for him. You don’t know for sure what is inside the door of death but you do know your Master is there." That should be good enough for us all. The God who so loved the world ... and that means you ... will be there with his everlasting arms.
That kind of love can set us free. Death is no longer an insurmountable canyon but a thin veil that separates life from life. And we can really live with gusto if we are not afraid to die. Three young monks, one of them Ignatius Loyola, were playing croquet on the monastery lawn. One asked, "If the world were coming to an end in two hours, what would you do?" One said, "I would go to the chapel to pray." The second said, "I would go to be reconciled to my brother." Loyola said, "I would finish the game." Set free from the fear of death to live, unbound from anxiety.
As you unwrap presents this Christmas, let’s start unwrapping people so that God’s great gift of life in his children will be sprung loose. Who knows, you might find a new "YOU."