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“All the Ends of the Earth” A sermon by the Rev Roland Kubke Christmas Day, 2009 Isaiah 52:7-10; Hebrews 1:1-6; John 1:1-14
Did you know that the custom of setting up a Christmas tree is one of the most widespread customs in the world? The custom is so compelling that it finds its way into the most surprising places. In some ways, it is if that custom is irresistible. The lure of Christmas trees is so powerful that many people set them up, even when they reject the symbolism of the Christmas tree and reject Christianity entirely. It is common to see them in the homes of many Jews, where they call them Hanukkah trees. The Soviets set them up during the days of Eastern European Communism, calling them “New Year’s Trees”, and under that name, they are becoming increasingly popular in China. They are popular as Christmas trees in Japan and South Korea and Taiwan, where it is cool to follow Western customs. They are commonly found among Hindus who readily accept just about any colourful and joyful religious custom. They are even making inroads among moderate Muslims, because Muslims acknowledge Jesus as a great prophet, and also acknowledge His birth. Of course, you don’t have to look far around you to see how many non-Christians still admire Christmas trees even when they believe that they have moved on and don’t need any God in any heaven. According to a recent article in Maclean’s magazine, the most outspoken anti-Christian crusader of our day, Richard Dawkins, sets up a Christmas tree in his home. You could say that the Christmas tree has made it to all the ends of the earth. Yesterday, we learned about the great symbolism of the Christmas tree and how that symbolism helps us to teach the great truth that Jesus is the Promised Messiah. Now, we can add another connection between the Christmas tree and the prophecies of the Bible. The Christmas tree custom seems to have made it about everywhere on the planet, and it is a picture of how God’s promise of salvation will be heard everywhere, too. Isaiah proclaimed with great confidence and joy, “All the ends of the earth will see the salvation of our God.” (Isaiah 52:10) The great news of Christmas is an irresistible thing! Let us thank God for that this Christmas!
How is that for a confusing statement? The Christmas Gospel is irresistible, but at the same time, it can be rejected and certainly has been rejected by many people from the very start. It is irresistible, but there certainly has been no shortage of people who have resisted it! The Bible gives us many examples of how the Gospel was resisted even as Jesus walked this earth. There were all sorts of people among the Jews who didn’t want to hear anything of a Messiah who would be a spiritual Saviour and who would only bring on a new world at the end of time. Many of those people wanted a Saviour to come their way at their time. They wanted the kind of glory that anybody could recognize, the kind of glory that is attached to wealth and influence and power and fame. They certainly resisted, to the point where John tells us so simply, “ He came to that which was His own, but His own did not receive Him.” (John 1:11) That irresistible joy of Christmas can certainly be rejected, and many, many people rejected Jesus even as they saw Him with their own eyes and heard Him preach and watched Him perform miracles. How could anyone reject Jesus when they had the privilege of looking right at Him? It is because human beings can be so disappointingly good at seeing only what they want to see! You would think that a person was crazy if he or she told you that the Mona Lisa, though perfectly beautiful, is only a melon splattered onto a piece of canvass by accident, and it only happens to look just like a woman with an interesting smile. Yet, we routinely see pictures of the deep universe that show an amazing beauty and form and then we are told all of that is an accident. Why? Because the people who are interpreting those pictures for the public don’t want to see anything else. The complexity of the universe is an irresistible sign of God, but that sign is very much resisted by anyone who rejects God Himself. In a similar way, the Christmas Gospel is easy to resist if you reject what it is really telling you about yourself. You see, the great good news that Jesus was born into human flesh so that you could be saved makes no sense if you reject that fact that you are sinful. It is quite possible to look at all the evidence of sin – betrayal and violence and neglect and self-abuse and the abuse of others and all the rest, and say these things are nothing but an accident. It is easy to make strange claims that we simply evolved to behave the way we do and therefore are not responsible for the horrible things we do to ourselves and to others. We can reject the fact that any of it might be the fault of each of us, with each of us contributing in our own ways to the ills of this world. You can resist what you reject, and you reject what you fail to recognize, or purposely work on failing to recognize! John tells us, “He was in the world, and though the world was made through Him, the world did not recognize Him.” (John 1:10) The Greek word that is translated as “recognize” is the word ???????, which means, “acknowledge who someone is”. The way you may read this verse in English, you might assume it was an accident that people didn’t recognize Jesus, but the Greek word doesn’t allow for such an interpretation. The Greek word says that people made a point of refusing to recognize that Jesus is the Son of God. As a general rule, people were decidedly uninterested in what God was offering through that unassuming baby born to that unassuming couple. As a general rule, mankind was uninterested in what Jesus grew up to be, and uninterested in the claim that Jesus is God and man at the same time, the fullness of the Deity dwelling in bodily form. They did not want to know, because it was too inconvenient for so many of these people to have such information. They rejected the Gospel of Christmas. They resisted it, but that does not change the fact that the Gospel of Christmas is irresistible. An irresistible thing is something that simply does not go away, even if you try to ignore it or if you make an effort to work against it. For example, you often see people, especially teens, but many adults, too, show their great determination to ignore the fact that it is winter outside. Such people will step outside into -30 degree temperatures and refuse to wear something on their heads. Some will even go as far as wearing summer clothing in temperatures that are so cold that they could freeze to death if the car ever broke down and they couldn’t get help right away. They can do everything they want to reject winter, but no matter how strongly they feel about it, they can’t stop the frostbite or the hypothermia that comes to people who simply won’t face up to the reality that winter in our part of the world is a very dangerous thing. You can’t stop the winter by refusing to acknowledge it. Winter is winter and it will be what it will be. If you insist on being stubborn and insist on refusing to accept winter for what it is, the day may come when you join the hundreds of people who freeze to death or at least are injured by the cold every year, but you won’t change winter in the least by your sacrifice. The Word of God is irresistible in a similar way. The Law is the Law, if we acknowledge it or not. You can ignore God’s Law and suffer terribly from the consequences of ignoring it, but your suffering won’t change God’s Law one little bit. Sin is sin, if we want to admit it or not. God is God and God hates sin. He would continue to be God even if not a single person on earth believed in Him. Jesus Christ is God who took on human flesh, who ministered, lived and died and rose again so that we could be saved. That is true and will remain irresistibly true even if every person on earth were to reject that salvation. The Holy Spirit is God, and will always be God, no matter how hard people try to explain Him away as nothing but some spiritual force within us, or some version of the human conscience. These truths from the Word of God will always be true, because the Word of God itself stands forever. Jesus said in Matthew 24:35, “Heaven and earth may pass away, but My words will never pass away.” God’s Word is irresistible, so irresistible that all the forces of the universe cannot break it down. One definition of resisting something is to stop its course or to prevent it from reaching its goal or to withstand its effect. King Herod tried to stop the course of salvation by killing the baby boys of Bethlehem, but that drastic measure did not succeed. No king, no empire, no earthly authority is powerful enough to prevent Jesus from reaching His goal of saving us. The Jewish leaders tried to withstand the effect of the teachings of Jesus by crucifying Jesus, but they only ended up being the agent through which God’s plan could be fulfilled. The Roman Empire tried to stop the salvation that comes through Jesus Christ alone, and the Gospel ended up overcoming the Roman Empire. The Muslims tried to stop the Gospel as they set out to conquer the world a few hundred years after the Roman Empire became Christian. They managed to decimate the Christian populations of the greatest centres of Christian learning and Christian civilization in Africa and Asia Minor, and control those areas to this very day. At the same time, they also managed to drive Christians northward and eastward into what is Europe today. The end result was that Christianity spread around the world with European explorers and ended up being brought to the far reaches of the earth. By the very process of resisting the Gospel of Christmas, people who rejected Jesus were used by God as a means of making the Gospel available on a scale that the world had never seen before! The Gospel persists. It finds its way to the very ends of the earth. It does not force itself on people, but it certainly makes itself heard. It simply stands for what it is: the truth of God’s mercy upon a sinful world and the great evidence of God’s love toward a rebellious, hard hearted population. The Gospel simply stands simply and powerfully. It certainly can be rejected, but not everyone persists in rejecting it. It can be ignored, but it can only ignored for so long. It can be fought and terrible things can happen at the hands of those who try to force the Gospel away from people who appreciate it. But, sooner or later, it becomes very, very clear, “It is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes.” (Romans 1:16) It is the power of God and will remain that power of God right until that day when Jesus comes again and all eyes will see Him. It is the power of God that will do God’s Will that day and become our very reason for existing from that time on to eternity. This is what the great joy is all about this morning. The fact is that the irresistible truth of God’s Word has become irresistible to you! We are here today to celebrate the fact that God Himself overcame you in your Baptism and that you have been converted, changed, transformed to hear His voice. We are here to celebrate the fact that you certainly have been overshadowed by the power of the Most High so that, you, along with Mary, can say those words, “My soul now glorifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God, my Saviour, for He has been mindful of the humble estate of His servant!” (Luke 1:46-48) We are here to celebrate the fact that God manages the impossible in us: He overcomes our resistance through the forgiveness of our sins so that we are filled with gratitude and eager to praise God. The irresistible Christmas Gospel is yours and mine. It belongs to us through the gift of saving faith so that we see far more than a little child born in faraway Bethlehem, and look upon the very “radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of His being.” (Hebrews 1:3) God has made it very clear to us and He sustains that clarity within us that Jesus is far, far more than a man. He is God with the power of God and the love of God and the grace of God. He is God and His salvation is real and true and full and complete. He is God, and in His name, we are children of God who rejoice in the glory of God! We are children of God, and the very Gospel keeps us in that marvellous place! Now, we are also called to celebrate by receiving that Gospel in the special form of the Lord’s Supper. We are called to celebrate by hearing it through the preaching of God’s Word. We are called to celebrate by sharing that Gospel, not just in what we quietly believe, but in what we say and in what we display. We are called to celebrate by making that Gospel so obvious in our lives that others see it and want a part of it, too! In that way, the story of the Christmas tree gives us an interesting example. Christmas trees, according to the Lutheran Cyclopedia at least, first were used at the time of the Lutheran Reformation. There is a well-known story that Martin Luther actually started the custom, but it could be just as true that Luther was simply the person who made the custom popular. In any case, Luther did use a Christmas tree and he brought it into his home on account of the rich symbolism that could be attached to it. The Christmas tree became a method of sharing the Gospel in the home. As we learned in our services yesterday evening, every part of the Christmas tree can be attached to Bible truths that show us that Jesus Christ is the promised Messiah. The Lutherans embraced the Christmas tree as a great aid in helping them teach their children about Jesus. The use of Christmas trees spread quickly in northern and central Europe. It was not just Lutherans who used them. Roman Catholics adopted the Christmas tree, too. They liked what they saw, and the custom worked well in their own homes, too. However, the radical Protestants rejected Christmas trees just as they also rejected Christmas itself. Radical Protestants made the claim that Christmas was nothing but an extension of the pagan Roman festival, Saturnalia, and that Christmas trees were some pagan thing. In the parts of the world where radical Protestants were most influential, Christmas was completely banned. Of course, Christmas trees were, too, which was no surprise, considering that radical Protestants also banned stained glass windows and crosses and statues and church organs and most kinds of hymns. For this reason, Christmas trees didn’t show up in Puritan England and England’s colonies for a very long time. Also, for this reason, most of those arguments that Christmas is simply an extension of Saturnalia and everything to do with Christmas is pagan and evil actually come from fundamentalist Christians. So then, how did Christmas trees and Christmas become so important? It is because there has always been something irresistible about it. In North America, the first colony to gain great influence over the rest was Pennsylvania, with Philadelphia being the centre of the American Revolution and the first capital city of that new country. That colony was strongly Lutheran. Most of the northern colonies had very large German populations, which meant that the original Puritan English colonists found themselves surrounded by Lutherans and Roman Catholics. It didn’t take long for the radical colonists to adopt Christmas, as well as many of the other previously forbidden things like congregational singing and musical instruments in church. Christmas and Christmas carols and Christmas trees eventually came to England from the American colonies, and from there, they spread throughout the British Empire, including England’s largest colony, India. Finally, during the reign of Queen Victoria, the Christmas tree received a royal blessing. You see, she and her family were originally Lutherans from Germany before she got the British throne and converted to Anglicanism, and they were very fond of the custom of the Christmas tree. The royal family brought Christmas trees into the palace and anyone who was anyone quickly followed the Queen’s lead. The Christmas tree was strongly resisted in the US on official levels for some time. Eventually, it but it had such an effect on people that no official decrees or public bans could hold it back for long from the people who appreciated its beauty. By 1850, the Christmas tree became a feature in the White House, and soon afterward, Christmas trees were displayed in most American public squares. Even today in the US, when manger scenes and crosses and other displays that come out of Christianity have been outlawed in many communities, Christmas trees are still allowed. In fact, a recent news article stated that the public Christmas tree lighting ceremonies in most communities of that country are the second most important public display after their 4th of July celebrations! The Christmas tree, for all of its irresistibility, is still a custom. It has largely lost its meaning when it comes to the rich Christian symbolism that is attached to it. It doesn’t seem to be used much anymore as a centrepiece for that noble Lutheran tradition of telling the story of our salvation to everyone gathered around the tree each Christmas. They day may come when there is such a backlash against the trees that they might even be forbidden again. What the trees represent, though, will remain, even if noone remembers anymore why we have those trees in the first place. The Gospel is the real joy of Christmas. Jesus certainly did come to bring salvation to you. He certainly did come to fulfill the song of the Christmas angels, bringing glory to God, the highest, and true peace on those upon whom His favour rests. The Christmas Gospel indeed has spread throughout the earth, and the day will come when nothing will interfere with its glory. Until that day, we taste of that glory and long to see Jesus in all His glory for ever and ever. May God bless you with the joy of the Gospel and the sweetness of that longing this day and all days, for Jesus’ sake. Amen. |
