Heaven cannot hold Him

Soon, soon, so very soon it is the birthday of our Savior. May you be blessed as you prepare for Christmas.

Hope this'll bring a smile to your face. At home we have a nativity poster my daughter filled with stickers of sheep, camels, magi and so on. It's a busy one and I love it. I love the sheep on top of the roof and everyhting else. I love that my daughter does not have a preconceived idea of how things should look and created her own version. And that she looks at the poster everyday.

John

I had a really hard time writing this sermon. Not because the subject was difficult, but because - for some reason - I found it really hard to find a point that would carry through the sermon. I now know what it should have been but that's a wee bit to late now. Sermons really are hard work sometimes even though it is work I enjoy.

Mainly, I think, my lack of being able to stick to a point was quite simply due to the fact that I am quite tired and I found myself not concentrating as well as I should have. This is not to say that you should pity me (but you may of course if you'd like :)) it's just to say that sometimes your pastor is not quite as awful at preaching as you think but has just had a tireing week or month or two.

But, oh dear, this really is not a good sermon. Sigh! Be blessed, though, and I do hope that at least something in this text will bless you. After all there are quite a few parts that come straight from the Bible :).

To be honest I have never been a fan of John the Baptist. It’s the eating grasshoppers and living in the desert thing, I think. And the way he was killed although it is hardly fair to blame him about it. But still, locusts?! Yack.

However, the Bible with the words of Jesus and as a result the church tells us that he was more important than any of the other prophets. As I started thinking about it I realized I did not quite understand prophets in the first place, and I am quite embarrassed about it,.

As always when I have to admit that I do not understand or get something I came to realize something quite obvious. That’s Holy Spirit working for you, I think. You see, it is in fact probably obvious to everyone else but of course there had to be prophets. Who in their right mind believes the very first person who tells them something utterly new? We had to be prepared, by the prophets. There was no other way, of course there wasn’t. Silly me.

In a long line of prophets preparing the way for the Messiah John was the last. He was the one the prophet Isaiah was talking about, when he said,

"In the desert someone is shouting,

`Get the road ready for the Lord!

Make a straight path for him.' "

And, incidentally I’ve always been a fan of Isaiah.

“Get the road ready for the Lord! Make a straight path for him.” “I wonder what that means?” that’s what Ruth would say if she were telling us the story today. “Get the road ready for the Lord! Make a straight path for him.” How do you do that?

Be ready, I guess. And not only ready but prepared. But how does one prepare for the Lord? How does one make a straight path for him to take? That is today's question. The question I would like you to take with you to bonder about.

The people who followed John, his disciples, asked the same question. How do we prepare for the arrival of the Messiah? Not unlike the teaching of Jesus would be, John told them, "If you have two coats, give one to someone who doesn't have any. If you have food, share it with someone else."

When tax collectors came to be baptized, they asked John, "Teacher, what should we do?" and John told them, "Don't make people pay more than they owe." And then when some soldiers asked him, "And what about us? What do we have to do?" John told them, "Don't force people to pay money to make you leave them alone. Be satisfied with your pay."

This was rather practical advice. This was not complex theology at all. Treat others better than you have been. Be generous. In other words, love each other like you love yourselves or yet another way, start behaving like you should have in the first place.

Contrary to present day since we have 2000 years worth of teaching based on the idea of generosity John’s simple teaching was so novel and unlike any other teaching that it was radical. As a result, tells the Book of Luke, people became excited and wondered, "Could John be the Messiah?"

John’s response was this: "I am just baptizing with water. But someone more powerful is going to come, and I am not good enough even to untie his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.”

The Book of John expresses the same sentiment in today’s Gospel reading. “No one can do anything unless God in heaven allows it. You surely remember how I told you that I am not the Messiah. I am only the one sent ahead of him. . . Jesus must become more important, while I become less important.”

When Jesus then had started to preach John's followers told John everything that was being said about Jesus. John sent two of them to ask the Lord, "Are you the one we should be looking for? Or must we wait for someone else?"

When these messengers came to Jesus, they said, "John the Baptist sent us to ask, `Are you the one we should be looking for? Or are we supposed to wait for someone else?' "

Jesus was healing many people who were sick or in pain or troubled by – as the Bible puts it - evil spirits, and he was giving sight to many who were blind. He said to the messengers sent by John, "Go and tell John what you have seen and heard. Blind people are now able to see, and the lame can walk. People who have leprosy are being healed, and the deaf can now hear. The dead are raised to life, and the poor are hearing the good news. God will bless everyone who doesn't reject me because of what I do."

That would be a “yes” then, right? As a result the disciples left John to join Jesus but interestingly John did not. Their division of labour seems to have been quite clear for them, except, of course, when Jesus left Galilee and went to the Jordan River to be baptized by John. John kept objecting and said, "I ought to be baptized by you. Why have you come to me?" To which Jesus answered, "For now this is how it should be, because we must do all that God wants us to do."

Then John agreed. I like that. I like that he knew that it should be the other way round. I like that he needed to hear the Lord’s words to understand and agree. I like that he did not automatically just do what he was told but needed to be guided to understanding God’s plan.

And so Jesus was baptized. As soon as he came out of the water, the sky opened, and he saw the Spirit of God coming down on him like a dove. Then a voice from heaven said, "This is my own dear Son, and I am pleased with him."

These words I repeated already last week.“This is my own dear Son, and I am pleased with him.” Jesus and everyone heard them that day but they were present equally strongly the night he was born. They were there when Mary was told about her pregnancy, and when Joseph was told about Mary’s pregnancy. And they were the reason the prophet lived in the desert preparing for the arrival of the Messiah.

God’s love to His Son is so deep it cannot be put to words but his love to us is even greater. We believe in a trinitarian God. God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit (or Holy Ghost). Yet, I cannot but think in terms of parenthood, too. The only way the Son could go through what he did was absolute knowledge of God’s love; Absolute trust in Him; Absolute love to Him. The only reason John would live a life of a hermit and a prophet was the very same love.

The Christmas story is a love story. It is a love story of Mary and Joseph but it is also a love story between God and all human kind.

No force

Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, ‘The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, “Look, here it is!” or “There it is!” For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.’

Of course it is, since Jesus was standing right in front of the Pharisees. The story of Christmas and not only of Christmas but of the entire salvation story went very differently from what the pharisees or, indeed, us would have expected. No one came with a huge army to put things straight. Angels appeared, yes, but not to fight but to praise. No force was used. None.

It all started with a young woman and her fiancé and a baby. In Nazareth, Bethlehem, Egypt and Nazareth again. Nothing else. It continued through the baby’s childhood, early years working as a carpenter to a time of teaching and then the tragedy of his execution. No force – from God’s part, that is.

As I look around me I keep being surprised by Christian religious fanaticism because it is in such contradiction to the whole story of Christ’s life, death and resurrection. How can the meekness and gentleness of God’s plan, God’s love, lead to manipulation and to the use of force?

As I was reading today’s passage and the first part I chose to preach on I was and keep being struck with the smallness of things. Our theme sounds so grand, our King arrives in Glory, but all I see is this one man arriving with a donkey; Praised by the people around him, certainly, but at the end of the day just a guy riding on a donkey. No entourage of important people following nor an army behind him. Just him and some disciples. This was not a man with cloud, not from the perspective of the world at least.

And then I listen to the answer to the words to the Pharisees expecting to hear about a grand plan to make them almost like kings themselves, expecting to have a special place once the kingdom had arrived, once the Messiah had taken over, since had not they served God better and more diligently than anyone else? Instead they are told that a) the kingdom is already here, b) you can’t see it and c) it is among them.

The story almost, nay, reads like a riddle. What is it that is here among you and yet you cannot see it? And the gospel is a riddle in a way. God’s presence is not obvious. God’s nature seems to be to not show off, to not toot His own horn. That is why those little moments when the angels fill the sky praising God’s glory and when His voice is heard saying: “This is my son with whom I am well pleased”, are in fact extremely rare in the Bible. And all the more precious for us since they show us the other side of things, the side we cannot see, the side that is behind a veil, hiding the miracle; the miracle of God’s kingdom being so close we can touch it.

We might not be able to see it, we might not be able to say it is here or there, although I would be inclined to say it is right here where we come to worship God together as a congregation, but it is among us; whatever that means. It is a secret, it should be a secret and it will remain a secret. For me that is exactly how it has to be. It is enough to know that it IS - among us. Amen.

The Christmas Story by St Paul's

This is a very sweet version :).