On Proclaiming Christmas

In an Everyday Christian article from last year, my good friend Randy Gruendyke, campus pastor at Taylor University, was asked how pastors can proclaim the Christmas  story year after year in a way that’s still “inspiring and engaging.” Randy’ s response is helpful for pastors and laypeople alike. Here’s an excerpt from that article:

The pastor at this Christian college located 70 miles northeast of Indianapolis, Gruendyke emphasized the importance of not getting overly anxious about the familiarity of the story.

He said there were three key factors to keep in mind:

1. Diversity.  While there are plenty of Christmas texts on which to preach (and to preach for many years!), thinking beyond the accounts in Matthew, Mark and Luke can be helpful.  For instance, John 1:1-18 describes one of the preeminent purposes for Jesus’ incarnation – to explain the Father.  Philippians 2:5-11 unfolds the depth of our Lord’s humiliation (the First Advent) and the height of his glorification (the Second Advent).  Isaiah 9:6-7 anticipates the breadth of Jesus reign in time and eternity.  Genesis 3:15 contains the “proto-evangelium”, revealing that the hope of the incarnation is found in one of the earliest chapters of the Bible.  Showing people that Christmas is found beyond the first three books of the New Testament helps bring the story of the whole Bible into sharper focus.
2. Confidence.  Because the Christmas story is so well known, some pastors feel compelled to embellish it – to “dress it up”.  So, instead of preaching a Christmas passage, there’s a temptation to recount Christ’s nativity from the perspective of a fictitious shepherd boy or wondering angel.  This approach reflects a lack of confidence in the sufficiency of God’s word preached.  When accompanied by careful exegesis, prayerful preparation and the power of the Holy Spirit, the many angles of this well traveled story can remain perennially fresh.
3. Repetition.  While some think that hearing the same story over and over is a bad thing, it can actually be good!  It can be good for learning purposes – repetition allows the preacher to examine multiple aspects of the Christmas account.  It can be good for retention purposes – repetition helps listeners remember the story and its many facets.  It can be good for evangelistic purposes – repetition builds confidence in a congregation to expect a clear exposition of the Christmas story to which they can bring their unsaved friends.

He added that he thought pastors should rely on the sufficiency of the message’s substances to hit home with all Christians regardless of where they are on their faith walk.

“Paul exhorts the Colossian church, ‘As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him…” (2:6) – that is, the way one begins in Christ is the way he gets on in Christ,” he said. “So, when it comes to preaching, what’s good for the new believer is good for the old believer.  That means a Christmas text preached responsibly in its context can be used by God to mint a new believer or strengthen a seasoned one.”

 

Hauerwas on Faith and Suffering (and Christmas)

Stanley Hauerwas is one of my favorite theologians–not because I agree with him on everything (or even most things), but because he communicates in a way that’s as compelling as the subjects he considers: theology, philosophy and ethics, the social sciences, political theory, and medicine. A bricklayer from Texas, Hauerwas has become known for his “rough speech and pointed views.” He’s been called “contemporary theology’s foremost intellectual provocateur” and was named by Time Magazine as “America’s best theologian” in 2001. His characteristic edginess often stems from frustration with Christians who “take the best story in the world and make it so damn dull.”

About a year ago, Hauerwas was invited to lecture at the Fuller Symposium on the Integration of Psychology and Theology at Fuller Theological Seminary. His talks, which were based on his memoir Hannah’s Child, reflected on his 24-year marriage to his ex-wife who suffered from severe bipolar disorder. He simply told his story which, like all of ours, is determined by God’s story.

Following Flannery O’Connor, Hauerwas affirmed the view that suffering in life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be endured. And so he cautioned against making Christianity into an answer that sets out to make sense of suffering. Faith that functions as little more than a rationale–a means of demystifying the mysterious–is no faith at all. We must learn to be Christians, Hauerwas said; which, at very least, means this:

“Learning to be a Christian is learning to live without answers. And learning to live in this way is what makes Christianity so wonderful. Faith is about learning how to go on without knowing all the answers … Being a Christian makes life so damn interesting … The only remedy for [suffering] lies in the good news that we may and we must have, what Paul calls, ‘hope beyond hope’ that’s found in the kingdom of hope that takes its residence here in the body of Christ but ends beyond the bounds of this world.”

While God’s story determines our stories, it also sweeps us up into his life. Because he came to us in Jesus, the gloomy clouds of night, death’s dark shadows, and all suffering were put to flight. As Owen said, in the work of Jesus, death has been put to death. And so rather than seeking to solve the problem of suffering, we should (faithfully) endure it in hope that the kingdom inaugurated on that first Christmas morning will one day come in full, and suffering will be no more. “On that day,” writes Carl Trueman, “it will truly be Christmas everyday.”

O come, Thou Day-spring, come and cheer

Our spirits by Thine advent here;

Disperse the gloomy clouds of night,

And death’s dark shadows put to flight.

Rejoice! Rejoice!

Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.

Christopher Hitchens, RIP

Days after reflecting on “the measure of [his] inevitable decline” in Vanity Fair, well-known writer Christopher Hitchens has died.

Over the years, Hitchens had earned quite the reputation for himself. He was described by one journalist as a “combative and caustic critic, intellectual, atheist and self-defined ‘conservative Marxist’” whose passions were “words, alcohol, and cigarettes.” He was perhaps best known for his contempt of all things sacred; he wasn’t just satisfied with being known as an “atheist”, he made it a point to label himself an “anti-theist.” But even for as much as he despised religion, I always liked him and was sad to hear the news that he had been diagnosed with cancer a while back (see my post On Hitchens and Cancer).

Much has been written about his life and writing, his illness, and now, his death. Even a lot of religious folks have been compelled to comment since his death last night. Along with Doug Wilson’s  article in Christianity Today, Russel Moore has, in my opinion, written something on Hicth’s death that’s really worth reading:

Christopher Hitchens was a blasphemer, true enough, and a nasty character. Aren’t we all, in our different ways. Christ Jesus came for nasty characters like us. And the same blood of Jesus that can deliver us from wrath could do the same for Hitchens had he, if he, at any point, embraced it. It’s not likely, but it’s possible, and, if he did, then Christopher Hitchens’s past atheism would be no barrier to communion with God. It would be, like my sin, crucified with Christ, buried, and remembered no more.

I don’t know about Christopher Hitchens, about what happened in those last moments, but I do know that, if he had embraced it, the gospel would be enough for him. I know that because it’s enough for me, and I’m as deserving of hell as he is …

I don’t know. But I do know that the gospel offers forgiveness and mercy right to the edge of death’s door. And I know that the kingdom of God is made up of ex-thieves, and ex-murderers, and ex-atheists like us.

 

On the Incarnation

From Thomas Watson’s A Body of Divinity:

”He was poor, that he might make us rich.

He was born of a virgin that we might be born of God.

He took our flesh, that he might give us His Spirit.

He lay in the manger, that we may lie in paradise.

He came down from heaven, that he might bring us to heaven …

 

That the ancient of Days should be born.

that he who thunders in the heavens should cry in the cradle;

that he who rules the stars should suck the breast;

that a virgin should conceive;

that Christ should be made of a woman,

and of that woman which himself made,

that the branch should bear the vine,

that the mother should be younger than the child she bare,

and the child in the womb bigger than the mother;

that the human nature should not be God, yet one with God …

 

Christ taking flesh is a mystery we shall never fully understand till we come to heaven.

 

If our hearts be not rocks, this love of Christ should affect us .

 

Behold love that passeth knowledge! (Eph 3:19).”

A Little Christmas Humor

Christmas according to Dickens and Handel

Tony Reinke, whose new(ish) book Lit! is on my Christmas wishlist, has written a great post on the meaning of Christmas as understood by Charles Dickens and by George Frideric Handel based especially on A Christmas Carol and Messiah, respectively. 

Here’s an excerpt:

For Dickens, Christmas is a reminder that we are all Scrooges, self-centered ungrateful nobs who yet have some hope of appeasing God through our personal reform.

For Handel, Christmas reminds us that we are all sinners, we are “in Adam,” and for that we are helpless to stop God’s righteous judgment towards our sin. Yet there is One who has paid the price to quench God’s wrath on our behalf.

In both A Christmas Carol and Messiah, all our warm and tranquil Hallmark Christmas sentimentality gets blasted by cold reality. Death is coming for us all, and the grave is approaching quickly.

Dickens wants people to die in peace.

Handel wants people raised from the dead.

Dickens’ hope is rooted in the future — in the finished work of moral reform necessary in our lives.

Handel’s hope is rooted in the past — the full and complete work of Christ on our behalf.

Dickens’ message is “do.”

Handel’s message is “done.”

Dickens’ work is good for what it is, a seasonal, warmhearted morality tale. For that I find it agreeable and commendable. But Handel’s work comprehends the scope of the hope-giving and guilt-freeing meaning of Christmas. For that I find eternal comfort, and hope for my ongoing battle against my inner self-centered, thankless Scrooge.

Read the entire post here.

HT: Justin Taylor.

 

 

Blue Christmas?

Two weeks ago the children’s ministry at our church presented their annual Christmas program during our corporate worship gathering. It was, I suspect, much like those that take place in almost every church across the country: cute kids dressed up festively like miniature adults, singing off-key, flailing their arms about attempting choreography, all while their proud parents snapped pictures and took video on their iPhones. The show was a big hit, complete with a standing ovation at the end. One of the songs they sang really struck me. Its chorus went like this: “Jesus is the rock and he rolls my blues away.”

That’s it—just one line. But they repeated it a lot: “Jesus is the rock and he rolls my blues away/Jesus is the rock and he rolls my blues away/Jesus is the rock and he rolls my blues away.”

Now normally, I doubt I would have given this song a second thought, if even a first. But this day, it really gave me pause. I happened to be sitting next to someone who I knew was going through a real hard time, someone who was suffering—whose blues were not being rolled away by the Jesus in whom he placed all his faith. And so, as the children cheerily sang “Jesus is the rock and he rolls my blues away”, I wondered how my friend heard that. He was polite enough to grin along with everyone else, but I can’t help think that he must’ve just scoffed as they sang this song about the apparent good news of Christmas—that Jesus makes us happy, clap our hands.

As Dickens would say, this is more of gravy than of grave.

In his book, Above All Earthly Powers: Christ in a Postmodern World, David Wells writes that the kind of “spiritual gravitas” which marks so much of American evangelicalism is simply unable to “match the depth of horrendous evil and address issues of [seriousness]. Evangelicalism … is simply not very serious anymore.” John Piper, commenting on Wells’ analysis, concurs:

… our vision of God in relation to evil and suffering [has been] shown to be frivolous. The church has not been spending its energy to go deep with the unfathomable God of the Bible. Against the overwhelming weight and seriousness of the Bible, much of the church is choosing, at this very moment, to become more light and shallow and entertainment oriented, and therefore successful in its irrelevance to massive suffering and evil. The popular God of fun-church is simply too small and too affable to hold [evil and suffering] in his hand.

In other words, the message “Jesus is the rock and he rolls my blues away” is not enough to sustain faith given the grave reality of sin. We know all too well that our world is quite different from the world Norman Rockwell portrayed—things are not as they’re supposed to be. Evil and suffering take place all around us, regardless of the season. And Christmases, for many, are very blue.

But the message of the angel on the first Christmas morning was far greater. It announced that God himself was “pleased with us in flesh to dwell.” In Jesus, through whom the entire world came into being, God came into our world to be with us. His presence with us was not meant to take away all of our suffering; instead, it was intended to fill us with such great joy in him and his salvation that we would be sustained in the midst of whatever suffering we experience. Indeed, a Savior was born to us that day—“born that we no more may die/born to raise us from the earth/born to give us second birth.” Any other message is just not good enough. For no other message can bring peace to earth like the message of “God and sinners reconciled.”

 

The Tree of Life

Terrence Malick’s film The Tree of Life finally made it to Red Box, which means I finally got to see it. And it was wonderful.

Patterned after the book of Job, the film explores human suffering but doesn’t try to explain it. It looks at suffering honestly, not as an isolated experience, but as one that’s part of a greater, mysterious design over which God carefully superintends.

“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?…when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” (Job 38:4–7).

What stands out most about this film is not its plot, but its beautiful depiction of the “way of grace” over the “way of nature.” The cinematography and soundtrack convey this theme as much as the dialogue, narration, and story.

Watch it patiently. Keep an open mind. Don’t try to figure it out. Just let it do its work on you.

And after you watch it, read the following reviews and reflections: The Tree of Life: The Gift of Life by Robert Johnson who teaches about theology and culture at Fuller Seminary and The Tree of Life–Incarnations of Nature and Grace by screenwriter and author Brian Godawa.

A Few Thoughts on the Penn State Scandal

I can’t say what’s saddened me most about the sex abuse scandal at Penn State: The alleged actions of Jerry Sandusky or the obvious inaction of officials at the university. All that’s come to light in the past week has been a sobering reminder that, as Edmund Burke supposedly said, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men to do nothing.”

Something that puzzled me about this whole situation was how surprised everyone seemed that someone like Joe Paterno could screw up so badly. Although it should certainly sadden us, sin should not surprise believers; for all of us are “so corrupt that we are totally unable to do any good and are prone to do all evil” (Heidelberg Catechism, Question 8). We are all, as Melville said, “dreadfully cracked about the head and desperately in need of mending.” No person can outgrow his or her need for grace. And no amount of good deeds can make us good. God alone is the molder of men: “It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption” (1 Cor. 1:30).

Another thing that stood out to me was how certain many of the commentators were that they would have handled the situation much more appropriately had they been in JoePa’s shoes. Attribution theory in social psychology shoots a lot of holes in self-serving statements like these; but suffice it to say that we are often much more optimistic than realistic about our own moral capabilities. As much as I would like to say for sure that I would have done things differently if I were Paterno, I’m not naive enough to think that I’m incapable of even greater evil than his sin of omission. “[My] heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked” (Jer. 17:9a). And so, as they say in recovery, “There but for the grace go I.” And sometimes, even despite of the grace of God go I.

President Obama is right. This scandal should move us to do some real “soul searching.” We should pray, like David, that God would search our souls “… and see if there be any grievous way in [us], and lead [us] in the way everlasting (Ps. 139).

On Child Abuse Reporting

It’s important for everyone to understand a couple things about child abuse reporting. First, the primary purpose for reporting suspected child abuse is protective, not punitive. It’s intended mainly to keep kids safe, not to punish those who endanger them, though punishment necessarily follows. Second, simply suspecting that a child might have been abused in some way is reason enough to file a report. The consequences of a mistaken report are far less than those of abuse that’s never reported, as was seen in the mess at Penn State. Go here to find out about the reporting laws and procedures in your state.

Christian Fellowship

Our Sunday school class has devoted the month of November to reflecting on relationships and how the gospel restores our fellowship with God and each other. Here are the notes from Week 1, A Few Marks of Distinctively Christian Fellowship.

And here are a few resources for further study that deal with Christian fellowship in particular and/or the nature of the church in general:

• Life Together by Bonhoeffer
• Becoming a True Spiritual Community by Crabb
• The Wisdom of Each Other by Peterson
• The Church by Clowney
• Nine Marks of a Healthy Church by Dever
• Stop Dating the Church! by Harris
• Vintage Church by Driscoll & Breshears