| The Invasion |
Morning Worship, December 24, 2000 |
Max Weber, the German sociologist, noted that
Christianity is not
"world-fleeing" but is
"world-rejecting."
Christianity refuses to take the world for granted, but seeks to
change the world.
The central figure of these world-rejecting religions was not
the magician, but the prophet who holds out the vision of a new world
and the deliverance from suffering.
Such religion leads to "not only an acute but a permanent
state of tension in relation to the world and its
orders."
"God so loved the world that he gave his only
Son"
(John 3:16),
and John goes on to reflect "and
the world did not know him "
(John 1:10).
So Weber said that Jesus was characterized by "an absolute
indifference to the world."
That is, not that Jesus denies the world, but that
Jesus contests the world as it is presently constructed.
He stood outside the humdrum rituals and arrangements of this
world in order to offer a new world.
He was in conflict with governmental and religious authorities,
his family and all those who protected and preserved the received
world as it is.
In other words, Jesus' connection to another vision, another
world, casts him into constant conflict with all those who want to
protect the world as it is.
This week I sat and watched a movie, The Ice Storm.
I'll tell you more about it later.
On Wednesday, I had a visitor, a very educated person, come to my
office and ask me,
"Do you really think that people must be saved by Jesus
Christ or they have no hope?"
I expected that this person wanted me to say something that
seemed more "inclusive" or
"pluralistic" than she had heard.
"Well," I replied, "yesterday I might
have been willing to consider other possibilities for our
redemption.
But recently I saw the movie The Ice Storm, and I would have to
say, especially if you live in an affluent neighborhood with beautiful
people as friends, that without Jesus Christ--his grace, forgiveness,
and power-- you are damned.
No, I can't really imagine any other way that
people like us could be saved except for a God who is willing
to suffer for us, with us, to bleed, even to die.
People like us couldn't be saved by any less of a God than
that."
Dostoevsky observed,
"The more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love
individual people.
How true of us all.
We love "humanity," it's people we can't stand!
It is always easier to love at a distance, aloof from the
particularities and actualities of who people really are and where
they really live.
On Christmas, Christians contend with a God who came among us,
looking us in the face, standing beside us.
That is the only kind of God who could make any real difference for
people like us.
Read the Scripture:
Micah 5:2-5a, Luke 1:39-45
"Each night, we secretly huddled around the
wireless," she said, "eagerly hoping to receive
some coded message that meant, 'Invasion Begun.'
We scanned the skies, looking for Allied planes.
People walked along the dikes, hoping for ships on the horizon.
We prayed.
People in Holland were starving.
The Jews were already gone.
Could we endure another year of Nazi occupation?"
An old Dutch woman remembered the dark days of Christmas 1944 as
Holland awaited redemption.
What is it like to be a people captive, awaiting deliverance,
dependent on someone, something to come from the outside to save
you?
Captivity, caughtness comes in different forms.
Alcoholics Anonymous puts it?
"We are powerless to help ourselves.
We had to reach out to a higher power."
If you've never had debts you couldn't pay, a cancer that won't
heal, a marriage that can't be fixed, a problem that defies
solution, you won't understand this sermon.
Cicero, in his best book On the Nature of the
Gods, tells us of three religious options in classical Rome of
the first century:
- You could be Stoic,
a pantheist, believing
that everything is impregnated with the divine, God in every rock and
tree.
- You could be an Epicurean,
believing that, if gods
exist, they have better things to do than worry about us,
so relax,
don't whine, and get along as best you can.
- Or you can be as Cicero himself--
an academic--
smart enough to know that not much can be known on these
matters anyhow so, even though you are skeptical, go to
the temple once in a while and enjoy the sacred rituals that are
mainly of value for holding the government
together.
Sound familiar?
Nature worship.
Stoic stiff upper lip.
Intellectual scorn.
These are among our deities.
No wonder the world seems emptier than a college campus in late
December.
We are fairly much on our own now, left to our own devices.
What care the gods for us and our vexations?
Find what consolation you can in available therapy, or
out of a bottle, relentlessly scan the information
highway, scour the winter skies, search the horizon at
twilight.
People are starving.
Another winter of occupation may do us in, and where is
deliverance?
I commend to you a movie, if you can take it.
The Ice Storm.
Stars Kevin Kline, Joan Allen and Sigourney Weaver and Toby
Maguire.
Made in 1997.
It's a cold night in post-Christian Connecticut 1971,
and the beautiful people with hep mod houses, and big cars, and bell
bottom leisure suits are having a party.
Upstairs, Moms and Dads delve into a little spouse swapping and
downstairs the kids are belting vodka and experimenting with sex,
and it is an unrelieved, cold, empty world.
The Ice Storm.
The movie ends with the family in the cold car frozen,
with Dad crying like a baby because that's all you can do in a world
where deliverance is inconceivable.
They had it all, these beautiful people had it all, everything
except hope.
"In those days a decree went out from Emperor
Augustus"
(Luke 2:1).
Caesar calls the shots.
What hope is there for Jews languishing under the heavy heel
of the empire?
Nobodies named Mary and Joseph search in vain for a warm
place to spend a cold night.
There's no room at the inn.
When is there ever room for the poor?
Caesar calls it "the end of welfare as we know
it."
People on the bottom, unwed moms like Mary, know it as no
place to spend a dark night.
Bethlehem-- an occupied town, full of
refugees, caught, powerless, and what then?
Stoic stiff upper lips?
Epicurean accommodation?
Keep up appearances, go through the motions even if you no longer
believe it?
What hope for deliverance?
Then, a flutter of wings.
Songs flung into the silence.
Light.
All creation flooded with presence.
A virgin conceives.
A child cries out in the night.
Passionate, risky intrusion.
There is traffic between God and humanity and tonight, it's one
way.
God with us,
Emmanuel.
The invasion has begun...
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