11-27-11 Sermon - THE SCANDAL OF CHRISTMAS

Listen to today's sermon, "The Scandal of Christmas" by clicking here. Below is the manuscript version if you'd care to read the sermon.

THE SCANDAL OF CHRISTMAS  11-27-11 Sermon

Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made.  He said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?”  The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’”  But the serpent said to the woman, “You shall not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”  So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate.  Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves. 

They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.  But the Lord God called to the man, and said to him, “Where are you?”  He said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.”  Genesis 3:1-10

This morning I want to say something that needs to be said at Christmastime, something that is not often mentioned.  And that is that Christmas began with a scandal.  It’s easy to avoid this scandal, because the occasion of Christmas itself is bathed in so much loveliness.  Think of the pictures.  There’s a baby; what could be lovelier than a baby?  And a star in the sky; one that has a heavenward pull.  And there are angels singing, and wise men on a quest with gifts.  The manger itself, if the truth be told, was not a pretty place, but artists through the ages have kindly hidden its distasteful elements in mystical shadows.

But the church calendar prepares us for the Christmas scandal, and as a result, so has some of the music related to that calendar.  We begin the season of Advent this morning, a season celebrated in the church since the 6^th century.  As you can see on the altar and the pulpit the color of Advent is purple, which is symbolic of repentance.  And it is in that mood of repentance that earnest Christians over scores of generations have prepared themselves for the celebration of our Lord’s coming by reminding themselves of our great need for a Savior.  We modern Christians don’t easily get into that mood.  At Christmas, we’re planning festivities, and the music around us encourages it.  Not just “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” and “Jingle Bell Rock,” but the festive church music.  You may hear “Joy to the World” and “Silent Night” in a shopping mall, but you probably won’t hear “Come Thou Long-Expected Jesus,” or “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.”

That’s because we don’t face up to the Christmas scandal.  And if we don’t comprehend the scandal, we’re not likely to get the full magnificent impact of Christmas. It may well be that one of the reasons so many people have to deal with depression at the Christmas season is because in our cultural patterns, Christmas is so tied to fun, celebration, childhood memories, and a sense of belonging; and because we have so little grounding in the theology of Christmas, we can be quite empty when these elements are missing.  As a result, we’re easily susceptible in the Christmas season to feeling of loneliness or depression.

So here’s the hard fact.  There wouldn’t be a Christmas, there wouldn’t be a need for Christmas, if it weren’t for our scandal.  Note that I said OUR scandal.  Stay with me, and I’ll tell you what I mean.  There are many ways to tell the story, but the book of Genesis really tells us the reason for Christmas. 

Genesis tells us that once there was this couple.  The Bible calls them Adam and Eve, but, in truth, we could just as well call them Frank and Peggi, or Henry and Martha or Tony and Brenda, because we know them well.  Anyway, they had everything going for them, living as they were in a garden of exquisite beauty and perfection.  But they turned their lives into a shambles by disobeying God. 

There’s a word for what happened to them, and for what they did.  It’s called SIN, and that’s where the scandal comes in.  The human race became a race of sinners.  They weren’t created that way, they became that way by their own choice and actions. 

Now let me be clear about this, because most modern people aren’t very good at understanding sin; but for that matter, we humans never have been.  If we think of sin (and a great many don’t; they find the word distasteful and therefore judge it to be outmoded and inappropriate), we generally think of rather dark, back-street matters.  “Sin” brings to mind pictures of addiction, pornography shops, criminal conduct, and adulteries.  Yes, those are sins, but they can distract us from the larger, more compelling facts. 

That is because sin is a problem all of us have to deal with.  It’s a fact of life for ALL of our lives.  You see, the basic sin is disobeying God.  The ways in which we disobey God may be crude or sophisticated, naïve or knowing, but the root issue is the same.  To be specific, it’s the issue of self; and the reason it’s so complicated is that we have to live with self, and self is so familiar that it doesn’t really frighten us. 

So there we have it.  Sin is our problem, and it’s related to self.  Every generation has found ways to excuse its sins, but our generation has raised this skill to a particularly high level.  We have euphemisms for sin that take away its sting.  We identify sin as a personality disorder, a genetic predisposition, a problem in our genetic code, a pattern of antisocial conduct.  Or, at a simpler, everyday level, our word for sin is mistake.  Have you noticed how often we hear persons guilty of everything, from corporate fraud, to child abuse or murder, offer an explanation by saying, “I made a terrible mistake”?  We find it very hard to describe our conduct for what it is.  That is, we hate to admit that we are sinners—or, to put it another way, to confess that we’re part of a scandal.  The human scandal.

Isn’t it interesting that we sometimes identify newspapers as “scandal sheets”?  Why?  Because they tell us about some of the particular acts of sin that are going on in our world.  They rarely get at our deeper problem, nor do they often compel us to face some of the hidden sins that affect the lives of even model citizens.  But it is quite true that when the newspapers report on the world in which we live—a world of war, poverty, rape, murder, fraud, slander, corruption—we call them scandal sheets.  And the term is well chosen, because this is what we’re dealing with—the scandal of our human condition. 

But let me bring the matter closer to home, because probably not many of us feel very scandalous at this moment.  We may well have some chapter in our lives that we wish we could forget, and certainly some thoughts that we’d rather were not broadcast in the lat-night news.  But because I’ve used such a strong word, scandal, we may think sin relates more to others than to ourselves. 

Consider the following poem:

I was shocked, confused, bewildered/As I entered Heaven’s door,

Not by the beauty of it all, Nor the lights or its décor.

But it was the folks in Heaven/Who made me sputter and gasp—

The thieves, the liars, the sinners,/The alcoholics and the trash.

There stood the kid from seventh grade/ who swiped my lunch money twice.

Next to him was my old neighbor/ Who never said anything nice.

Bob, who I always thought/ Was rotting away in hell,

Was sitting pretty on cloud nine, Looking incredibly well.

I nudged Jesus, ‘What’s the deal?/I would love to hear your take.

How’d all these sinners get up here?/ God must have made a mistake.

‘And why is everyone so quiet,/ So somber—give me a clue.’

“Hush, child,” He said,/ “They’re all in shock.

No one thought they’d be seeing you.”

So hear me. When we live below our best potential, when we’re anything less than godly, it’s because we’re involved in this scandal called sin.  Not just those other people, but you and I.  You and I are part of the scandal.

Now what makes our human scandal even worse is the way we deal with it.  Look again at the story in Genesis 3 because the experience there sounds so much like our own. By their sin, Adam and Eve felt guilty before God.  Good sense would suggest that they therefore should have sought God’s forgiveness, in order to get back on the right track.  Instead, the Bible tells us, they “hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the tress of the garden. “  The trees of the garden ought to have been instruments of revealing God to them, and for giving them still another reason to appreciate God’s blessings.  Instead, Adam and Eve used them as a way of hiding from God.

And so do we.  Almost any wondrous thing in this world can be turned into a means of holding God at a distance.  We absorb ourselves with “the trees of the garden”—family, work, sports, politics, music, TV, even church work—all of them good things.  But we can easily use these things the way Adam and Eve used the trees of the garden, to hide ourselves from God—or perhaps more correctly, to distract ourselves from God.  All of us know that people flee from God through alcohol, drugs, gambling, pornography, but we aren’t as quick to recognize that we may use the good things of life to hide us from God and from God’s demands. 

And that is a scandal.  God has provided a wonderful potential for our human race, and we squander it.  Then, to make it worse, we flee from God, and we use God’s own gifts to hide ourselves from him.

And that’s why we need Christmas.  Christmas didn’t come to our human race because we worked ourselves up to it, or because we evolved to a state of deserving such a favor; Christmas came because we are a scandalous lot.  Christmas is, indeed, a gift, the ultimate gift, because it is a gift undeserved and unjustified.

We try, generally, to avoid these crucial facts about the Christmas story.  That’s why we don’t really “get” this Advent season. When we sing, in a true Advent hymn, “Come, thou long expected Jesus, born to set thy people free; from our sins and fears release us, let us find our rest in thee,” we’re inclined to sing it in a detached sort of way, not really applying it to ourselves.  Who wants to know that Christmas happened because there was a scandal, and that we are the obvious inheritors and perpetuators of that scandal?

Here’s something that is fascinating.  The secular Christmas stories we love best are remarkably true to this original Christmas story, in their own special way.  Perhaps the classic Christmas story of the Western world is Charles Dickens’s Christmas Carol.  It’s the story of that mean man, Scrooge.  See how Dickens describes him:  “Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge!  A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner!”

Did you get that?  Dickens called Scrooge a sinner!  And so he was.  Scrooge was the quintessential sinner, though he broke no laws and was quite safe from prison.  But he was a miserable human being who was all wrapped up in himself, and who seemed almost to enjoy making other people miserable.

And do you remember how the story ends?  Scrooge is converted!  Dickens doesn’t use that theological term, but that’s what happened.  So, as the story ends, Dickens sums it up this way:  “It was always said of Scrooge, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.”  The man who violated Christmas worst became the man who kept it best. What a conversion!

These days one of the most popular secular Christmas stories comes to us from Dr. Suess, How the Grinch Stole Christmas.  Dr. Suess doesn’t get around to Dickens, in calling the Grinch a sinner, but he surely describes him as such—so much so that the term “Grinch” now competes with the name “Scrooge” as the epitome of everything that is bad.  But as many of us know, at the end of the story, the Grinch is completely changed (converted, though Dr. Suess wouldn’t use such a word), so that every “Who down in Who-ville” has the greatest Christmas ever.

I’m trying to say that our secular Christmas stories can’t help saying what the original Christmas story has always said.  We humans have a scandal to deal with, whether our name is Scrooge, Grinch, Adam, Eve, Frank or Peg.  We all need to be converted—to be born again. And that’s why we have a Christmas. 

That’s also why we change the style of the word, and often also the melody, when we move from Advent music to the songs of Christmas.  Advent songs are so often cast in a minor key, and with slow, deliberate timing.  They’re songs of longing and of waiting. 

But Christmas music is an entirely different matter.  Mind you, it may be quiet and thoughtful, as is “Silent Night” or “O Little Town of Bethlehem” but the mood is peace, not longing.  And more often than not, the words and music of Christmas are light and celebrative.  One like:

God rest ye merry, gentlemen, let nothing you dismay,

Remember Christ our Savior was born on Christmas Day;  {Why?}

To save us all from Satan’s power when we were gone astray. 

[there’s the scandal]

         O tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy;

         O tidings of comfort and joy.

         There’s a song to be sung by people of scandal—people who need to be saved from Satan’s power, and who realize it, and who now have found the way.  This is the good news that turns our scandal into laughter.  Tidings, indeed, of comfort and joy!  The power of the scandal has been broken.  The Savior has come.