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And tonight's readings are a reading from the Gospel of Luke, chapter 2, verses 2-20, and Paul's letter to Titus, chapter 3, verses 3-6.
A reading from the Gospel according to Luke.
In those days, Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world.
This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.
And everyone went to their own towns to register.
So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem, the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David.
He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him, and was expecting a child.
While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son.
She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no guest room available for them.
And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night.
And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified.
But the angel said to them, do not be afraid.
I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all people.
Today, in the town of David, a Savior has been born to you.
He is the Messiah, the Lord.
This will be a sign to you.
You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.
Suddenly, a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying,
Glory to God in the highest.
Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth, peace to those on whom his favor rests.
When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another,
Let's go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.
So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph and the baby, who was lying in the manger.
When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child,
and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them.
But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.
The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen,
which were just as they had been told.
This is the gospel of the Lord.
Praise to you, Lord Christ.
And the New Testament lesson, a reading from Paul's letter to Titus.
At one time, we too were foolish, disobedient, deceived, and enslaved by all kinds of passions and pleasures.
We lived in malice and envy, being hated and hating one another.
But when the kindness and love of God, our Savior appeared, he saved us,
not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy.
He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit,
whom he poured out on us generously through Jesus Christ, our Savior,
so that, having been justified by his grace,
we might become heirs, having the hope of eternal life.
This is the word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
Isn't it great to have a string quartet here tonight?
I'm going to relieve them of feeling like they need to preach with me, though,
so thank you for that.
Well, Merry Christmas to you all, and a warm welcome to our Christchurch family,
and especially a warm welcome to those of you who come with your family and friends,
maybe here from out of town or visiting Christchurch for the first time.
We are so, so glad that you're here tonight.
And, you know, Christmas Eve is always a bit of a mixed crowd, spiritually speaking.
Typically, about half of our church is out of town,
traveling to other places to celebrate with their people,
and their seats in the pews are filled with folks who are from all different kind of experiences and backgrounds,
religious, non-religious,
people who know bits and pieces about the historic Christian faith,
and people who know nothing whatsoever.
However, perhaps even some of you here tonight would say,
you know, I don't even know if God exists.
I'm not even sure if we can have our ultimate questions answered.
And wherever you're coming from tonight,
we just want you to know we're delighted that you're here.
And I want to begin by just pointing out a very strange detail in that story we just heard read.
And just to say that if I were writing the Christmas story,
I'm not sure I would have written it as it stands.
For example, what's up with the shepherds?
You know, could God not have found better characters to write into a story?
I mean, why didn't God choose other people to receive the news of the birth of His Son?
Think of how much better the story would have been if God had sent news to the Roman Emperor Augustus,
or to Herod the Great, or the high priest in Jerusalem.
Why did God not go to the halls of power, to people sitting on thrones,
you know, to celebrities and influencers and elites,
the high and mighty people who were rich and famous?
Instead, the glorious presence and power of the Lord appears not only in this vulnerable baby in this lowly manger,
but it appears in this field with unlikely and lowly shepherds.
Think about that.
The most stupendous news that the world has ever heard is given to these simple, ordinary people,
a bunch of nobodies on the margins of society,
people who are just going about their everyday business with no expectation whatsoever
that anything out of the ordinary was going to happen that night.
They were taken completely by surprise.
It's a strange detail to me.
And so, for the next few moments, I want to just invite you into the experience of these shepherds
to hear what they heard with their ears and see what they saw with their eyes.
Know what they knew in their minds.
Feel what they felt in their hearts.
And what I want to invite all of us to do tonight is just to listen to the song of the angels
and to go through a process of investigation and to open our hearts to sharing and singing.
Okay, three things.
Listen to the song of the angels.
Go through a process of investigation.
And open our hearts to sharing and singing.
So, first of all, let's listen to the song of the angels.
Verse 9 in our story tells us that an angel of the Lord appeared to them
and the glory of the Lord shone around them and they were terrified.
You know, many people seek spiritual experiences, transcendent experiences,
in order to get above themselves and beyond themselves.
And they may not be aware of what might happen when they seek that, right?
Because when the Almighty shows up, when the Holy penetrates your life,
when the eternal light of God comes into your darkness,
the first thing you feel is not a thrill of hope, right?
You feel dread.
You feel terrified.
Like, am I going to die?
Why?
And every time in the Bible a messenger from heaven is sent from God to speak,
what do they say to human beings?
Fear not.
Do not be afraid.
And so in our story in verse 10, it says,
the angel said to them,
Do not be afraid.
I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people.
Today in the town of David, a Savior has been born to you.
He is the Messiah, the Lord.
And the angel sums up the Christmas message in those three little words.
He's Savior, Messiah, and Lord.
The one born to you is the Lord.
That's the name of the God of Israel.
I am who I am.
And that name is Yahweh for short.
And the angel says,
Jesus is the embodiment of Yahweh, the Lord.
Secondly, the one born to you is the Messiah or the Christ.
And that's not his last name.
It's not Jesus, Mr. Christ.
Messiah is his title.
It's his office.
It means that he's God's chosen and anointed king.
And thirdly, this one born to you is the Lord.
He's the Messiah, and he's the Savior,
which is good and joyful news.
It says that God desires to save the human race from itself.
And, of course, the bad news is that we're the kind of species living in the kind of world that needs saving.
Right?
A saving that we cannot do for ourselves.
A saving that all of our money and technology,
all of our technology,
our education,
our government,
just simply cannot affect.
When I think about this need for being saved,
I think about my favorite fictional Christmas character,
which is the Grinch.
Right?
And I have a Grinch mug at home,
which has the Grinch quoting.
He says,
I'm not arguing.
I'm just explaining why I'm right.
And I love this guy.
In fact, you may remember in the original film in the 1960s,
there was a great song called,
You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch.
And one of the stanzas in that song says,
You're a rotter, Mr. Grinch.
You're the king of sinful sots.
Your heart's a dead tomato splotched with moldy purple spots, Mr. Grinch.
Your soul is an appalling dump heap overflowing
with the most disgraceful assortment of deplorable rubbish imaginable
mangled up and tangled up knots.
Now, I don't know about you,
but Dr. Seuss, to me, is a great theologian.
He's an incredible anthropologist.
And if we're honest,
all of us have hearts tonight
that are about two sizes too small,
at least.
And we have this inner Grinch,
if we're honest with ourselves,
we have this inner Grinch
that unleashes all sorts of misery
on the people around us,
maybe even upon,
and especially upon ourselves.
Right?
We know better than God how to run our lives.
We would be better off if we were just independent from God.
We're in a war not against Whoville.
We're in a war against God himself.
We're in a war against God.
And because of that,
we're in the grip of sin and death.
We're living under condemnation and judgment and wrath.
And that's like the one doctrine of Christianity
that we could almost prove from this morning's newspaper.
But the good news of great joy
is that God has sent a Savior.
That God won't allow us to be stuck
in the misery of our Grinchiness and our Grinchitude.
That God announces to us the best news
that's ever been told to planet Earth,
that the one born to you is Savior, Messiah, and Lord.
And the great irony of this story
is that the way God announces this message
is he sends a heavenly army of angelic warriors
not to destroy humanity,
which God would have been right and completely just to do,
but he sends this heavenly army of angelic warriors
to sing to us the first Christmas carol
and to offer us God's terms of peace.
And here it is in verse 13.
Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host
appeared with the angel, praising God and saying,
glory to God in the highest heaven
and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.
Their message is that we as human beings,
our deepest need is not political
or sociological or economic
to achieve a kind of outward interpersonal peace
between individuals or groups of people.
They tell us that our deepest problem
is not biological or mental or psychological
to achieve a kind of inward intrapersonal peace,
though of course we're desperate for both forms of peace,
given the deep disharmonies that we find within our own souls
and out in the world between people groups.
But what they tell us is what we most need
is a saving and reconciling peace with God,
not peace out in the world or peace in our hearts,
but peace up here with God.
Peace between the glorious maker and judge of all
and grinchy sinners like me and like you.
And this peace, you notice,
is offered to all people of every culture,
every race, every nation.
All humanity here is invited to join in heaven's song
about this one born Savior Christ and Lord,
this one who's given authority to accomplish salvation
and to bring peace with God.
But while this is a universal announcement
for all peoples at all times and in all places,
we also notice that it's only effective
for those on whom God's favor rests,
on whom God's grace has come to rest.
Will God give peace to everyone?
Well, if you're indifferent to God,
if you're opposed to God,
why would you get the peace that He brings?
No, it's only as we surrender,
it's only as we accept God's terms of peace
that we come to enjoy the incredible shalom
that He offers us both now in this life
and in the age to come.
And so tonight I want us to listen very closely
to the song that the angels are singing to us
and see if we really understand
what it is they're saying.
But I want us to not only listen
to the song of the angels,
I'd also like for us to go through a process
of investigation,
to go through a process of investigation.
These unlikely and lowly shepherds,
they hear this first and oldest Christmas carol,
the original Hark the Herald Angels Sing.
And then what do they do?
How do they respond?
Because the angels are gone as quickly
and unexpectedly as they came
and when the song was over,
the shepherds found themselves in the silence
and then in the darkness again.
And so what now?
What should we do now?
They must surely have wondered
what they just experienced.
And then we pick up in verse 15,
it says,
when the angels had left them
and gone into heaven,
the shepherds said to one another,
let's go to Bethlehem
and see this thing that has happened
which the Lord has told us about.
They say,
let's go through a process of investigation.
Let's go and see for ourselves
whether or not this thing is true.
They neither laughed off the experience
as a hallucination or a dream
nor did they accept it without investigation.
They were not content with mere hearsay
but they said,
let's go find out the truth for ourselves.
And this is important tonight
because I think some of you might be skeptical
of this Christmas story.
Perhaps you're here and you're inclined
not to trust naive,
empty-headed,
religious credulity.
And if that's you,
I am with you.
And I absolutely respect that.
But the antidote to naive,
empty-headed,
religious credulity
is not cynical,
unstudied,
secular incredulity.
Rather,
I want to suggest to you
that the most intellectually
credible position you could take
is to engage in an open-minded,
unprejudiced inquiry,
to go and gather
the adequate primary source evidence
and then base your conclusions
on that evidence
without depending on hearsay
or second-hand opinions
from other people.
For example,
you might be socialized
and culturally conditioned
to read this supernatural story
about angels
and a virgin birth
and this God
born as a human baby.
And when that story hits
the plausibility structures
in your mind,
when it hits the dominant paradigm
of your brain,
you say,
ah,
I see what's going on.
We're talking about a legend.
This is a myth.
It's a fable.
It's a made-up story
with symbolic spiritual meaning.
But if you say that,
that just means that
your plausibility structures
and the paradigm in your mind
is causing you
to misunderstand
what you're reading.
It's causing you
to misunderstand the genre
because when you examine
the evidence,
Luke does not begin
his story like a fairy tale
and say,
once upon a time.
Right?
Nor does he begin
his story saying,
a long time ago
in a galaxy
far, far away.
Indicating that
you are now reading
a mythological
Jungian hero story
about an unending conflict
between the dark side
and the true force.
Right?
This isn't once upon a time.
It's not a long time ago
in a galaxy
far, far away.
How does Luke,
this meticulous doctor,
this scrupulous historian,
write his story?
He says in verse 1,
in those days,
Caesar Augustus
issued a decree
that a census
should be taken
of the entire Roman world.
This was the first census
that took place
while Quirinius
was governor
of Syria.
He says,
this is history.
This is,
this happened.
It happened
under the rule
of the grand nephew
of Julius Caesar,
Caesar Augustus.
And you can go
look at all the evidence
about it.
And what I want to invite
some of you to do tonight
is just to engage
in the primary source material,
maybe for the first time
in your lives.
And if you do that,
if you read the Gospels,
you'll find that
this one who's born,
he makes,
he grows up, right?
And he makes
some astonishing claims.
He says stuff like,
only I know God the Father.
He says things like,
I alone have the authority
to forgive sins
and to do what only God can do.
He says,
I'm going to come back
at the end of history
and I'm going to sit
on my throne in glory
and I'm going to gather
all the nations before me
and I'm going to judge
all the earth
because I hold
your eternal destiny
in my hands.
What?
Who says that?
Who in history
has ever said these things?
And where does he get,
where does he get off?
Not to mention
all the other things
you'll find
about eyewitness testimonies
that after his
ghastly crucifixion
to bear the sins
of the world
that he was seen
raised from the dead
and alive again.
You see,
if you engage
with this story
as it's written,
not as legend
but as history,
you will have to
confront the facts
that either
this one who was born
became a dangerous madman
or he became
a pitiful lunatic
or he's the Lord
and he's telling us
the truest truths
of the universe.
And what I want you to do
is go on that process
of investigation
for yourself
to say what the shepherds
said to themselves.
Let's go
and let's see this thing
and whether or not
it really happened.
And I'd encourage you
to just read the gospel.
Read the gospel of Luke.
You can read a chapter
a day over the next
24 days
and be done
in mid-January.
And I'd encourage you also,
I have two books
to recommend
for your 12 days
of Christmas reading.
One is from
a professor
at the University of Cambridge,
Richard Baucom.
This is a very short book
and it's incredibly cheap.
You could probably order it
and have it at your house
tonight, I bet.
It's called
Jesus,
A Very Short Introduction.
It's phenomenal.
And this is by
Tom Wright,
N.T. Wright,
the original Jesus,
the life and vision
of a revolutionary.
He teaches at the
University of Oxford
and I commend
these trustworthy historians
to your reading.
But as we close,
I want us to not only
listen to the song
of the angels
and go through
a process of investigation,
but I'd also like
to encourage us
to open our hearts
to sharing
and singing.
To open our hearts
to sharing
and singing.
Because what did
the shepherds find?
Did they,
did they see
what their eyes
thought they would see?
Did they,
did they see
what they heard
with their ears?
We read in verse 16,
so the shepherds
hurried off
and they found
Mary and Joseph
and the baby
who was lying
in the manger.
They showed up
and they found
the King of Heaven
as a powerless
baby
in this lowly manger.
They showed up
and they found
the light of the world
descended down
into the darkness.
They found
the giver of life
born to die,
born to come
into the depths
of all of our
grinchiness
and God forsakenness.
What they found
when they arrived
was the Savior,
the Messiah,
the Lord
in the person of Jesus.
And what did they do?
What did they do
when they saw
God in the flesh?
When they saw
the embodiment
of beauty
and truth
and goodness?
It says in verse 17
that when they had seen Him,
they spread the word
concerning what
had been told them
about this child
and all who heard it
were amazed
at what the shepherd
said to them.
You know,
perhaps you've met
Christians
who are irrepressibly
and perhaps even
at times
annoyingly joyful.
You ever met
these people?
And they can't
help themselves,
right?
They can't help
but to share
their joy
with others.
Maybe you're even
here tonight
because a family member
or a friend
just wouldn't stop
pestering you
and bothering you
to join them
for Christmas Eve
and your present
to them
is just to come
and also your hope
is that they'll
stop asking you
and stop bothering you.
But I want to encourage you,
please don't be
too hard on them
because they're just
doing what the shepherds
did.
Right?
The shepherds,
they just can't keep
the good news
to themselves.
They want other people
to know,
they want their family,
their friends,
their neighbors,
their co-workers,
they want the whole world
to know
that what they heard
and what they saw
is such good
and such joyful news.
They just can't help
but share it.
And not only do they
want to share it,
but they also want
to sing about it.
It says in verse 20
that the shepherds
returned glorifying
and praising God
for all the things
they had heard
and seen
which were just
as they had been told.
You see,
they shared
and they sang.
They witnessed
and they worshipped.
They proclaimed
and they praised.
They just could not
contain themselves.
Their souls were
bursting with joy
that had to be shared
and had to be sung.
Now,
I want you to know
that those shepherds
the very next day
had to go back
to work.
They had to go back
to their ordinary
everyday lives.
They returned
to their fields
and their homes.
They returned
to their vocations
and their relationships.
But they were different
and they were changed.
They went back
to their old job
but with a new spirit.
They went back
to their old family,
perhaps dysfunctional families
like ours,
but they went back
with a new heart.
Meeting the Savior,
the Messiah,
the Lord,
in the person of Jesus
changed them profoundly.
And so,
for the rest of their lives,
they wanted simply
to worship God
along with that army
of angelic warriors
making as their own anthem
glory to God
in the highest heaven.
And so, dear friends,
let's follow the shepherds
this Christmas.
As we enter into this
12-day feast of Christmas,
let's also listen
to the song of the angels.
Let's also go through
a process of investigation.
And upon discovering Jesus,
upon encountering
this good news
of great joy for ourselves,
let's also open our hearts
to sharing and singing,
to witnessing and worshiping,
to proclaiming and praising.
Friends, let's praise
this Jesus tonight even
from a glad and a full heart.
Let's celebrate His birth
over these next few weeks
with everything that we have
to give Him.
And let's live as people
who have the glory
of the Lord shining on us.
As people who've been saved,
actually, from our grinchiness.
As people who have been saved
into peace with God.
As people who just can't
contain their joy.
Because what they realize
is that God's favor
and God's grace
is resting on us.
So friends,
Merry Christmas.
And I want to invite you now
just to take a moment
in the quiet of this night
to bow your heads
and just close your eyes
and ask God
to draw near to you.
Ask Him to apply
His word to your heart.
And we'll sing together
in just a moment.
Amen.
See you next time.
Thank you.
Bye.