The Park Road Pulpit

    Sermons from Park Road Baptist Church 

        Russ and Amy Jacks Dean, Pastors

 

“Brand New Year. Same Old God.”

Galatians 4.4-7, Genesis 8.20-22

Russ Dean, December 29, 2002

 

            It was a day just like any other day. A plain, ordinary day. Sunrise. Sunset. And all the hours in between. And, yet, it was a day unlike every other day. Unlike any other day had ever been. He was a baby. Just another, ordinary, boy-child. Born to struggling parents in a small town. Parents with hopes for their child. Parents with dreams which they shared with parents everywhere. He was a plain, ordinary baby. And yet one unlike the world has known. There was a God...  An ordinary God? Not in any way like any other god of the pantheon of gods. On every day. In every way, this God is extraordinary!

            This is the Christmas story, if we can heart it, today, amid the competing claims of the still-vocal gods of this world: one ordinary day, one ordinary man, one absolutely extraordinary God.[1]

 

            Our text for this first Sunday of Christmastide not a Christmas text, per se. Paul’s letter to the quarreling church at Galatia is called the “Magna Carta of Christian liberty,”[2] because he writes to free the minds and the souls of this beloved congregation from the tenacious claws of religious legalism. Paul says that Christ came, “born of a woman, born under the law” to free us from the law and from all its external, religious practices. For freedom itself... Christ has set us free.[3]

            Today’s occasion for worship is the aftermath of another exhausting and intoxicating season of celebration, which serves for so many only to mask the despair, the emptiness, the shallowness which life has become. How can Christmas bring such emptiness? The answer is not that Christmas has gotten too commercialized (though it may be). The answer is that Christmas has become too religious – that is, Christmas has become a story which the Church insists must be believed – while doing little to help the masses experience the coming of God among us. So our occasion for worship is a religious Christmas. It is also the eve of a Brand New Year. A few years ago, this eve brought millennium madness and Y2K fever and fear and chaos and reports of terrorism. This year we can subtract the Y2K element, but all the rest of the fear and the chaos remain. What will this year bring?

            In the midst of a superficial and superstitious religiosity on the one hand, a gripping fear of tomorrow on the other, the Child of Christmas call us to freedom – from all that binds us on this fallen earth, both secular and religious. For freedom Christ has set us free. This is the “Good News!”

 

            Today’s sermon depends on three lessons, which could become three sermons. The first lesson is in Chronology (time): biblical time is not just clock-ticking time, but fullness of time, the eternal nature that God longs to bring to individual moments. Such was, and is, Christmas. Christmas was not just a day and hour – Christmas is an event.[4] The second lesson is in Christology (Christ): in Christ, God was reconciling the world.[5] God uses ordinary people in eternal and extraordinary ways when those people can live, as they pray, “not my will… but God’s will be done.”[6] The third lesson is in Theology (God). I need to give you this one in a nutshell:

            The God of Christmas faith stands markedly opposed to other gods known to the history of humanity: They demanded the toil and labor of their subjects to create; this God creates freely, molding out of nothing, giving of God’s own divine breathe to see a world come into being.[7] They sat in mountain-top Temples and gave deafening orders, demanding exacting execution or else executing a demanding punishment; this God speaks in a still, small voice,[8] and through strange and all-too-human mouthpieces, accepts far less than perfection, and  relents (even repents[9]) of plans for divine wrath – even when covenants are continually broken. They sat in remote and absolute power, ruling by force and coercion; this God chooses to reign in person and to abdicate power, choosing only the rule of unrelenting love. They remained mysteriously hidden; this God gives a name,[10] shows a face,[11] pitches a tent,[12] learns to sing a human song in a foreign land.[13] For one day the ordinary man spoke, and made it clear: “If you have seen me... you have seen [this] God![14] Only an extraordinary God could be fully represented by an ordinary man. No other god would allow such.

 

            Let me give you two implications from these mini lessons that might help us all live in the ordinary days of a new year, as ordinary children of an extraordinary God.

 

            1). If God does, in fact, allow ordinary days to be filled with a kind of divine fullness, a sacred character, what is the implication to us – we who are ordinary people? If we read Paul and understand that the “fullness of time” was a time divinely appointed in some distant past, if we credit all the sacred events of our history to the supernatural intervention of a powerful and distant God,[15] we will be inclined to spend the next week waiting, wondering, worrying about what God might do in the new year. In fact, we might be inclined to build a whole theology, a whole Christian ethic, an entire world view around a timid “wait and see” attitude of fear and anxious expectation.[16] What is God going to do? What is God going to do to save us, or... to end us? And when is God going to do it?

 

Over Thanksgiving the Deans gathered as we usually do to sing together. My sister had collected tons of music. Among the assortment, an old song book from our youth, “Sing ‘n Celebrate.” As we flipped through the pages, my stomach churched as we sang again, ALife was filled with guns and war and everyone got trampled on the floor... I wish we’d all been ready... There=s no time to change your mind, the Son has come and you’ve been left behind.@[17] I was transported back in time to a theology of fear and anxiety: the end was coming, and probably coming soon. God had set the date and when the time came, there would be much weeping and gnashing of teeth.

            But many years ago I found a wonderful passage in scripture. The anxious end of earthly history is often compared to the great flood, in which God destroyed the earth with water. In this final end, though, as many preachers will tell you, God will destroy with fire. But hear the good news, today, from the book of Genesis:

 

            Never again will I curse the ground because of humans, even though every inclination of [their hearts are] evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done. “As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease…[18]

 

            If God is not going to destroy our earth and our life here… Who is!?

 

            A cocky young boy went to the wise old man of his town. In his hands he carried a small bird. “Tell me whether the bird in my hands is dead or alive, old man.” If the man said “alive” the boy would simply crush the bird in his hands and produce a lifeless body. If he answered, “it’s dead” the boy would open his hands and smile as the bird flew away. But the old man was wiser than the boy knew. “I don’t know” said the old man, “whether the bird is alive or dead. I do know that the life of the bird is in your hands.”

I believe that our lives, today, on the brink of a Brand New Year, our destiny on those still-ordinary days is very much in our own hands. As we face a dangerous horizon, looming with threats of war, we need to remember: our destiny is very much in our own hands.

I believe God is asking us, a world on the brink of a new day, AWhat are you going to do today? What moment will you claim today as a fullness of time? What will you see and do and say today to open an ordinary moment to the life of the extraordinary God?@

 

            2.) If any day, any moment, can overflow with God’s fullness, we must not miss the lesson implicit of the very God who made it so. I said earlier that the problem with our Christmas is that it has become too religious. We tried to work this out in our Advent theme. Though Christianity speaks of a God who is “with us”[19] – most people live with a very different, practical understanding, for God seems to be with us only sometimes. “Why doesn’t God do the miracles that God used to do? You know, in the “Good Ol’ Days.”

            But if Jesus Christ is the same, as Hebrews says, “yesterday, today and forever” – then the God who became his Father is also. Since God is beyond time there is no yesterday or tomorrow. Only today. There is only the present for God. Which means if God was once a creative, creating God — then God is today creative, and creating still. If God was once a miracle-working, participating God — then God is today a miracle-working, participating God. If God was once a jealous God, a God of wrath and great anger, then God is today a jealous God, a God of wrath and great anger. If God was once a God of everlasting love — then what else could God be today?[20]

            As the lesson of the barefoot Moses has tried to teach us for thousands of years, God is the great “I Am.” God is all that God is – all the time.

 

            When Amy and I moved to Birmingham, we began searching for a home. This was no easy task with Mountain Brook prices! We finally found 1124 Gladstone Avenue – and the realtor said the house had “potential.” After hours and hours of work, with every room changed (though we were never fully satisfied), some of the potential was realized while we were there.

            Amy said later:  “I never want to buy a house with potential again!”

            God has no potential... We will never have to wait and see who God is. What God is. How God is going to change... tomorrow. God is all that God is – all the time.

 

            I have come to believe that Frank Tupper, my theology professor at Southern Seminary,  is quite right: “God always does everything that God can do!”  Through his own painful experience, Dr. Frank Tupper has chosen to believe[21] that in his wife’s last days on earth, the mother of his two young children who lay dying of breast cancer, the God who is the same yesterday, today, and forever... had done, was doing, would always do “all that God could do.”

            And I too believe, that in the life and death of my teenage nephew, whose fourth absence from our family Christmas tree we grieve this week, as in the life of Byron Hamrick and Gerrie Morrison, of Mike Poole, Cathy Blackwell, Lura Kester and all of the moms and dads and children and friends whom we have “lost” this year, God was doing all that God could do on this earth to bring life. I believe that when this life ends, God stands with welcoming arms and whispers, “Welcome home. I’ve been expecting you.” To some, God adds, “... just not so soon!”

            And God says to us who are left: “I love you. And lo, I will be with you always.”[22]

 

            In life’s most difficult moments, and on the brink of new, but ordinary days, in the living of Christian Faith, prayer is essential. Prayer is not a matter of asking the changeless God to get “down here” and do something. What “more” could God possibly do? (God is all that God is, all the time.) Prayer is the discipline of asking God to open our eyes and our hearts to what it is that God is already doing. In prayer, the spirit opens in us the conviction to pray with the Christ — with the ordinary One who became quite extraordinary for us — “not my will... but Thine be done!”

            The man was a philosopher who taught violin lessons to help pay the bills. A friend dropped in one day and asked “What’s the good news today?” “Asked lightly or seriously?” “Seriously,” replied the friend. The man stepped to a curiously shaped metal device, suspended from a silk cord and struck it a sharp blow and said, “That is the good news for today. That is an “A.” It was “A” all day yesterday. It will be “A” all day tomorrow, and next week, and a thousand years from now. The soprano next door warbles abominably. The tenor across the hall faults unspeakably. The piano down the hall is out of tune. Noise and confusion all about me. But that is “A.”

 

            Brand New Year. Same Old God.

            It is the Good News of Christmas. And it is always enough!

            May it be so.

 

 Let us pray.

 

O Timeless God

   meet us in ordinary days

      that the living of ordinary lives

         might be extraordinary.

Amen!

 

Appendix One: A Chronology

 

First. The ordinary day. Since the Creator cast the stars into space, creating days and nights, and allowing the dividing up of life into slices called Atime,@ time has been Aof the essence.@ Can you imagine living without a day divided into hours and minutes, even seconds? Yet before the invention and mass-production of the clock, and especially pocket or wrist-sized time-pieces, days and nights were divided only functionally: sunup to sundown. But the more precise our ability becomes to record time, it seems the more exaggerated becomes our need to maintain and control and possess it.

The Greek language does a better job of describing the essence of time than does our own.. Where English provides one word, the Greek used two. Chronos was clock-time. The ticking away of the minutes. The kind of time that recorded temporal events.

When Amy and I married, someone came to us after the ceremony and said that when she was married, she had been told the Aexact time@ when she had said AI do.@ That had meant much to her, so she wanted us to know that we had been Aofficially@ married since A7:36 p.m.@