Transcript
TIM: Let us pray. Truly, O God, we rejoice for the coming of Emmanuel, the coming of the Messiah, who has been in our midst. And yet, O God, as the Hebrew people who waited long years, we, too, look for Your coming again -- coming to fulfill and accomplish the acts of
that You have begun, and that we, in our meager attempts, continue. O God, direct our understanding this evening. Let Your Spirit dwell with us and with the speaker. Bring Your Word to us afresh, send us out, with Your blessing, to accomplish Your Word. In Jesus' name. Amen.
MCCORD: Thank you very much, Tim. Merry Christmas, everybody.
CONGREGATION: Merry Christmas.
MCCORD: One is always at a disadvantage when the text for exegesis is assigned. This happened to me last year, when Dr. Gaiman died. There were found among his papers these instructions that he was requesting that his funeral be taken by the senior minister of the Nassau Presbyterian Church and the president of the Seminary. And
if there be a homely, that the president of the Seminary give it, and the text should be, "For the zeal for Thy house hath eaten me up." That was the last exegesis assignment Dr. Gaiman gave. But the truth is, if you knew the man, "The zeal for Thy house," did eat him up, driving him
to a life of great scholarship and great influence in the service of Christ. Hear the reading of the Word of God from the Gospel according to Saint Matthew, chapter 2, beginning at verse 16. "Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, was in a furious rage. And he sent and killed all the male children, in Bethlehem and in all that region, who were
two years old or under, according to the time which he had ascertained from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what was spoken by the profit Jeremiah. A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing in loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children. She refused to be consoled because they were no more. But when Herod died, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared in
a dream saying to Joseph in Egypt, 'Rise, take the child and his mother, and go to the land of Israel. For those who sought the child's life are dead.'" When Tim asked me about a topic for tonight, I suggested the dark night of the soul -- which all of you will recognize as the title of a very famous work written
in the last quarter of the sixteenth century by the Spanish mystic Saint John of the Cross. He wrote this book, not as one who was struggling with the dark
night, but as one who had found spiritual peace. And he wanted to share what he had found with the younger members of his order. And therefore, he could talk about a dark night in which he went out, but he could go out praising God because he had found the light that was in God. For us, the dark night of the soul is far more dreary, and we can understand Rachel weeping for her children or Job cursing his day or Paul dying
daily. This is the reason that we turn, now, to this particular passage because we have, in our own background, a built-in understanding for tragedy and sorrow. This is encased in the familiar story of the wise men -- we say three, but the Bible doesn't give us a number -- who come from the east.
They are probably followers of Zoroaster, they had been spending their years scanning the heavens for some sign of deity. They were looking for some frozen fingerprint or footprint of God that had been left behind in creation, because they believed -- what we call today -- the teleological
argument that God could be found in the divine order. But now a star appears and leads them, and they are venturesome enough to pull up stakes and to follow the star. And they come to Palestine, and there they meet Herod the king. And they ask, "Where is the Messiah to be born?"
and the answer is, "In Bethlehem." And so they go, only after the king has extracted the promise that they would return and acquaint him with the results of their quest. And if they were successful in finding the one who was born king of the Jews, then he, too, would go and pay homage and worship. And you recall, they came to the house and they found
Jesus, they found the child. And this is the beautiful scene of Jesus and His parents, the miracle and the mystery of Christmas. This is all that you would expect us to talk about, the beauty of this nativity scene extended however many months or years until the Magi arrived
there, bringing the gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh. How many times we have seen the pageant of the gifts of the wise men, indeed, how many times we have participated in such pageants when were children and growing up. But there is something more. First of all, those who had spent their lives as seekers for God
in the heavens found God in human form in a child. This is why Martin Luther -- you will remember -- liked the festival of Christmas. He liked God in the form of a babe because it is this adaptation of God to us -- coming to us in human form in the form of a babe, of a child
-- that shows us the extent of God's offering His hand to reintroduce Himself to us when we have thrust Him back so many times. And while they're there, they're warned in a dream that they should not return. And so they went back to the east, not going through the capital and seeing Herod. And Artec said, when he learned that he was tricked,
then he killed all of the infants, the slaughter of the infants that took place, of children, male, up to two years old. And immediately, the author breaks out with a passage from the 31st chapter of Jeremiah, the lamentation of Rachel weeping for her children as Benjamin is led along into captivity.
Rachel seems to emerge from her tomb, and to weep and wail and lament at the loss of her children. This is what any sensitive soul would do, isn't it? You remember Dostoevsky's writing, "As long as one person suffers, I suffer"? That, in the face of Lenin saying, "I don't care one wit about all this prattle concerning the
sacredness of human life"? Or you remember the sensitive novelist in France, after World War Two, Camus, wrestling with the question of one innocent child's suffering. There was one who said that, "As long as this happens, I can never believe. This one fact is enough to keep me from believing." He addressed a group of Dominicans and said, "If you believe,
really believe. And if you preach, really preach what you believe, and teach it. But as long as there is one innocent child suffering, I cannot believe." This is the kind of sensitivity that the meaningless slaughter of infants immediately invokes in our spirits, and we cannot palliate it
by saying, "After all, as small as Bethlehem was, it couldn't have been more than 20 or 25 who were slaughtered. And that many will go today when a school bus overturns," or, "More survived than did not survive if you look at a population large enough." You cannot say it was enough for them to go -- in order for Jesus to escape into Egypt with Joseph and Mary. This ineluctable fact is
still there, that in this world, innocent children suffer and are slaughtered. I don't have much to say tonight that you have not already thought, but I want to share with you three points. First of all, this is the sort of world into which Christ came. It was a world in which there was incessant war, great poverty,
and heavy oppression. Look at Herod himself, not really a Jew, an Idumean. Here is one who murdered in order that he could keep power once he got it, killing his own son. The emperor Augustus said, "I had rather be the pig of Herod than his son. The pig was safer." This is kind of person who was
in power and this is the kind of person that is often in power -- he was living in an apocalyptic time. Ernst Käsemann has re-convinced us of that, that the New Testament really is born in the matrix of apocalypticism. The Jews were looking for Messiah, but the last thing that Herod wanted was for Messiah
to come. He had gained the pinnacle of power, and he intended to keep it, he was not going to be dethroned. And he hoped to pass the power onto his family, for this is the way power is. Many believe that good can only be achieved through power. I think if you took a vote today, overwhelmingly
the answer would be that this is the way you achieve your goals. And if you are powerless, you cannot achieve your goals. So we have lived in a society in which the favorite word has been empowerment, and we are for it. But do we really understand the nature of power? Lord Acton said, "Power corrupts." Lord Eustace Percy
wrote in his biography of John Knox that, "Of all the lessons history teaches, this one is plainest. The person who tries to achieve ideal ends through force is always unscrupulous and is always corrupt." Power does corrupt. Power means that you do not want to be confronted with something that questions you.
You cannot stand the threat, and therefore you become more and more encased in your own pride. The Bible says what is behind all of this is human sin. I know there's a great division, and there always has been, about where do you tackle things at the level of structures or at the levels of persons, and the answer -- as far as
I'm concerned -- if you cannot deal with persons, if you cannot change persons, you will not be able to change structures and forms. You can change those who have power, but you have the same power-crazed drunkenness on the throne. The Old Testament wrestles with the origin of evil, the origin of sin.
Is it Genesis 3? Is it the temptation in the garden? Or is it corruption coming from outside with the angels that come? Or is it our evil imagination? It's a sort of technical term in Hebrew very closely akin to Freud's id. Kierkegaard has helped us with his concept of dread. Giving us the psychological description of
Genesis 3, how we are filled with fear, we are filled with dread. And therefore, sin, first of all, takes the form of egocentricity. We who were created in the image of God -- to respond to God, to mirror God, to reflect Him -- we instead turn in on ourselves, and
egocentricity, then, is the first element of our sin. And then the second is idolatry. As soon as we dethrone God, we create a god. That god may be the self, or the god may be the state, or the god may be some ideology or some institution, but we create a god so that this egocentricity immediately translates itself into idolatry. And think of
how many idolatries abound in society. Not giving our loyalty to the one to whom loyalty is due, we create that idol that we can control. We create that false God that we now can manipulate for our own ends. The Bible is quite clear, the reason infants are slaughtered, the
reason these things happened in the first-century world, basically, comes down to the central citadel of the human self -- to our own pride, to our own egocentricity, to our own idolatry -- which in the end, simply strips us of all morality. And therefore, you are no longer persons, you are only things to be manipulated
and controlled. That's one of the great problems today, how can there be another if you are no longer a person? If you are a person, you are an other, and therefore one can relate on that basis. But if you're only a thing that challenges my own idolatry, then you can be removed like harmers after the Bolshevik
Revolution. They were not murdered, they were destroyed. But destroyed because they harmed the system, and the system has now become the idol -- the object -- of first loyalty. If this is the sort of world into which Christ came, my second point is, this is the sort of world in which we live.
We move from utopianism to dystopianism, we move from the highest hopes to bleak despair. But whether we are oscillating from one pole to the other, we must take seriously the diseased nature of the society of which we are a part. This is the century that has seen the Holocaust,
and we say 4 to 6 million Jews -- so many that we can't really deal with it. I know I could not deal with it in terms of guilt, in terms of 4 or 6 million, give or take 2 million deaths, until I saw the German play, The Deputy -- Der Stellvertreter -- in which it came down to a single person. And once it was reduced to a single person, then somehow it was small enough -- or vivid enough --
for me to understand and realize how monstrous had been the crime that had been committed. But think of the other holocausts, think of the one in China during the revolution and of the millions that were lost then. Or, think of Indochina, we don't know how many millions have perished -- including children -- through war and starvation
and oppression, in this very decade. We are insensitive. We simply are radial men and women, it all comes to us and we're able to flick it off and to cast it out because we really aren't able to deal with it. And the futurologist and economist Heilbroner says that it will get worse, that as the limitations of our planet become more apparent --
as shortages become more acute, as population grows -- we are unable to discipline ourselves, and therefore there will be more and more authoritarian governments, there will be less and less civil rights, there will be more oppression, inevitably. And he says, not on the basis of human sin, but he also points to the human condition saying
that we are, basically, in our make up, Freudian. We represent civilization, or better, we represent the discontents who are in civilization. We simply are sociopaths, we are unable to live together, to share, and to recognize. So inevitably, we live in this kind of society that is irascible,
that is constantly clawing at each other, and the only way that you can have any semblance of order is the imposition of order from above. The difference between the Bible and Freud is that the biblical view of the human being is redeemable, someone who can be changed and become an apostle and agent of
change in the service of Jesus Christ. My third point is, this is the world for which Christ died in order to redeem. You recall in Chapter 1 of Matthew, the angel comes to Joseph and tells him, "Thou shalt call His name Jesus. For it is He who shall save His people
from their sin." To understand the incarnation, you must see it against the background of human sin, for the star of Bethlehem shines against the blackness of the human condition. And from the very beginning, "His name shall be Jesus because He will be Savior." A great deal is made,
today, about the proper hermeneutic for understanding the work of Jesus. Whether you understand Jesus as reconciler or liberator or whatnot, I'm still convinced that the best word to describe the work of Jesus is Savior -- that He comes to save us and He comes to save the whole world. Indeed, I would say the whole cosmos. For He is the cosmic Christ as is so clearly
portrayed in the letter to the Colossians. This is the world in which He came to die in order to redeem. The death on the cross represents a new definition of power. You see the old contrast between Herod the king and the infants who were slaughtered -- the power and powerlessness.
But here, now -- in the life of Jesus and in His death -- you see a new definition of power. Saint Paul makes this crystal clear in his first letter to the Corinthians where he says, "We preach Christ crucified. The wisdom of God and the power of God." The Jews require a sign,
they were always looking for a Messiah to have characteristics that they themselves gave him. They were the trappings of external authority and power. Jesus could have lead an insurrection if He had chosen to conform to the messianic ideal of those who were his contemporaries, but He refused. They
require a sign, and you know the temptations are all temptations for Him to adopt for Himself the Jewish messianic ideal. If He had done that, then they would have followed Him. Even to the cross, there is the demand for the sign -- the external sign of human power. But He
refuses. The Greeks seek after wisdom, they believe that everything can be understood and worked through by the mind. They do not look for messiah, for each of us is messiah, according to the Jew. Each equipped with noose, with knowledge -- each able to work out her or his own salvation --
they seek after wisdom. But we preach Christ crucified -- to them who are called both Jew and Greek -- the wisdom of God and power of God. Therefore, to understand the true meaning of God's power, as well as His wisdom, is not to multiply our concept by infinity, but to bring
our attention totally to the cross of Jesus Christ, and see here how God redefines power and wisdom in the death of His Son. This is tough to believe in the face of the slaughter of innocents, but this is heart of the Christian faith. Of course, it does not stop
with the cross, but if the cross is not there, Easter has no meaning. Just as Easter had behind it the cross, so the incarnation has behind it the slaughter of innocents -- the two are there. One is God's way with us, the other is our way with God. The resurrection and the ascension
point also to the parrhesia, to the fact that the drama is still going on and the drama will not be over until the one who was crucified returns and openly is acknowledged as the King of kings and Lord of lords. This is where the full
revelation takes place. Now we walk by faith and not by sight, we walk by faith that the light keeps on shining in the darkness, and the darkness will never be able to put it out. You remember, this is why Barth said he loved the music of Mozart, that Mozart saw the left, but his music always flows from left
to right -- he knows the threat, but he never succumbed to the threat. There's always the affirmation that action flows from left to right, away from the threat, toward reaffirmation. This is what we know in the midst of suffering and pain, in the midst of all that we see around us in the world, that we have a friend --
we have a friend who has redefined power and who is in control. We know that suffered love is the most powerful force there is, and that one day suffering love will become triumphant love. And, that the nature of suffering, with its power to triumph, will be openly revealed.
And in that knowledge we can live -- although we don't like it, and we do not live insensitively to it -- but we can live with the ambiguities of the Herods and the innocent children, of the Hitlers and the Holocaust and all of the others, in the knowledge that the one who controls is the One whom we
serve. And, who has called and asked us to be ambassadors for him so that through us He can continue this ministry of saving, until the whole world confesses His name and kneels at His feet. Tim said that I could stop
period, or stop paragraph, and see if there's discussion. I think I'd rather stop paragraph and have a prayer. Let us pray. Almighty and everlasting God, we bless Thee for the miracle and mystery of Christmas, for its beauty,
joy. For its music, sound. For the love and affection it engenders. For the Spirit of giving that it underscores. For the majesty of the revelation of Thyself in a human babe. For the knowledge that the Lord of the universe could take the form of a human child,
what can we do but bow and adore Thee? But we know also that we live in a fallen world and that we are part of the problem -- the human problem -- that remains from generation to generation.
Remind us now of the babes that are being slaughtered because of neglect, because of hunger -- some because of total privation. Make us sensitive to those needs, and above all, make us caring.
Release us from the prisons of ourselves. Introduce us to others as others. May we respond as children made in Thy image created to grow up into the image of Christ as we are remade anew. Perform, we beseech Thee, the true transubstantiation
this Christmas, when Christ is formed in each one of us. This we pray in His name. Amen.
CONGREGATION: Amen.
TIM: Let us rise to receive the Lord's blessing. The Lord says the Redeemer will come to Zion, to those in Jacob --