Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
December 28, 2003

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

In the church calendar, it’s still Christmas. Out in the world, we equate the Christmas season with the shopping season that extends from the day after Thanksgiving to the day before Christmas. On December 26, the "after Christmas" sales begin. In the church, however, the season of Christmas doesn’t start until Christmas Day, or at least Christmas Eve, when many churches, including ours, hold their actual Christmas services. Now, I know that that’s a problem for lots of folks in the church. We want to start singing Christmas carols on the first Sunday of Advent. After all, they’re playing them in all the stores, aren’t they? Why can’t we sing them in church? The liturgically correct answer to that question is: Because it isn’t Christmas yet. I mean, no one wants to sing "Christ the Lord is Risen Today" during Lent. During Lent, liturgically, Christ hasn’t risen yet. It’s the same with Advent and Christmas. In the church we don’t celebrate Christ’s birth until Christmas because, liturgically, he hasn’t been born yet. Now, to be honest, I fudge on that a little bit. My sermon last Sunday was essentially a Christmas sermon, and we sang two Christmas carols in that service. If I were a liturgical purist, like many of my friends and most of my seminary professors, I wouldn’t have done that. So remember, at least, that with some other pastors it could be worse. But now it really is Christmas, and I can preach about Christmas and put Christmas carols in the service with a clear conscience.

So, what is Christmas all about? For us Christians, it is about Emanuel, God with us. It is about God coming to be with God’s people. That’s what I talked about last week and in our Christmas Eve service. For Christians, that’s who Jesus is-Emanuel, God with us. To call Jesus God with us is, for us, a powerfully, profoundly true confession of faith; but today I want to look at another aspect of what Christmas is about, because, you see, once again I am reminded of my favorite statement by one of my favorite people, my friend Dennis: "There is no non-dangerous theology." The danger in focusing exclusively on Jesus as God with us is that we may come to see him solely as God walking around on earth merely disguised as a human. In other words, we risk losing sight of the fact that Jesus of Nazareth, whatever else we may in faith confess him to be, was a flesh and blood human being. He was born as a baby like the rest of you. He grew up through all the stages of childhood and adolescence like the rest of us, and he lived a life and died at the end of that life just like the rest of us. He was, truly and not just in appearance, one of us.

He was, however, a very special one of us. He was a human being whose life, indeed the purpose of whose life, was to show us what God intends human life to look like. That’s the great thing about the Christian confession of who Jesus Christ was. He is the image of the living God. Christians say: If you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus. He is the Incarnation of the Word and will of God; that’s not all that he was. We also confess that he is the very image of what God intends human life to be like. If you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus; but also, if you want to know what you’re supposed to be like, look in the same place. Paul expressed this idea when he called Jesus the new Adam. He is the model to which we are to look for our understanding of how God wants us to be with one another.

Which brings us to this morning’s reading from the pseudo-Pauline letter to the Colossians. In that reading, the author doesn’t come right out and say what I just said. Rather, he is instructing the Christians of the Greek city of Colossae on the virtues appropriate to the Christian life. To put that another way, we can say that he is instructing them in what human life looks like when it is fully authentic. He is telling them how we live when we live the way God wants us to.. Listen to part of that reading again:

clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Bear with one another..., forgive one another, just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Above all, clothe yourselves with love....Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts. Let the word of Christ dwell in your richly. With gratitude in your hearts sing"songs to God".[Give] thanks to God the Father....

Quite a tall order, huh? At least, I know it’s an awfully tall order for me. I can’t do it. At least, I can’t do it fully and not all the time. I suspect the same is true for you.

But doesn’t it remind you of someone? It does me. The one person I know of who lived like that, who embodies those virtues in all aspects of his life was Jesus. He truly clothed himself with compassion and love. He healed the sick, including those whom the culture of his time said were sick because they were sinners. He reached out to the outcast, to those whom his society and his religion rejected and included them in his ministry. He taught and practiced forgiveness. He lived with peace in his heart. Even when he confronted the authorities of his day he did it with an inner peace that came from knowing the unfailing presence of God in his life. I don’t know if he actually sang songs to God. The Gospels don’t say he was a singer, but he sure prayed a lot, which amounts to the same thing. And he continually gave thanks to God the Father for his life, his mission, his calling. He lived these words from Colossians. He was the model for them. He is how we know that this is how God wants us to live.

Now, at this point we can run into a problem. I have heard people who consider themselves very devout Christians essentially dismiss everything about Jesus except his death and resurrection. His death, they will say, made atonement for our sins, so it matters. His resurrection conquered death and is our guarantee of eternal life, so it matters. But nothing else about him really matters, these people seem to believe. He is not and cannot truly be a model for how we are to live our very human lives. Why? Because, they actually believe, he wasn’t really human. He was God. He was God walking around on the earth looking like a human being, like a First Century Jewish man from Galilee; but all that was illusion. What he really was, was God.

And how can God be a model for our lives? We aren’t God, for heaven’s sake. We can’t possible live like God. We’re mortals, sinners indeed. God is so far above all that that we can’t even try to emulate God. All we can do is believe in God in Jesus Christ, but can’t be expected to emulate him! He was God!

Tragically, the Christian church, in most of its myriad manifestations and throughout most of its history, has encouraged this was of thinking about Jesus. Oh, sure, nominally it calls this way of thinking about Jesus heresy. It calls it the heresy of Docetism, the heresy of believing that Jesus wasn’t really human but only appeared to be; but while out of one side of its mouth the church has condemned this belief as heresy it has, out of the other side of it’s mouth, so over-emphasized Jesus’ divinity, the way that he was indeed Emanuel, God with us, God Incarnate, and has so ignored his humanity while denigrating fleshly existence that it has in fact encouraged the very belief that it supposedly considers heresy. The Church is itself guilty of a heresy, the heresy of holding only to one side of the dual nature of Christ, proclaiming his divinity while dismissing his humanity.

The church has a lot to answer for in this regard. Orthodox Christian confession is in fact that Jesus was both fully God and fully human. The Nicene Creed says as much. And look at what dismissing Jesus’ humanity does. It makes him irrelevant. Think for a minute about your experience with the people who have been important role models in your life-parents or other people who raised you, teachers, mentors, leaders who inspired you in some aspect of your life. . What was most important about them to you? What they said? What they told you to do, how they told you to live? I doubt it. I suspect that what was most important for you about them wasn’t what they said but how they lived. In most any field of human endeavor, the best, truest, most authentic leadership is leadership by example, not by words. But what kind of example, what kind of model for us is a God set far above us in realms of glory and inaccessible in blinding light? A really bad one. One that we can’t possibly follow.

But we have Jesus. That’s the genius of Christianity. That’s the genius of God, that God became human, truly, completely human, in Jesus the Christ. Let’s say it again. It’s not: GOD became human. It’s: God became HUMAN. Truly, fully human. Jesus was a person, and we can follow his example. Because he lived the way he did, we can strive to live that way too. We won’t do it as well as he did, but that’s no excuse for not trying. But that’s precisely why God had to become human: That we might live like Jesus, that we might, in the words of Colossians, above all clothe ourselves in love.

Do you want to know what God is like? Look at Jesus. Just as importantly: Do you want to know what you’re supposed to be like? Look at Jesus, the fully human Jesus whose example we are called to follow. Amen.