Rudolph’s glowing red nose was great gift—misunderstood, difficult, even dangerous—but a gift nonetheless. Using clips from the Rankin-Bass holiday classic Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, I share insights about the gifts that God gives us by relating the TV special to the experiences of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.
The following is my original manuscript. The video clips from Rudolph that I showed in church are included.
In keeping with the spirit of Christmas, I guess, it’s fitting that this classic Christmas special begins with an unusual birth. No, it’s not a virgin birth—and God knows Rudolph’s parents are not at all like Mary and Joseph. Notice the first thing Rudolph’s mother, Mrs. Donner, says when she sees her son’s glowing nose: “We’ll simply have to overlook it.”
Overlook it! Oh my goodness! So Rudolph’s mother can’t conceive for a moment that this unusual feature of her son’s anatomy is nothing more than a problem that needs to be solved—or at least hidden. From her perspective—and her husband’s perspective and even Santa’s perspective—there’s just nothing good about it at all. She can’t conceive for a moment that far from being a problem, it might actually be a gift or a blessing in some way!
I recently created a 26-day Advent devotional booklet for my church called “Good News of Great Joy.” I will be posting a devotional from it each day between now and Christmas day. Enjoy!
“It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas,” as I’m sure either Bing Crosby, Johnny Mathis, or Perry Como is telling us somewhere up or down our radio dial right now. Indeed, it’s beginning to sound a lot like Christmas, too. Some radio stations play Christmas music round the clock from Thanksgiving to Christmas Day.
Since I love Christmas music, I’m not complaining—except about one small thing: We never hear a good Christmas song about Joseph, Jesus’ adoptive father! Have you noticed? Mary certainly gets plenty of well-deserved attention in song—like, for example, in Amy Grant’s beautiful “Breath of Heaven.”
The Bible even features Mary singing her own song, the Magnificat, in Luke 1:46-55. By contrast, we never hear Joseph speak in his own words anywhere in scripture.
One Canadian rock band, a favorite of mine, sought to remedy that. They wrote a song about Joseph, in Joseph’s voice, recounting the likely argument that took place between Joseph and Mary after she broke the news to him that she was pregnant by the Holy Spirit. According to that song, here is what Joseph says to her:
Rumors are flying all over Galilee these days And, Mary, I’m trying to be cool. When my friends walk by ’em, they cannot look me in the eye Baby, I’m trying You’re asking me to believe too many things You’re asking me to believe too many things
I love the way this song humanizes Joseph’s plight. It captures some of the emotional turmoil he must have been going through. Imagine: your fiancée tells you that she’s pregnant, miraculously, without the intervention of a human father. Who could blame Joseph if he said, “You’re asking me to believe too many things”? Because you know what Joseph is thinking: that his fiancée has cheated on him!
In the midst of Joseph’s anger, broken-heartedness, jealousy and disappointment, he could not imagine that God was at work in the most profoundly good and loving way possible—that through these difficult circumstances, God would soon demonstrate how much he loved the world by taking on flesh and becoming like us, so that through faith in his Son Jesus we could become like him.
Are you dealing with anger or disappointment right now because something in your life hasn’t turned out the way you expected? What can Joseph’s experience teach you during this difficult experience?
This would have made a good Thanksgiving post yesterday, but better late than never…
Andrew Wilson, whose praises I’ve sung on this blog several times already, gave an interview this week with his wife, Rachel, about their new book, The Life You Never Expected, which comes out in the States next year. The book is about their ongoing adventure of parenting two autistic children in light of their Christian faith.
In the following excerpt, Wilson discusses what he’s learned about gratitude from the experience:
I know I’ve got to get my head around the fact that what I deserve is death and condemnation, and, instead, I’ve received life. And you start there with the gospel, really. The center of the gospel makes you grateful as you consider it—and your eschatological hope and all the rest—compared to what you have. So you stop feeling grumbly about what you have.
But as that sets in in your heart, it begins to spread sideways as well and you become grateful rather than entitled to people… other people—you know, human organizations and institutions and the like—and start thinking, “This isn’t just that I’m grateful to God that he’s given me this instead of eternal separation from God. It’s changes the way you think about gratitude toward other people as well. And you begin to feel happy and excited about things that other people assume is their rights.
Next he talks about his gratitude that in Britain he has access to health resources that many parents of autistic children in other parts of the world don’t have.
But [gratitude] starts with the gospel, and you realize this is just scandalous, and I’ve got so much more than I should have. And as that seeps through bits of your life, it does begin to change [you]. Obviously, that’s a very nice picture of it; it doesn’t always feel like that, but I genuinely think I am a much more grateful person, and I have a much better theology of gift now than I did three years ago because of learning to see gifts everywhere.
He means “scandalous” in the sense that we take so many of God’s blessings for granted.
When I hear things like this, it reaffirms my conviction that we preachers need to preach the gospel in every sermon, in one way or another. We need to continually remind ourselves of the fact that “what [we] deserve is death and condemnation,” whereas what we receive in Christ is eternal life.
We discussed St. Anselm’s ontological argument for God’s existence way back in Philosophy 1001 at the Georgia Institute of Technology 25 years ago. The argument has proven to be surprisingly resilient—and even my prof expressed admiration for it. At the same time, like most people, I fear that we’re playing with words more than saying anything about God.
Nevertheless, Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga updated it recently. I’m posting it here not because I necessarily buy into it, but because I want to remember what it is, and this puts it rather plainly.
Premise #4 is the trickiest for me, but, as Wilson says, it follows from the meaning of “necessary.” Christian theology teaches that God is a necessary, rather than contingent, being; he doesn’t depend on anything else for his existence. You can substitute “maximally great being” for “necessary divine being.”
Here’s a quick, and surprisingly robust, argument for the existence of God. It amounts to a late twentieth century Plantingan rehash of Anselm’s ontological argument, and it goes like this:
1. It is possible that a necessary divine being exists.
2. If a being possibly exists, then it exists in some possible world.
3. Therefore a necessary divine being exists in some possible world (from #1, #2).
4. If a necessary being exists in some possible world, then it exists in all possible worlds.
5. Therefore a necessary divine being exists in all possible worlds (from #3, #4).
6. Therefore a necessary divine being exists (from #5).
The conclusion obviously follows from the premises, so the only question is whether the premises are probably correct. Both #2 and #4, in effect, are simply ways of stating what the words “possible” and “necessary” actually mean, and as such are not as controversial as they might appear. So the real debate is over #1 – but this, to most people, sounds intuitively correct. I’m not saying it will compel people to repent of their sins and follow Jesus, but it’s a good one to pull out at parties, isn’t it? (Presumably it depends on the parties.)
The Parable of the Sheep and the Goats is often used by preachers like me to urge their congregation to be like the “sheep” in the parable. And since most of us are more “goat”-like than “sheep”-like, that means we need to “try harder.” The problem with this approach is that it ignores the context of the parable. Jesus is speaking here of Final Judgment. Salvation or damnation hangs in the balance. If the only difference between “sheep” and “goats” is that one did something that the other failed to do, then are we saying that we have to earn our way into heaven?
I hope not! If so, I’m lost, and so are you!
In this sermon, I’ll offer what I hope is a grace-filled way to understand the parable—one that will inspire us into doing good works rather than guilt-ing us into it.
The following is my original sermon manuscript with footnotes.
Last Sunday marked the end of an era: In the game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Denver Broncos, Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning, a future Hall-of-Famer, who now holds the record for most career passing yards, who has won a Super Bowl, and who is easily among the best to have ever played the game of football, Peyton Manning was benched. His coach put in the second-string guy. I can’t blame the coach: Last Sunday, Manning finished the day with just 35 yards on 5-of-20 passing, zero touchdowns, four interceptions, two sacks and an almost unheard-of zero passer rating. For the season, Manning has nine touchdown passes and 17 interceptions. It’s not good.
Manning went from being a hero to being a goat. It’s not the first time Manning has been a goat, just not usually during the regular season. In fact, the only knock against his career is that while he’s been consistently heroic during the regular season game, he’s sometimes been goat-like during the playoffs—and in two of this three Super Bowl appearances. Of course, football is a team sport, so he doesn’t deserve as much blame as he gets. Besides, this season, one problem is that he has plantar fasciitis, which I know from painful personal experience is just awful!
Heroes and goats… Have you heard that expression before? Sports writers, sports-talk radio show hosts, and sports fans use this expression often. I don’t know where it comes from—but it’s clear from today’s scripture that being a goat back in the first century was no better than being a goat in the twenty-first century! Read the rest of this entry »
From my friend Julie’s blog… Music helps me when I’m hurting like this. I can’t think of a better song for the occasion, or a better performance of it.
I complained in my previous post—just a few hours ago—that we often risk missing the gospel of Jesus Christ in the four Gospels. I said that we turn scripture passages such as the Good Samaritan and the Sheep and the Goats (which I’m preaching on this Sunday) into messages of works righteousness. The message is “try harder or else!”—or why mince words? “Try harder or be damned for eternity!”
Was I exaggerating? Consider today’s blog post from Adam Hamilton, which is an appeal for us Christians in America to support the immigration of Syrian refugees. Much of what he says is reasonable. But then, like many fellow pastors this week, he badly mishandles the parable of the Sheep and the Goats from Matthew 25:31-46. He writes, “In the parable it appears that the goats thought of themselves as religious.” [Probably true.] “They were therefore surprised when, at the last judgment, they were turned away.” [Definitely true.] He continues (emphasis his):
So, why did the goats turn people away who were in need? I think it was because they were afraid and they allowed their fear to override their compassion and humanity. And the sheep? They found the courage to overcome their fears and to act with compassion and love.
I’m sure the “goats” failed for a host of reasons, which likely included fear, but that’s beside the point. Here’s my problem: Jesus’ words here are about nothing less than Final Judgment, salvation or damnation, heaven or hell. Does Hamilton really mean to say that the difference between those who are saved and those who are lost comes down to our ability to “find the courage to overcome our fears” or not?
Do you see the problem? It’s downright Pelagian! Without qualifying his words, Hamilton is implying that we’re saved or lost based on what we do! This isn’t the gospel of grace; it’s the gospel of good works! It’s the gospel of “try harder or be damned.”
I’m guessing Hamilton doesn’t mean to imply this. After all, like me, Hamilton is a Wesleyan-Arminian. He’s supposed to know as well as I do that while we cooperate with the Holy Spirit (theologically, we’re synergists, not monergists), even our cooperation is made possible by grace, such that none of our good works contributes anything to our salvation.
But if Hamilton isn’t talking about salvation, why does he use this particular parable, in which nothing less than salvation is at stake?
Where’s the gospel? Where’s grace?
As I said in my previous post, if we rely on the gospel of good works, we’re all in trouble. Maybe in the instance of Syrian refugees, Adam Hamilton and others are “overcoming their fear” through their advocacy. But aren’t there plenty of other times in his life when he fails to “overcome his fear”? Aren’t there at least thousands of times in his life when he “did it not to one of the least of these”? Will he be condemned to hell for these failures?
Of course not! Why? Because we’re saved not because of what we either do or fail to do, but because of what Christ has done for us!
Otherwise, we’re doomed. Hamilton knows this. I just wish he would say it!
When we pastors use this parable to say something about works of mercy, which is perfectly appropriate, we need to also say that these works are a sign of salvation, which comes to us as a free gift from God by grace through faith alone.
By all means, there’s a warning here: Saving faith will include good works. And if we’re not doing these things regularly, in spite of our many failures, then it may be a sign that we haven’t truly trusted in Christ. The apostle James makes this point repeatedly.
But this isn’t Hamilton’s point here. Like many others, he’s preaching the gospel of “try harder or else.” And that gospel can’t save us.
I’ve blogged recently about how much easier preaching the Old Testament is when you believe, often against the propaganda of mainline Protestant seminary, that the Old Testament, like all of scripture, is about Jesus. Granted, to believe that, one has to believe that the same Holy Spirit, the very Spirit of Christ, inspired both Testaments—and that the sending of God’s Son into the world wasn’t a surprise or a change of plans for God; rather, from an eternal perspective the Lamb was slain “from the foundation of the world” (Rev. 13:8).
The gospel of Jesus Christ permeates the Old Testament. And of course it’s often the main subject of the apostolic epistles of the New Testament. It’s become clear to me recently, however, that unless we’re careful, we can end up missing the gospel in the four Gospels themselves!
What do I mean?
I’m thinking, for instance, of the scripture that I preached last Sunday, the Parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10:25-36, and (even more) this Sunday’s text, Matthew 25:31-46, the parable of the Sheep and the Goats. As I said in my sermon on the Good Samaritan, we can easily turn the parable into a message of works righteousness rather than grace: “What? You call yourself a disciple of Jesus Christ and you don’t love your neighbor the way the Good Samaritan loved this wounded victim on the side of the road? Shame on you! You need to try harder!”
As I said on Sunday, I stink at trying harder! Don’t you? I mean, honestly… If the message of the parable is that we need to be like the Good Samaritan, aren’t we all in trouble? (Maybe I should speak for myself.) But when I hear a “try harder” message, I tend to feel more guilty and ashamed than convicted. Guilt and shame, alongside anger, are default emotions for me, unfortunately; I hardly need extra incentive to feel that way! 🙁
Over the past week, I’ve noticed that many of my fellow Christians and clergy colleagues have appealed to the Good Samaritan as scriptural warrant for welcoming Syrian refugees into the U.S. (and especially into those southern states, like my own, whose governors have said they won’t accept any). More than one pastor I read said that this issue strikes at the “core of the gospel.”
Politics aside, does it really? Does the question of whether or how to offer sanctuary to Syrian refugees strike at the core of the gospel? If so, what exactly is the gospel? Is it based on good works? Is it about what I do? Is it about “trying harder” after all?
I hope not. Otherwise I’m in trouble! Aren’t you?
What does Paul say? “For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin” (Rom. 3:20). The law can only condemn me. I have no righteousness of my own; it’s only because of Christ’s righteousness, which I receive through faith, that I’m saved (Phil. 3:9). I hope that this strikes closer to the core of the gospel than anything else!
Besides, it’s not as if social media activism—or “slacktivism”—would bring any of us nearer to the “works righteousness” gospel anyway! I’m not any more like the Good Samaritan if I tweet an angry tweet or post an angry Facebook post than if I don’t. If the gospel is about works, then I’m lost and so are you. We don’t need to try harder. We need Jesus!
What, then, is the primary meaning of the Good Samaritan if not to “try harder”? Feel free to read or watch my sermon. But my favorite part of the sermon was sharing an insight that the Church Fathers shared in their preaching and teaching about this parable: The Good Samaritan is Jesus Christ. We need Jesus to be a neighbor to us. We are the helpless, dying victim in need of rescue. As I said last Sunday:
The most important meaning of this parable is that Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, is our Good Samaritan. We human beings, the apostle Paul says, have made ourselves God’s enemies because of our sin and rebellion against God. Satan has stripped us, beaten us, and left us for dead on the side of the road. We have no one to save us—until Jesus the Good Samaritan comes to us and offers us salvation.
Now, Samaritans and Jews hated one another. They were enemies. An ordinary Samaritan wouldn’t have compassion on his enemy, a Jew—any more than we’d have compassion on those terrorists that attacked Paris on Friday. But Jesus the Good Samaritan had compassion on his enemies. An ordinary Samaritan wouldn’t risk his life on this dangerous road in order to save his enemy, but Jesus the Good Samaritan not only risked his life, he laid down his life to save his enemies. An ordinary Samaritan wouldn’t give his time, his strength, his money, in order to nurse his enemy back to health. But Jesus the Good Samaritan said, “I’ll take the sickness of your sin upon myself, and I’ll suffer your disease for you, even though I’ve done nothing to deserve it; I’ll gladly suffer it”—I’ll take all your bad stuff and give you all my good stuff; I’ll take your sin and unrighteousness and give you my righteousness—so that you will be eternally healed!
I delivered the following homily at last night’s Church Council meeting. I hope it’s clear below that I love Charlie Sheen. I’m rooting for him. He’s a gifted actor, of course. But it’s more than that for me: I recognize in him a fellow sinner in need of God’s grace at every moment. We’re not so different from him, are we? As I say in this sermon, we all have shameful, embarrassing, guilt-ridden secrets. It’s just that ours don’t get exposed on TMZ or in the National Enquirer! Something about his story scratches the grace itch for me.
Part of the reason that Sheen came forward with this announcement today is, well… he’s broke. You see, for four years he’s been paying lots of people to keep quiet about his illness—including women he’s slept with over the years who threatened to go public his secret. And when I say a lot of money, I mean a lot of money! Upwards of ten million dollars!
I get the irony here: For years—decades, even—we’ve known about Sheen’s drug and alcohol abuse; we’ve known about the prostitutes that he’s hired; but in his mind, it was H.I.V.—rather than all the other self-destructive things he’s done—that was so shameful and embarrassing to him that he was willing to pay ten million dollars to keep it secret! Which goes to show, of course, that some people don’t embarrass easily!
But it also goes to show that if even someone like Charlie Sheen isn’t completely without shame, then it’s safe to say that everyone has shameful, embarrassing, guilt-ridden secrets that they want to hide from others!
But this is where the good news of the gospel comes in. In his own way, Charlie Sheen expressed at least a little bit of this good news when he told Matt Lauer, “I think that I release myself from this prison today.” What a relief! He feels like he’s released from prison!
I can’t help but think of Jesus’ own words: “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”[1] A big part of the truth of the gospel is that we are all sinners—and before we can even receive God’s gift of salvation in Christ, before we can receive the good news of the gospel, we have to confess bad news!
We are sinners! It sounds like bad news. But you know what I’ve discovered in my own life? Even this bad news, when you let it sink into your bones, is incredibly good news: What a relief to know—apart from God’s grace, left to my own devices—that I am a hopeless sinner! At last I see there’s a reason I struggle like this! There’s actually a reason, as St. Paul says, that “I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.”[2]
Years ago, I heard an interview with actress Patty Duke, who lived for years with undiagnosed bipolar disorder. She said she was so relieved when her doctor finally told her that something really was wrong with her, and that this problem had a name.
Humanity’s main problem has a name, too—sin. Left untreated, it will destroy us and people we love, both now and for eternity.
When you realize that you share this problem with the rest of humanity, and that all you can do is “fling yourself on God’s mercies” and cry out, “Help me, Jesus,” that is a wonderful place to be! Because that’s the place at which God’s all-sufficient grace meets you.
So thank you, Jesus, for this bad news!
But not so fast, you might think: It’s one thing for someone like Charlie Sheen to come clean about his sins. After all, I don’t know if Charlie Sheen has any religious faith, but he certainly isn’t famous for being a churchgoer or any kind of born-again Christian. That’s what we are! And doesn’t Paul say in Romans 6, the scripture I read earlier, that we shouldn’t sin anymore—and that if we still sin, then there’s something seriously wrong with us?
No. That’s not what he says.
While it’s true that we ought to sin less and less over time as we’re sanctified by the Holy Spirit—indeed, to become holier—Paul says, in spite of whether or to what extent we’ve been sanctified, we are still, at this present moment, “dead to sin.” This is, Paul says, an objective fact that is true of all Christian believers.
Why? Because of what Christ has done for us! “For the death [Christ] died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God.” In other words, we are dead to sin not because of anything we’ve done, or do, but because of what Christ did, “once for all” —all means all of us—on the cross!
But Christ didn’t merely die on the cross for our sins—so that we could be forgiven—although that’s great news in and of itself. Even more, he died to our sins. And since we die with him, as represented by our baptism, as Paul says in Romans 6:4, we also die to sin. His death to sin has become our death to sin. And this is true, regardless of the fact that we continue to sin.
Paul’s point is, even though we still sin, we are no longer enslaved by sin.
Think of it this way: For the past four years, Charlie Sheen was enslaved by all these people who held all this power over him: the power to blackmail him; the power to force him to do their bidding, including paying them upward of $10 million. He was deeply in their debt, and he couldn’t afford to pay them anymore. By going public with this secret, he was set free from those forces who enslaved him. He’s set free!
Now, for all we know, these people who’ve been blackmailing him for the past four years might still come to Charlie Sheen and say, “O.K. Fork over the dough! You need to pay me!” And maybe he will still pay them—old habits die hard—but he certainly doesn’t have to anymore! He can tell them to get lost. He’s free from their influence! They have no power over him!
We who are in Christ are in a similar position: we no longer have to pay attention to that voice of Satan—remember, Satan literally means “the accuser”—to that voice that condemns us and makes us feel guilty: That voice that says, “You’re no good! You’re a failure! You’re a terrible sinner! God doesn’t love you anymore! You’ve let him down too many times!”
Like Charlie Sheen, we can tell the devil to get lost! We don’t answer to him anymore. He has no power over us. Yes, it’s no secret that we’re sinners; yes, it’s no secret that we fail; yes, it’s no secret that we let one another down. But it’s also no secret that God isn’t holding that against us! He isn’t holding it over our heads! He’s forgiven us through the life, death, and resurrection of his Son Jesus!
I have a friend in A.A. This year he’s celebrating, I think, 20 years of sobriety. He travels a lot—he’s a successful entrepreneur. But no matter where he is, no matter what city he’s in—he always seeks out the local A.A. chapter in order to go to a meeting. And I think, “What is it about A.A. that is so powerfully attractive and important to its members that they make a point of seeking out opportunities to go to it?” I want church to be like that! It ought to be like that!
And I think that one reason that A.A. is so important to so many is because the people who go there have nothing to hide! They are up front about their biggest problem. They begin each meeting saying, “My name is [fill in the blank], and I’m an alcoholic.”
In that spirit, I want us to begin this meeting the same way. Turn to the person to your right and say, “Hello, my name is… and I’m a sinner.” Please take a moment to do that right now!
Have you ever noticed that in today’s scripture, Luke 10:25-37, Jesus doesn’t answer the lawyer’s original question? The lawyer asked, “Who is my neighbor?” In response, Jesus told a parable that answered a different question: “Who proved to be a neighbor to this injured victim?” This sermon explores the meaning of this difference. I also relate this scripture to tragic events in Paris last Friday.
Last Friday night at 9:30, in Paris, several terrorists entered a popular concert venue where an American rock band was playing, and they began shooting. At least eighty people were killed. Shortly after that, more terrorists entered a nearby Paris restaurant and killed at least 18. Shortly after that, still more terrorists entered another nearby restaurant and killed at least 14 more. Several other Parisians were killed in the streets. Across town, at least two bombs exploded near a soccer stadium, during a match between Germany and France—which the president of France was attending. The stadium was evacuated.
When we hear about this kind of deadly violence, it’s very easy to identify with its victims—because they’re like us in so many ways. Just in the past week, literally the last nine days, I’ve been to a rock concert with my son. Just last Thursday night, I went to a sporting event at a large stadium in a big city with two of my children. On a few occasions over the past week, I’ve been to restaurants with my family or my wife, Lisa. To think that we could just be going about our business—our normal routines—and have our lives, or the lives of our loved ones, come to a sudden, violent end—just like that… We are so vulnerable. There is so much evil in the world.
