A Fourth Church Sermon by Carol J. Allen

December 25, 2001 | Christmas Day

When Human and Holy Meet

Carol J. Allen
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Titus 3:4–7

How shall we understand this gift of Christmas come to humankind in a tiny baby? On Christmas Day in the year 1223, St. Francis of Assisi made the first manger scene as an attempt to tell the story. He invited members of his town to come and see the image of the baby that he had placed there. It represented the story in quite literal terms. Theologians later attempted to explain the gift in more abstract terms. For example, Karl Barth said that Jesus, the gift, did not come as a result of “gradual human progress but came to earth out of the pure grace of God” (from William Placher’s comments on Christmas).

I think we need something in between the literal representation and the abstract explanation to make the Christmas story our own.

Titus was thought to be a disciple of Paul, even brought to faith by Paul, perhaps. In the brief passage from Titus that serves as today’s sermon text, we find a very neat summary of the gospel, the good news accompanying Jesus’ birth: “When the goodness and the loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us . . . according to his mercy.”

When human and holy meet, salvation happens. Salvation is what we have to ponder in order to understand Christmas. Use this image to think of God and Jesus: God like the root and stem of a plant and Jesus like the fruit. It is Jesus who grafts us onto the plant so that we may share in the life of God. To know what salvation is, we have to know who Jesus is. Our tradition teaches us that Jesus is where God has chosen to meet us. To know God, we must know Jesus.

In my young adult years, I was annoyed by the question “Are you saved?” It always felt to me like a trick question, a question asked by someone not really wanting a conversation or wanting my particular answer at the time. He or she wanted me to give the answer they had chosen as the only and absolute one. So I avoided the question of salvation altogether. As I’ve gotten older, perhaps because I am more aware of my mortality, I have put aside my annoyance and tackled the question. I begin with Frederick Buechner who says that “salvation is an experience first and a doctrine second” (in Wishful Thinking). Pastor Jon Walton wrote that salvation “is the experience of losing yourself and, by doing so, finding yourself. It is loving God and getting lost in that love so deeply that in it you are found.”

These reflections begin to open up the concept of salvation in a direction for making better sense of it. We could still use more specificity.

Consider our experiences of darkness for a minute. There is loveliness in the night: stars, galaxies, love making. Danger and fear also lurk in the darkness. The darkness of ignorance, crime, and hatred builds walls between neighbor and neighbor, friend and friend. Last night on Christmas Eve, here in this sanctuary, we celebrated God’s coming into the dark of a Chicago night. We lit candles to create little circles of light, warmth, and welcome to push back the darkness for a while. Joseph Donders reminds us that Jesus was born in the darkness and became like us, that is, like “lights in the darkness we try to survive.” In his view, salvation has something to do with the resiliency of the human spirit to survive against great odds, a resiliency we see active throughout the whole of Jesus’ life.

Consider how Jesus was born in a small, out-of-the-way, not very swanky place. Born not at the seat of earthly power. Luke’s Gospel doesn’t focus on the glitz of the royals’ gifts or the wisdom of the wise guys or on the light bathing manger straw or sweet angel voices filling the air, like Matthew’s Gospel. Luke focuses on the glow of light on the shepherds, who weren’t the most reputable people of their time. Luke’s message is that God came in Jesus to identify with the poor, the homeless, and the oppressed. This is what is called the scandal of the gospel. God came to people abandoned, forgotten, broken by life, people most readily dismissed by those in charge. Lest we think that you and I don’t belong in the circle of God’s saving light, consider this.

Lisa and Todd Beamer were probably like some of you. According to last Sunday’s Chicago Tribune Parade Magazine, they met in college, wed at twenty-five, and had two sons. On September 11, Todd left his family to fly from Newark, New Jersey, to California. You know the story. Hijackers took over the plane, and Todd and other passengers decided to try and take it back. Consequently, Flight 93 crashed in rural Pennsylvania rather than in a more populated area or on a government target. Lisa, now thirty-two, whose third child is due next month, responded to the question often asked in these days: “Do we have any reason to hope?” She replied,

I personally do have hope, even in the midst of my circumstances. What keeps me going is just knowing that this world isn’t all there is, that there’s a bigger reason I’m here. . . . The whole situation has caused people to look deeper. Is life just about making money or is there something more? It has caused people to show renewed patriotism but also love and concern for fellow human beings–here and throughout the world. . . . I think people have taken stock of who they are. They’ve looked at what others did on September 11 . . . and they’ve asked themselves, “Would I do that? What’s my character, my moral fiber?” There’s been a lot of good across the country that’s come out of this, and I hope it doesn’t wear off.

Lisa Beamer went on to add,

One day, I want my kids to understand . . . why their daddy was able to do what he did. I want them to realize that they can grow up to be like him. . . . It’s definitely going to be hard this holiday. But little kids keep you focused on the here and now . . . it forces me to look up and find whatever joy I can muster, rather than allow this dark cloud to overshadow my whole life. I think that’s what Christmas will be like this year. There will be moments of sadness, but there also will be moments of joy.” (23 December 2001)

“I want them to realize that they can grow up to be like him.” Those words begin to make sense of salvation for me. I am helped in my understanding by Thomas Troeger, a teacher of preaching and ministry. For Troeger, salvation is Jesus. Begin to get at Jesus, he says, by remembering real people who influenced you, who loved you in distinctive and personal ways, who embodied ideas and values that you acquired from them and that continue to guide you to this day. This offers a clue that Jesus was, after all, a person, not an abstraction or a principle. People who really love us say “I love you,” and they mean it by showing it. They don’t offer us a philosophical discourse on love as a great virtue. In being loved, we discover who we are at the core, a lovable human being. Just as love comes to us in different ways and we don’t all love each other in the same way, Jesus didn’t relate to each person in the same way. Nevertheless, Jesus always sought to save with his love all the people he met.

Troeger invites us to think about Jesus as an artist, “a master sculptor of salvation.” Jesus works in every medium from the “soft wood of human relationships” to the “steel of political affairs.” He carves, chisels, melts, molds, hammers, shapes, and constructs ever new forms of healing and forgiveness. Jesus’ home studio, Troeger says, is the church. Jesus also becomes a “street artist” and opens up his shop wherever persons work and play. His tools for us church folks are scripture, hymn, and sermon. In church, we are like an apprentice to Jesus, a master who guides us with his own strength and skill, arm around our shoulder, while we are learning to shape our own life. Jesus dresses in a myriad of other forms to reach persons who will never enter his studio, the church, in order to communicate his message of salvation in other contexts. Jesus saves through his personhood.

Jesus also saves through his use of power, Troeger reminds us. Not the kind of power by which, with tanks and bombs, one nation conquers another, or by which people are coerced into supporting tyranny, or by which one individual manipulates and controls another. Jesus wields power “like the power that overtakes us when we regain our health after a long illness,” or that we experience when a musician, dancer, or artist thrills and overcomes us with the beauty of their performance or production. This is the kind of creative use of power that makes tyrants uneasy, that enables us to keep helping someone under the most trying circumstances, the force that works “through love, rather than rifles.” This love looks like a puny David against a giant Goliath but prevails, nevertheless, against all odds. Jesus saves through power.

To mix metaphors even more, Troeger asserts that each of us is a preacher. Each of our lives is a sermon. “Our pulpit is where we live and work. Our congregation is made up of friends and family, colleagues and strangers.” Our actions, our words, our attitudes preach the gospel we believe. Will they demonstrate a “me first” spirit or a “try at showing compassion toward others” kind of spirit dwelling in us? We can see all too well the problem we have with purpose–we use lots of words but aren’t always sharp and clear in the message we send. “We get sidetracked in our loving by doubts and bitterness. We disappoint ourselves as well as others when our life seems to contradict itself.” Not so with Jesus. His life was “the perfect sermon,” his life and words were one. He kept focused across his lifetime on God’s love, justice, and truth. They remained his first priorities. He treated the prostitute, the cheating tax collector, and the disciples who deserted him all the same. To bind ourselves to the life of Jesus Christ is to find our lives becoming more coherent and meaningful. Jesus saves through purpose.

Jesus was more than this. He had a quality of being that, like the master dancer, actor, or musician, draws in the audience and frees them to experience elements of “ecstasy and beauty that were previously missing.” The presence of this new creation lingers long after the physical presence of the performer is gone, “the sound echoes, the leap astounds the eye, the scene disturbs the psyche.” Jesus could walk unscathed through a mob bent on his destruction, amaze his hearers by the authority with which he spoke, “intrigue the sophisticated and captivate the common folk.” What was it about him? Troeger believes Jesus was “the most exciting performer of God’s music, the most graceful dancer of heaven’s ballet, the most impassioned actor of the divine drama.” He made people want to shout, Bravo! Amen! Alleluia! When Jesus reached out, people felt him with them, beside them, in the tapping of their feet, in the beating of their hearts. Notes of love stretching across time into our time come in the form of prayer or in the bond between lovers who neither speak nor touch but simply enjoy being in each other’s company. Jesus saves through his presence.

“Are you saved?” Troeger would say being saved is

when Jesus becomes the central truth of your life, when you feel connected to the essential, personal character of existence, when you are energized with the power to hope and love, when your life is filled with a clear and compelling purpose, when you sense the presence of the God who is always with us, when you have been liberated from what holds you in bondage, when you have a sense of security that can bear the earthquakes of war and tragedy, when the dark ghosts that haunt your psyche have been driven out, when you have known the joy or forgiveness and acceptance, when you have felt the strength of resurrection in the face of death, and when you frame your life with worship. (from Are You Saved?)

In the face of this kind of maturity, we know only too well that we are still works in progress. At any one time, we may answer the question of salvation with yes, no, or maybe. We cannot save ourselves. For us in the church, the earthly body of Christ, God’s work in the person, power, purpose and presence of Jesus, is the only guarantee. It holds us and keeps us as we seek over a lifetime to become one with Jesus.

Kathleen Norris put the human experience of salvation this way in her poem “Goodness”:

Despite our good deeds, the chatter of our best intentions, our many kindnesses, God is at work in us, close to the bone, past the sinews of our virtues, to the marrow we cannot feel, the sudden helpless tears when we know what we are, and can go on.

The gift of Christmas is an encounter with a real person who forgives and loves us in spite of ourselves, most especially when we are dwelling in the shadowy places of our personal and public lives, a person who keeps faith with us even when we turn away or when shadows overcome us. When human and holy meet, we are saved through Jesus Christ, God-with-us. Amen.