Message by Rev. John Culp : December 23, 2007
“We’re Expecting – Part 3”
Text – Matthew 1:18-25
Franz Liszt was one of the towering figures in the musical world of the 19th century. Liszt was a pianist of legendary virtuosity. He was a child prodigy. The story is told that he played when he was not yet twelve for the great Beethoven, who was so impressed that the aged master kissed the young Liszt on the forehead and praised him enthusiastically. Gifted pianists practice long hours to be able to play the great A Minor Concerto of Edvard Grieg. Liszt once stunned Grieg himself by playing his concerto perfectly at first sight. Franz Liszt was known as well as a conductor, teacher and composer. Many of his works are often performed still today – more than a hundred twenty years after his death!
But Liszt was also a colorful, complicated figure. By all accounts he was a deeply religious man: late in life he even took minor religious orders in the Roman Catholic Church. But he was also a man of deep passions, a free spirit. He was romantically involved with a number of ladies throughout his life, though I don’t believe he ever married. He had several known children. A century and a half ago people talked just like they do today. Liszt was said to have fathered a number of other children, in addition to those he openly acknowledged.
One who was linked with him was another well-known pianist. His name was Franz Servais. People whispered that he was actually Liszt’s son. But Liszt repeatedly denied this. He said, “I know his mother only by correspondence, and one cannot arrange that sort of thing by correspondence.” (Source: www.anecdotage.com.)
Liszt may have made a joke about it, but as you know, questions of paternity are often no laughing matter. Frequently there are large sums of money at stake. Some-times it even comes down to a crown and a throne.
I want to talk today about the most important paternity case of all time. It involves far more than mere money or political power. In fact it is a question of truly eternal significance: Who is the Father of Jesus Christ?
We’re expecting! But exactly what are you expecting? You may recall that mentioned a few weeks back that our seminary intern Janice Good came up with that very clever title for a series of messages during this Advent season. And since we had three weeks to consider the topic, it was natural for us to look at it from a Trinitarian angle.
So we have already thought about our Advent expectations from the perspective of God the Father and God the Holy Spirit. Two days before Christmas it’s quite fitting for us to think about God the Son.
Of course you can’t have a son without both a mother and a father. It turns out that the matter of the paternity of Jesus Christ is as crucial a question as we can ask about Him, because it cuts right to the heart of who He is. And that’s the essence of what I want to discuss today:
Because Jesus Christ is both Son of Man and Son of God,
we can trust our lives to the promises God makes to us in Him.
Two days before Christmas, let’s think about that that most important of questions: Who is the Father of Jesus Christ?
It’s a question that involves tremendous Good News. Let’s think first about the wonderful good news that came to Mary’s husband Joseph.
Of course good news is never really especially good except against the backdrop of bad news. You no doubt know that a lot of jokes are based on the interplay between good news and bad news.
Maybe you know the one about the Roman galley plying the Mediterranean Sea about 55 B.C. Stripped to the waist, 380 galley slaves toil over their oars, hour after agonizing hour. A guy up front beats on two timpani to maintain the rhythm of their rowing.
Finally the first mate comes below deck and gives the order to rest. 380 galley slaves lean on their raised oars, catching their breath. The first mate says, : “Men, I have good news and I have bad news. First the good news. Tomorrow we make Carthage, and the Captain has ordered that all hands be given extra rations of bread and water, and three days’ shore leave.
“Now the bad news. Right now, the Captain wants to water ski.”
The news that confronted Joseph before the first Christmas was very bad indeed. The process of engagement in first-century Judaism was a much more formal matter than is engagement typically in our day. That engaged status was to last one full year. If during that time the husband decided to end the engagement, he had to formally divorce his betrothed wife. But during this one-year engagement, the couple certainly could not live together as husband and wife. So for an engaged woman to turn up pregnant was a terrible scandal. In fact the law of Moses said such a woman should be stoned.
Now it seems that by the first century, rabbinical practice had generally softened that punishment. But the penalty – in terms of societal stigma and shame – was still “severe and humiliating.” (M. Eugene Boring, The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. VIII, page 134.)
When Mary offered the explanation that the Child she carried was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, it would have likely only made things worse. People would think – Joseph would probably think – ‘Not only has the woman committed this scandalous sin; now she adds to it the blasphemy of suggesting God Himself was somehow involved!’
The news Mary presented to the people of the village, to her family, and most of all to Joseph, was very bad news indeed!
But Joseph receives a supernatural message from none other than an angel of the Lord. Think of it! The news he shared was not just that it would somehow be OK for Joseph to still take Mary as his wife. That would have been wonderful enough in itself! But what the angel has to say is far more glorious even than that. The angel confirms that Mary’s Child is indeed the Child of the Holy Spirit of God! The Son to be born is to be named Jesus – The-Lord-is-Salvation – because, the angel says, He will save His people from their sins.
Now Joseph couldn’t have possibly begun to fathom the profound theological depths of that brief statement. It took the Church some three hundred years to crystallize what it meant. In fact people in the Church still debate it! But to Joseph, it was clearly Good News of life-changing power and significance!
It would not be too long after the death and resurrection of that Jesus that His followers would come to see in the great messianic second Psalm (our Old Testament lesson today) a clear prophecy of Mary’s Child:
“‘As for Me, I have set My King on Zion, My holy hill.’ I will tell of the decree: The LORD said to Me, ‘You are My Son; today I have begotten You. Ask of Me, and I will make the nations Your heritage, and the ends of the earth Your possession’ ” (Psalm 2:6-8 ESV).
So who exactly was the father of Mary’s Child? That baby Boy would be the Son of Man and the Son of God in a way like none other – before or since or ever. When first Mary and then Joseph figured out the glorious Good News of that unbelievable but absolutely sure truth, it made all the difference in the world to them.
But of course the truth about Jesus’ Father is glorious Good News not only for Mary and her husband Joseph, but for every one of us!
Just as was the case for Joseph, the Good News that the Son of God came to bring is really meaningless apart from the context of some very bad news. If in fact Jesus of Nazareth is not the Son of God in precisely the way the Christian Church has long insisted, the news is very bad indeed. The Bible says: “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Corinthians 15:18 NRSV).
But the fact that Jesus Christ truly is the Son of God comes as just as much good news to you and me as it did to Mary and Joseph. If God – the Creator of the universe – can be trusted to have wrought this great miracle of clothing Himself in human flesh, He can surely be trusted to fulfill every one of the promises He makes to us in His precious Son.
What’s going on in your life just before Christmas in this year of our Lord 2007 that makes God’s promises to you in Jesus Christ matter? Maybe you have lost something and the pain of that loss is almost more than you can bear. It may be a relationship. It may be your health. It may be a dream. It may be a loved one. If Christmas for you this year is shrouded in the grave clothes of some crippling loss, know that in His Son Jesus Christ God promises not to take that loss away. But in Christ God does promise to preserve you through the pain, to carry you safely over to the other side of that suffering, even to make you know His perfect peace in the midst of the valley of the shadow.
Because Jesus Christ is the Son of Man and the Son of God, you can make the words of the Bible your own words: “My God will meet all your needs according to His glorious riches in Christ Jesus. To our God and Father be glory for ever and ever. Amen.”
(Philippians 4:19-20 NIV)
Or maybe you’re feeling the crushing weight of some pressure right now. It might be the pressure of a work load that’s wearing you down. It might be the pressure of a relationship that you can feel unraveling. It might be the pressure of a financial situation on the brink of disaster.
If Jesus of Nazareth is a great teacher and nothing more, even His wise words will fail you here. But because He is indeed the almighty Son of God Almighty, if you place your trust firmly in Him, with the Apostle Paul you can make your rallying cry, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” (Philippians 4:13 NKJV).
Or maybe two days before Christmas 2007 you really can’t believe just how good your life is. You may look around and see a world of people in pain and suffering, and recognize that all you know in your own life is God’s gracious blessing. That is of course a wonderful place to be!
But know also that it is a very dangerous place to live. It carries with it at least two grave risks: The risk that you will be blind to the great needs all around you; and the risk that you will fall into the gross idolatry of allowing any one of those very good things God has given you to assume first place in life.
Jesus the great moral teacher – if He is nothing more than that – cannot really protect you from either peril. But because He is the very Son of God in human flesh, you can live in the power of the same truth Paul grasped (here in the startling freshness of Eugene Peterson’s The Message paraphrase):
“The very credentials these people are waving around as something special, I'm tearing up and throwing out with the trash – along with everything else I used to take credit for. And why? Because of Christ. Yes, all the things I once thought were so important are gone from my life. Compared to the high privilege of knowing Christ Jesus as my Master, firsthand, everything I once thought I had going for me is insignificant – dog dung. I've dumped it all in the trash so that I could embrace Christ and be embraced by Him. I didn't want some petty, inferior brand of righteousness that comes from keeping a list of rules when I could get the robust kind that comes from trusting Christ – God's righteousness. I gave up all that inferior stuff so I could know Christ personally, experience His resurrection power, be a partner in His suffering, and go all the way with Him to death itself. If there was any way to get in on the resurrection from the dead, I wanted to do it.”
(Philippians 3:7-11)
The One who came through the womb of Mary is the Son of Man and the Son of God. That amazing truth made all the difference in Mary’s life and Joseph’s. It can do the same for you and for me.
As we heard at the start of worship today, this fourth Sunday of Advent is a day when we focus especially on God’s great love for us in the Christ of Christmas. Because the Son of Man is also the only begotten Son of God, He is the very embodiment of God’s great love. So we do well to think earnestly of the real meaning of love.
Ed Black recently shared something that helps us in that direction. They’re some answers a group of four-to-eight-year-olds had to the question, ‘What does love mean?’
8-year-old Rebecca said this: “When my grandmother got arthritis, she couldn't bend over and paint her toenails anymore. So my grandfather does it for her all the time, even when his hands got arthritis too. That’s love.”
Here’s what 7-year-old Chris thinks: “Love is when Mommy sees Daddy smelly and sweaty and still says he is handsomer than Robert Redford.”
There’s this from 8-year-old Emily: “Love is when you kiss all the time. Then when you get tired of kissing, you still want to be together and you talk more. My Mommy and Daddy are like that. They look gross when they kiss.”
5-year-old Karl said: “Love is when a girl puts on perfume and a boy puts on shaving cologne and they go out and smell each other.”
Then there was the wisdom of 6-year-old Mark: “Love is when Mommy sees Daddy on the toilet and she doesn’t think it’s gross.”
8-year-old Jessica reminds us: “You really shouldn’t say ‘I love you’ unless you mean it. But if you mean it, you should say it a lot. People forget.”
There is this great wisdom from 6-year-old Nikka: “If you want to learn to love better, you should start with a friend who you hate.”
And this beautiful thought from 7-year-old Bobby: “Love is what’s in the room with you at Christmas if you stop opening presents and listen.”
But the best of all came from a 4-year-old little boy whose next door neighbor was an elderly gentleman who had recently lost his wife. Upon seeing the man cry, the little boy went into the old gentleman’s yard, climbed onto his lap, and just sat there. When his Mother asked what he had said to the neighbor, the little boy said, “Nothing. I just helped him cry.”
We’re expecting! But exactly what are you expecting this Christmas? If you’re looking for love like that, you can find it in the Son of Man who is also the Son of God. But you have to ask for it!
Phillips Brooks discovered that. He was one of the greatest American preachers of the 19th century. Brooks was just thirty years old on the Christmas Eve 142 years ago that he spent in the Holy Land. He was especially inspired by the worship service he attended Christmas Eve in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.
Back home in Philadelphia, during the Christmas of 1868 three years later, Brooks channeled that inspiration into the words of the beloved carol with which we’ll close our worship today.
Brooks knew full well the tremendous power available to all who live in the name of Jesus Christ. He said this:
“Pray the largest prayers. You cannot think a prayer so large that God in answering it, will not wish you had made it larger. Pray not for crutches but for wings!”
(quoted in Leadership, Vol. 12, no. 3.)
Are you ready to fly this Christmas? The Son of Man who is the Son of God invites you to do just that!
Let us pray. Gracious and almighty God, we give You thanks and praise for the One who is the Son of Man and Your precious Son. Please help each of us to trust in Him, that we might know His victorious power for life. And please help us in the days ahead to draw closer than ever before to Him, that we might share Him with all the world. We ask it in His mighty name. Amen.