How Does God Pay it Forward?
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Earlier this week, on one of those cold and rainy days that we have had, I was walking along one of the city streets getting ready to make some of my Christmas purchases. As the rain was starting to teem down and the temperature was dropping, I saw out of the corner of my eye a man standing under a portico outside one of the stores. He was playing an electric guitar and I wasn't sure about the wisdom of doing that in the rain, but he was clearly under cover and he had his case out front, as one does, with some very neatly placed bills that he had put there in the hope of enticing others to match them.
Unlike everybody else on the street, I decided to stop and listen to him, for as you all know I have a love of guitar playing. I stood, with the rain pouring down and half under cover, and listened to him play. First, I noticed the guitar he was using was an Epiphone, an actual SG Gibson knock-off. I watched him plug in his amp and start to play, and I listened for a while. He was absolutely awful!
I cringed inwardly but I wouldn't let it show. I thought it would be rude to leave quickly, so I waited until he had finished his rendition of The House of the Rising Sun, which was barely recognizable amongst all the other notes that he added. But, I listened, and you have that sense of camaraderie and solidarity as a musician. I put some money in his case, a he thanked me, and I walked on. My heart sort of felt heavy for him. There he was, playing his heart out and no one was listening - but I couldn't blame them either!
It is not just sometimes those musicians who are not worthy of being heard are ignored. I was given an article from The Washington Post from a Christmas two years ago. It is written by Gene Weingarten, and it is entitled Pearls Before Breakfast. It is the story of one of the greatest violinists of our time, a man called Joshua Bell. Nights before, Joshua Bell had played at the Boston Symphony Hall. He had sold out that great place of music. People had paid hundreds of dollars for a ticket to hear this magnificent 39 year old make the violin sing. It was like Beethoven, who said, and I think it is fitting, that the violin is like the Holy Spirit in the Trinity: it is so like our voice, it pierces our soul.
On this particular day, Joshua Bell was playing in the subway in Washington, DC. He went down to play there in consultation with the newspaper. The idea was to see whether or not people actually listened to good music. He found a spot that was acoustically magnificent. He said it was the best acoustics he had heard in his life, in fact. There, for 45 minutes, as people started to go down to the subway, he played Brahms and Schubert with excellence. In his hand was a three million dollar Stradivarius that was in fact made in 1717 - irreplaceable! He played his heart and soul out! It was one of the greatest performances he thought he had ever given.
What happened? Nobody listened! At the end of 45 minutes he looked in the case that he had placed on the floor and there were thirty-two dollars and seventeen cents there. As he said, pro-rated to an hour at forty dollars of income, it was not too bad; but compared to the fact that people paid hundreds to hear him in a concert hall, peanuts! People didn't listen even though it was greatness! Even though it was magnificent, nobody really listened!
One elderly lady tried to. She was the only one who recognized him and thanked him, but she did so simply because she was too slow to get on to the train and had to stand next to him. It was that bad! Isn't it interesting? Isn't it fascinating that even someone great could not be heard? Even something magnificent and beautiful and of immense value could not and did not receive attention. It was Immanuel Kant who said, and he is correct in this, that our perception of beauty is coloured by the state of our mind.
I think Christmas is very much like these two musicians of which I speak. It is as if God comes into a place at a time humbly and without much fanfare. You see, Joshua Bell, when he was being recognized had to have a management team, had to have promotions, sold tickets at a high price, went into a great theatre, and then people enjoyed him. Without all of that, people did not recognize the magnificence of what was before them.
Christmas is just like that: Christmas was God coming in a humble form in a child among us, in an ignominious setting, in a corner post of the Roman Empire. He came from a family that had little or no status. He was going to live in a place that had little or no standing: Nazareth. Yet there, with very little fanfare, the Son of God was born. When he came, he came incognito. He came under the radar of the culture that had been looking for a certain type of person and a certain type of monarch. He came hidden in a child in Bethlehem.
It wasn't as if God hadn't already revealed himself before. He did so in creation. He did so, as I suggested last week, in the people of Israel. He did so in the prophets and the kings and the laws. He did so in many different places, but now Jesus of Nazareth came in person. The Gospel of John tells us that Jesus came, and the world knew him not. He came in a humble incognito way, and people did not receive him. He came as a child; he died as an executed outcast. Jesus of Nazareth was sometimes not recognized for what he was.
Yet, in the midst of all this, the “Good News” speaks of something much more profound. The witness of The Gospel of Matthew is that Jesus came to be “God with us.” He came, to use the phrase that is used, as “Immanuel” and then he interprets it for us: “God with us.” This name, Immanuel had appeared before in The Old Testament. It was there in The Book of Isaiah in Chapter 7. There, it referred to a child called Immanuel. The idea was that between the birth of that child and the maturity of that chid, in that time period, the Syro-Ephraimitic War would come to an end.
The people of Israel prayed for a time of peace. In the early life span of Immanuel they would have hope, and the war and the desolation would come to an end. “Immanuel” for Isaiah, meant “God with the people” was to bring peace and to bring hope. This child, this person, represented that hope.
For Matthew however, this Immanuel-Jesus fulfills all of The Old Testament Scriptures: He fulfills all the expectations of the people. He is not only hope and peace; he is the embodiment of God, the source of hope and peace.
This Immanuel is “God with us.” But he came in a remarkable way! He came in a hidden way, a way that wasn't seen. And, here is the great paradox of the incarnation of “God with us.” The paradox is this: that in his hidden-ess, he is revealed, and in being revealed, is his hidden-ess. There is this profound sense that what we see in Jesus is both the presence of God, but also our inability to fully comprehend God. God is present, but God is also mysterious.
What is needed to see God with us? The answer is faith. Oh, we can sing all our glorious carols! We can sing, O Come, O Come Emmanuel, we can belt out, Hark! The Herald Angels Sing, we can sing, O Little Town of Bethlehem, we can make all our declarations, attend all our services, be full of all kinds of religious activity, but if we do not have faith, we do not see Immanuel as he really is.
What happens in The Old Testament after the birth of Jesus is this gradual coming to faith. What we see expanding from the manger is the belief that Jesus is Nazareth is “God with us” in the most profound and simple of ways. If you want your Christmas to be magnificent, if want to hear the music of Joshua Bell, you have listen with the ears of faith, for you see it in Christ, who is the Lord.
This really came home to me a couple of years ago when I went home to England and I visited London to do some research. I decided to go to a place that I had always wanted to go to called Bunhill Fields, a cemetery in Islington. So, I took the Tube out to the Old Street Station, and then I got on the escalator up to the ground level, and lo and behold, right outside the subway stop there was somebody playing a guitar! In this case, he was playing a classical rendition of the music of Andrés Segovia. I was in awe. He was magnificent! I listened for a while, left him some money, winked at him, and went on my way.
I went down to the cemetery not far from there buried there are many of the greats of the Reformation in England: John Bunyan is there, William Blake is there, Daniel Defoe is there, Thomas Hardy is there, Susannah Wesley, who is the mother of John Wesley, is there, and buried there is Sir Isaac Watts, the great Congregationalist hymn writer. I went to pay homage to my background and to the people who had formed my faith.
Then I looked across the road, and there was the home of John Wesley. That is where John Wesley died. In his final words, John Wesley said the following: “The best of all is this: that God is with us.” For John Wesley, even on his deathbed, Immanuel was everything! Even facing the end of his days, it was Jesus and his presence that meant the world to him. He saw things, as those buried in Bunhill Fields, the saw them through the eyes of Immanuel. They had faith!
“God with us” is not the only affirmation in The New Testament. There is another one, and it is found in today's passage from The Book of Romans. Years after the death and the Resurrection of Jesus, Paul is writing this magnificent Epistle to the Romans, and at the high point of the Epistle, in Chapter 8, he makes this incredible declaration: “if God is for us, who can be against us?” The apostle Paul was convinced that in the presence of Jesus Christ, mediated through the power of the Holy Spirit, humanity might know, above all things that God is actually for us.
Martin Luther once said, “The most disgraceful and sordid statement and proposition that can ever be made is that God is against us.” For Paul, there was this belief that in the incarnation of God in Jesus of Nazareth, the ultimate statement that God was “for us” was present. But part of the problem in the world is that people think that God is actually against us.
I pained this week at the death of a fellow countryman, Christopher Hitchens, a writer who I adore for his honesty and I disagree with a great deal. I often feel if only he in his questioning about God understood this one reality: that God is never ever against us; God is always, always, always for us! The problem is “The Great Lie” as Luther suggested, is the preposition “against” us.
However, because God is always for us, it does not always mean that God always agrees with us. It does not mean that God does not always see our sin and our violence, or that God does not see our enmity, or God does not see our arrogance, and our rudeness. God sees it all! But that is why He came to be “for us.” He called his Son, Jesus, through whom He means to save us from our sins. Jesus saves us then because He is “for us”, not “against us”. That one belief, that one understanding of the Christmas message transforms everything, because it transforms us. It transforms the whole way in which we see life and the life to come.
I was reading, as I do every Christmas, the letters of my hero Dietrich Bonheoffer, who in his final Christmas wrote his beloved Maria von Wedemeyer a letter, knowing that it would be the last probably before his eventual execution. He was alone in his cell. He had not his friends around him, but only his Bible. He wrote:
I haven't for an instant felt lonely or forlorn. You, yourself, my parents, all of you, including friends and students on active service are my constant companions. You prayers and kind thoughts, passages from the Bible, long forgotten conversations, pieces of music, books, are all invested life and reality as never before. I live in a great, unseen realm of whose real existence I am in no doubt. The old children's song about the angels says ”˜Two to cover me; two to wake me.' Today, we grown-ups are no less in need than children of preservation, night and morning, from unkindly, unseemly powers. So, you mustn't think that I am unhappy. Anyway, what do happiness and unhappiness mean? They depend so little upon circumstance, and so much more on what goes on inside us.
There's that word again. Even though he was facing execution under the Nazis, he was writing to the woman that he loved, he knew that happiness and unhappiness are based on faith, and there was his source of happiness. This also means that if God is for us even when we face life's end, God is also for others. He is also, so to say in Latin pro nobis, or “for others.” He is there to help and assist.
One of the great joys that I have in the Christmas period is to go around to many of the places that do charitable work here in our city. I have gone everywhere from Scarborough to Downtown to way out in Symington. I have travelled the city! I have been to many different places that provide care in our city, and I have watched with my own eyes, and it is one of the most amazing day-and-a-half that I have ever spent, and I think what I missed most last Christmas in not being able to do it, is to go around and see people caring for the people of our city.
Everyone that I spoke to was a Christian. They are Christian organizations that I support, or founded by Christians, or staffed by Christians. I went around and found people providing clothing, providing food, providing homeless shelters, providing advice and guidance for people who are new to the country, providing all kinds of care at all different levels of society. I left at the end of that day exhausted and inspired!
One of them wanted to talk about what she calls “The Holy Trinity of Need:” shelter, clothing, food. I realized that in all of these they are seeking to do that for ourselves, and doing it humbly. They do it in February, when no one is noticing. They do it in November and August, when people are not applauding, like the choristers and great musicians who play in the subway and are not recognized that they are there doing their work: God with us; God for us; God for others. It inspires because it is faith.
Finally, God is “for us” because he is for you, and because above all things he loves us. For Paul, now there is no separation between us and God in life, in death, in the past, in the future, neither heights nor depths, and nothing in all of creation can separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ, the God “for us.”
One of the most touching statements that I have ever read, and I shared it with you some years ago, but it is so worth repeating, and I will leave you with this. It is a passage from a work by Max Lucado, the Christian writer. Believe-you-me, my friends, this is what Christmas is all about:
There are many reasons God saves you: to bring glory to himself, to appease his justice, to demonstrate his sovereignty. But, one of the sweetest reasons God saves you, is because He is fond of you. He likes having you around. He thinks you are the best thing to come down the pipe in quite a while. If God had a refrigerator, your picture would be on it. If He had a wallet, your photo would be in it. Whenever you want to talk, He will listen. He can live anywhere in the universe, but He chose your heart. And, the Christmas gift He sent you in Bethlehem? Face it friends, He is crazy about you!
“God for us” is to affirm that reality. “God with us” is to reveal it in Christmas. “God loves us” is the final word of Christmas, one that shows that in everything, God has paid it all for us. What a Christmas this will be! Amen.