PENTECOST AT CHRISTMAS

In Rome, Caesar Augustus casually scrawled his signature on a census document that would disrupt the lives of millions of his subjects across the empire. In Nazareth, a humble carpenter and his pregnant wife left home to register in the place of their ancestral roots—80 miles away. In the midnight blue of an eastern sky, a star of astonishing brilliance flashed a message that triggered the wise men’s expedition in search of a royal baby.

Over Bethlehem, a cascade of singing angels poured from heaven in a display of sound and light that propelled a group of frightened shepherds in a search for the Saviour of the world. In Jerusalem, a puppet king, half-Jew, half-Arab, listened with mounting alarm to ancient prophecies telling of a coming trueborn son of David, and brooded over a plan to exterminate him.

This complex pattern of Roman politics, Jewish history, intimate personal experience and divine purpose made Bethlehem the epicentre of an event which would shake the foundations of human history and transform the moral and spiritual landscape of the world.

However, beyond this fascinating interplay of human actions and divine purposes lay the hidden but dynamic work of the Holy Spirit. In fact, without him there would have been no Christmas story, no incarnation, no cross, no resurrection, no ascended, reigning Lord, no coming King, no Gospel, and no church to preach it! Guardedly and reverently, we may say that the whole plan of redemption depended on the Holy Spirit.

Behind the drama of the first Christmas, the Spirit worked mysteriously and creatively in the body of a village girl (Luke 1:35 compare Matthew 1:20–21), and in the life of her aged cousin, Elizabeth, giving her a son when all hope had gone forever. Elizabeth and her husband Zechariah were “filled with the Spirit” and broke out into prophecy, and Mary sang an inspired worship song (Luke 1:41-55, 67-79).

Meanwhile, the Spirit was upon the aged Simeon, granting him special revelation about the Messiah’s birth, and leading him into the temple at the precise moment when Jesus was presented before God. He, too, was enabled to prophesy under the Spirit’s anointing (Luke 2:25-35), and the 84 year-old widow Anna, the prophetess, was enabled to “give thanks to God and speak of him (Jesus) to all who were waiting for redemption” (Luke 2:36–38).

God’s secret agent was at work beneath and within and beyond the world of political power-seeking, social upheaval and religious confusion He brought about supernatural happenings in individual human lives in terms of creation, inspiration, revelation, and direction. This was world-changing “Pentecost” at Christmas!

The journey of the Magi is a reminder to us that neither wealth nor wisdom need necessarily stop God from working in us. Zechariah and Elizabeth, Joseph and Mary, Simeon and Anna remind us that “the secret of the Lord is with them that fear him” in humble openness to the Spirit, faith, and sincerity of heart.

Within the complexity of the modern world, we need to understand that only the Holy Spirit can bring about the purposes of God, and that he does so in the lives of ordinary people who are willing to say with Mary, “I am the Lord’s servant, and I am willing to accept whatever he wants ” (Luke 1:38 NLT). Or, as we used to sing, “Here l am, wholly available!”

Excerpted from Reflections: Looking at Timeless Truths in a Changing World, with permission, copyright © John Lancaster 2010

As I and my family celebrate the birth of Christ this year, I will take a break from posting further blogs to this site until about mid-January. We will meet again then. In the meantime, we wish you a renewed joy of this Christmas season.

IF YOU WANT TO CELEBRATE CHRISTMAS, WEAR A TIN HAT!

Dressed as Eastern shepherds, a group of men stood self-consciously around the crib where a doll lay amid the straw. This was Cardiff City Temple choir’s nativity play, part of its annual Christmas program. All was going according to script, until, suddenly, the “doll” moved! The shepherds, choir and congregation were stunned—there was real life in the manger!

It was only afterwards that the secret came out: someone had replaced the doll with a living baby. But that’s the truth about Christmas. God doesn’t keep to our script. He replaces our easily manageable “dolls” with shocking reality; the conquering hero of Jewish messianic dreams slips unobtrusively into the world as a village girl’s baby, his royal palace is the stable of a Bethlehem inn.—But there’s life in the manger!

Often our ideas about Christmas are bland and sentimental: the “little Lord Jesus” who, according to the carol, doesn’t cry; the “silent night” where “all is calm, all is bright”; the trio of exotic kings and their shiny gifts; the air-brushed pictures of the cleanest animals that ever inhabited a stable. Moist-eyed parents watch little Wayne and Jemima in school nativity plays; record shops are awash with the latest seasonal celebrity discs: hard-nosed businessmen send “appropriate” cards adorned with Old Masters’ versions of the nativity. So long as Jesus is left in the manger, so long as he doesn’t move, everyone is happy to celebrate Christmas.

The trouble is—he does move! The “little Lord Jesus” grows up and begins to move down country lanes and city streets, on storm-tossed seas and lonely deserts. And he does cry—weeping with bereaved  sisters at a brother’s grave, weeping over a doomed city that had rejected him, weeping great gut-wrenching sobs as he wrestles with demonic powers in the darkness of Gethsemane. There’s little calm where Jesus is.

Incarnation is not just a pretty story. It means labour pains, blood and tears, a crying baby’s disturbed nights, parenting anxieties, struggling teenage years and manhood, the cost of sacrificial ministry and the trauma of the cross. Jesus birth is not only singing angels and worshipping wise men, but also Herod’s savage sword dripping with baby blood. Christmas is not so much a day for party hats as for tin hats. It is “D-Day,”—God invades planet earth to “destroy him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death ” (Hebrews 2:14–15).

Bethlehem is more than a birthplace, it is a bridgehead—the place where the liberating Christ begins his march to final conquest; the place where the despotic ambitions of Herod, and following him, all the high command of hell’s warlords, are “vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.”

The real Jesus is not a manageable doll, shelved with the rest of the Christmas trivia until next year. He is the living Christ of God coming into the world as prophet, priest and king. He declares the truth God commands us to hear; the only mediator who can restore a meaningful relationship with God; he comes to establish God’s final authority over people and nations.

The Christ of Bethlehem summons us to acknowledge his Lordship, accept his saving power, and follow him as he goes forth to wage war on the hosts of darkness and establish the Kingdom of God. Incarnation means invasion; it is a war on error, and it calls for more than celebration; it calls for consecration and commitment. Party if you will, but prepare to follow the King as he leads his church against the gates of hell. You’ll need a tin hat for that! 

Excerpted from Reflections: Looking at Timeless Truths in a Changing World, with permission, copyright © John Lancaster 2010

THE DARK SIDE OF CHRISTMAS

In the foggy winter of 1741, an elderly German immigrant paused for breath outside a church. He was frail, suffering the effects of a near-fatal stroke some four years earlier, nearly bankrupt, frustrated by recent failures as a composer, and forsaken by his friends. As the church loomed through the gloom he thought about God, but it brought him no comfort, only questions: “Why did he grant me renewal of life,” he whispered, “if I may no longer create?”

A bulky packet awaited him in his shabby lodgings. It was the libretto of a sacred oratorio prepared by his friend, Charles Jennens. He was in no mood for music, however, and gave the pages little attention as he turned them over.

Suddenly, words leapt from the script: “He was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” Powerfully, they resonated in his troubled soul and he turned to the rest of the verses Jennens had collated from the Bible. By now his mind was on fire, and for 24 days, his sleep abandoned and his food untouched, he wrote almost non-stop as some of the most glorious music ever written poured from his fast-moving pen.

Multitudes of musicians will take part in performances of Handel’s Messiah every Christmas, and thousands more sit entranced by his inspired music, but how many understand the darkness and despair out of which it was born? Perhaps not many. In the same way, millions will celebrate Christmas once again, but how many will understand the dark realities out of which the Messiah—the Son of God and Saviour of men—was born? Again, not many.

To start with, you’d not expect to find anything of worth in Bethlehem. In Helmut Thielicke’s words, it was a “one-horse town”, a non-descript suburb of Jerusalem, “too little to be among the clans of Judah” (Micah 5:2, ESV). Furthermore, a minor carpenter and his wife, with a suspicious pregnancy, were unlikely to have any significance—just ordinary people caught in a mass shift of population ordered by the authorities, with no clout for accommodation in a crowded town; they were just mere numbers on a census form.

Their baby was just another little crying scrap of humanity destined for poverty and pain. Mary’s taste of fear as the labour pains began in Bethlehem’s stable would be nothing compared with the overwhelming sword-thrust of anguish which would engulf her at Calvary. The cries from the manger would be nothing compared to the searing pain that awaited this baby as in manhood he trod the way to the cross. Shadows in the stable pointed to “the horror of a great darkness” at Calvary.

Inspired by “a man of sorrows, Handel’s Messiah ends with a Hallelujah Chorus and a King who “reigns for ever and ever.” God’s Messiah, born in the poverty-stricken anonymity of Bethlehem’s stable, rises from his Easter tomb in final triumph and ascends to his Father’s throne with a Name that reverberates through the universe with the ring of absolute power and glory. Out of the darkness, light shines.

That “dark side” of grace took the bigoted, Pharisee Saul of Tarsus—“a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent man ” (1Timothy 1:13)—and transformed him into one of the greatest Christians who ever lived. That grace still moves with transforming power into the dark places of a fallen world where fear reigns, hope dies, unanswered questions haunt the mind, and all seems lost. This “dark side of Christmas” brings it into touch with the harsh realities of life, where suffering and sin cast deep shadows that fairy lights and shining baubles can never banish. 

 Jesus came to this world at Christmas, the “light of the world” the “second Adam to the fight and rescue”; a Saviour, sharing our human situation and dying in our stead, “saves to the uttermost” and makes hope blaze in the darkness. So John writes, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness can never extinguish it” (John 1:5, NLT), because it is “the light of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6).

 

Excerpted from Reflections: Looking at Timeless Truths in a Changing World, with permission, copyright © John Lancaster 2010