Sermon
Christmas Confusion
December 18, 2005
Pastor Mark Cox

I think it's safe to say that our culture is becoming increasingly confused as to how to respond to Christmas. I don't know if you saw this week - there was actually a serious debate this week whether the tree on the White House lawn was to be called a Christmas tree or a holiday tree. And there are some people, I've heard, who are boycotting Target department stores now because Target management has told their employees they can't say Merry Christmas they have to say happy holidays. And my favorite one personally is at my wife's work - they somewhat jokingly, have come up with a politically correct phase to use through the December season that tries to include all the various religious holidays, and it goes like this: May you have a satisfactory RamaHanaKwanzmas. You get Ramadan, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and Christmas and say RamaHanaKwanzmas.

Of course, when you try to go and please everybody, you end up usually pleasing nobody.

Now this confusion about Christmas is nothing new. In fact, if we look at the New Testament we see that there is just as much confusion, if not more so, about the very first Christmas. So if you'll turn with me this morning we are going to be in the Gospel of Luke chapter 1. Now it's important to note that Luke was not one of the original 12 Disciples of Christ, but he did accompany Paul on his missionary journeys, and more importantly, Luke was an accurate historian who detailed both the life of Christ in his gospel and the history of the early church in the Book of Acts.

In the prologue you read of the Gospel of Luke, he addresses his gospel to somebody named Theophilus, whom he addresses as most excellent Theophilus, which leads us to believe that this person was someone of very high status, of high power, of high importance, perhaps even commissioned Luke to do the research for his gospel. And Luke records in his prologue that his desire is to record for Theophilus an orderly account of the life of Christ. So Luke begins his orderly account in chapter 1 by describing the announcement of two miraculous pregnancies. One to Elizabeth who was old and barren, but is now pregnant with John the Baptist, and one to Mary who is young and virginal and pregnant with Jesus the Messiah.

Mary and Elizabeth are cousins, and in the first 38 verses of chapter 1 Luke describes how both women separately have had angels come and announce their miraculous pregnancies, and so we are going to pick up the story this morning in verse 39 of chapter 1. "Now Mary arose in those days and went into the hill country with haste, to a city of Judah, and entered the house of Zacharias and greeted Elizabeth. And it happened, when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, that the babe leaped in her womb; and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. Then she spoke out with a loud voice and said, "Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! But why is this granted to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For indeed, as soon as the voice of your greeting sounded in my ears, the babe leaped in my womb for joy. Blessed is she who believed, for there will be a fulfillment of those things which were told her from the Lord."

Now Mary has definitely heard the amazing news of Elizabeth's pregnancy. Elizabeth was way past childbearing age and had been barren all her life, but now is pregnant with John, and so Mary thinks if anyone can even begin to relate and understand what I'm going through, it's going to be my cousin Elizabeth. Now remember Mary is still an unmarried teenage girl who has never been with a man and suddenly finds herself pregnant. You can imagine the confusion and the scandal of it all, and what the neighbors must be whispering as Mary's belly grows larger. You can only hide a pregnancy for so long.

Condescending looks fall upon both Mary and Joseph whenever they walk through town, and somehow the idea of trying to explain to family and friends...well you see, there was this angel that came and told me the Holy Spirit had impregnated me and now I have the Jewish Messiah in my womb. Somehow that doesn't seem to help trying to explain. Not only is she an adulterous, but they think she's crazy on top of all that too. So in the midst of this confusion and uncertainty is where Mary goes and seeks refuge and comfort in the home of her cousin Elizabeth, and, she finds it.

Elizabeth led by the Holy Spirit confirms that what the angel said to Mary is true. You weren't dreaming Mary. This is for real. Just as the angel said, you are going to give birth to the Son of God. And it's this confirmation from Elizabeth that prompts Mary to burst out in a song of praise, which is what we are going to look at this morning. This song is also known as the Magnificat in the traditional, but also is the Song of Mary and it begins here in verse 46.

"And Mary said: 'My soul magnifies the Lord,
And my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior.
For He has regarded the lowly state of His maidservant;
For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed.
For He who is mighty has done great things for me,
And holy is His name.
And His mercy is on those who fear Him
From generation to generation.
He has shown strength with His arm;
He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He has put down the mighty from their thrones,
And exalted the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
And the rich He has sent away empty.
He has helped His servant Israel,
In remembrance of His mercy,
As He spoke to our fathers,
To Abraham and to his seed forever.'"

Now I want us to see this morning that Mary's song that she sings here really has three sections to it, and the kind of literary structure that she is using here is really the structure of a Christmas tree. We all know a Christmas tree at the top starts narrow and then as it goes down farther and farther becomes wider and wider as it gets towards the bottom, and Mary's song is going to start narrow at the top in terms of her focus, in terms of her perspective, but as she sings through the song of hers, her focus and perspective are going to widen and broaden as they get towards the bottom.

Verse 46 begins with a conjunction. Now do you remember back to your high school English class, do you remember what a conjunction is? And the conjunction here is and, and you probably had English teachers that told you you are to never start a sentence with and. They were lying. And Mary said, and as with all conjunctions we must ask the deep theological question, conjunction junction what's your function? The word and implies a connection to whatever was stated directly before, and what comes just before Mary's song is Elizabeth's confirmation of her divine pregnancy. This is important because it shows that Mary's song is an immediate and spontaneous reaction to Elizabeth's words. What Elizabeth says deeply impacts Mary's heart and causes her to immediately burst out in song.

Notice how her song begins in verse 46 and 47: "And Mary said: 'My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior.'" The text says as its Mary's soul that magnifies and her spirit that has rejoiced. And what's interesting is that souls and spirits are internal, silent aspects of who we are. Mary's song is an outward expression of an inward reality. Notice that nothing has changed in Mary's physical condition after she comes to Elizabeth's house. She was pregnant before she got there; she's still pregnant after. Nothing has changed there, but what has changed is her understanding and her attitude towards her physical condition.

Mary comes to Elizabeth's house scared, confused and uncertain, and through the power of the Holy Spirit Elizabeth gives confirmation and clarity that opens up Mary's eyes to deeper understanding of what God is doing. That in turn prompts Mary's soul and spirit to worship. And what is it that prompts this inward response of Mary's heart? Notice she started the top of her song with a narrow focus of her own internal response, and now in verses 48 and 49 she is going to widen out from an inward state to acknowledge God's mercy and power in her life.

Verse 48: "For He has regarded the lowly state of His maidservant; for behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed. For He who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is His name."

Now when Mary asserts that all generations are going to call her blessed, she is not saying that she has somehow been deemed worthy as an object of worship. In fact it's quite the opposite. Mary's focus throughout her song is not that she has any merit or has done anything special to receive this blessing, but it's God who has regarded the lowly state of his maidservant, and the mighty one who has done great things for me. Mary's emphasis is on how God has done it all.

She indeed has blessed, but it's God who gets all of the glory. Look at what she says at the end of verse 49 - and holy is His name. What does it mean that God's name is holy? It's not just that He has, you know, some name tag that says, hi, my name is holy. God's holiness and that His name is holy refers to His character, refers to His essence, refers to everything that He is. God is holy.

I'm sure many of us have heard that the word holy means separate or set apart. Now I don't know about you, but that doesn't help me too much to try to figure out what God is like. Separate from what? Set apart how?

Now imagine for a moment that I have never seen a reindeer, and so I've come and I've asked you to try to describe to me what a reindeer looks like so that I can get a picture of it in my mind. And you start off and you tell me well a reindeer is a mammal. Okay, I know what mammals are. I am one, and I've seen them before; that's a start. Then you tell me that reindeer have four legs. Okay, the table has four legs and I've seen other animals; I have two of them. I can picture four of them.

Is it a large animal like an elephant? No, it's more like horse size. Okay, I've seen a horse. And reindeer have fur. Well I have a cat and I know my cat has a bunch of fur, so I can kind of picture fur on this four-legged animal. And finally, reindeer have these large antlers coming out of their head that look like dead tree branches. Okay, so now in my mind even though I've never seen a reindeer, I have a picture of a four-legged furry mammal about the size of a horse with antlers.

Even though it's not perfect, it's pretty close. And the reason I can do this is because I have categories in my brain to which I can compare and get a rough picture of what a reindeer might look like, but the problem is you can't do this with God. What categories and what comparisons are you going to use to describe God? There are none, and to even try would be blasphemy because any attempt to classify God into a human category would be to make Him less than He is. How would you compare someone of utmost beauty, of infinite glory, of perfect righteousness untouched by sin, absolute in judgment, supreme in all power and sovereignty, perfect in love and faithfulness? To whom or to what will you compare God? He is outside any human categorization. He has no comparison. He has no equal. He is altogether separate and completely set apart. He is holy.

And yet, what is absolutely mind blowing and what prompts Mary's heart to worship is the reality that the eternal, immortal, invisible, glorious Creator is now going indeed to become visible, temporal, mortal, and a humble servant. God is going to become one of us. He's going to reveal Himself in the person of Jesus.

Paul writes in his letter to the Colossians, Jesus is the image of the invisible God. And the writer to the Hebrews describes that Jesus is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of His nature. And Jesus even says of Himself in John 14:9, anyone who has seen Me has seen the Father. If you want to know what God is like you look to the Son, holiness in the flesh. And it's coming to comprehend this incarnation, this in the fleshing of God that prompts Mary's heart to worship. And what's more, is that she realizes that this merciful working of God is not just towards her alone, but in fact it's the way that God works with all generations of people. Look at verse 50: "And His mercy is on those who fear Him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with His arm; He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich He has sent away empty. He has helped His servant Israel, in remembrance of His mercy, as He spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and to his seed forever."

Some Mary's song begins narrow as the top, focused on herself, and then as it moves down it widens perspective and acknowledges the merciful work of God in her life, and now at the bottom it broadens out to recognize God's dealings with all generations. And it's this sense of awe at the incarnation that Luke wants to impress upon Theophilus. Take note most excellent Theophilus, God's mercy is for those who fear Him. He scatters the proud; He puts down the mighty; He exalts the lowly; He sends the rich away empty. Take heed my friend of the unexpected way that God works.

The common assumption is that a great God must work through great people, but this is not true. Rather God chooses to bring glory to Himself through the humble. Paul writes to the Christians in the city of Corinth in 1 Corinthians chapter 1, he says, "For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God."

In verses 54 and 55 Mary concludes her song with the mention of God's faithfulness to the nation of Israel. Have you ever wondered why God chose Israel to be His favorite nation in the Old Testament? In Deuteronomy chapter 7 He actually tells them why. In Deuteronomy 7 starting at verse 6 God is speaking to Moses and to the people of Israel, and He says this, "For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth. It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the Lord set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but it is because the Lord loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers, that the Lord has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt."

So God chose Israel not because they were anything special, but precisely because they weren't. You were the smallest nation and on top of that you were just nothing but a ragtag band of slaves trapped in Egypt. Why would God choose them? Because when God would act there would be no doubt in the eyes of the world as to who was to receive the glory...it must be God.

Why did God choose Mary? Because she was someone of great importance? No, because she is a humble nobody, and it's humble nobodies that God uses to do great things to bring glory to Himself. And so there is Mary's song - a Christmas tree from top to bottom. And now they are just two observations I want to make from this text this morning.

Number one, true worship is always something internal. The only real worship is heart worship. Yes, we have singing and we have banners, and we do applause, and we give an offering, and we do all of these different expressions of worship, ways that we might express our worship or things we might use to try to invoke worship, but in themselves external things are not worship. Think about it, you can have two people sitting in the exact same pew, in the exact same service and they go through everything together, sing all the same songs, said all the same stuff, and at the end one of them worshiped and one of them did not. And the difference between them was their heart. One person's heart was engaged and responded to who God was; the other one was not engaged and they were just going through the motions.

Jesus says in Matthew 15, He's quoting the prophet Isaiah, These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. All true worship is heart worship. All true worship is spontaneous, and by spontaneous I don't mean that worship is somehow random or chaotic - not at all - but that it needs to be a genuine response from the heart towards God's holiness. And this leads to the second observation...what inspires true worship is clarity. What inspires true worship is clarity of God's holiness. Worship is not inspired by music; music is inspired by worship.

It's common today in many churches to put this backwards and try to use music to manipulate emotion. You want to start off with some real, you know, kickin' high adrenaline upbeat songs. We'll get that adrenaline moving and get people excited and get them pumped up, and then we'll start to transition and we'll get some of those slower, deeper songs, and we really want people to feel it deep; and that's worship. That is not worship! There's nothing unique to Christianity about that. I can go to a U2 concert and have the same exact experience.

Real heartfelt worship is a response to seeing God's holiness with increasing clarity. That's it this morning. Real heartfelt worship is a response to seeing God's holiness with increasing clarity.

Mary comes to Elizabeth's house confused and uncertain. Elizabeth, by the Holy Spirit, brings clarity to how God is working and this fresh understanding prompts Mary's heart to worship. And as we come to see God's holiness, what does it do? It reveals my sinfulness. The more I come to see God's holiness, His glory, His sovereignty, His beauty, His grandeur, and more and more as I come to see clearly who He is as He reveals Himself in His word and in His Son, what does it do? it starts to reveal to me more and more of my sinfulness, of my lack, of my desperate, desperate need for a Savior. And it's this gap between who God is - seeing clearly who He is, and seeing clearly who I am - it's this gap that is my worship. There is a direct correspondence between how clearly you see God and see your own condition and how real and deep your experience of worship is going to be.

What's the difference between an immature Christian and a mature Christian? An immature Christian has a low view of God and a high view of self. That's about how much worship they're going to have; very shallow worship. What is maturity? How do we grow? Don't we grow by coming to see more and more of who God is, and more and more of who we are, and between that, what does that do? Gratitude. God, how far did You have to reach to reach me? The more I see that, the more it hits my heart and I say thank you, thank you. He who is forgiven little, loves little; he who is forgiven much, loves much.

In Chapter 5 of Luke Jesus states it is not the healthy who need a doctor, it's the sick. I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance. And the assumption behind that verse is not that there are two groups. You know we have the healthy and the righteous Christians over here or righteous people, and you have the sick and unrighteous people over here. The assumption is we are all sick and unrighteous. The only difference is some of us recognize it and some of us don't. God can only be a Savior to those who recognize that they need to be saved.

How wide of a gap did God have to bridge in order to reach you? We need to pray for God's Spirit to open our eyes, give us clarity, let us see You, see truth and see who we are in light of Your holiness.

I fear that many of us may respond to the incarnation the same way we would respond to receiving black socks for Christmas. Think back to when you were a kid. On Christmas morning you are all excited, you were thinking of all the things that you wanted, whether it was a pony or a BB gun or whatever it was, you get up that morning and your whole family is there in their pajamas and Aunt Beulah is there on the couch this morning and it has come time where you're opening the gift from Aunt Beulah and she is watching you with eager anticipation. And so you rip off the paper and throw open the box and there they are - black socks.

Now here is a dilemma, what do you do? There's a tension here. In your heart you are disappointed, and in your mind you're thinking: black socks, Aunt Beulah, don't you know anything? Don't you know anything about what kids want for Christmas? We don't want black socks. But of course you can't say that. Why...because your mom's right there and she's telling you, now Mark, tell Aunt Beulah thank you for the black socks. And so, in obedience and duty, I turn to Aunt Beulah and with a dry emotionless monotone I respond, thank you for the black socks Aunt Beulah. There, I said it! I said the words, thank you, isn't that enough? Am I really excited about these black socks? Did I really express gratitude from my heart? No, because honestly I'm really not that excited about black socks.

And the reality is that many of us respond to God's gift of Himself the same way we respond to black socks at Christmas. We come and we sing the words - I praise you Lord, I love you God - and we go through all the emotions and say all the right words, and we even look like we are worshiping, but meanwhile our hearts are far from Him. Jesus says where your treasure is there your heart will be also. And I fear for many of us our hearts have been captured by treasures other than God, and the reason for this apathy I believe is because our understanding of what Christmas is about and who God is, is becoming increasingly confused and unclear. You can see this in our Christmas cards.

I don't know about you, but I find it harder and harder each year to find good Christmas cards. I'm not talking the secular ones with the winter scene that say warm wishes this holiday season; I'm talking about the Christian ones, the ones that show the manger scene. You see the problem is I look at the Hallmark rendition of the manger scene and I compare this to what I read in the New Testament, and they don't seem to line up. We've adopted a very sanitary and sentimental view of the first Christmas that is not very realistic.

These Christmas cards, and you've seen them, and I don't want to make you feel bad if you've already bought your Christmas cards, but these Christmas cards show a very clean, well-lit little barn with docile sheep and camels sitting around. I've even seen some where the camels are smiling. And then there is Mary and Joseph kneeling beside a golden bed of clean straw and they are smiling, absolutely serene with rosy cheeks, and above them there is this angel with blond hair and a flowing white dress, and then there's little baby Jesus smiling with perfectly clean diapers.

This sentimentality is even in the songs we sing. You know the one, Away In A Manger, the second verse goes the cattle are lowing, the baby awakes, but little Lord Jesus, what? no crying He makes. What!? Come on. Yes He's God, but He is still completely and totally human. He cried. He had dirty diapers. Imagine Mary's fear of giving birth and the messiness of it all inside a dung filled and flea infested barn. She has never given birth before and there is no anesthesia. And for Joseph, there is no midwife. He is not trained on how to birth a baby through all this. And the shame that Joseph must feel, he can't even get a decent room for his wife to give birth in. He has to take her to this manger. What kind of husband am I? And the wonder that God could have arranged for there to be room at the inn, but why didn't He? What is God doing? I'm sure these two teenagers were both terrified feeling desperately alone and not really understanding how God is working through all this seeming chaos.

If you've ever been on a farm you know one thing for sure, animals stink and they are filthy. Can you fathom the scandal that the Jewish Messiah is born in a ceremonially unclean place? And the angels - do you realize every time, just about every time an angel appears in the Bible, do you know what their first words are? Fear not, and the assumption is that when people in the Bible encounter an angel their first thought is...I am going to die. Angels are incredibly terrifying creatures. They are not these fat little cupids with diapers and bows and arrows. That's not...

Angels have to say fear not, you are not going to die. And on top of all this, King Herod, who was the ruler at the time, gets wind of this prophecy that there is this coming king and he feels threatened. And so what does he do? He orders his Roman soldiers to go from house to house invading homes and if they see any baby boys under the age of two, they are to take their swords and slaughter these babies. I don't recall seeing that picture on any of my Christmas cards. And it's in the midst of all this seeming chaos that God chooses to enter the world. It's into this harsh reality where the filth of humanity is blatantly exposed that He says that is where I am going to meet them.

We have sanitized and marketed the Nativity so that it's no longer offensive. We need to remember it's only offensive to the proud. We airbrush out the blemishes, soften the edges, do some Photoshop work on it, and make it more palatable to our taste buds, but ultimately the message of Christmas is that you and I need a Savior. We are not comfortable with this. We would like to think better of ourselves; that we're really not that bad, but as our understanding of God and of the incarnation becomes fuzzy so our worship becomes dry.

True worship is the result of seeing the truth clearly. You will know the truth and the truth will set you free. God announces the birth of the Savior not to kings or to priest or to the wealthy, but to shepherds, to lowly shepherds who were considered social outcasts in Jewish society. Since they often had to work with dead animals, they were continually declared unclean and could never go to the temple to worship. And it's to these outcasts that God announces hope and good news. God invites the unclean. He welcomes the sick, the lowly, the outcasts, the humble. Come and see Him; get a closer look.

Come behold, born this day in the city of David, is Christ the Lord. And the shepherds leave the manger rejoicing. Come Lord Jesus and be born in the dirty manger of my heart. Will you stand with me?

I'm going to conclude this morning with a prayer from Paul from his letter to the Ephesians. Paul writes, "For this reason, ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints, I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers. I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and his incomparably great power for us who believe." Amen. Blessings on you all.