Sermon Tone Analysis

A Not So Silent Night

A few days ago I played a game on my Facebook page asking people Christmas themed this or that questions.

One of the questions was if you prefer Christmas Music or Christmas Movies.

I was surprised that the overwhelming answer on my very informal poll was CHRISTMAS MOVIES.

Personally I am not a fan Christmas movies, they are basically 100’s of movies that boil down to 2 or 3 plot lines.

I like movies that engage, movies with twists, movies that if you miss a minute you could miss the point.

I think that sometimes we under estimate God as a story teller!

Let’s look at some of the basic plot markers...

These scriptures frame the Christmas story and have given us the foundation for some of the greatest hymns ever written (Joy to the World, What Child is This, Silent Night) BUT is this really the whole story?

A few weeks ago we talked about the two advents… Today I would like to look at the Not So Silent Night!

How may of you have a Nativity Scene?

Now How May of You have a Red Dragon in your Nativity Scene?

Maybe you should!

This is the Christmas Story!

Let’s look at it in Matthew’s Gospel

What happens after Christmas?

“The dragon will wage war against those who keep God’s commands and hold to the testimony of Jesus.”

We’ve already talked about life in between the two Advents, The birth of Christ and the Return of Christ.

Advent begins in the darkness and ends in the light!

We have the hope of Jesus behind us and in front of us!

There is a stabilization in our lives because of this.

The advent focus on peace, hope, love, and joy all depend on the reality of the life, death, resurrection, and future return of Jesus.

That foundation is in place.

But we see how life unfolds between the two advents right away in scripture.

After Jesus is born, Mary and Joseph have to flee with him to a foreign land, a land that represented a history of bondage and slavery to the people of Israel.

They live separated from family and perhaps livelihood for months, perhaps years.

In the area from which they fled, Herod promptly slaughtered children.[11]

The dragon was unleashed.

Just like that, the darkness begins to push in to the light.

As John made clear in his apocalypse, that war would continue.

Indeed, it has, in great and small ways.

The dragon hates the light of truth, love, goodness, hope, joy, peace….

When life feels ‘kingdom good,’ expect pushback.

Expect war.

It's often after great moments of God's revelatory light that the darkness pushes in hard.

I’ve not been persecuted in any meaningful sense of the world, so I don’t want to compare my experience with that of the persecuted church around the world.

When I talk about the dragon in my life, I’m talking of the ways in which spiritual/emotional/relational darkness presses in to spiritual light.

I don't know if you've experienced this in your life, but I've often found moments of great depression after times of great satisfaction.

It's the sermon that feels really good followed by a Monday of doubt and anxiety and second-guessing.

It's the fantastic vacation with the family, and two weeks later feeling like there is a relational chasm between us.

It's feeling really good about my fathering one day, and then having the wheels come off the next.

It's thinking one day how much I love the people in my life and the next day having my heart torn out by one of them.

It’s going from a moment where I think, “I am finally grounding my identity in Christ” to days of thinking, “Dear God, I am such a screw-up.”

This is the pattern.[13]

But how does it end?

With the resurrection and life.

How will history end?

With the return of the king to make a New Heaven and New Earth.

What happens when my life ends?

Joy unspeakable and full of glory.

So we know the beginning, we know the middle, and we know the end of the story.

We're just in the middle right now.

The light shines, the dark pushes in, the light shines, the dark pushes in.

This is life between the advents.

This, too, is an apocalypse of sorts, an unveiling that the Bible makes clear to us and that is confirmed throughout our life.

We think of the apocalypse as something earth-shattering and perhaps catastrophic, but in some ways it's the ongoing pattern of our life.

Truth is constantly being unveiled to us by the grace of God.

We see through a glass darkly on this side of heaven

There is a constant need for an unveiling.

·      It's when we finally understand that obscure passage of scripture.

·      It's when we finally see how a biblical truth applies to our life in a life-changing way.

·      It's when we begin to actually understand the power of repentance, and grace, and justice, and mercy.

·      It's when the biblical interplay of both grace and works clicks.

·      it's when we see the flow of our life in the reality of God's plan.

·      It's when one our Christian brothers or sisters speaks truth into our life that opens our eyes.

·      It's when we see ourselves as God sees us.

·      It's when we learn how to lift up our heads (Luke 21:28)

·      It's when we understand how God in his mercy and power could take people like us and tell us to arise and reflect his light  (Isaiah 60:1) in a way that will bring glory to him.

These, too, are unveilings.

We participate in an ongoing apocalypse.

So one of the questions I have between the two advents of God is this: “How do these dark valleys work in our favor?

How does God take the war leveled by the dragon and use it for our good and God’s glory?”

Apocalyptic literature in scripture was always literature of Hope.

How does my life participate in that kind of story?

Those who walked in darkness had often walked in the darkness of their own making.

In fact, the Bible has far less to say about the attacks from the dragons “out there” than the ones that have burrowed into our hearts.

Our greatest threats as Christians and as a Church are not out there.

God told his people through the Prophet Jeremiah in Jer 11 and Jer 29:12-14 that if they humbled themselves and sought the face of God, their nation would experience the blessings that God told them were in store for them if they were true and loyal to God.

If they didn't (as Jeremiah warned so vividly), it wasn't going to end well for their nation at all.

They were always going to be God’s covenant people, but their experience of that covenant, their experience of life, was going to be radically different based on the posture of their hearts.

Their flourishing in the Kingdom God had planned for them had almost nothing to do with what the nations around them did.

It had everything to do with how seriously they took the covenant.

And if Old Testament physical realities teach us something about New Testament spiritual realities, our flourishing as Christian individuals and as a church will have almost nothing to do with what our Empire does to us or for us.

It will have everything to do with how seriously we take our covenant.

This, I think, is the way in which we experience life more abundant, the fullness of the richness of God’s redemption of the world in our lives.

And that can’t help but make us the kind of salt and light in the world that God intends.

This is an invitation of repentance and communion!

Repentance should not be a scary subject, but rather a welcomed part of our Christian life!