Praise the Lord for this
wonderful season of Advent and Christmas that is celebrated around the corner and
around the globe. When I was young boy growing up in a remote village in
India, I recall the joys of waiting for Christmas. While growing up we did not
have electricity, there were no telephones, cell phones or ipods. There was no
television where you can watch Christmas movies beginning at Thanksgiving
and all through the month of December. I recall listening to Christmas
stories. My dad, my mom, my grandpa, and my uncles told us the Biblical stories
of Christmas. There were also times they told us the fairy tales. We did not
have any books with fairy tales so these stories were passed down to us through
oral tradition.
As a young boy I thought that the
Christmas story was a beautiful fairy tale that turned out to be very true. In
a way this is the story of a Mighty prince who becomes pauper so that when we
receive Him we become Royal princes and princesses .
Søren Kierkegaard, famous Danish
theologian, told it this way. There once was a mighty king
who from a distance fell in love with a humble maiden. He was a mighty king!
Every statesman in the world trembled in awe of him. No one dared speak a word
against this king, who could crush nations with his power. Yet the heart of
this mighty ruler melted with love for a humble maiden. Oddly enough, it was
his kingliness which tied his hands. If he brought her to the palace, crowned
her head with costly jewels and bedecked her in royal robes, of course she would
not resist, because no one dared resist him. But would she love
him?
Of course, she would say she loved
him, but would she truly? Or would she live with him in fear, privately
grieving for the life she left behind? Would she be happy at his side? How
could he know her true feelings? If he rode up to her cottage in the forest
accompanied by an armed escort, with bright banners flying, that would overwhelm
her. He did not want a cringing subject; he wanted a lover, an equal. He wanted
her to forget that he was a king and she a humble maiden, and to let their
shared love cross the gulf between them. For it is only in love that those who
are unequal become equal. So the king clothed himself in beggar's rags and
slipped unnoticed through the palace gates. He walked the roads. He tilled the
fields. And later in a marketplace, still in his tattered clothes, his hands
now calloused from rough work, he bumped into her and introduced himself. Then
he wooed and won the hand of this servant girl. On their wedding day he
whispered in her ear, "My dear beloved, you are now a queen." And they were wed
in royal splendor, and lived blissfully ever after as King and Queen.
That is the fairy tale of
Christmas. The King of Heaven fell in love with his bride, the church, and
humbled himself so that he might win her love. Christmas, in a sense, is a fairy tale so, like a fairy tale, it takes
place in magical land of time beyond time. In the real story of the Christ child, there isn't a chimney (for Santa
to slip down). The best fairy tales take
place at night though in the church we usually meet in the bright light of day.
But that baby was born at night. The angels serenaded from heaven at night.
Joseph had his dream at night. So John wrote in his gospel that the Christ boy
came as a light into our darkness. As Simon Tugwell has pointed out, in Jesus
God was pursuing us in our night, so when we tried to run away we ran right into
his arms.
Though it seems like such a fairy
tale, what brings us and millions of other people together this season is not
make-believe. The incarnation of God in human flesh — in the birth, life, death
and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth — was an historical event. The book of Hebrews describes the Lord of all enthroned in
glory: radiant as a diamond, every angel eye was on him. But then the Lord of
all looked down and saw the suffering and pain and heartbreak of our world. He
saw that the terrible diseases of sin and selfishness had broken out and
overtaken his beloved creatures. Knowing the cost of his coming, that in our
twisted-ness we would certainly reject the God of light, out of love for us he
came anyway. He came so that tonight we might
receive him by faith and have among us and within us the life of God, the
eternal indestructible life of God's own spirit.
Sometimes it seems that in this
world we are caught in the bad part of a fairy tale, surrounded by the darkness
and evil forces, and there's no way to get out of our trouble, no hope that we
will ever break out of that darkness. Every time we turn on the news, we are
bombarded by stories of murder, terrorism, madness and mayhem. We feel small,
insignificant, and helpless, and the darkness seems impenetrable. Yet, in fairy
tales, creatures are ultimately transformed into what they truly are. The ugly
duckling becomes a great white swan, the frog is revealed as a prince, and the
beast is transformed by Beauty's love. At Christmas, my friends, you and I
undergo an almost magical metamorphosis into what we always are but sometimes
forget to be: children of God. We are all, in
fact, characters in the greatest story ever told. James Patrick has likened the
church to the characters in J. R. R. Tolkien's Ring trilogy: out in the world,
moving among the forces of evil, surrounded by darkness on all sides, and yet
triumphant.
I read about a Christian family in
which there is a four-year-old daughter named Kylie. Like many other little
girls, Kylie wants to be a princess. After all, she has heard the fairy tales
and knows how beautiful princesses are. One day she asked, "Mommy, can I be a
princess?" A lot of parents would have said, "Someday" or "Maybe," but Kylie's
mom is a very smart woman. Without blinking, she replied, "When you believe in
Jesus, you're already a princess." Silence suddenly engulfed this talkative
little four-year-old, because the answer made perfect sense. Of course God would
make her a princess.
In the same way, you and I are sons
and daughters of the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. Though we live as
flawed people in this flawed world, as someone has said, we are ragtag
royalty. We are princes and princesses. It is written in John 1, "As many as
received Him to them He gave the power to become the sons and daughters of
God."
In Christ,
Brown
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