Unto You - - A Savior 12/23/45
Scripture: Luke 2: 1-20
Text: Luke 2: 11a; “For unto you is born this day .. a Savior.”
What shall the sermon today be about? Isn’t there a theme that is in harmony with the Christmas season? Lynn Corson suggests that there is, after all, only one message at Christmas time. It is the message proclaimed by angels on that glorious night when a bright star shone over the roof of a Bethlehem stable -- when shepherds in a field heard the music: “For unto you is born this day ... a Savior.” This is the whole significance of the color and pageantry, the might and the tenderness of Christmas: “Unto you ... a Savior.”
Again, as in every year, we go back across the centuries to relive the ancient scene. And in the reliving we always find but the one great theme. After ages of sinning and wandering and doubt and despair among mankind, the means of man’s redemption appeared. At last, into the dark world came a Savior!
Suppose you were God; how would you feel about this creation of yours - especially mankind, molded with great hope, in your own image; given a measure of your own freedom to make choices; surrounded by your own love, yet beset also by evil temptation to which he unhappily yields; a crowning purpose in your creation yet filled also with perversity and selfish stupidity?
Suppose you had seen, in this mankind which you had created, the appearance of envy, of violence, and had then seen it grow in magnitude through the years. Would you have destroyed it, as the old Testament Hebrews taught that God did try destroying it by flood? Or would love prompt you to try something else, as the New Testament disciples believe God did? In the fullness of time, God sent into the world his Son, to redeem the world, so that the very angels of the heavens should sing, in rich harmony: “For unto you is born this day, a savior.”
Is it any wonder that wise men spoke of a star to guide them? It is a true instinct of joy that makes the psalmist picture the little hills leaping together like lambs, and the book of Job speaks of the morning stars that sang together, “and all the sons of God shouted for joy.” [Job 38: 7].
They were quite right in their assertion that the natural order is subservient to the spiritual order which is the dominant force in the universe! We are now driven, by a kind of desperation, to recognize that this is true. The mighty material power which we have seen developed, is naught of good or evil of itself. It is tremendously evil when used by the spirit of evil; it can be tremendously good if used in the spirit of Good.
It is no wonder, then, that desperate hearts everywhere have leaped up in hope at the brightness of a star and at the loveliness of a song of pope. “Unto you a savior is born.” If we are to be saved, our powers may be used for good.
Ah, yes! but not without the challenge of evil. Hardly had the poor, plain parents realized the preciousness of their child; hardly had the shepherds and the wise men of the East returned over their respective roads when Herod’s evil intent came with massacre in Bethlehem, hard on the heels of the holy family fleeing toward Egypt.
The strongest days of the Christ, in his time on earth, and in the hearts of his followers, have always been days spent in overcoming besetting evil - often at tremendous cost. The “peace” is only to men of good will. The evil world of ill will cannot know it.
The wise men of the New Testament, writing their record of their faith in the Son of God did not stop with the thought that Jesus had dominion over the souls of men. In a daring venture of faith they declared the Jesus has dominion over all creation. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him and without him was not anything made that was made.” [John 1: 1-3].
Paul breaks out in a kind of paean of praise over Jesus Christ’s mastery over the things of heaven and earth. Small wonder, then, on that first Christmas when Jesus was born, that a star symbolized the ultimate meaning of the event in the world of spirit.
We now live, more than 1940 years later, in a time when our preoccupation with material things, through scientific investigation and research, has placed in our hands more power than we know how to use! In our spiritual immaturity, we are not yet capable of using it for good. The time for us to learn is terribly short!
If Paul were living today, he would claim all the findings of the sciences for Christ; he would say that all power belongs to him. All that physics reveals; all that chemistry discovers; all the findings in any field of truth belong to Christ! He is King of Kings and Lord of Lords.
To busy, busy man --- ceaselessly searching through nature for knowledge that may be his very undoing, there comes the witnessing star and a voice: “There is born to you this day a Savior.”
The shepherds, too, affirm the great truth. They were humble men, unschooled in the intricacies of the Law and the Hebrew prophets, but wise in the ways of nature. We might speak of them as illiterate or ignorant. But they were wise enough to hear the voice of God when he spoke -- and there is no true wisdom apart from that!
When the angels of God spoke that night the shepherds instinctively felt that the message of redemption was for them; that common people all over the world had a stake in what was being proclaimed that night. The voice said “to you and to all mankind” - that meant folk of every class or condition; the rich and the poor; the learned and the unlettered; the merchant and the fisherman and the shepherd and the tax collector - yes, to the king and to the thief! The savior came to touch with divine awareness the simple, kindly, sincere people of the world. No wonder that the angels sang to shepherds; “Unto you is born this day, a savior.”
An author was traveling by train not so long ago from the Ruhr Valley over into Poland. Some Polish miners were being repatriated, and he walked through the cars where they were sleeping as the train sped on through the night. He paused by a seat where a father and mother and a little boy lay sleeping. He writes of his thoughts as he looked at them, especially at the child: “A golden fruit born of two peasants. I bent over the smooth brow, over those mildly pouting lips, and I said to myself; this is a musician’s face. This is a child Mozart. This is a life full of beautiful promise. Protected, sheltered, cultivated, what could not this child become? When by mutation a new rose is born in a garden, all the gardeners rejoice. They isolate the rose, tend it, foster it. But there is no gardener for men! This little Mozart will be shaped like the rest by the common stamping machine. This little Mozart will love shoddy music in the stench of night dives. This little Mozart is condemned. What torments me tonight is the gardener’s point of view - it is the sight, a little bit in all men, of Mozart murdered.”
But there is a gardener for men. That is what the angels were singing about when they announced in the night above the shepherds: “Unto you is born this day a savior.”
Not only simple shepherds but wise men as well heard the message. They were earnestly seeking after truth. They would not be content until they had found the truth, realizing that only the truth can make men free.
And so, in true wisdom, they came to lay their treasures at the feet of the Christ child. True wisdom always bows before the Christ. True wisdom always needs to find a savior. People can be clever and intelligent, but they are wise only as they dedicate their cleverness and their intelligence to great spiritual ends. The richest gifts of the mind belong to Christ. There is no true intellectual life that is not dedicated to him for there it finds its spiritual meaning.
One of the brilliant minds of our generation, Paul Elmer Moore, who had himself made the journey from agnosticism to faith, speaks of it in this way; says he, “I recite the creeds and wonder and doubt. And then I read in the Gospels, and out of some sentence or some act - out of some gesture or some glance of the eye I think it would have been had I been there to see - springs a flash of light, comes a sudden lifting of the curtain, which compels me to say: this thing is of man and more than man.”
The shepherds were there; the wise men were there; and Mary and Joseph were there. A true family has Christ in the midst of it in radiance and love. Life in the modern world seems to get more and more complex. But the importance of the family and the need for the Christian home has not changed. It is still the most important unit in our society. What the church can do in molding life, what government can do, even what the school can do, is small compared with what the home does. There is formed the basic character of the churchman, the citizen, the student.
The angelic message of that holy night was proclaimed to a home - to all homes - “For unto you is born this day a savior.”
What a mighty ray of hope may flood our hearts in this desperate day as we listen to the angels’ song. Here is God saying that surely there shall come to pass the things proclaimed so long ago over Palestinian hills. We must not turn cynic, nor lose our faith in goodness. We must not water down, and lose, our idealism. We must lay our love on the altar in redemptive sacrifice for the world’s hate.
We must commit ourselves steadily to the propagation of the truth proclaimed on that first Christmas morning. We must not allow the savagery of war, nor the problems of peace, nor personal loss or tragedy, nor the agony of these times to dim for us the beauty, the promise, the hope of that message: “Unto you ... a Savior.” It is God’s promise to a weary, heart sick, broken world of people. Out of the precious wealth of Christmas greeting that came to a certain home last year, one in particular caught and held fast the attention. The front was made up of two panels; on each panel an angel stood with raised trumpet. On the back of the card, the friend had written just one word, “Rejoice!” and signed his name.
Would that every one who receives a Christmas greeting this year might have for his own the same message: “Rejoice!” “For unto you is born this day a Savior.”
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Dates and places delivered:
Wisconsin Rapids, December 23, 1945