The Man of the Years                                                                        12/15/46

 

Scripture:  John 1: 6-17

 

Text:  John 1: 14; “...we beheld his glory..full of grace and truth.”

 

The angels sing!  Does anyone doubt it?  In the midst of all the hatred, greed, suspicion, sin, callousness which we cannot help seeing in the people of our world [and perhaps even in the mirror], the angels sing!  When the lovely Christmastide comes, the music we want most to hear is the sound of the carols.  I have seen Jew join with gentile to sing them, not in surrender of his own faith, but just because he loves the joy of them.

 

Peoples’ hearts become glad, generous, compassionate.  For a short time they are more nearly like what the Eternal God would have us all be.  Is not that the music of angels?

 

The birth of a baby is rightly an occasion of rejoicing - not because a helpless, utterly dependent, attention-demanding, work-creating little human existence has put in its appearance, but because of what that mite of human life promises to be.  “The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.”  Is not that the secret of joy in the hearts of parents, relatives, friends, at the birth of every babe?

 

It was so at the birth of Mary’s son.  Not many people knew about it except the man and his wife who couldn’t get into a hotel because of the housing situation.  A few simple, country people were said to have found out about it through a sort of intuition.  They had seen a host of angels.  And some wise fellows from a distance, who were astrologers of a sort, were on the way to find out about it.

 

For most people lacking the news, the significance of that birth became known much later when the child became a man and lived among people as no other person ever lived.  Is it not because he lives today in millions of hearts that people look back to his birth with rejoicing?

 

            “...warm, sweet, tender, even yet a present help is he.

                        And faith has still its Olivet, and love its Galilee.”

 

“Time” magazine has had the custom for some years of selecting each December some prominent figure to be “the man of the year.”  Each year the editors explain why they make their choice.  The man of 1945 was President Truman, they said, largely because they couldn’t think of anyone else who was a better candidate!  In past years, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, even Adolph Hitler (in 1938) have been Time magazine’s “men of the year.”  Only Roosevelt repeated.  He was chosen three times.  Such men of the year come and go.  They fill the public attention for a time, and are soon gone and largely forgotten.

 

But through the years of a long history - nearly 2,000 such years - there is one who has not been forgotten.  At his coming, time was changed, so that people who knew about him came to speak of “AD” and “BC”.  In our minds, we turn all history around his advent into the world. 

 

Long before this advent, the prophet Micah had given a definition of religion which stands yet as one of the best:  “He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with thy God?”  [Micah 6: 8].

 

This one historic figure fulfills that definition perfectly - doing justly, loving kindness, walking huumbly with God.  He was open and sincere.  He had no craft or guile; he hated sham and pretense.  When a man said flatteringly to him, “Good Lord, what shall I do ...” and so on, he first rebuked that flattery: “Why do you call me good?  There is none good save God.”  [Matthew 19: 16-17].  He had no use for hypocrisy and attacked it with merciless directness: “You look like lambs,” he would say, “but underneath you are ravening wolves.”  [Matthew 7: 15].

 

This man understood people.  They were drawn to him more surely than filings to a magnet.  People loved him and crowded about him wherever he went.  A person could count on him to understand.  He understood Peter’s impetuosity.  He understood the character of a woman drawing water at a well so accurately that she told her friends he seemed to know everything she had ever done from childhood.  He recognized the root difficulty of a young prince who was enslaved to his own wealth and station.  And yet, with all his understanding of people he was compassionate and merciful toward them.

 

And he was close to God.  The deity was no problem to him.  God was a presence, a reality.  He had a complete and contagious certainty about God.  People saw it.  When they met him, they knew that God was real - that God was there!  He was constantly breaking out with the word “Father” as naturally as any other word of common conversation.

 

He hated anything that hid God from people’s understanding.  It made him violently angry that the temple had become so commercialized that worship was just another deal.  “My house shall be a house of prayer,” he quoted from the Scriptures.  [Mark 11: 15-17; Isaiah 56.7].

 

At the very end of his life his closing utterance, and nearly his last sound, was this:  “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.”  [Luke 23: 46].  He was close to God!, keenly aware of the divine presence, and completely obedient to God’s spirit and purpose:  “I and my Father are one.”  [John 10: 30].  “It is my work to do the Father’s will.”  [John 4: 34].

 

Jesus of Nazareth fulfills perfectly Micah’s definition of religion.  He did justly; he was honest.  He loved mercy; he understood.  He walked humbly; he was close to God.

 

It is because he was like that, this babe of Bethlehem grown up, that Jesus is the Man of the Years.  In the promise of his infancy we all rejoice and sing.  In the fulfillment of that promise as a man grown to perfect character, we are taught the way to live.  In his living timelessness we are given the means of salvation.

 

He speaks with the voice of conscience.  He expects your self and your service.  He knows that you belong to the Father’s will and purpose.  He should be first in your life, not by his force but by your choice!  When this “man of the years” is put first in a life, he just makes it over.  Or perhaps it would be better to say “he makes it,” as though that life is now something it never was before.

 

Saul was a respectable enough man, self-reliant, educated, influential, even unusually zealous about his religion, genuinely concerned lest its laws and customs be upset by these fanatics who were called Christian.  But when he became a changed man on a trip to the town of Damascus, when he saw the light, he came out with a new name, Paul, and a brand new life!  From then on, everything that Christ meant was first in his life.  “In him who strengthens me,” he wrote to the Philippian people, “I am able for anything.”  [Philippians 4: 13].

 

George Bernard Shaw once said that though men “crucified Christ on a stick, he somehow managed to get hold of the right end of it.”  Like this “Man of the Years” who had become his Lord, Paul was able to keep hold of the right end of the stick through all of the difficulties and trials and temptations and dangers that finally culminated in his own martyrdom.  Because he believed implicitly in the Lordship of Jesus, Paul was able to accomplish feats of persuasion and organization that would otherwise have been utterly impossible.

 

And the other Christian converts were the same in spirit.  Sholem Asch has this said in his great book, The Apostle:  “See you not what has happened in Rome?  The more they burn the believers in the Messiah, the more they fling them to the beasts, the mightier grow their numbers.”  O how our time needs the quality of a Paul - in you and me - in Christian people, as we are called, of our day!

 

A young worker did not conceal his hostility to Christianity to the head of a worker’s high school in Sweden.  The principal asked the young man whether he was opposed to Christianity because Christians worked for peace and justice in the world or because Christians preached neighbor-love.  “No!” the young man replied, and then added after a thoughtful pause, “I guess that what I resent in Christians is not that they are Christian, but that they are not Christian enough!”

 

Isn’t that the real trouble with all of us - that we are not Christian enough?  Is our missionary zeal for the redemption of men and nations a mere flicker, when it should be a consuming passion?  Is our giving to the church’s world-wide mission a trickle beside the flow of sacrificial concern we could release for multitudes in darkness and millions at the verge of starvation?  Are we satisfied to get to church occasionally, when the spirit and work of Christ awaits the solidarity of a consecrated and concerned fellowship?

 

Bombs destroyed the Cathedral  at Coventry, in England, during the war.  On one of the cathedral walls, which had been concealed when a chapel was added centuries earlier, was a painting of Christ.  No one seemed to know anything about that painting.  After all, if a painting of the head of Christ stands in the way of a bigger and better cathedral, why not cover it up with the new wall?  Do we have to have the droning of planes and blast of explosives to uncover, to our eyes, for one surprised moment, the appearance of Christ?  Can’t we be sufficiently in earnest to put Him at the head of every list in importance to our lives and plans? - to keep his vision out where we can see it?

 

It is said of Branch Rickey, president of the Brooklyn Dodgers, that when he signed up Negro Jackie Robinson to play shortstop on the Montreal team [one of the farm teams of the Dodgers], he was asked why he had done such a thing, unprecedented in baseball history.  He replied, “I’m doing it because I can’t help it.  I cannot face my God much longer knowing that his black creatures are held separate and distinct from his white creatures in the game that has given me all I call my own.”

 

Marian Anderson, the great contralto singer, is quoted as  saying, “I dream of the day when there will be a better understanding among people.  When I sing, I don’t want them to see that my face is black; I don’t want them to see that my face is white; I want them to see my soul.  And that is without color.”

 

William Pierson Merrill tells the story of an aged, simple preacher, who had spent 70 of his 90 living years preaching in a small church of the South.  He had delivered more than 10,000 sermons from one text.  Dr. Merrill was decidedly skeptical about the veracity of the story until he heard what the text was.  This was the text of 10,000 sermons: “Have this mind in you which was also in Christ Jesus.”

 

After all, what else is there for the Christian minister to preach about?  Is not the whole gospel an elaboration of that one theme?  Is not that the absolute pitch around which the complete organ of life’s harmonies and discords is built?

 

If we Christians have the mind of Christ, this Babe of Bethlehem grown to the “Man of the Years,” we shall transform the church, we shall leaven the whole world, we shall push the cause of missions, we shall build good homes and brotherly communities, we shall give the very angels cause to sing again!

 

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, December 15, 1946.