To You Is Born a Savior 12/22/46
Scripture: read Isaiah 40: 1-5; 9-11; 29-31
Text: Luke 2: 11; “For there is born to you this day ... a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.”
With what longing have the peoples of the earth looked for someone to save them! Men with tyranny in their hearts have made capital of this longing, only to betray the people into deeper need - even unto despair.
But, over the babel sounds of men’s shouting there have come repeatedly voices of assurance and expectation. Such a voice of genuine spiritual hope is that of the Isaiah whose cry begins, “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith the Lord.” The voice continues the plea that people “prepare the way of the Lord,” for he shall come and “feed his flock like a shepherd.” And in him shall people find new power, new strength, new assurance.
Throughout centuries of stormy history, a people who were sure that they were chosen of God, waited for a Messiah. They had the spiritual rule of the decalogue to live by. They had the Law and the Prophets. They had the ministration of their priests. But they needed something else.
They needed it all brought out in the life of a person; someone in whom they could recognize the spirit of right, as God expects it to be; someone to save people from their sins and free their lives. A few, really a mere handful, realized that such a Savior had come when a babe was born in the village of Bethlehem some 19 centuries ago.
But, O the rejoicing in those few hearts then! And how that rejoicing has swelled to a tide of joy through the years, as hosts of people now sing at the birthday of the Savior!
A good deal of the modern world doesn’t know much about the heart of Christmas, however. Christmas means a holiday, brisk business and more work. It means a recess from school for the young people, and many family gatherings, and present, and Christmas cards. But that far only, it is just another secular super-holiday.
Probably children have a special right to a full heritage of the sheer fun of Christmas. But they ought to have some indoctrination as to its meaning, too - which they get in our church and Sunday School sessions, and should have even better in their homes.
All this is not enough for adults. Ronald Bridges suggests that adults have to qualify each year. They have to give evidence, before their own souls, that they have kept up their “residence as citizens in the Kingdom of God.” And he goes on to suggest that anyone who groans about the awful burdens and boredom of the day is one whose citizenship has obviously lapsed. He is like one married who, having dropped the vital contributions to married happiness, depends on grim respectability to maintain its vitality.
Christmas is a time for catching up on spiritual accounts that may have fallen behind, for wiping out old grudges that hang over the ledger like bad debts, for walking a second mile and giving away a cloak or two, for being sure that one has not become a spiritual jay-walker with a genius for getting hit and hurt by anything moving on the highways of living.
It is important to have one’s spiritual accounts in order. Further, it is important to learn to live in the way that Christmas shows a man how to live - by treatments of generosity, kindness, good will and the great therapy of love.
Anybody can be born again, with Christ, at Christmas, and restore his citizenship in the Kingdom of God, if he will.
There are certain things that are quite essential to the full realization of the spirit of Christmas, as old Scrooge belatedly discovered! One is that you don’t get it, nor do you have it forced on you nor wrenched from you; --- you give it. And you give it in practical ways.
There isn’t half the fun in a mere exchange of presents, pleasant as that often is, especially when the choice of gifts has been a happy one, that there is in providing some of the necessities of life for the desperately needy. The story is told of a little boy who was hungry for a hamburger. He approached a man who looked financially able to provide it and said to him, “Mister, can you give me a dime for a hamburger?” The man looked at him with disapproval, hating to be bothered and inconvenienced, and said, “Why?” The little urchin was not easily shaken, however. Looking right back into the eyes of the man, he said, “Mister, why not?” In saying, “Mister, why not?” he threw the burden of argument on the one who had the ability to give. Why should he stand there trying to establish his need? Why shouldn’t the one who obviously had so much, try to answer for himself the question as to whether he should give?
There are a lot of people in the world - far more than we in comfortable, half-grumbling America realize -- who have hardly the zip left to ask for a dime. There are more than a million war orphans in Poland alone, where children are 70% tubercular! Milk for Greek children does not exist except for a trickle that flows in through relief sources. These are just hints of the despairing need that stalks the existence of peoples in country after country of Europe and Asia.
When you remember that 25 cents will buy 10 children a cup of milk each, and $10.00 will buy and deliver a package containing 29 pounds of food to last 3 weeks for a family of 4, I suspect that the family that has sent a CARE package, the individual who has given to relief, the Congregationalist who has pledged his giving to War Victims and Reconstruction, is going to enjoy Christmas dinner this year much more than he might had he been only the recipient of some gift.
There is that about giving that is more blessed than receiving. Especially is this true of giving to the special work of God’s Kingdom. A gift through Christian channels is not just an exchange of courtesies with God - a sort of attempt to compensate the Eternal for favors received. It is a priceless share in the joy of spreading the news of God’s enduring love.
But this matter of giving presents is yet not the best part of Christmas. Christmas is the announcement of great good news. “Unto you is born this day a Savior.” Remember what that means. Living, for us all, has its joys, its comforts, its satisfactions, its accomplishments. But its setting is in a world of evil deeds, selfish desires, temptation and frustration -- in short, of living out of accord with God’s will, that is, sin. Salvation means being saved from the evil of thinking and acting out of accord with God’s will. It is a conscious return to the Christian way of life wherein one’s own soul again becomes whole.
Because One came, bringing in His life the power to restore unity of soul, the very angels announce “Unto you is born a Savior.”
Suppose your life and mine is saved, made a harmonious whole; once, or many times -- what then? Perhaps the best gift is one which can be happily used. Here is the greatest gift to us - and the one we can best use in the giving of ourselves. For the constant giving of our life, with all its powers, is the best part of Christmas -- better yet, much better, than the giving of the most considerate presents. And the world has such need of the gift!
Nearly 3 years ago, in January of 1944, a Danish pastor named Kaj Munk, who had incurred the wrath of the Nazis by his refusal to conform to their regulations concerning his preaching, was taken from his home at night, shot, and thrown into a ditch. In his last Christmas sermon, the martyred pastor had asserted that the good news of Christmas is not that we are to have a nice fat goose for dinner, sing carols pleasant to hear, and be generally comfortable. The meaning of the original Christmas is this: that there were dropped into this world, as if by parachute, God’s weapons of the spirit. It is with these weapons that the world’s evil is to be conquered, for men must stop being beasts, and go forward toward becoming men in God’s image! The meaning and joy of each succeeding Christmas is to be found at the front of this struggle to conquer the world’s evil, found at the very point where the battle is fiercest in the place where we live.
A truly happy Christmas is to find our place in that host whose song is “Glory to God; peace on earth, good will to men.” The host who sing that song are a beloved community of all people, some of them great leaders but most of them “just folks,” who are of the spirit of Kaj Munk. Like a giant mirror, they reflect through the ages, and in this time, the light of God in mankind’s dark hours.
They are a community of life “for the healing of the nations.” They are the folk whom God uses, in this moment of history, to establish a world-wide fellowship of those who will bring persons together, breaking the chain reactions of hatred and fear. It is important that you and I join that host which sings, “glory to God” and on earth practices “good will toward men.”
There’s a song in the air!
There’s a star in the sky!
There’s a mother’s deep prayer
And a baby’s low cry!
And the star rains its fire, while the Beautiful sing,
For the manger of Bethlehem cradles a king.
In the light of that star
Lie the ages impearled’
And the song from afar
Has swept over the world.
Every home is aflame, and the Beautiful sing
In the homes of the nations that Jesus is King.
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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, December 22, 1946