Choosing Christmas: Obedient to Death

A few months ago, I was visiting with a church member here at Highland. After spending some time with her, I could tell that she was an incredibly godly, mature woman. There was an almost saint-like quality about the way she held herself and thought and talked about life.

At one point she was telling me about a particularly painful season she went through. A few decades earlier, she had sensed God calling her to join a mission team in another part of the world. So she left her home, her friends and family and joined a team of people to plant a church few away from anything she knew. It was an act of pure faith on her part done with pure intentions and noble spirit.

And it was an absolute train wreck.

The whole endeavor failed in almost every conceivable way possible. The relationships on the team became fragile, they couldn’t connect well with the culture there, and after a couple of years the church dissolved leaving behind some heart broken people with shattered dreams and crushed hearts.

It took this particular woman years to work through the disappointment from that season. She said it was particularly difficult because it was probably the most pure act of faith in her entire life. She had done it for the most self-sacrificing and noble reasons. And it had totally failed.

Toward the end of our conversation though, this woman told me something that has stuck with me ever since. It’s been one of those things that regularly comes to mind on a hard day or when something disappointment happens.

She told me that years after this, she was praying to God asking Why He had allowed this to happen to her, and God’s responded to her something like “So that you could know My heart.”

And after that she was fine.

To Know A Suffering God

I don’t know what that story does to you, but I found it very moving.

In a world of Health and Wealth gospels and television preachers promising God will make you rich, you don’t hear a lot of testimonies like that. But I think it bears witness to a God who chooses to death, and more specifically, who chooses to die in the most shameful way possible.

Theologians used to say “To Know God is to suffer God” and I think there’s a lot of truth in that way of describing it.

To know God is to know a Suffering God, and that will involve suffering.

I don’t think God thinks pain is good or that suffering is inherently noble. All pain and suffering is an intrusion on God’s good world and will one day be ended.

But God chose to create a world where pain and suffering and death and evil were all a possibility that we could choose and create for ourselves and each other, but the goodness of God means God refuses to withdraw from that reality.

The way Philippians says it is “Jesus humbled Himself and became obedient to death…even death on a Cross.”

No-one reading this gets to choose whether or not to become obedient to death. It’s going to happen to us eventually whether you want it or not. But God could choose.

That’s what Christmas means, from Bethlehem to Calvary God has chosen to participate in everything that we don’t get a choice about. And since God chose to be with us in it, He can redeem even the worst stuff we go through.

So this time of year, depression seems to be higher, loneliness and family dysfunctions are felt more acutely. While the background music may say Joy to the World, that’s often not the case.

And if that’s where you are at, you should know Christmas has something to say even to you…maybe especially to you.

The Seeing Eye

In 1961 Yuri Gagarin was the first human being to successfully travel into space.  The Russians had won the initial part of the space race and sent a Cosmonaut into orbit around a watching world.

Afterward, the Russian Premier reported that when Gagarin went into space he discover there was no God there.  In response, C.S. Lewis wrote an article called “The Seeing Eye.”  Lewis said if there is a God who really did create all of us, we couldn’t discover him by going into outer space.

That kind of logic, Lewis says is nonsense. Obviously, if God does exists, God wouldn’t relate to human beings the way a person on the second floor  of a building related to someone on the first floor.

Instead, God would relate to us the way Shakespeare relates to Hamlet. If Hamlet wanted to meet Shakespeare he couldn’t just travel somewhere in his little Hamlet world, because Shakespeare was the creator of that world, and by definition, outside of it.

No, Lewis says, if Hamlet were ever able to meet Shakespeare it would be only if Shakespeare as the author, chose to write himself into the play.

Here’s how Lewis ends his essay:

To some, God is discoverable everywhere; to others, nowhere. Those who do not find Him on earth are unlikely to find Him in space…But send a saint up in a spaceship and he’ll find God in space as he found God on earth. Much depends on the seeing eye.

Lewis is saying If God created all things, if God holds all things together, than you can’t just find God in a telescope. God has to find you. God has to choose you.

Which is exactly what Christmas is.

Despite the cost to author, God has written Himself into our story.

God has put on our flesh and lived our lives, and died our death. He chose to pick up that which we can’t put down.

This is the world that God was born into. On purpose. God didn’t just choose humanity, God chose to be born in poverty, God chose to die with the least of these, and then command His people to follow Him there.

To be a Christian is to die a thousand deaths.

It’s to die the death of defending yourself when you are right and those who are accusing you are wrong.

It’s to die the death of trying to protect yourself from close friends who might betray you, or to die the death of caring when your family thinks you’re crazy, or when the world thinks you are an illegitimate kid.

It is to choose the path of downward mobility, of a God who was rich for our sake became poor, a God who though a King was born in a manger. And if you can’t see God there, in the words of Lewis, you might just not have eyes to see.

Until the New Year, from my family to yours, Merry Christmas