The Bigness of God--A Christmas Sermon

This is my Christmas sermon from a couple of years ago. It's one of my favorites.


Every October, around St. Luke’s Day,
the seminary community at Sewanee
holds a series of lectures.

These are a pretty big deal;
they get big names in the theological community,
and alumni come back from all over the country to attend.

Well, a few years ago,
the lecturer was a certain Dr. Adams,
who was a big deal professor at Yale,
but getting ready to transfer to Oxford
and become an even bigger deal.

Dr. Adams is a professor of Christian ethics
who had just written a book on the theological implications of September 11,
so I thought that these lectures
were going to be really good.

Well, it turns out that Dr. Adams is very very smart.
Way too smart for regular folks like me to understand.

She stood stiff and still behind the podium,
and read her notes word for word
in a tone of deathly monotony.

Her lectures were full of five dollar words that most of us had never heard before—and mind you,
I was on the faculty,
so I was supposed to be one of the smart ones—
and I wasn’t alone in thinking that this lecturer
was so far above me
that it seemed a waste of my time even to try to understand what she was saying.

There was stuff in there about cosmic forces,
and stuff in there about God as a sort of life-force,
the ground of all being.
There was stuff in there about the deep anthropological need planted in all people to connect with the transcendent.

I’m not really sure what all was in there, actually.
All I could get was that Dr. Adams believed in a really really big God.

I am usually on the lookout for heresy,
and I didn’t find any,
though I probably wouldn’t have understood it if it had been in there.

Others around me—intelligent people—
either fell asleep
or struggled to follow her arguments.
When she finally finished,
and it was time for questions,

there was a long ringing silence—
a sound that’s death to a lecturer.

It means that your audience either fell asleep,
or they didn’t understand a word you said.


In this case, it meant both.


The silence stretched on so long it was getting embarrassing,
when finally someone stood up and hesitantly said, “Um…could you explain again about that cosmic transcendence thing?”

“Oh, sure,” she said,
and she stepped out from behind the podium,
away from her carefully prepared manuscript,
and said, “Well, it’s sort of like this…”
and gave us the information using words that we understood,
and ideas that related to our lives and work.

Her face was animated,
her gestures lively,
and her voice reflected the passion
that caused her to make this her life’s work.

Suddenly we understood.
When this brilliant, world-renowned genius
stepped a little closer and got down on our level,
we finally got it.
And she was right, it was really exciting stuff.

Her recap ended with these words,
and unlike the well-prepared portion of her lecture,
these are words I have not forgotten.

“The bigness of God,” she said, “is on our side.”

The bigness of God is on our side.

That is what we’re celebrating tonight.

The bigness of God, everything that God is,
all his perfection,
all his transcendence,
all his power,
all his knowledge,
all his compassion,
all his sheer cosmic hugeness,
is for us.

For us in every sense.
It is for us to make use of
and it is for us and not against us.

The bigness of God is on our side.

God’s people have always known this on some level, though we have from time to time lost sight of it.

We have claimed that our God
is bigger than all the other gods,
and that when he comes,
it’s gonna be a really huge deal.

We were so convinced of God’s bigness, and rightly so, that when a peasant girl gave birth to her first child in a stable in a Judean hick town,
nobody but she and her husband and a few shepherds even knew that anything interesting
was going on at all.

Nobody would have believed
that this rather pathetic circumstance
had anything to do with our very big God.

Knowing how big God is,
we were looking for a big sign—
an army,
a king,
an earthquake,
a political revolution.

In our dedication to God’s bigness,
we nearly missed some of the bigger signs that
were in fact given—
such as a star that shone as brightly as day light, and a sky full of angels singing praise to God.

Those sorts of signs are big,
because God didn’t want us to miss this event entirely.

But in the end,
there’s only one way to show what bigness is for.

Bigness is always manifest in smallness.

Think about it.

Think of the deepest,
most overwhelming, biggest love you’ve ever felt.
A sweetheart or a spouse,
a child or a parent,
a friend or a relative,
or maybe even for God himself.

That love is huge in human terms,
so huge it overflows our hearts,
so what do we do?

Well, tonight’s Christmas,
so how are you showing that love?

Did you buy someone something big—
a skyscraper
or an island
or a planet
or a city?

If you did,
we need to get together and talk about your tithe.

But seriously,
chances are you bought them something small.

A CD they’ve been wanting,
an MP-3 player,
a little-tiny gift card
for their favorite bookstore or restaurant.

Tiny, tiny things compared to the bigness of love.

Or even when it’s not Christmas,
we do little tiny things to somehow communicate the bigness of our love.

We cook a favorite meal,
we get up with the kids so the other one can sleep late, we put gas in their car,
we pick up a card in the grocery store.
We call just to say, hi, I’m thinking of you.

Tiny, tiny things, compared to the bigness of love.

God works the same way.

To show us the bigness of his love,
God stepped out from behind the podium,
out from behind two thousand years of
code and commandment,
out from behind prophecies
and revelations
and signs
and judgments,
and laid it out in a way that we could relate to.

A way we could touch, and hold, and love.

The bigness of God is on our side,
and if bigness is always shown in small ways,
that was never more true than it is tonight.

The God whose love is bigger than the universe
gave us a baby.

A tiny, tiny, helpless, little baby.

Now that is something we can understand,
something we can get excited about.

That’s what it all comes down to.

The bigness of God is on our side,
and is contained in this little person.

He’s dependent,
he’s hungry,
he’s so very small,
but he’s the biggest person ever born.

Even when this little person gets big,
he’s still just one man,
grown from just one baby,
but his Godly bigness flows out of him
and into everyone around him.

That is the great gift of God that we celebrate on Christmas.

Everything that God is,
everything that God does or has,
is for us,
is on our side,
and he wants to make sure we know it.

The smallness of the gift is the proof
that the bigness of God is on our side.
'

I KNEW IT! or Yes, there Really Were Earthquakes

Here I was thinking I was crazy, and I'm NOT! At least not for this!

I could have sworn I felt the floor, or maybe the bed, shake late at night on a couple of different occasions. I figured it was either small earthquakes or demonic possession, a la The Exorcist (something I try very hard not to think about late at night).

And it WAS! The ever-active New Madrid fault, just a few hours away from us, has been very active recently. We've been hearing about "the big one" that was coming since we were kids (a very short time geologically), and while they do still say that's coming (the SEMA and FEMA crews are actively preparing for it), what we're mostly getting is small 2.0-4.0 scale quakes...not strong enough to do much damage, but certainly strong enough to be felt.

Add to that the fact that our county, Lawrence County, Missouri, is actually situated on THREE fault lines, I shouldn't doubt myself. I really have been feeling quakes. So there.

The Date of Christmas

From time to time, people ask me why we celebrate Christmas on December 25. Or, they don't ask, and they believe what they were told. Most people have been taught some version of history that goes like this:


The Romans had a huge Solstice festival called Sol Invictus (the Invincible Sun) and the Christians took it over so they could convert it into a Christian festival and get rid of the pagan Roman practices in the area. So, really Christmas is nothing more than a made-up day designed to use a party that was already in place.


Okay, well...yes and no. The Romans did have a Solstice festival called Sol Invictus. And Christians have often associated the increasing Sun with the ever-increasing Light of the Son. And it's also true that when Christianity spread into pagan cultures, they often kept all the big parties, celebrations, and festivals, but put a Christian spin on them. I mean, why convert to a religion that takes away your parties? And Christianity has always loved a good celebration (despite this weird reputation we have for being joyless prudes--just not historically true).

But every society has had a Solstice celebration, and Christianity no more had any need to take over the Romans' festival than anyone else's. Frankly, it would have made a lot more sense for us to take over Hannukah, but we didn't.

The date of Christmas comes from another source entirely.

You have to remember, though, that dates as we understand them now were much less exact in the ancient world. So, people get confused when they hear that the Solistice is on the 21st, but Christmas on the 25th. Neither of those numbers would necessarily have had any meaning in ancient times.

Same for Jesus' death date. Scholars now put it around April 4-7, probably in the year 29. But that's a very recent development. For centuries, starting from the very first century AD, the date of the crucifixion was thought to be March 25--and it probably was, the way dates were calculated back then. Remember, our calendars have had a lot of adjusting in the last 2000 years.

Why does Jesus' death date matter in the question of his birthdate? It matters because the ancient Greeks (the dominant culture in Jesus' day, even if it was being run by Romans at the time), believed that a Hero lived a perfect life, and that even included that life's timeline.

A perfect life began and ended on the same day--it was full, complete, perfect, with no remainders. And they considered that life began on the day of conception. Therefore, their ultimate Hero, Jesus, was conceived and died on the same day, March 25. We also celebrate the Annunciation on March 25, the day when the Archangel Gabriel announced to the Virgin Mary that she had been chosen to be the Mother of Jesus.

And what happens 9 months after Jesus' is conceived? December 25, Jesus is born.

And if there's already a big Solstice party going on, great. There's nothing stopping us from joining in the celebrations.

Christmas Fun

Apparently there's a guy who does nothing but collect really bad Nativity scenes. It's called The Cavalcade of Bad Nativities. It's awesome! You can go to his blog, Going Jesus, and check out both his pictures of all these truly...interesting...Nativity sets, and the captions he puts under them.

Who knew there were so many depictions of the nativity with animals, for example?