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?

Grateful

It's the day after Thanksgiving, and we didn't have one of those moments yesterday where we all sat around and asked each other, "So, what are you grateful for?"

If we had, I would mostly have the same answers: my family, my friends, my health, a warm home, a working car, the genius of people who write books, the libraries and bookstores where we can get those books...you know, the usual. Just because those are "the usual" for me doesn't mean I'm not truly grateful. I am. I don't wake up in the morning, whatever challenges the coming day will pose, without being overwhelmed by gratitude at everything and everyone that has blessed my life.

But I want to express my gratitude for something a little more specific today. I am grateful to have been born a Christian, and I'm grateful to have been born in the United States.

The reason I'm so aware of those blessings today is that I've been reading a book called Princess: The True Story of Life Behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia, by Jean Sasson. I have been made newly aware of things I knew before, but never in such a vivid and personal way.

So, in honor of Princess Sultana, her daughters, and all her Middle Eastern sisters, daughters of God who don't have the freedoms I have, I'd like to offer a few more things I'm grateful for.

• I’m grateful that I can go to church. Not only is Christianity legal in this country, but women are allowed to walk into places of worship. In some parts of the world, women are not allowed to go into the buildings of their own faith.

• I’m grateful that I don’t have to cover my face. I can look at the unique beauty of other people’s faces, meet their eyes, take in their expressions.

• I’m grateful that I can vote.

• I’m grateful that I can serve my country and my God as I see fit to do, using as many of my gifts as I can. And if that puts me in a position of authority over men, then it does.

• I am grateful that I chose to marry and have children, and wasn’t forced to do it.

• I’m grateful for my education, and for parents who encouraged me to read and learn.

• I’m grateful that my body is whole and has never been mutilated at the hands of others.

• I’m grateful for a husband who loves me, respects me, and doesn’t worry about gender roles very much, a husband who depends on me as much as I depend on him. I’m grateful that I got to choose him myself (though my mother did have some input into that).

• I’m grateful for my husband, but if (God forbid) something happened to him, I’m really grateful that my children and I wouldn’t have to move back in with my dad. Sorry, Daddy, you know I love you, but…

• I’m grateful that domestic abuse is illegal in my country and my religion.

• I’m grateful that my 13-year-old daughter’s biggest concern is raising her science grade and getting her crush to like her. She’s not planning a wedding, and she’ll never be anyone’s third wife.

• I’m grateful that polygamy is illegal in my country and my religion.

• I’m grateful that I can wear jeans.

• I am grateful that I can drive and am allowed to drive.

• I’m grateful that my daughters and my son are equally loved and cherished by all of our family and by our religion.

• I’m grateful for a life that’s been blessed, but just a little bit hard. When my parents told me, “It builds character,” they weren’t kidding. In our culture, you can get handed a lot, but if you don’t put in the work, you won’t succeed. Struggle builds character, and much as I resist it, I’m grateful for it.

• I’m grateful that my husband and I decide together what’s best for our kids. Nobody’s word is law in our house or our country… parents decide together.

• I’m grateful that I’ve never been so poor that I couldn’t protest injustice or mistreatment. I’m becoming more aware that I have to speak up for those who are afraid of losing what little they have by speaking out.

• I’m grateful to the men and women of my country and my religion who have fought to make sure that we have the rights, freedoms and dignity that we have.

• I’m grateful for a country and a religion that hold men and women to the same standards of virtue and citizenship.

• I’m grateful for an incarnational religion that says that bodies are wonderful, miraculous things that should be cherished and respected.

• I’m grateful that I worship a God who would have done everything he did if I had been the only person ever to live. There are no second class citizens in heaven… at least the way my religion understands it.

That’s a long list, and it only begins to cover everything we have to be grateful for. Think about it, and give thanks. And pray for the people who can’t say any of the above.

The Best Laid Plans, or Poor Sick AJ

Some of you know that last Spring, Abby auditioned for a pretty exclusive regional children's choir, Children's Choir of Southwest Missouri. She made it, of course, because she is awesome, and so every single Tuesday night starting in August, we've driven out to Springfield for rehearsals.

Their concert was this weekend, the thing they have been working for for 4 months. But last Wednesday, AJ came home from school with a sore throat and headache. She missed school Thursday and Friday. She was running a temp of about 102, and her throat was hurting her terribly, she was crying and everything.

We went to the doctor on Friday (our awesome nurse-practitioner, Nancy), and Nancy gave her one of those 3-dose antibiotics because she had a throat infection (not swine flu--we dodged that bullet again!). Nancy told her that if she was going to be able to sing Saturday, she'd have to miss the dress rehearsal and not use her voice at all--not even to talk to us. She had to write everything in notes. It was kind of funny. AJ can be very expressive in writing!

I got permission for her to miss the dress rehearsal Friday night, hoping she'd feel better by Saturday night, and have some sort of voice to sing with. But she really didn't. Her throat was still very sore, her voice was raspy and hoarse, and she kept having coughing fits--which hurt her throat even more. We thought we might try to go to the concert, so she could at least be there for her choirmates, but the coughing sort of precluded that. You can't sit in a choir concert if you're coughing up a lung--it disturbs people.

So, after all those months of work, our poor baby didn't even get to sing in the concert. It was really disappointing for her, and for us, but mostly it was just terrible watching her suffer with being so sick. Poor little thing.

That's not the only sickness we've had this season. Matt had the flu, which really took him out of commission for almost a week, and both girls had terrible sinus infections that kept them out of school for a couple of days. But we're mostly doing okay, thanks to Nancy and a lot of good luck.

And obsessive wiping down of all surfaces with Clorox disinfectant wipes.

So...World's NOT Ending?

Great...so what am I supposed to do with all my stockpiles?

Here's the article from NASA. Although, how much can we trust NASA? Who knows...

2012: Beginning of the End or Why the World Won't End?
11.06.09

Remember the Y2K scare? It came and went without much of a whimper because of adequate planning and analysis of the situation. Impressive movie special effects aside, Dec. 21, 2012, won't be the end of the world as we know. It will, however, be another winter solstice.

Much like Y2K, 2012 has been analyzed and the science of the end of the Earth thoroughly studied. Contrary to some of the common beliefs out there, the science behind the end of the world quickly unravels when pinned down to the 2012 timeline.

Below, NASA Scientists answer several questions that we're frequently asked regarding 2012.

Question (Q): Are there any threats to the Earth in 2012? Many Internet websites say the world will end in December 2012.
Answer (A): Nothing bad will happen to the Earth in 2012. Our planet has been getting along just fine for more than 4 billion years, and credible scientists worldwide know of no threat associated with 2012.



Q: What is the origin of the prediction that the world will end in 2012?
A: The story started with claims that Nibiru, a supposed planet discovered by the Sumerians, is headed toward Earth. This catastrophe was initially predicted for May 2003, but when nothing happened the doomsday date was moved forward to December 2012. Then these two fables were linked to the end of one of the cycles in the ancient Mayan calendar at the winter solstice in 2012 -- hence the predicted doomsday date of December 21, 2012.



Q: Does the Mayan calendar end in December 2012?
A: Just as the calendar you have on your kitchen wall does not cease to exist after December 31, the Mayan calendar does not cease to exist on December 21, 2012. This date is the end of the Mayan long-count period but then -- just as your calendar begins again on January 1 -- another long-count period begins for the Mayan calendar.



Q: Could a phenomena occur where planets align in a way that impacts Earth?
A: There are no planetary alignments in the next few decades, Earth will not cross the galactic plane in 2012, and even if these alignments were to occur, their effects on the Earth would be negligible. Each December the Earth and sun align with the approximate center of the Milky Way Galaxy but that is an annual event of no consequence.



Q: Is there a planet or brown dwarf called Nibiru or Planet X or Eris that is approaching the Earth and threatening our planet with widespread destruction?
A: Nibiru and other stories about wayward planets are an Internet hoax. There is no factual basis for these claims. If Nibiru or Planet X were real and headed for an encounter with the Earth in 2012, astronomers would have been tracking it for at least the past decade, and it would be visible by now to the naked eye. Obviously, it does not exist. Eris is real, but it is a dwarf planet similar to Pluto that will remain in the outer solar system; the closest it can come to Earth is about 4 billion miles.



Q: What is the polar shift theory? Is it true that the earth’s crust does a 180-degree rotation around the core in a matter of days if not hours?
A: A reversal in the rotation of Earth is impossible. There are slow movements of the continents (for example Antarctica was near the equator hundreds of millions of years ago), but that is irrelevant to claims of reversal of the rotational poles. However, many of the disaster websites pull a bait-and-shift to fool people. They claim a relationship between the rotation and the magnetic polarity of Earth, which does change irregularly, with a magnetic reversal taking place every 400,000 years on average. As far as we know, such a magnetic reversal doesn’t cause any harm to life on Earth. A magnetic reversal is very unlikely to happen in the next few millennia, anyway.



Q: Is the Earth in danger of being hit by a meteor in 2012?
A: The Earth has always been subject to impacts by comets and asteroids, although big hits are very rare. The last big impact was 65 million years ago, and that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Today NASA astronomers are carrying out a survey called the Spaceguard Survey to find any large near-Earth asteroids long before they hit. We have already determined that there are no threatening asteroids as large as the one that killed the dinosaurs. All this work is done openly with the discoveries posted every day on the NASA NEO Program Office website, so you can see for yourself that nothing is predicted to hit in 2012.



Q: How do NASA scientists feel about claims of pending doomsday?
A: For any claims of disaster or dramatic changes in 2012, where is the science? Where is the evidence? There is none, and for all the fictional assertions, whether they are made in books, movies, documentaries or over the Internet, we cannot change that simple fact. There is no credible evidence for any of the assertions made in support of unusual events taking place in December 2012.



Q: Is there a danger from giant solar storms predicted for 2012?
A: Solar activity has a regular cycle, with peaks approximately every 11 years. Near these activity peaks, solar flares can cause some interruption of satellite communications, although engineers are learning how to build electronics that are protected against most solar storms. But there is no special risk associated with 2012. The next solar maximum will occur in the 2012-2014 time frame and is predicted to be an average solar cycle, no different than previous cycles throughout history.