Reflections for Christmas

Dr. Michael S. Beates, Chaplain

We live in a time of unprecedented anxiety. So many of us are fighting against defeats on numerous fronts; damages to life, home, and property; despair from hope and dreams that seem crushed by forces beyond our control; death and resulting grief have seemed to be epidemic in recent years. From a biblical angle, many of us are shocked to find ourselves wandering in a desert wilderness, unfamiliar and seemingly unending.

But then a baby came to Bethlehem to bring us victory in all these things!

I often tell students that God seldom does things the way we might expect. He uses people and event we would least expect to accomplish his ends so that he gets the glory. And we are reminded of all this at Christmas.

About 90 years ago, Gustaf Aulén wrote a book entitled Christus Victor that reintroduced us to an ancient theological concept of Jesus as the one who bring victory through his death. He said, Jesus gives his followers “victory over the powers which hold mankind in bondage: sin, death, and the devil.” He got this idea from early Church Fathers like Cyril of Alexandria and Gregory
of Nyssa who saw Christ as the bait on a fishhook, bait that lured the devil to bite and eventually to destroy himself. This concept has even been called the “fishhook theory of atonement.”

It all began immediately after The Fall in the Garden. As God pronounced the curse in Genesis 3, he said to the serpent:
I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and her offspring;
he shall bruise your head,
and you shall bruise his heel” (Gen. 3:15).

This verse is called the proto-evangelium – the first hint of Good News that God will defeat Satan through the offspring of Eve, even Jesus, born to Mary so many years later. But it only starts there.

We see God provided redemption from slavery in Egypt, real and existential, for his people Israel through the blood of a lamb on their door posts at Passover in Exodus 12. This foreshadowed a much greater redemption from sin and death through the blood of the Lamb for all people everywhere who believe in Jesus.

In the New Testament, we see the first glimpse of this when Mary and Joseph took Jesus to the Temple just days after his birth. The old man Simeon, after singing about Jesus as one who would bring salvation to all people in the “Nunc Dimittis” (Luke 2:29-32), he blessed the new parents and said to Mary, “Behold, this child is appointed for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is opposed (and a sword will pierce through your own soul also” (Luke 2:34–35).

Paul continually speaks of our triumph in Christ as in 2 Corinthians 2:14 (“But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere”) and in Romans 8:2 (“For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death”).

The Apostle John also tells us that “everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith” (1 John 5:4). And of course, in his Gospel, John gives us some of Jesus’ final words to his followers, “I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).

Are you fighting despair these days? Is the prospect of death far too close? Do you feel like you are wandering in a desert wilderness? Remember this:
A baby came to die for us to defeat death and sin.
A baby came to repair all the damage the world inflicts upon us.
A baby came to dispel despair in the midst of our misery and to and bring everlasting joy.
And a baby came so our deserts might bloom again, despite our worst fears.

I believe that Mary must not have been totally surprised by Good Friday because she heard soon after Christmas that God was going to work wonders through her pain and loss. So remember at Christmas, Jesus’ words in John 12: Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Whoever loves his life loses
it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life” (John 12:24-25). The baby born in Bethlehem came to die for our sins, to redeem us from our despair and misery and to bring us great, great joy.

Merry Christmas to you all.

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An Advent Homily for The Geneva School

The Geneva School Chapel, Monday, Dec. 5, 2022

Dr. Michael Beates, Chaplain

All this fall semester, we’ve been looking at the “cloud of witnesses” – those people from the deep past who showed faith in God, believing the promises of God. Well today we look at two of the later kings of Judah, good kings in the midst of many bad ones.

Hezekiah was king in Judah for about 5-6 years when the northern kingdom of Israel, famous for apostasy, child sacrifice, and wickedness, fell to the Assyrian empire. God promised Hezekiah that though his kingdom of Judah would also fall and his decedents would be carried away in exile, he would die in peace.

Isaiah was the prophet who spoke during his reign – and this is the Isaiah who had already promised during the reign of a prior king that one would be born who would be the salvation of Israel and a light to the Gentiles. Things were bad, but they were going to get worse before the promises came to pass.

But here is the thing with Hezekiah – he had moral courage and righteousness, even though he knew doom would eventually come. In 2 Kings 18:3–7 we read “Hezekiah did what was right in the eyes of the LORD, according to all that David his father had done. He removed the high places and broke the pillars and cut down the Asherah. And he broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, for until those days the people of Israel had made offerings to it (it was called Nehushtan). He trusted in the LORD, the God of Israel, so that there was none like him among all the kings of Judah after him, nor among those who were before him. For he held fast to the LORD.”

When he began trying to bring Judah back to faithfulness, he destroyed an ancient relic from the time of Moses – the bronze serpent on the pole. That took massive strength of leadership and moral courage to destroy a 1,000-year-old relic from the time of Moses. But the truth is, something that had been a good thing had become, over time, a bad thing. That relic had become an idol. Even good things can become bad if we turn them into idols and worship the man-made object instead of worshiping God.

Friends, this is still true today. Good things can actually lead us astray from God if we allow them. Have you seen the ads for a new movie, show, something, call “Violent Night”? It’s playing off a time-honored song about Jesus’ coming, but it turns something beautiful and profound into something dark and violent. Yes, . . . it can happen in our day too.

But Hezekiah had the courage to say no to a good thing that had turned bad.

Well, jumping ahead a couple of generations, after a couple more really kings, Hezekiah’s great-grandson Josiah finally came to the throne later on.

The Kingdom of Judah was already past the point of no return. No matter how much Josiah tried to turn the ship and do what was right in God’s eyes, the kingdom was too far gone to recover. I call it an example of “The Niagara River Principle.” Years ago, living near Buffalo, I had a boss take me out on his boat on the Niagara River. At some point we came upon signs that warned not to pass that point. It was the “point of no return” for small boats. Go any further and you will be swept over Niagara Falls. But the Falls were about 8 miles down stream still. You could not see them, hear them, and the water was deceptively calm.

For instance, water runs at 7mph leaving Lake Erie into the Niagara River, but runs at 40+ mph just above the falls.  Water running at 25 mph has the force of 700 mph wind. The actual “point of no return” is 6 miles away from the falls.

The point is, the Kingdom of Judah had gone too far. That kingdom, despite the attempts of Josiah, was going to go over the falls. Judah would be conquered by the Babylonians at some point after Josiah’s death and God’s people would spend 70 years in exile in a foreign land.

But here’s the shocking thing about the reforms of Josiah: the Israelites had forgotten about God’s Word – the Scriptures had been lost in piles of “stuff” in the Temple (2 Kings 22). Hard to imagine! And worse, they had forgotten about Passover . . . for hundreds of years (2 Kings 23:21-ff). It sounds like even by the time of King David Israel had already forgotten this most important rite of remembering God delivering His people from slavery in Egypt, how He had saved them by the blood of a lamb on their door posts and had led them out to freedom to the Promised Land.

Think about this! It would be as if the Pilgrims forgot Christmas and we, 400 years later, somehow stumble upon and rediscover this lost, vital, profoundly important rite of remembrance. This is why way back in Moses’ time in Deuteronomy 4:9, God told the Israelites to remember the things their eyes had seen, not to let them slip from their hearts all the days of their lives; but to teach them to their children and their children’s children. But someone in some early generation simply had not passed on the tradition of Passover. And it only takes two generations of forgetting for important things to disappear.

Could such a thing happen in our day? Certainly! And in fact, I think in many ways it has happened. So many people – so many of our neighbors – think Christmas is about snow and parties, reindeer and presents . . . and they forget it’s about a baby who was born in Bethlehem Immanuel, God with us in human flesh, who came to die for our sins in Jerusalem.

My family watched the old Christmas classic movie Miracle on 34^th Street the other night. Do you know . . . the name of Jesus never even is mentioned in that film? Already, just after WWII in our country, Christmas had turned into a social phenomenon of good will toward people, giving gifts, and being nice.

But we have to remember and cherish the true story of a baby born in Bethlehem, to be the Messiah for all the world for those who believe. But so many people simply have forgotten this.  So when you hear songs on the radio or at the mall about a “holly, jolly Christmas” remind yourself that there is far more to the story.

Are we as a culture too far down the river? Are we going over the falls? I don’t know.  We certainly hope not! But God is the One who raises up kingdoms and princes and He is the One who brings down empires and kings, all in His timing and for His glory.

Our job is to be like Josiah: to hold on to stories the culture has lost, to remember God’s story, to sing about the Jesus who came to save His people from their sin. Having inherited the Word of God, we are to be a people who stay in the Word of God, reading it, studying it, as we pursue Christ’s calling on our lives. We need to tell these things to our children and to our children’s children so that God receives the glory.

May God give us all the moral courage to throw away those things that have nothing to do with worshiping God . . . even perhaps things that once were good but that now threaten to take us away, to distract us from the God who saves. And may we never forget the Good News sung by the angels to shepherds that night. So, come let us adore Him. Christ is born, Christ is born, Christ is born for you.