The Unauthorized Homily

By Bill Dunn

A commentary on the Scripture readings from the Sunday Lectionary

(Scripture readings for Sunday, December 24th: Micah 5:1-4; Hebrews 10:5-10; Luke 1:39-45)

ESSAYS OF CHRISTMAS PAST

I’ve been writing these essays, these “Unauthorized Homilies,” since the early 1990s. There are close to 350 of them archived on my website at: www.boomertrek.com/FaithArchive.htm .

Over the years I must have written at least a dozen different essays about Christmas. I’m not sure there’s anything new I can think of regarding the Incarnation of Christ. So for this week’s column, I’d like to offer some highlights of various homilies, kind of a smorgasbord of thoughts, my personal Ghosts of Christmas Past.

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Ah, the week of Christmas. This is a perfect time to give some thought to . . . Easter.

EASTER?!  Now wait a minute, you say. Dunn, you must have had one too many eggnogs. This is the Christmas season. Mistletoe, and Ho Ho Ho, and presents wrapped in bright red bows. Why in the world would someone want to talk about our Spring holiday, Easter, here on the verge of our favorite Winter holiday, Christmas?

Well, the way I figure, Christmas is the only time of year when many people acknowledge that there is, or was, a historical person named Jesus. Some manger scenes still can be found here and there, each containing a little baby Jesus statue.

Yep, it’s Jesus in those crèches all right, and that’s a good thing. But He’s just a baby, and babies are tiny and helpless. Since many people only think about Jesus at this time of year, in their minds He exists in a kind of perpetual infancy. He never grows up, He never gains wisdom, He never performs miracles, He never challenges us to confront our sinful ways and get our act together with God. And He never hangs from a cross.

If you dig deep enough and get past all the materialistic folderol, you will discover that the true meaning of Christmas can be found outside the walls of Jerusalem where an itinerant, street-preaching rabbi hung from cross beams above the city garbage dump. In other words, the true meaning of Christmas is Easter.

When Jesus died on that cross, He was the perfect, atoning sacrifice for all of our sins. And when He rose from the tomb three days later, He conquered death once and for all. Best of all, He promised that if we put our faith in Him, we can do the same thing.

This is the true meaning of Christmas.

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Charles Colson recently wrote: “It’s true that most Americans profess to believe in God, but this God is a far cry from the God of Scripture. More than a century of naturalism has eroded our belief that God is providential—that is, in charge of all events.”

Mr. Colson has a point. Many people profess to be Christians, but they are actually deists. They believe God created the universe and then left it on its own. After creating the world, God apparently went on vacation and left no forwarding address.

If God were truly distant and uncaring, He never would have bothered with the defining aspect of Christianity: the Incarnation. If God were on a cosmic vacation, He never would have lowered Himself to be born in a stinky old stable. He certainly never would have offered up His life as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.

If deism were true, we would not be celebrating Christmas this week. Instead, we would be celebrating the old pagan festival of Saturnalia, marked by a lengthy period of over-indulgence and drunken revelry. (Oh, wait a minute. That IS how most people celebrate Christmas nowadays.)

God went to a lot of trouble to reveal Himself to mankind, culminating in the awesome miracle of the Incarnation. Then, just to make sure those of us living twenty centuries after the fact would not be confused, God inspired the Holy Scriptures to be written.

If you want to know what God is like, pick up your Bible. It’s the best Christmas present you can give yourself.

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The Virgin Birth has been in the news recently. A couple of days after the November (2004) elections, historian Garry Wills mentioned the Virgin Birth in a New York Times opinion column titled, “The Day the Enlightenment Went Out.”

In the key line from his article, Wills condescendingly asked, “Can a people that believes more fervently in the Virgin Birth than in evolution still be called an Enlightened nation?”

Wills holds up for comparison the Virgin Birth and evolution. The former represents irrational religious faith while the latter represents rock-solid scientific truth. But as usual, Wills’ comparison of the Virgin Birth and evolution is NOT faith vs. science. It is really faith vs. faith.

Garry Wills believes as an article of faith that Chaos + Chance + Time = Intricate Precision. He believes that at one special moment in history non-living chemicals just accidentally and suddenly formed themselves into a functioning organism more complex and precise than the most sophisticated computer software program ever devised by man—without any planning or guidance or design. It just…happened. The fact is, Wills believes in miracles, he just won’t admit it.

We are now only days away from celebrating the second greatest miracle in history, the Incarnation. (We celebrate the first greatest miracle, by the way, in the spring, in remembrance of the Incarnate One’s rising from the dead.)

Emmanuel, God is with us, is the best news in the history of the world—although you’ll never see it mentioned seriously in the self-described “All the news that’s fit to print.”

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No one is quite sure who authored this story, but radio commentator Paul Harvey made it famous some years ago. It’s about a man who simply could not believe in the Incarnation. The idea that God actually became a human being struck him as preposterous. So as his family drove off to attend Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, he stayed home alone, not wanting to be a hypocrite.

It started snowing rather heavily that evening, and a group of small birds began thumping into his picture window, seeking refuge from the weather. The man put on his coat and boots, and went outside to try and lead the birds into the warmth and safety of his barn. But the more he tried, the more the birds scattered.

And then he realized that they were afraid of him. To them, he reasoned, I am a strange and terrifying creature. If only I could think of some way to let them know that they can trust me. That I am not trying to hurt them, but to help them. But how? Because any move he made tended to frighten them, confuse them. They just would not follow. They would not be led or shooed because they feared him. “If only I could be a bird,” he said to himself, “and mingle with them and speak their language. Then I could tell them not to be afraid. Then I could show them the way to the safe warm barn. But I would have to be one of them so they could see, and hear and understand.”  

At that moment the church bells began to ring. The sound reached his ears above the sounds of the wind. And he stood there listening to the bells pealing the glad tidings of Christmas. Suddenly he realized “all that Incarnation stuff” was true. He now understood why Jesus came to earth. And he sank to his knees in the snow and prayed.

©2006