I got AI to convert a couple excerpts from my 12/11/2005 sermon into short essays. I’m experimenting with this, and have posted a few different versions with varying degrees of editing, but I like the way these came out so I’m sharing them here:
—
The world today is a joyless place. It is up to the church to show the world what real joy—truly human joy, incarnational joy—really looks like.
Let me give you an example. Many of you are familiar with the work of G.K. Chesterton, the great theologian, writer, and thinker. You can just tell from reading his books that he never wrote a page without a big grin on his face because everything he wrote is so enjoyable. He was a master at unmasking the bankruptcy of non-Christian thinking and living. In his book Heretics, he gives a number of examples of this. One of my favorites is when he takes on Auguste Comte. Comte may not be a name that is familiar to you, but at the time he was a well-known philosopher, known as the father of secular humanism. What is interesting about Comte is that when he turned humanism into a kind of new religion, he said that as Christianity continues to wane and wither, and as secular humanism more and more takes the place of Christianity as our new religion, secularists are going to need a new calendar to replace the Christian calendar—to replace those old Christian festivals and celebrations with new humanistic festivals and celebrations.
Of course, you can imagine Chesterton has a lot of fun with this. The whole chapter is worth reading, but this is one of the things he says: as a philosophy, Comte’s worship of humanity is unsatisfactory. It is unreasonable to attack the doctrine of the Trinity—the doctrine that the one God exists in three persons—as a piece of bewildering mysticism and then turn around and ask men to worship a being who is ninety million persons (or six billion persons in our day, I guess)—in one God, neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance. Comte has this rationalistic objection to Christianity: we worship one God who exists in three persons. Well, now you’re asking us to worship one God who exists in ninety million persons. How can that be reasonable? Humanity is one god existing in six billion persons. It just doesn’t work. It doesn’t make any sense.
Chesterton says that while the philosophy is the worst part of Comte’s new religion, the ceremony actually is the most sensible part, for at least Comte sees that men cannot live without ritual or festival. If Comte’s religion is to overtake the world, it would have to be through its calendar, not its philosophy—through its new festivals and saints’ days rather than its ideas.
Chesterton says, with a hint of sarcasm no doubt, that while he cannot imagine the pain of having to actually read through Comte’s philosophical works, he can easily imagine, with the greatest enthusiasm, lighting a bonfire on Darwin Day. He can’t get into the ideas, but he can really get into the rituals. But of course, Chesterton goes on to point out that it doesn’t work, it hasn’t worked, and it never can work. After all, no one ever really feels like celebrating Darwin Day. There can be no rationalist festivals because rationalists have nothing to celebrate. Who wants to hang a stocking in honor of Karl Marx? Who wants to put up lights in honor of Immanuel Kant? Who wants to celebrate Aristotle’s birthday? You just can’t get excited about these things.
Chesterton goes on to say, “Men only get gloriously materialistic over things that are thoroughly spiritualistic.” Take away the Nicene Creed and you do serious wrong to the sellers of sausage. No Nicene Creed, nothing to celebrate. It’s bad business for the sausage seller. Wherever you have faith, there you have hilarity. You have something to celebrate. But if man’s reason is all there is, there is no joy. Men will not be filled with hilarity over abstract principles. Only the creed—the Christian creed, the gospel creed—can produce a life of vigor and feasting.
Nobody reads Marx’s Communist Manifesto or Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and then decides, “You know what I want to do? I want to go out and buy a bunch of gifts and wrap them up in pretty paper and give them to my friends and family.” There is nothing there worth celebrating. There is nothing there that compels joy.
But if you tell people a story—a true story about a promised Savior King, born in a cattle manger, who emerges from the backwoods of his homeland in Judea, who takes on the corrupt religious and political establishment of his day, and who ultimately becomes a hero by slaying the dragon of sin and death through his self-sacrificial love—now that is something that people will stand up and cheer for. That is something people will want to celebrate. And as Chesterton points out, because it is something worth celebrating, it is also something worth dying for. If you won’t even put a wreath on your head for it, you certainly won’t die for it. But if you are willing to celebrate it, it is something you are willing to die for.
The world doesn’t have any stories like that, and so they have to borrow their stories from the church. Why is it that in the last couple of years we have seen such a craze over the Tolkien trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, and now C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia? (You could possibly even put the Harry Potter series in this category as well, though that would be debatable.) Why are these things so popular all of a sudden? It is because the world craves a good story.
But we need to ask: why are people so caught up in these stories that are basically just Christian allegories? (Or maybe they are not truly allegories of the gospel, but we certainly have to say they are shot through with biblical images and archetypes and symbolism, and they cannot be understood apart from the Bible.) It is because the truth they are intending to communicate is truth straight out of the Scriptures. I read an article this week about how The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe movie isn’t just for Christians—pagans can enjoy it too. Well, that is nonsense. If they stick to the book and the movie, that is nonsense. Obviously you could say anybody can be entertained by it. But if you are really going to understand it, if you are really going to enter into it, you’ve got to believe the gospel story. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe—that is our story. It belongs to us. It is a retelling of the gospel story.
Lewis tells us why he wrote it. He wrote it so that by finding the gospel there in Narnia, we might know it better here. That by meeting Aslan in that world, we might meet the true Aslan in our world. That is why he wrote. Apart from that, it doesn’t make any sense. These great stories that Lewis and Tolkien wrote are just the shadows of which the gospel is the reality. Those are the myths, but as they both liked to say, the gospel is myth made fact. That is why Christmas and Epiphany and Easter and Ascension Day are all worthy of the greatest celebrations we can give them. They comprise the true myth. They are fairy tales made over into facts. That is what the gospel is.
The church calendar tells the story. It is a way for us to take hold of the story—or even better, it is a way for the story to take hold of us, to shape and mold us. Think again about Lewis’s story, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. What is the situation in that story? It is always winter, never Christmas—or you could say it is always Advent, never Christmas—until Aslan comes. As the snow starts to melt, the White Witch is trying to do all these things to stop Aslan from acting, to reverse this. But as Aslan is on the move, things begin happening. One thing that happens is Father Christmas comes around bearing gifts. In one place he spreads a feast for some small animals in Narnia. When the White Witch comes upon this small feast, the animals gather, and she begins to interrogate them. She asks them a bunch of questions. Then she turns them into stone.
Why did she do that? They weren’t really directly involved in the battle. Why does she care? Why does she interrupt the feast? Why does the enemy care if we celebrate? Why should it matter? The truth is, there is great power in the church’s feasting together. As we celebrate God’s goodness in creation, as we celebrate his graciousness in redemption, there is great power in it. Feasting together bonds us into a community. It strengthens our bonds of fellowship and friendship together. Not only that, but God strengthens us by making us participants in his own joy. We could say the church eats her way to victory. We feast our way to dominion. It may be hard at times to convince the world of Christian doctrine, but at least we can show them who throws a better feast. Who has a story worth celebrating? We do!
We are called to a life of joy—a joy that conquers the world, a joy that overcomes the world. In 1534, Martin Luther received a letter from the young prince Joachim of Anhalt seeking his counsel. It seems that the young prince was suffering with melancholy and what he called “dejection of spirit.” Listen to Luther’s wise—and I would say radical—advice to the prince:
“I should like to encourage your Grace, who are a young man, always to be joyful, to engage in riding and hunting, and to seek the company of others who may be able to rejoice with your Grace in a godly and honorable way. For solitude and inwardness are poisonous and deadly to all people, and especially to a young man. Accordingly, God has commanded us to be joyful in His presence. He does not desire a gloomy sacrifice. No one realizes how much harm it does a young person to avoid pleasure.”
Can you imagine a pastor telling a young man in his congregation today, “Son, your problem is you’re just not having enough fun. You’re not seeking after pleasure enough”? Luther here says it is harmful to avoid pleasure. No one realizes how much harm it does a young person to avoid pleasure and to cultivate solitude and sadness. Luther continues:
“Your Grace has Master Nicholas Hausmann and many others near at hand. Be merry with them, for gladness and good cheer when decent and proper are the best medicine for a young person, indeed for all people. I myself, who have spent a good part of my life in sorrow and gloom, now seek and find pleasure wherever I can. Praise God, we now have sufficient understanding of the Word of God to be able to rejoice with a good conscience and to use God’s gifts with thanksgiving, for He created them for this purpose and is pleased when we so use them.”
Now, how is that for an answer to depression? Would you give that counsel to a struggling young man? I think that is pretty good advice. I like Luther’s counsel.
—
The incarnation—God becoming man—demands a celebration that is itself incarnational. It will not be satisfied with thin abstractions or hushed, disembodied reverence. It calls for flesh-and-blood joy: friends crowding around a table, family filling every chair, feasting until the plates are empty, singing until voices crack with laughter, rejoicing with arms wide and hearts full. Our redemption is an earthy thing, and so our celebration must be earthy too.
Think of the One whose birth we honor. He entered the world not as a phantom or a whisper, but as a real baby with warm skin and kicking legs, who drew real breath in a cold stable, who nursed at a real mother’s breast. That child grew into a man of muscle and sinew, who walked real roads in real dust, who touched lepers with real hands, who broke real bread with sinners. He hung on a tree of real wood, shed real blood, and when His lifeless body was laid in a real tomb, it was a real corpse—cold, heavy, and gone. Then, on the third day, He rose again—not as a specter or a symbol, but in a renewed, glorified, yet unmistakably physical body. Every moment of our salvation unfolded in the material world, through the things God Himself made. How then could we honor it with anything less than a full-bodied, full-throated, full-hearted celebration?
The church has always known this in its bones. Look at the customs we have carried down through the centuries: Christmas trees glittering with ornaments, tables groaning under platters of food and pitchers of wine, gifts wrapped in bright paper and exchanged with eager hands, candles casting warm light, parties spilling into the night, songs rising in chorus, wreaths hung on doors, lights twinkling against the dark like stars come down to earth. These are not mere traditions. They are acts of theological confession. We celebrate with things that can be seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and touched—because the Son of God entered a world that can be seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and touched.
Yes, many lament the commercialization of Christmas. The concern is not without merit. But whatever we do with that issue, let us never try to spiritualize Christmas. Let us never reduce it to a quiet, ethereal sentiment or a private, invisible piety. We are not commemorating a vague idea or a disembodied principle. We are celebrating the moment the eternal Word took on flesh and dwelt among us. The incarnation cannot be an ethereal thing.
The ancient Greeks had a different vision. They saw the body as a prison house for the soul, a cage to be escaped. In their philosophy and mythology, salvation meant shedding the material world like a worn-out garment and ascending to pure, immaterial existence. But the Gospel of the incarnation stands in fierce, defiant opposition to that vision. How could God call us to flee the physical when He Himself entered it? How could He urge us to despise the body when He took one on? He came to inhabit the physical in order to redeem it—not to abandon it. He did not come to rescue us from the world; He came to rescue the world itself.
So when God commands celebration—when He says, “Spend the money, buy wine and strong drink, eat and drink together, and let your heart rejoice” (Deuteronomy 14:26)—we dare not disobey. We dare not shrink back into a pinched asceticism or a dour spirituality that fears abundance. There is liberation in this command. There is freedom in the call to feast, to give, to sing, to revel in the goodness of God’s creation and the greater goodness of His redemption.
The incarnation does not invite us to a somber memorial. It summons us to a riotous, joyful banquet. Let us answer that summons with all the earthy, embodied, exuberant delight it deserves.
—
The incarnation—that is, God becoming man—can only be celebrated in an incarnational way. That is, with friends, with family, with feasting and singing, with rejoicing in these kinds of ways. It has got to be an earthy thing because our redemption is an earthy thing. Our redemption comes to us through a flesh-and-blood baby who grew up into a full-grown flesh-and-blood man who hung on a tree made of real wood, who shed real blood, whose corpse was placed in a real cave, and who then came forth from that grave on the third day in a renewed but real physical body. It is all real. It is all physical. It is all earthy. Our redemption takes place through the earthly, through the physical, through created things, through the things that God has made.
An incarnational salvation requires an incarnational celebration. The church instinctively knows this. Consider the customs we have inherited: celebrating Christmas with trees and ornaments, eating and drinking, giving gifts, lighting candles, hosting parties, singing songs, hanging wreaths, and stringing lights. The church’s instincts in these matters have been exactly right. We celebrate in ways that can be seen and heard and felt and tasted—just like the Son of God when He took on flesh.
Many people talk about how we commercialize Christmas. But however you deal with that issue, don’t try to spiritualize Christmas. We are celebrating the incarnation of the Son of God. It cannot be an ethereal thing. The Greeks thought of the body as a prison house for the soul. In Greek philosophy and mythology, the way to become holy, the way to achieve salvation, is by shunning the body and escaping physical reality. Salvation, in their view, is an escape from the material world. But what does the Gospel offer as a counter to that? The Gospel of the Incarnation is just the opposite. How could God want us to escape the physical and the bodily when He Himself came to inhabit it? He came to inhabit the physical and the bodily in order to redeem us. How could He possibly want us to escape it?
Understand this: when God says celebrate—when He says spend money, buy wine and strong drink, eat and drink together, and do what your heart desires, as He commands in Deuteronomy—we dare not disobey that. We dare not disobey that command. There is liberation here.
—
The incarnation—God becoming man—demands a celebration that is itself incarnational. It cannot be observed in the abstract or celebrated in the thin air of disembodied piety. It must be marked with flesh-and-blood reality: with friends gathered close, with family crowding around the table, with feasting and singing, with laughter and song rising into the air. Our redemption is an earthy thing, and so our joy must be earthy too.
Consider the one whose birth we celebrate: a real baby with real lungs filling with real air, who cried real tears and nursed at a real mother’s breast. This child grew into a full-grown man of sinew and bone who walked dusty roads in real sandals, who touched lepers with real hands, who hung on a tree of real wood, who poured out real blood, whose lifeless body was laid in a real cave. And on the third day, He rose again—not as a ghost or a spirit, but in a renewed, glorified, yet unmistakably physical body. Every step of our redemption took place in the material world, through the things God Himself created. How then could we possibly honor it with anything less than a full-bodied, full-throated, full-hearted celebration?
The church has always known this, even when it has not always said it in so many words. Look at the customs we have inherited across the centuries: Christmas trees heavy with ornaments, tables groaning under the weight of food and drink, gifts wrapped and exchanged, candles flickering, parties spilling into the night, songs lifted in chorus, wreaths hung on doors, lights twinkling against the winter dark. These are not mere traditions. They are instinctive acts of theological confession. We celebrate with things that can be seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and touched—because the Son of God Himself entered the world of the seeable, hearable, smellable, tasteable, and touchable.
Many voices today lament the commercialization of Christmas. Fair enough. But whatever we do with that concern, let us never try to spiritualize Christmas. Let us never reduce it to a quiet, ethereal sentiment or a private, invisible piety. We are not commemorating a vague idea or a disembodied principle. We are celebrating the moment the eternal Word took on flesh and dwelt among us. The incarnation cannot be an ethereal thing.
The ancient Greeks had a different vision. They saw the body as a prison house for the soul, a cage to be escaped. In their philosophy and mythology, salvation meant shedding the material world like a worn-out garment and ascending to pure, immaterial existence. But the Gospel of the incarnation stands in fierce, defiant opposition to that view. How could God possibly call us to flee the physical when He Himself entered it? How could He urge us to despise the body when He took one on? He came to inhabit the physical in order to redeem it—not to abandon it. He did not come to rescue us from the world; He came to rescue the world itself.
So when God commands celebration—when He says, “Spend the money, buy wine and strong drink, eat and drink together, and let your heart rejoice” (Deuteronomy 14:26)—we dare not disobey. We dare not shrink back into a dour asceticism or a pinched spirituality that fears abundance. There is liberation in this command. There is freedom in the call to feast, to give, to sing, to revel in the goodness of God’s creation and the greater goodness of His redemption.
The incarnation invites us not to a somber memorial, but to a riotous, joyful banquet. Let us answer that invitation with all the earthy, embodied, exuberant delight it deserves.
—
The incarnation—God becoming man—demands a celebration as flesh-and-blood as the mystery it proclaims. It will not settle for airy abstractions or hushed, disembodied reverence. It calls for the full riot of embodied joy: friends pressed shoulder to shoulder around groaning tables, families spilling over with laughter, feasting until the last crust is gone, singing until voices crack with delight, rejoicing with arms flung wide and hearts ablaze. Our redemption is an earthy thing, and so our celebration must be earthy too—rooted in soil, soaked in wine, alive with the taste of bread and the warmth of candlelight.
Picture the One whose birth we honor. He did not descend as a whisper or a wisp of light. He came as a real infant—skin soft and flushed, lungs drawing their first sharp breath in a cold stable, tiny fists clutching real air. He grew into a man of calloused hands and steady stride, who walked dusty roads beneath real sun, who touched lepers with real fingers, who broke real bread with sinners and outcasts. He hung on a tree of real wood, splintered and rough, poured out real blood that stained real earth. His lifeless body—cold, heavy, broken—was laid in a real tomb hewn from living rock. And on the third day He rose again—not as a ghost or a memory, but in a renewed, glorified, yet unmistakably physical body, scars still visible, breath still warm. Every step of our salvation was carved in the material world, through the very things God Himself spoke into being. How then could we honor it with anything less than a full-throated, full-hearted, full-bodied feast?
The church has always known this in its very bones. Look at the ancient customs we still cherish: Christmas trees standing tall and green, heavy with ornaments like fruit on the tree of life; tables laden with roasted meats and golden loaves, pitchers brimming with wine that sparkles like the joy of heaven; gifts wrapped in bright paper, handed over with eager hands; candles dancing in the dark, casting pools of warm light; parties that spill into the night with song and story; wreaths hung on doors like crowns of victory; lights strung across the winter sky, twinkling like stars that have come down to walk among us. These are not mere traditions. They are living confessions, sung in color and flavor and sound. We celebrate with things that can be seen and heard and smelled and tasted and touched—because the Son of God entered a world that can be seen and heard and smelled and tasted and touched.
Yes, many lament the commercialization of Christmas. The concern is real. But whatever we do with that issue, let us never try to spiritualize Christmas. Let us never shrink it into a quiet, ethereal sentiment or a private, invisible piety. We are not commemorating a vague idea or a disembodied principle. We are celebrating the moment the eternal Word took on flesh and made His dwelling among us. The incarnation cannot be an ethereal thing.
The ancient Greeks saw the body as a prison, a cage to be fled. In their philosophy and myths, salvation meant casting off the material world like a heavy cloak and ascending to pure, immaterial light. But the Gospel of the incarnation rises up in fierce, radiant contradiction. How could God call us to flee the physical when He Himself plunged into it? How could He bid us despise the body when He took one on—when He clothed Himself in the very flesh we are tempted to scorn? He came to inhabit the physical in order to redeem it, to raise it up, to fill it with glory—not to abandon it. He did not come to rescue us from the world; He came to rescue the world itself.
So when God commands celebration—when He says, “Spend the money, buy wine and strong drink, eat and drink together, and let your heart rejoice” (Deuteronomy 14:26)—we dare not disobey. We dare not shrink back into pinched asceticism or a dour spirituality that fears abundance. There is liberation in this command. There is freedom in the call to feast, to give, to sing, to revel in the goodness of God’s creation and the greater goodness of His redemption.
The incarnation does not summon us to a somber memorial. It beckons us to a riotous, joyful banquet, a table spread in the presence of our enemies, a feast that echoes the banquet Isaiah saw on the holy mountain. Let us answer that summons with all the earthy, embodied, exuberant delight it deserves—letting every bite, every note, every embrace declare: The Word became flesh, and we have seen His glory. And we will celebrate it with everything we are.
—
TPC Pastor's Page 