Text: Titus 2:11
Theme: "The Master of Disguise"
The Feast of the
Nativity of Our Lord
December 24, 2012
First
Presbyterian Church
Rev. Paul R. Dunklau
+In the Name of Jesus+
For
the grace of God has appeared that offers salvation to all people.
The first verse of our New Testament Reading from Titus chapter two is our provision for meditation on this blessed Christmas Eve. St. Paul presented a short and highly concentrated version of the Christmas message to a young man by the name of Titus. He writes to him: "For the grace of God has appeared that brings salvation to all people."
Titus was not a Presbyterian. He wasn't Protestant; he wasn't Catholic. Simply put, he was your garden variety Gentile. For that matter, he knew nothing of Santa Claus, decking the halls with boughs of holly, or having a "merry little Christmas" in spite of it all. He never heard Eartha Kitt sing "Santa Baby" or Elvis Presley sing "Blue Christmas". He wasn't Jewish; he didn't have any ethnic ties to religion. Perhaps he was like the growing number these days, who claim no spiritual, faith-based, or religious affiliation. These are the folks -- to put it as gently as possible -- for whom none of that matters. It's just ancient, archaic beliefs that are best left in a museum in our ultra-modern world.
If there is a god, Titus might have thought, he must be the emperor. If you didn't believe that, you might have been killed in those days. If it's not the emperor, God -- whoever God is -- must be so far away that He doesn't care, and, therefore, is irrelevant. Or if God is near, He's more like a little pet that is nice to have around but you wish it would stop barking at inappropriate times. Titus was like all of us. On his better days, he had his hopes: "Someday soon, we all will be together if the fates allow. Until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow." Titus, like so many, was just another nameless face muddling through. And isn't that about as much as we can hope for? As Melvin, Jack Nicholson's character in "As Good as It Gets", says: "Are ya with me, sweetheart?"
But then one day, a day that changed him forever, he heard the true meaning of Christmas and, indeed, the true meaning of life. He heard of a child -- born of the history and promises of Israel. Along the way, he discovered that the world was not a mistake, and accident, or a cosmic joke. It was created and created good by a loving God, but something went horribly wrong. Yet that's not how the story would end -- because, as Titus learned, when the time had fully come, God sent forth His own Son to pay the price for humankind's age-old rebellion against God. He came to believe in Jesus, the Messiah, the one long foretold. He came to trust in Jesus, the Immanuel, the God-with-us. He came to understand that the church was not a social club or yet another strange religious organization with archaic, unenlightened, and anti-intellectual beliefs. It was a gathering of people who were called out of darkness into God's marvelous light. They were citizens of a kingdom that cannot be shaken. Every congregation -- for all its welters and warts, faults and failures -- was an embassy of heaven!
Thus, all other bets were off. This was the real deal. That dark void in his soul -- you know what I'm talking about? That part of you that is so real and so painful and that you try so hard trying to deny? -- was filled with light. What dawned on him was that he was loved (even when he couldn't love himself, and even when he loved himself too much), and, more than that, that God, in Jesus Christ, was doing for him what he could not do for himself. He became a real man, a believer. It was all because, as the blessed Apostle Paul wrote to him in the letter, "the grace of God that brings salvation to all has appeared."
That grace didn't appear in the Roman Coliseum or in Madison Square Garden to a sold-out , standing-room-only crowd. It appeared in a lowly manger bed, a rock-hewn feeding trough-- with stinking animals and manure all around. The imminent arrival of the grace of God was not signaled by a flyover of F-16s, but by a guiding star. The announcement of God's grace appearing did not come via divine tweet to a bunch of godly, pre-chosen twitterers. It wasn't a viral phenomenon on YouTube. It wasn't captured via Instagram and then disseminated far and wide. The message that we are to harken to, the message of the herald angel, was first given to the poorest of the poor, the day laborers, the shepherds watching their flocks by night. And the grace of God didn't arrive in a warm birthing suite that looked like a 5-star hotel room with pink or blue teddy bears and balloons at the ready. Anything approaching a hotel in Bethlehem was an Inn that would make a Motel 6 look like a Hilton, and there was no room for them there anyway.
And what of the theotokos, what subsequent generations would call the "God-bearer"? It was a girl -- likely no more than a teenager -- named Mary. Her creator was in her womb as that donkey trudged along toward Bethlehem on that first Christmas Eve. If you can marvel at that, my friend, you are on your way! You're on your way!
You see, God is the master of disguise! He didn't do it in the way that we would envision it or choreograph it. It's as if the grace of God snuck up on us unawares. It wasn't like a foreign invasion with predator drones, tanks, and troops; it was like it embedded itself -- quietly, in this world, even in our own skin. "How silently, how silently the wondrous gift is given," says a best-loved Christmas carol.
Richard John Neuhaus writes that "Disguise is central to God's way of dealing with us human beings. Not because God is playing games with us but because the God who is beyond our knowing makes himself known in the disguise of what we can know. The Christian word for this is revelation, and the ultimate revelation came by incarnation." And that takes us to Mary's baby; that's where the grace of God that brings salvation is found. The almighty God wears swaddling clothes.
We celebrate The Feast of the Nativity of Our Lord this night at First Presbyterian Church -- an embassy of the Kingdom of God and an outpost of heaven on earth. And in just a few moments, disguised in the lowly forms of bread and wine, we are privileged to share that grace of God that brings salvation in The Lord's Supper. How precious it is to share this meal, this feast of the Nativity, with family and friends from far and near this night.
I know that there are a number of homes among us where, this Christmas for the first time, there will be an empty seat at the holiday table. But there is no emptiness here tonight, for here in this Supper -- with angels, and archangels, and all the company of heaven -- we keep the feast. Earth is in heaven, and --- thank God! -- heaven is on earth, for, albeit in disguise, the grace of God that brings salvation to us all has appeared. Titus would never be the same. What about you? A very merry Christmas and a happy new year to you all!
Amen.
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