I.
The news is in trouble these days. It used to be that there were respected publications, newspapers, magazines, which were considered trustworthy, as opposed to the sensational, yellow journalism, jingoistic muckraking of the pulp press and tabloids.
Today we have fake news, misinformation, disinformation, and twitter. It’s very hard to separate the signal from the noise. And there’s just too much of it coming across our feeds.
I abandoned social media a few years ago and went from having over a thousand friends to, well, my wife, my dog, and a group chat I’m on with three or four friends from college.
I still get text messages and email alerts every time I order something. The other day I reordered my contact lenses and within a few minutes, I got this chipper note:
“Hey Jacob,
We have some great news for you!”
“Oh boy, get ready,” I am thinking. What is the news going to be? But first, who is this writing to me, and how did I get on a first-name basis with info@tr.1800contacts.com?
(You know, at one point I actually went into several of my accounts and updated my first name to “Mister” so that I could force the computer bots to show me some respect. That worked fine until one time I had to call customer service and a cheerful young woman came on the line and just kept referring to me as “Mister.” “How can I help you today, Mister?” “Is there anything else I can do to provide you with excellent service, Mister?” and finally, “Thanks for being such a loyal customer, Mister.”)
Anyway, back to the great news from info@tr.1800contacts.com. What was it going to be? I opened the email to read:
“Your prescription has been verified and is ready for you to use in your account.”
Wow. That is great news. I remember the day I got a note on the message board at school that said, “Call the Yale College Admissions Office,” which I did, and found out I had been admitted, but that was nothing compared to this great news from info@tr.1800contacts.com.
Great news indeed. My prescription has been verified.
I think you get my point. News has become both incredible and exaggerated.
II.
Tonight [this morning] we read a story of when the news actually mattered. To the shepherds the angel of the Lord says:
“Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.”
We lose something when we cheapen words and degrade the media by which they are transmitted. The great news of the birth of the Messiah and the news of a prescription being filled are separated by many, many degrees of importance. Yet because we are bombarded by such exaggerated claims of importance for messages that don’t matter (or matter very little) we cannot hear the one message that is truly important.
Moreover, when the media is filled with lies, our skepticism increases, and we dismiss the biblical record of an event that occurred, and that can change our lives forever, if we will but listen.
III.
For a few minutes every year most of the world still stops to let this message be proclaimed. But do we hear it?
Two people can experience the same thing yet not agree on what it means. One person sees the world around him as certain proof that God is real and makes up his mind to follow this God and find out more about Him. Another person, looking at and living in the exact same world, decides that the whole thing is a product of chance.
A million monkeys bang away on a million typewriters and one of them finally manages to write a line of Shakespeare. But without a Shakespeare in the first place, who would ever know?
And so, it is with the message of Christmas. It isn’t likely to get through if you presuppose it can’t be true in the first place.
IV.
Something happens, however, when you start with the presupposition that this story is true. That the angels really did announce some great news. That the Virgin really did conceive and bear a Son.
First, you realize that the rest of the world’s messages aren’t nearly as important as they say they are, even if the subject line is, “Great News! (About your contact lens order).”
Second, you begin to wonder, and then to ask, and finally to see, that nothing else that claims to be true can be true if it excludes this particular message from God.
Finally, you learn to relate all of life’s little facts, all of your comings and goings, your days, and your years, to this message, and you discover that it’s in this message that they all find their meaning and purpose. You realize that there are no accidents in life because there is no such thing as chance.
What happened in Bethlehem 2,022 years ago was no accident. It was not a myth or fake news. It was a divine revelation.
It was God, who had been revealing Himself all along in nature, but especially and explicitly in the words of the Jewish scriptures, whose Hebrew language gave us the most apt word for it, Emmanuel, which means God-dwelling-with-us, who at last came to dwell with us, as one of us.
As the hymn “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” says, “Pleased as man with man to dwell, Jesus our Emmanuel.”
V.
The other day I got a phone call from a scammer, threatening to turn off my electricity in the next 30 minutes if I did not immediately pay the utility bill. Of course, this is a well-known scam, but the sophistication, even the hold music, was believable. Here was one more message, one more lie, in a world that’s full of them.
I stayed on the line to speak to the so-called “representative” because I wanted to ask him what he thought his mother would think of him if she knew what her son was doing. I pressed #2 and was soon connected to a friendly-sounding man named Alvin or something like that. I said, “Alvin,” (since we’re always using first names these days), I said, “Alvin, how can you possibly be proud, or happy with what you’re doing?”
To my surprise, he was defiant and answered, “I am very happy with what I do,” but his voice had an edge about it. There was a chord of guilt in it, as if he knew exactly what he was doing, and how wrong it was.
I then unloaded a bunch of Old Testament invectives and wrath and judgment on him, calling him a lawbreaker, telling him which of the Ten Commandments he was breaking, and how he was defrauding the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. I told him that God hates this sort of lie, especially this sort of economic fraud. I told him that when Jesus returned, He would consume him with the fire from His mouth.
Alvin got very quiet and then hung up. I am not sure what good my rant did except that I know that while he was busy hearing the truth from me, he wasn’t busy defrauding anyone else. Who knows, God willing, my words may save his soul. After all, it wasn’t by his bad luck that he got connected to me, but by God’s unfolding plan that he heard the truth about his evil way of life.
Here’s the point. There are no accidents in life. God didn’t leave the creation of this world up to chance and He didn’t leave salvation up to you or me either. God has come. The message of Christmas is that God comes to us to save us. Because we need to be saved. We need to be picked up by the scruffs of our stiff little necks, pulled off the world’s assembly line of sin, and put back on the path that leads to life and goodness and, finally, to heaven.
If we’ve forgotten what goodness is, Christmas reminds us. If we’ve wandered off the path, the star of Bethlehem lights the way back. If we’ve lost our joy, the angels are here with their song to restore it.
That is the great news of Christmas. Amen.
Preached at St. Peter’s, Lithgow, on December 24 & 25, 2022.