This Little Babe

A Christmas Eve Homily

December 24, 2009

Text: Luke 2:10-12

Have you ever thought you had a person pegged, figured out, only to discover one day that he or she was much more interesting, colorful, or deep than you had ever thought possible?  

Perhaps that person does something that reveals a dimension hitherto unknown. and you say to yourself or others: "I would never have guessed that William would ever do something like that," or "I didn't know he had it in him."

We had perceived that person to be rather one-dimensional or boorish and then they did something that opened up to us a rich personality or character of which we had not previously been aware.

Our understanding of someone's character or personality is heightened such that we will never look at him the same way again.

I experienced this with some regularity when I was training new lieutenants in the Army.  Typically, these men would undergo a couple of months of training in the classroom.  Some men excelled behind a desk with paper, pencil, books, and tests.  Others didn't.  Take these men out of the classroom into the field with a mission and men to lead, and the transformation was often stunning and quite unpredictable.

This often happens with seminarians, too.  The one that you perceive as a miserable, abject seminary student after a few years in the ministry is transformed.  You are amazed at the unveiling of depths of character and skill that you might never have predicted.

Something very much like that happens with the birth of Jesus.  What the world may have thought about God is revolutionized, transformed, even replaced.  Surely within the Hebrew Scriptures there was this latent potential hidden in typological and symbolic prophesy—that the God of Israel had more to him than man might have ever thought. But it remained dormant, hidden until Christmas day.

Religious and philosophically inclined men and women have, through the ages, sought to define and explain God.  Unfortunately, they usually seek to do so apart from the revelation of God's proper character and nature unveiled by the incarnation and work of Jesus Christ. So, to give one example, we have philosophers and theologians who attempt to nail down God by way of negation.  What is God like, they ask?  Let us apply ourselves to this question.  Well, first, we can subtract every characteristic of the creation and posit that God must be unlike anything in the world.  There is time in the world. God is timeless.  There is change in the World.  God is changeless.  There is weakness in the world.  God is all powerful.  God is nothing like anything in the world.  This is the pseudo wisdom of man seeking to understand God apart from Jesus.

It only leads to a philosophical, speculative God, defined in terms of his abstraction from his creation.  He is utterly removed from anything we experience or know.

This is the god reason constructs.  What a bland, blank sort of God this is.  A philosophical principle of a God.  A timeless, inert God.  This is the best that philosophy can come up with.  And it is all wrong.

Religious mysticism also seeks God by trying to transcend the here and now, the flux of change, gross matter, and even knowledge itself.  One must find mystic union with God in an experience that cannot be described or even known in the same way that we know earthly objects.  What kind of God is this?  Who knows. He is ineffable and beyond knowledge and human categories. He must be “experienced” in a flash, in a moment of inward-turned, world-transcending union with the divine.  

This is the best that man can do by turning inwards.  And it is also all wrong.  Both reason and religious sentiment would have you ascending beyond this life of flesh and blood, matter and time. Reason would have you search in the heavens for God; Religious mysticism—within. 

So, people flutter about seeking the big idea, the great concept, the spiritual experience—that one thing that will bridge the distance between themselves and God.  It is an idolatrous trek.  The distance has already been bridged, but not by you or I, by God himself.

The angels knew where to direct these shepherds.

Listen to the angel: the angel says, “You shall find him. . .”  Where?  The angel did not say, you should find him in heaven!  The angel did not say you shall find him within you. The angel did not say, you shall find him after much fasting and prayer so that you can transcend the distance between God and man.  The angel did not say, you shall find him if you do great works of mercy and love.  The angel did not say you shall find him when you philosophically abstract from him all created attributes.  The angel said, “Unto you a Savior is born, he is Messiah Yahweh.  You shall find him in Bethlehem, lying in a manger.”

This little boy is your Creator and Savior.  This is the glad tidings to be shouted on the mountain tops, according to the prophet Isaiah: “O Zion, You who bring good tidings, Get up into the high mountain; O Jerusalem, You who bring good tidings, Lift up your voice with strength, Lift it up, be not afraid; Say to the cities of Judah, “Behold your God!” (Isa 40:9).

If you would hear the glad tidings, you must bend yourself down to this place, and to this time, to this baby boy, nursing on this mother’s breast, soiling his swaddling clothes, crying in the cold.

If you would know God, the true God, then you must stay with this little boy as he sucks, is washed, grows, eats, sleeps, hammers and saws, suffers, bleeds, and dies.

Behold your God.

This is the offense of genuine Christianity.  This is also the glory of genuine Christianity.

Oh, you say, such lowliness and dirtiness and creaturely muckiness is not worthy of his honor and glory!  Well, what man considers glorious and honorable means nothing to God.  If the Son thought of glory as men do then he would have stayed in heaven sitting at God’s little right hand, seated upon a velvet-cushioned throne, having angels entertain him.

Don’t be distracted by the majesty and incomprehensible otherness of God.  Come and watch and listen at the manger.  

In every other way God is terrible and awesome, a consuming fire. Only in the flesh of Christ do we find a merciful God.

So Christ comes all the way to us, not just part of the way, all the way!  Mercifully he deals with us on our earthly level through our earthly things.

For God without flesh is useless.  Upon the flesh of Christ, upon that infant clinging to the bosom of the Virgin, you are to set your eyes and simply, with steadfast heart, say, “I have neither in heaven or on earth any other God, nor do I know Divinity outside this flesh which is gently enfolded in the bosom of the Virgin Mary.”

Do you see now?  The Christian can never think of God in the same way.  We will not tolerate the philosophers, the scholastics or the mystics. This boorish, one-dimensional, philosophically derived God is a phantom.  A dull, gray dream.  We Christians joyfully turn our backs on every banal, lifeless abstraction that men call "god" standing awestruck before "the light of the knowledge of the splendor of God in the face of Jesus Christ." 

Mediate on the Hymn “This Little Babe” by Robert Southwell.  The melody to sing this hymn can be heard here. 

This little babe, so few days old,

Is come to rifle Satan’s fold;

All hell doth at his presence quake.

Though he himself for cold do shake,

For in this weak unarmed wise

The gates of hell he will surprise.

With tears he fights and wins the field;

His naked breast stands for a shield;

His battering shot are babish cries,

His arrows looks of weeping eyes,

His martial ensigns cold and need,

And feeble flesh his warrior’s steed.

His camp is pitched in a stall,

His bulwark but a broken wall,

The crib his trench, hay stalks his stakes,

Of shepherds he his muster makes;

And thus, as sure his foe to wound,

The angels’ trumps alarum sound.

My soul, with Christ join thou in fight;

Stick to the tents that he hath pight;

Within his crib is surest ward,

This little babe will be thy guard.

If thou wilt foil thy foes with joy,

Then flit not from this heavenly boy.

Comments

[phang weei min]

A splendid piece that brings unspeakable peace to this enthrilled reader!