Born A Savior 12/19/43

Scripture: Luke 2: 8-14

Text: Luke 2: 11,12 ... “Unto you is born this day a Savior ..... a babe, wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.”

Once again, the hurrying weeks and months have brought us to Christmas - the best day of the year, with its joy, its cheer, its good will. We observe many holidays in our nation - days of deep historic meaning and of importance. But Christmas is a day on the calendar of all humanity. It is broader than the nation. It belongs to the world!

One other day ranks with it in Christian regard: that is Easter day with its song of hope eternal.

It is “fitting” that we have a festival of the dawn of life stemming from the birth of Jesus Christ, and a companion festival of the hope of eternity that transcends life’s sunset, validated by the same Jesus Christ.

Unaccountable blessing came into the world with the advent of one child, born of poor parents in an obscure place. Without sword or pen his life divided the story of man, for most of the world, into “before” and “after.” With that advent was born a hope that shall never fail. A spiritual wind, blowing from a manger-cradle, changes the climate of the earth; so that some age long evils blight and some age long hopes blossom perennially.

The story of that nativity is told with such dignity, restraint and beauty! It is a record of gladness as oft as we read it. At least once a year, we gather at a manger and find ourselves saved by the cradle, as well as by Easter’s cross.

The life of Jesus began in a cradle. It unfolded in the growing soul of babe, of boy, of man. As it covers all the days from Bethlehem to Olivet, so must our Christianity illuminate the whole of our lives from dawn to dusk. If we could use the powers of man, and his hard experience, in the faith of a little child, I suspect we should be near a very secret of life!

Christmas is festivity. Christmas is bells, and gaiety and gifts and greetings and good will. Christmas is the family around the table, or if not physically present at least in the heart. Christmas is the song of choirs and of little children. Christmas is sparkling trees and wreaths.

But, before all this, Christmas is a story of wondrous advent - not just a holiday, but a holy day of lasting loveliness. Why not remember the first significance of Christmas by taking down your Bible on that morning? Turn to the second chapter of Luke’s gospel and read the simple, beautiful story. Read in the remembrance that your ancestors of the spirit, or of the flesh, risked their lives for the right to read that word! Read without any theory to be proved or disproved. Let the story tell itself to your heart. Let its majesty and music steal over you. Let the wondering faith of your childhood revive in the wisdom of innocence and beauty. Read with the heart of a poet, for the poet discerns truths too great for definition. If we would know the truth about Shakespeare, we must know more than the dates of his birth and death, his residence, parenthood, education and positions held. These are mere shells of truth. The truth of Shakespeare is in the story of his soul. It cannot be told without the romance of poetry.

The truth of Jesus is found not so much in the historians’ account of his existence, as in the song of the angels, the adoration of shepherds, the homage of wise men, the searching face of a boy among the temple’s wise men, the humility of a man’s baptism at Jordan, the light of his transfiguration, his tenderness with little children, his yearning love for his disciples.

Read the gospel story in the higher, clearer air. Look on the face of babe and see that there the story is told as well and as wonderfully as words can tell it.

Great truths for all time lie in the Christmas story! For one thing the story bears witness to the reality, the beauty, the goodness of an unseen order which surrounds us as the air surrounds a tree. We are obviously surrounded by dull facts, a solid sort of earth, some sordidness, sorrow and frustration. But we are surrounded also by a miraculous realm more real than the obvious. Jesus is the supreme witness of the reality of that world of divine surprise. His message is that the unseen is a realm of beauty, not of horror. “Fear not,” said the angel to shepherds who trembled at the light of a world higher than their own. “I bring you good tidings of great joy.” Who can tell what this means in driving fear from human hearts?

Ignorant man has so long crouched in terror before the unseen. If that unseen is a realm of light and love, eloquent with glad tidings, we have a right to ring the joy bells!

To this vision a philosopher comes at last in these words, “And so God is love. What must that world be that is worthy of such love? The only worthy object of live is just love; it must, then, be a world that can love God. But love is free; in a ready-made world it could have no place. Hence the long and painful discipline of evolution, with its dying to live - the putting off the earthly for the likeness of God. In such a realm of ends we trust that God is love indeed and love the final law. We cannot live or move without faith, that is clear. Is it not, then, rational to believe the best, and can there be a better?”

But we can love God only as there is in us something akin to the divine. It is God in man which the Christmas story discloses in the account of the Eternal Spirit taking the form of a child. This becomes an authentic basis of all the high idealisms and heroic optimisms of mankind.

In his loneliness, man seeks God, and in seeking finds him - in himself. The hope of the world lies in the birth and growth of the divine in man, refining greed into goodness.

The real basis of democracy, worth its name, is here - God in man - in some measure in all men. We have a hint of this again in the Christmas story. Wise men and untutored shepherd meet here. Princes come to a stable and kneel while a humble woman and her husband are exalted. All bow before a beauty in whose presence they are one in wonder, hope and joy.

We are all a mixture of “dirt and deity” with fears and faith in common. Down in our hearts we have the evils and the divinity that is potential with every other human being. Since we have the same “dogs of temptation and passion” at our heels and the same “spark of divinity” in our breasts, we ought to love one another.

Easter teaches us hope in life that continues. Christmas teaches us hope in life that is now. The hope of the world is the child. The enterprise of education finds its everlasting sanction and reason here. The child holds in his hand the future of the race, all our hope of social goodness, of national good sense and human welfare. He is the custodian of whatever truth and worth we may pass on to times to come. In his worth we continue to live.

The powers of evil have perceived this no less keenly than have the forces of right. Hitler’s most horrible work has been the diabolical indoctrination of children and youth with his foul theories. If we mean to have a better world we must not fail to train that world in the thoughts and purposes of our children.

A child born in purity and honor needs to be reborn only as some killing sin slays his soul on the way.

On the day of Jesus’ birth, the imagination of the faithful may recreate the past in order to make the future live. Bethlehem becomes real, as the home of our own childhood. The manger, the mother, the babe, the shepherds, the angels are sounds we seem to have heard and scenes we seem to have witnessed. Though the picture belongs to the far past, it lives vibrantly today.

Over the armed camp of that tough old Roman world rang the angelic song, “Peace on earth among men of good will.” How strange and far off it must have seemed then; how remote it seems today. Hatred hangs like the smoke pall of bombed cities over the lives of modern men. But the song is neither a myth nor a mockery. It will come true.

Because it is far off, we know it is not our own creation, but music sent to our souls by One who is beyond the mists in the clear air of certainty. Perhaps not in our day, possibly not in many days, but at last in His own appointed time, the earth will fill with men of good will and war will be no more.

Joseph Fort Newton says that Christmas is a “prophetic day,” looking not so much back as forward. It belongs to a coming order, to a society not yet attained; to a Christianity not yet realized. It is a divine vision of a time when men shall lay aside their weapons of destruction, and learn to love one another.

How dear are our Christmas celebrations! Even when lonely and anxious, there is always someone to bless, someone to remember in the name of Him who was born a Savior.

We welcome the spirit of Christmas, symbol of the Eternal child. May that spirit flourish to the confounding of all unkindness and uncleanness. May it take us from all towering pride and teach us humility and righteousness. May it bring us, for one precious day at least, to simple faith in a splendid tomorrow.

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Dates and places delivered:

Wisconsin Rapids, December 19, 1943