GOD OF US ALL

The Fourth in an Advent Series of Sermons
December 18, 1988, 8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
Micah 5:2-5a
Matthew 1:18-25

“All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet:
‘Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and his name shall: be
calied Emmanuel' — which means, God with us.” _ Matthew -1:22, 23 (RSV)

Every year at about this time, exactly one week before Christmas, it
seems that our culture undergoes the. equivaient. of a nervous breakdown,
The circuits simply overload. There“is:simply too much going on. If: ‘you .
were courageous enough to venture out: onto the Avenue: ‘yesterday, you; now
what I mean. It was brutal out. there.. - People, . it seemed to me, were
.particularly determined, heads tilting inte ‘the: wind, <shoulders hunched 3} 2.
forward in a slight crouch, prepared to attack, . -a-look of almost primal oe
ferocity in their eyes... like Mike Singletary zeroing in ona quarterback...
It was no day out there for a man on a cane, so I sat in my window’and
watched; my fifty yard line seat: for Christmas on Michigan Avenue.

We will spend $700,000,000 ‘on North: Michigan Avenue this year, AON OP
it this month. We Americans will.gain an. average, ‘of. seven pounds per - -
person over the holidays, Jane Pauley announced last week. And it seemed
to me that we made real progress toward both objectives this weekend.

It's personal, too. Your schedule is probably creaking and groaning -
with the extra weight. At this point there doesn't appear to be the
remotest possibility that all the cards will be addressed, presents
purchased, wrapped and delivered, and parties attended. I hear my

-colleagues sighing a lot these days and I know what it means.

In an articie in The Presbyterian Survey, Kenneth Gibble calls it
"The Hectic Season," “the more-things—to—do-than-I-have—time-to-do-them-in-
season" and goes on to say that it's symbolized by the last-minute
Christmas crush at K-Mart. “I've gotten caught in it more than once, and
I've learned that there is a good deal of the beast left inus.. Anyone
trying to jump the line at the cash register would be savagely attacked by
shoppers willing to gouge, tear and maim. All with a perfectly clear
conscience." And that's just K-Mart. Gibble has probably never been to
the Banana Republic on December 17!

Every year at just this time I recali with great fondness an event
which happened in our home years ago. The children were young and we had
purchased one of those pressed-paper Nativity scenes which was to be
punched out and "easily assembled," the package promised: "press out on
line A, cut half-way to B, fold between C & D along the dotted line E, then
insert in slot F."| My youngest at the time and I sat down to do the job
after dinner. It was pretty complicated. Before long, the table was
cluttered with pressed paper: slightly bent sheep, cattle folded in the
wrong places, shepherds who refused to stand up, and a tiny Manger tilting
precariously to starboard. He was about four at the time, and he surveyed
the table top - the chaos we had created and asked.. "Daddy, where is God
in this mess?" _

It is a great question. You can count on children, I have
discovered, always to ask the great questions, the theologically profound

questions. “Where do we go when we die? Who made God? Why?" And, "Where >

is God in this mess?"

In fact, it may be the quintessential question in the middle of this
hectic season, one week before Christmas. Novelist and Chicago Tribune
feature writer, Bill Granger, thinks people buy the Sunday paper because
it's Sunday and they know. you're. supposed to do something special: and, ‘no
longer going to church, they substitute waiking to the drug store and
carrying home five. pounds of newspaper. So, maybe the frenzy of an
American: ‘Christmas ‘is precisely“ in:reverse ratio to the ‘theological -

; content: that is, the less. ‘we believe — the more.celebrating we do.

But ‘that's: the cynic talking. 8 “Maybe -it's not that at alli.-. Maybe".
there is a strong residue of ‘faith (which'we keep hidden for one reason or
ancther) in us and Christmas touches it and calls it out of us. Maybe .God
“is profoundly in the midst of this mess. ao

I began this series of Advent sermons on the topic of God by
proposing that there are two important questions:

Is there a God? - and - Does it matter? The first is academic. The
second is personal. The first is a matter of philosophy. .The second is a
matter of faith. The first is about ideas. The second is about following.
We have thought about the God of creation - the God of the galaxies and
mysterious universe — who made us all; and we believe, is still creating a
world to reflect the divine image. We have thought about God of the
outsiders, the oppressed, the captives, the poor, a God whose all-inclusive
love embraces and takes sides with those who are shut out of the human
family. And we thought about God of the lost who tugs at the hearts and
minds and lives of those who have lost their way and live in a wilderness
of despair, puilt, apathy and doubt. Today - God of us all.

Certainly, the question of God is on the human agenda with a new
urgency today. One of the books that called the world's attention to
Professor Hans Kung was entitled Does God Exist? I heard Hans Kung deliver
a lecture in which he said that the biggest mistake the preacher makes on
Sunday morning is assuming that all the people in the pews believe in God.

12/18/88

For the past several centuries, Kung points out, the most influential
scholarly thinking regarded the question of God in particular, and religion
in general, as irrelevant at best and, at worst, repressive and reactionary.
Human enlightenment was synonymous with liberation from religion — the kind
of religion that opposed Galileo, and democracy, and preferred exorcism to
psychiatry.

That is over now - dramatically so. One of the reasons is that
nothing has failed so utterly as the utopian, godless vision of Karl Marx.
The resurgence of faith and the tenacity and vitality of the church in
Marxist lands is acknowledged by all - even government authorities. There
is far more to the human spirit than Sigmund Freud could explain. Science,
of all things, has come full circle, peering out into an exploding universe
and inviting the theologians back into the conversation about the
beginnings and the meaning of human life.

If you are not stimulated to ask the question of God by modern
science or psychology - the arts continue to pose it. This church engages
in an annual Festival of the Arts precisely because even when the churches
are silent, artists bear witness to the transcendent, the holy,
mysterious and unexplainable in the middle of life. Even when they are not
using a theologically correct vocabulary, they know and we know that the
subject is God.

Jazz pianist, Dave Bruebeck divided his concert here between sacred
and secular music. He said something eloquent and important,
theologically, at the beginning of the jazz portion... “The cymbals are on
the altar, where they belong."

The motif appears regularly in the best literature of the day. In
John Updike's recent novel, 8S, Sarah Worth, a new Englander, becomes
enamored of a Hindu religious leader and joins his commune in Arizona. In
one of her letters to her husband, she writes:

“You worship a stupid God, a stodgy, pudgy, god of
respectability and outward appearance, ;
a tin snob ged of the 'right' causes and

shoes and country clubs, of acceptable street
addresses and the acquisitions that dissolve
downward into junk..." [p. 62]

The question of God comes at us out of our own experience and the
bewildering complexities and anomilies of life in this world. An
earthquake strikes and 50,000 people die and we find ourselves asking the
oldest theological question of all: Why? If God exists, how do things
like this happen? We know that it isn't possible to retreat to the old
arguments learned in Sunday School, or from popular mythology. It is not
possible to blame ali evil on human sin - or to attribute suffering to
God's punishment. Even to imply that there is divine intent involved when
babies die of leukemia or that the AIDS epidemic is God's judgment is
blasphemous and even non-believers know it.

And so, if we are to believe in God at all, it must be in a way that
takes very seriously our life in this world - our humanity, the human

17/18/88

condition; a way that includes God in the joys and tragedies of human life. “—
If God exists it must in some way intimately connect with my life.

Again, the artists and writers know what the issue is. John Updike
expresses it as one of his Jewish characters describes his wife's WASPish
Episcopalian religion...

"Many of her crowd went to church much as they faithfully

played tennis and golf and attended rallies to keep out developers.
Yet, their God, for ali his colorful history and spangied attributes,
jay above earth like a layer of icy cirrus, a tenacious and diffident
other whose tendrils failed to entwine with fibrous blood and muscle.’
[Beck is Back, p. 115]

And along comes Christmas and the astonishing assertion that the
child of Bethlehem was Emmanuel - God with us. In the middle of this
hectic season and all the frenzied activities, it is a mysterious word
which stretches our capacity to believe. This child, nestled at his
mother's breast, is the God of the creation, God of the Outsider and the
Lost, God of us all.

The name of this radical word is the Doctrine of the Incarnation.
What it means is that in the life of one man, Jesus of Nazareth, God lived
fully. What it means is that Christian thinking about God begins not with
philosophic speculation but with a very particular human birth. “

_ Christians have always pondered,. discussed, argued and fought over
this topic. How could he be human and divine? Was Jesus God, acting Like
a human being, or a very good person trying to-act like God? res re

. Fhere was a time when IE thought it was important for Christian people
to grapple with Fourth century incarnational controversies about whether
Jesus was of the same "essence" as God or was it the same "substance"?
There is only a letter or two difference in the Greek words and seminary
students lose a lot of sleep trying to remember which is which. Now I know
better. Understanding is not the issue. I've lived long enough to know
and acknowledge and enjoy the fact that there is a lot about iife and
beauty and love that I don't understand. Now I know that the urgent issue
for us is not establishing a tightly reasoned theology, but finding some
way to trust - live with a sense of wholeness, joy, security, i.e.
salvation - and that means a relationship. You don't get that from people
telling you things ~- you get it from relationships. When children ask the
important, sometimes frightening questions, I have concluded that what they
want is not so much a good answer, but a hug. The issue is a relationship
with God. Now I know that all of it - the shepherds and the star, the
Magi, the cattle and the sheep ~— ali of it presents us with the most

important claim in all of human history... God with us. In this birth...
God of us all. God accessibie to us... God close tous... God coming to
us...

It is not an easy time to believe in God. Even the best of us have
moments when the whole business seems remote. Instead of a joyful and
satisfying sense of God's presence in life, we live with an emptiness, a
vacuum, a vague dis-ease that perhaps we are alone and this brief life is

12/18/88

all there is. Christmas, the festival of the incarnation, invites us to
include in our religion, to entrust to God, even our sense of aloneness.
Think of it! In this child - this man - God is with us. And so, 33 years
later, when this very man, alone, abandoned, near death, cries out, "My
God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" we come face to face with a
profound mystery. Namely, that God is most present in precisely those
moments when we feel God-forsaken.

On a wall in the Warsaw Ghetto was scratched a brave and poignant
poem. It was written by a child.

"I believe in the sun, even if it does

not shine,
I believe in love, even if I do not feel it.
I believe in God, even if I do not see him."
[Hans Kung, Signposts for the Future, p. 164]

The birth of Jesus - is God with us. And so there is a whole new way
of relating to God: no longer as a remote and frighteningly powerful
deity, but as one who submitted to human life, who got into life with us.
God with us - and so when suffering occurs to us, God feels it with us,
weeps with us, stands shoulder to shoulder beside us.

The birth of Jesus is God with us; so our search for God has a whole
new focus. Human life is where we meet God: not just in church, but all
those places where we do our living: not just in worship and prayer - but -.

as we work for a living, and as we enjoy the gift of our lives; as we ove... we

one another passionately and profoundly.

The birth of Jesus is God with us; how life is lived in this world
becomes a matter of religious significance, distinctions between-sacred and
secular break down: God cares about life. Jesus, after all, was not a holy
‘man by anyone's definition. He did not live in a monastery. He lived
thoroughly in the world. He loved his family. He knew what it was to be
tired and hungry and discouraged ~- and exhilarated, happy and full of
passion. He argued with the authorities: he was arrested and tried and. -
convicted on very worldly charges. Ali of that says that God cares about
how life is lived in this world. God cares deeply about how people treat
one another. God.cares more about justice in South Africa than about
religious orthodoxy. God cares more about hope in the Middle East,
reconciliation in Northern Ireland, and the U.S.S.R. and U.S.A. inclining
toward unity, and about integrity and compassion in the political life of
our community - than about all the incarnation formulas in Christendom.

Finally - personally, intimately, because the birth of the Christ
Chiid is God with us - because God chose this way to come to us (this
modest, lovely and gentle intrusion into human history, a way we all share
~ human birth) you and I may live with a sense that we are loved,
infinitely and completely by the God who created us. We can live with a
saving sense that God is in this mess with us: in this vast and mysterious
universe, and this bewildering and hectic life, we are not alone, not
ever... There is one who comes to us in the midst of life - whose name is
Emmanuel... God with us.

So, there is a week left. And you may or may not accomplish
everything that simply must be done. Even if you don't - particularly if
you didn't - please remember that the festival is about a God who chooses
to dwell with us...

-a God who values human life, loves human life and makes human life
sacred - by coming to live it...

- a God who - in every age, in every city, in every circumstance - is
Emmanuel .

"OQ Holy Child of Bethlehen,
Descend to us, we pray;

Cast out our sin, and enter in,
Be born in us today.

We hear the Christmas angels
The great glad tidings tell;

0 come to us, abide with us,
Our Lord: Emmanuel."

Amen.

12/18/88