THE SCANDAL OF THE CRADLE

   Advent – preparing for the coming of Jesus; that season in the Christian year when we try to wrestle back from secular society and from the superficial pap that often passes for Christianity, some vestige of the original transforming power of the Scandal of the Cradle.

    Ever since I began preaching at age 16, I have loved the Bible and hungered to know what it says and as I matured, to know what it means. Eventually that sent me into the original languages of the Bible and into the cultures that gave it birth and breathe.  And I learned to interpret all Scriptures in the light of Jesus. Now when I do this, as often as not, it doesn’t come out sounding like what most people are used to hearing from those who only pick from the low hanging branches, if you get my drift. So let me start out by begging your patience and inviting you into one of the most important dialogues we could ever have.

    I’m not sure that God loves scandals, but that is what it looks like and sounds like when God turns our natural way of thinking inside out and upside down. What I am sure of is that the way we know God and the way we know how God comes into our lives and into our world is based on two scandals, the Scandal of the Cross and the Scandal of the Cradle. And I believe that almost from the beginning human false pride, known in the Bible as Hubris, the Original Sin, has done it’s dead level best to obscure these scandals and rob them of their truly transforming power. (Have I got you attention? That’s what I was afraid of.)

    Let me reason backward from the Christian Scandal of all Scandals. We have heard it so often and take it so much for granted that it may be impossible to imagine the original Scandal of the Gospel, the scandal of Emmanuel, the Scandal of the very idea that in the historical Jesus we see the mind and heart of the Eternal God!

  Those first century Hebrews had their Scriptures, their prophecies, but when Jesus ‘came out of the closet’, so to speak, and began his ministry by standing up in the Synagogue and reading the prophet, Isaiah, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me..Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” they didn’t exactly roll out the welcome wagon! On the contrary, they were offended and outraged and wanted to kill him by throwing him off a cliff. (Luke 4:16-30).  Jesus said to the paralytic, “Your sins are forgiven.” “Blasphemy!” they cried, “Only God can forgive sin!” (Luke 5:21) Jesus healed on the sabbath and said, “The letter of the law kills, but the Spirit gives life.” Blasphemy! And they sought how to destroy him. According to Matthew, the High Priest said to Jesus, “Tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God.” And Jesus replies, “yes, it is as you say.” Blasphemy! Crucify him. Throughout his ministry, and especially on Palm Sunday, Jesus refused to live down to their Jewish expectations for a Kingly Messiah, and in disappointment and retaliation on the following Friday they shouted, “Crucify Him! Crucify Him!” unwittingly playing into the very hand of God. For if there is no crucifixion, there is no Resurrection, no Christianity, and no Christmas!

   Jesus was cradled in the shadow of the Cross and in the light of the Resurrection. The Crib was not a part of the Gospel for those earliest Christians. It was Paul preaching, “I am determined to know nothing among you except Christ and him Crucified.” (I Cor. 2:2) In Jesus on the Cross, humiliated, beaten, more willing to be killed than to kill, we see the mind and the heart of God more clearly than any place else in human history! Scandalous! The Creator of the Universe? The Almighty? The All powerful? The Righteous Judge? Scandalous!

   And yet, for those early Christians, the Resurrection was God’s way of shinning a gillion

watt spotlight on Jesus, on Jesus being crucified, where we see and hear God’s blood-curdling scream: “I am not Almighty! I am not All-powerful! I AM ALL LOVING! And everyone of you can abuse the freedom of My Love to thwart My will, to go against what I want, to defeat My plan and purpose for you, for your loved ones, and for your world. You can and you do abuse the freedom of my Love to Crucify ME in every irresponsible and cruel thing you say and do! 

   OH MY GOD! The excruciating pain of an All-Loving, All-Merciful, and All-Forgiving God! Is it any wonder that for almost 1600 years, before the modern watering down of Christianity to an antiseptic feel good religion, that the best attended worship service in all of Christendom was neither Christmas nor Easter, but Good Friday? Yes, Good Friday because they knew that if there were no cross, there would be no Easter, no Christianity, and no Christmas! First Things First!

   In my not so humble opinion, the most serious mistake made by the Protestant Reformers, in a tragic over-reaction to the excesses of Roman Catholicism, was taking Jesus off the Cross – effectively obscuring the Scandal of the Cross as God’s Ultimate Self-Revelation! The Resurrection may be God’s final word, bit it’s not God’s Ultimate Word. The Reformers forgot! “Let’s clean up that ugly sight!” Never mind that it’s unbiblical! Never mind that the Gospel caught fire in the world with Paul preaching: “I am determined to know nothing among you except Christ and him crucified.” First things first!  “For God chose the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong; God chose the lowly things of the world, the despised things so that no one may boast before God.”

   Now what about the birth of Jesus? Looking back after 40 to 60 years when they got around to writing about it, wouldn’t it make Godly sense that those early Christians were staring at another scandal – the Scandal of the Cradle?

   The bare bones of the story, the skeleton in the closet if you will, is the fact that the mother of Jesus was pregnant before she was married. Joseph thought about “putting her away quietly”, whatever that means. By Jewish law she could have been stoned. Scandalous. Is this really the way God works? Using the lowliest of the low to come into our world?  Matthew seems to give a nod in that direction. In that all important genealogy leading to Jesus, Matthew includes Mary in the list of five women, all of whom were sexually tainted: Tamar who played the prostitute to seduce her father-in-law; (Gen 38:1ff) Rahab, another prostitute who helped the Hebrew spies in Jericho; (Josh. 2:1ff), Ruth, who got Boaz to sleep with her while he was drunk, and Bethsheba, the object of David’s lust who became his wife after David had her husband killed. Could this really be the way God comes into the world? I wouldn’t be at all surprised. Scandalous!  Just as scandalous as the Cross. No more, no less. “God has chosen the lowly things of the world, and the despised…” (I Cor. 1:29)

    How can I say what comes next without offending? Almost as soon as those early Christians were grasped and transformed by this Scandalous God, Human Sin came in, Hubris, False Pride, Spiritual Arrogance. Those early Christians began to develop stories and doctrines that were diametrically opposed to everything Jesus was and everything he taught! They began to use Jesus the way the Scribes and Pharisees used the Law – to claim that their particular understanding of Jesus was superior to everyone else’s. They perpetrated the most tragic and heinous heresy that has plagued the Church ever since, the heresy that being right is more important than loving each other! Instead of a crown of thorns, they garbed Jesus in Robes of Royalty, jammed a Jeweled Crown upon his head and put a king’s septer in his hand. Instead of swaddling clothes, they garbed him in Jewish Messianic expectations and Greaco-Roman supernaturalism.

Just as the Protestant “Deformers” sterilized the Cross, these early Christians sterilized the stinking stable and the Scandal of the Cradle! “The True Messiah”, they said, “was not really of tainted lineage. The Cross is not the Ultimate Word about God! No, our sinful pride can’t take that in. We can’t be identified with a looser! We want to be on the winning team! We do not want a Sacrificial Lamb and Suffering Servant! We want a Victorious Warrior King! And now that he’s not here to keep us from it, we’ll cast Jesus in the image of a Earthly King, a True Messiah who is going to come back the way we think he should. He’s going to come back and slaughter the wicked and send them to hell, and rule over us good and right believers in some new earth and some new heaven. Glory Hallelujah!”

    Well God help us. I think Jesus tells us and history confirms it, that any time we cast God or Jesus in the mold of an earthly king, something demonic is introduced into the psyche of people who need to be right, who need to feel superior! From the beginning, the Hubris of the wounded and insecure among us have clamored for earthly Kings and heavenly Kings to help them feel superior! I’m convinced that when we use these kingly images that Jesus avoided like the plague, the Jesus I know in the Bible is turning over in his grave. (Oh, Oh. Another wrong metaphor.) Worse yet, the Jesus I know is being Crucified! His Body is being ripped apart by all those who think being right is more important that loving each other! Jesus is screaming “NO! NO! NO! NO! “Get behind me Satan!” I faced those temptations in the Desert, and I said NO! Having eyes to see, do you not see? Having ears to hear, do you not hear? I’m not that kind of Messiah! My realm is not of this world! I don’t have and I don’t want that kind of violent power. For once and for all, I’ve said NO to earthly Domination, Condemnation, and Judgment.

    “Listen to me, all of you. I want to you to understand the scandal of the cradle and the scandal of the cross – the meaning of Christmas and Crucifixion and Resurrection – Everything!  You don’t live in a three story universe. The meaning of Christmas is that I am not up there somewhere sitting on a throne. I am Emmanuel. I am God with with you! I am there in the need of every baby for unconditional love, food, protection and guidance, and I am there in every parent, family and society that can give what I need. Look what happens when you don’t give it. Between 60 and 70 percent of everyone in prison has been neglected, abused or abandoned by their parents and people I wanted to love them with.

   I am Emmanuel. I am there in every stinking stable of your existence. I am there in the suffering of my brothers and sisters around the world! I am there in the brokenness and alienation of my human family that leads to squashing and killing each other! And how do I feel about it? Look at the Cross! And what can I do about it? Look at the Cross! I can’t do a blessed thing about any of it without you! Even if I could, I wouldn’t because I would have to destroy the freedom that makes it possible for us to love each other. That’s the Scandal of the Cross! And my Resurrection and Ascension – that doesn’t mean that I’m up there some where! That means that I’m in a dimension of Reality that is beyond time and space – so I can be with every one of you and love everyone of you and help everyone of you do your best every moment of every day! It’s like I said at the beginning – I am Emmanuel – God with you! It is like I said at the end, “Lo, I am with you always!”  Do you believe that?  If you really believe, people will be able to tell. You know how? Because you will love each other as I have loved you.”

    Behold your Your Messiah, Your Christ, Your God, hanging on a cross and wearing a crown of thorns. Scandalous! But if we believe…

    Behold your Your Messiah, Your Christ, Your God wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. Scandalous! But if we believe…

    But if we believe, I promise you, there will be no spiritual arrogance. There will only and always be Amazing Grace, the Very Spirit of God blowing our minds, pouring into our hearts, and shaping the words of our mouths and the work of our hands! We will affirm our Christian Faith in our uniquely United Methodist way, probably the only way I could be a United Methodist, by using the words of John Wesley in his New Year’s Eve Covenant Communion Service.  I want to invite you to stand and, if your conscience allows, repeat those words after me:

   “I will not quarrel with you about my opinions…

    Only see to it that your heart is right toward God…

    And that you are in love and fellowship with one another…

    And I will give you the right hand of Christian Fellowship…

    (Give each other the right hand of Christian fellowship)