One of the things I like to do when I get a moment is to watch the live feed from the International Space Station with its HD camera pointed at our blue planet, turning slowly against the inky darkness of space.
I know this makes me something of a geek, but I don’t care; it's a view I never grow tired of.
Of course, you only see what is beautiful about our world; azure blue oceans, swirling cloud systems, snow-capped mountains, rainforests, coasts… You can’t see pollution, or warzones, or poverty or any other catastrophe of human making.
The question occurred to me the other week, looking at this; if I were God looking down past the beauty of the natural world I had created, and saw all around the ghastly mess my world had become and, being God, having infinite imagination and unlimited resources and endless possibilities at my fingertips… and if I had already decided to send a saviour to fix things… how would I do it? How would you do it?
Where would I situate my messiah? Maybe I would pick a place with optimal communications networks so everyone would know about it with live updates in real time.
I might choose a city at the heart of political power or artistic creativity so people would know that this Saviour was somebody important.
I might want to announce it with a great fanfare and put on a dazzling spectacle like an Olympic Games opening ceremony. That way, people would be impressed. I might pick parents of royal blood, or who were famous so the Saviour I sent would be born into a dynasty marked by greatness.
But what God actually did was disappointingly low-budget. He picked a minor, nothing town in the middle of nowhere called Bethlehem.
The Oxford or Cambridge of the ancient world, the centre of academic learning, with all its impressive philosophy, was Athens. God overlooked it.
The Washington DC, or the hub of political power, was Rome. God ignored it.
Bethlehem was neither here nor there; it was (as we will sing in a few minutes) a sleepy little town surrounded by fields. It was an irrelevance on the world stage.
Moreover, the precise location in that nothing town was a common shed in a side street. The hastily improvised bedroom furniture was a couple of haystacks and a feeding trough. The supporting cast were farm animals and a motley band of peasants smelling of sheep and B.O.
For one so special, why not a little more bling? Why did God snub the impressive, brand new temple just 6 miles up the road in Jerusalem, with its dressed stone and fine marble?
And the parents God chose for the one he sent to change the world were nobodies. Joseph was a tradesman; the first century equivalent of white-van man, complete with tool belt and pencil behind the ear.
Mary was a total nonentity; a teenage girl, probably uneducated, and both lived in a nondescript town called Nazareth which had all the charm and cultural prestige of somewhere like Basildon.
Why did God do it this way? Why so low-key?
Is it because God watched, century after century, traders and businessmen grasping greater market share, earning more money, making higher profits, and building bigger empires?
They would pay low wages, exploit their workforce, hide their wealth offshore to avoid tax, plunder natural resources, pollute the skies, foul the seas … whatever it took to acquire more, they did it.
They felt they would only find happiness by acquiring more and God saw that they would do anything to get it. But it never delivered.
God watched political rulers down the years, kings and emperors, presidents and generals, thinking they would be happier if they could increase their power, and rule over more territory with bigger populations?
He watched them blow the nation’s wealth on ever more sophisticated military hardware, send their armies out into battle, and shed the blood of millions, just to acquire more land and expand their influence.
They felt they would only find happiness by acquiring more and God saw that they would do anything to get it. But it never delivered.
But it’s not just the rich and powerful. We all want more. We are like moths to the flame of more. More is intoxicating. The insane pursuit of more; more money, more toys, more luxury, more power, more gadgets, more pleasure, more stuff, more, more, more; our human species is addicted to the drug of more but more has never once satisfied or enriched a single life.
In fact, the opposite is true. Statistically, New Year’s Day, just a week after people acquire a whole load of new stuff, sees the biggest spike in suicide rates all year (probably when thoughts turn to the credit card bill).
Did God do it in a shabby barn, in a small town, in a backwater province, with nobody parents to tell us that more is less and less is more?
Did God do it the way he did to show us that the relentless pursuit of having more … does not and cannot fulfil our deepest desires?
Maybe that is why God set about sending a Saviour to the world in the understated way he did…
But why did he choose to do it when he did? Why was the time of Augustus Caesar and Governor Quirinius and King Herod the Great the best moment, the optimal time?
The Bible says in Galatians 4 that the time God selected was just the right time. It says, “When the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman.” God carefully set the date. He picked a very specific, deliberate and significant moment to send this world a Saviour.
It is etched onto Jewish consciousness that their ancestors spent many years as captives in Egypt. They were oppressed and mistreated. They were weighed down for generations under a yoke of slavery. Generations of children were born into it and died under it. They looked to a day when they would be liberated.
The Bible says that this period of repression and tyranny lasted 430 years. Remember that number. 430 years! At the end of that time, God dramatically set them free with a miracle of deliverance. That’s the story of the birth of the Jewish nation, and the Hebrew Scriptures (what we call the Old Testament) celebrate it over and over again.
Fast forward a few centuries, and the very last Old Testament prophet, Malachi, fell silent after promising that one day, a Saviour would come, bringing freedom, bringing life. “The Sun of Righteousness will rise with healing in its rays,” he said. Then there was radio silence from heaven for 400 years, four full centuries between the last pages of the Old Testament and the first pages of the New.
At the end of that 400 year period, Jesus was born. God broke his silence and started speaking again. 30 years later, Jesus began his ministry saying “The time has come. Heaven has come to earth. I have come to set prisoners free.” 430 years of waiting, of longing, of anticipation, of hoping and then Jesus bursts onto the scene, and God works miracles of deliverance not just for the Jewish people this time, but for the whole world.
The time was right. The moment had come.
I wonder if tonight is a special time, a right time, an optimal time for you to respond with your heart (maybe for the very first time) to the new-born King who came to set people free from the tyranny of more and the slavery of sin?
I’ll end with the true story of a wild young Russian. His life revolved around eating, drinking, music, revelling and the company of women. He lived for more.
He got involved in a movement for political and social revolution during the repressive reign of Tsar Nicholas I. He got arrested, was tried and they condemned him to death.
On a bitterly cold morning at dawn, he was in a line of prisoners led out against a wall to be shot. A drum began to beat. The prisoners were blindfolded. The guards loaded their ammunition. They raised their muskets. The command came to take aim. And then, at the very last moment, a white flag was raised to announce the news that the Tsar had commuted their sentence to life imprisonment in Siberia.
As he arrived in Siberia on Christmas Eve 1849, at the age of twenty-eight, two women ran up to him and slipped him a New Testament.
While in prison, he read it from cover to cover and learnt much of it by heart. He later wrote, ‘I believe that there is no one more lovely, more profound, more sympathetic and more perfect than Jesus. I say to myself with jealous love, not only is there no one else like him, but there never could be anyone like him.’
The man’s name was Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the greatest Russian novelist of his generation.
Jesus changed that man’s life. Jesus still changes lives today. Jesus changed my life. Jesus may have changed yours. If he hasn’t, is today the day when you ask him to?
We have Gospels of Luke to give away. They’re free. It’s the story of Jesus. The Gospel contains 24 chapters, each one takes about five or ten minutes to read. If you’ve never read Luke’s Gospel before, why don’t you take one away and read one chapter each day and ask God to reveal himself to you as you do?
Merry Christmas to you all.
Sermon preached at All Saints' Preston on Tees, 17 December 2017
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