Behind Closed Doors

A Sermon Preached by Dr. James Flamming
Pastor, First Baptist Church, Richmond, Virginia
December 4, 2005 

Audio file

Scripture: Romans 11:33,34 

Have you noticed there are two Christmases. One means joy and celebration, lights and trees and songs, anticipation of gifts for children, and homecoming. But there is another Christmas. For others it is laced with stress, pressure to get all things done, and even grief.   

There are, you see, two Christmases. Ruth Graham spoke of this yesterday at the High Tea, which was sponsored by our FLO (For Ladies Only) women. It was sold out. (Some of us men got to come because we were the servers.)  

I smiled as Ruth drew the contrast between the two Christmases. There is the idealized pictures the commercials and magazines give us where you always have time to do everything you want to do. Where everything is done ahead of time. At the check-out line you pick up the Martha Stewart magazine and leaf through it. Everything you serve is baked with your own hands, the house is perfectly decorated, and all of the presents are meticulously wrapped. It is marvelous: the recipes always work, the soufflé never falls, the cake never sticks to the pan, and the cookies never burn. It is the picture of family reunions when everyone comes and everyone gets along.  

And she mentioned the Budweiser Beer commercial with the slay, the teams of horses always in perfect step, the snow unforgettably picturesque, the bells in rhythm with the trot. Though I don’t drink beer, I confess that I love that commercial. The idealist within me says, “That is the way Christmas ought to be.”  

But It is a Christmas I do not know. It is a truth but only at most a half truth. It portrays no pain, no empty hearts, no broken dreams. It is a Christmas where there are no empty chairs since last year. Like there are two congregations here this morning. There is the congregation I see. You are wonderful, put together, so handsome, so beautiful, dressed in your Sunday best. Then there is the congregation God sees and knows, for the Bible says that God does not look at outward appearance but looks at the heart. He knows that celebrating does not make a holiday for hurting hearts.  

The question is, which Christmas was Jesus born into? Since God arranged the whole scene, the whole plot, the whole picture, which Christmas did he chose for his Son and our Savior to be born into?

Amazing. Every Christmas, every Advent season, I am awed by it. There is nothing about that first Christmas that we would have chosen. There was no hospital, no delivery room, no doctor, no nurses, no concern for sanitation. The people who could have helped seemed behind closed doors.  

If this was the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, where is the King? Where is the Press Corps? Where are the cameras? Did any invitations go to the people that mattered? Why not move everything to the palace grounds? Why not make use of the physicians who looked after the King? 

If this is the Savior of the world, Why not move the mother and father to the Temple area where the baby could be born protected from the elements, and given the best care available? 

Why, shut out of the only Inn in town, was everything in a messy barn, maybe even a cave, and on straw instead of a bed? Why did God do it this way?   

Our Scripture sums up our questionings: “Who has been known the mind of the Lord? Who has been his counselor?” The answer is in those first phrases of the Doxology in verse 33: “Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God.” 

If we are to be saved, if we are to be rescued, if we are to be put back together, if we are to be healed, it is not in the dress-up part of our lives but in the messed up part of our lives. If Jesus could be born in Bethlehem’s unsanitary stable, he can be born in the dirt-bound places of our lives as well.  

If it seems to you that the birth of Jesus wasn’t put together very well, maybe God is saying to you, let me into the areas of your life where you aren’t put together well. The straw stained condition of your life is just the beginning it is not the ending. You see with our Lord, what seems to us as the ending of everything might just be the beginning of something new.  What seems to be charred ruins turns out to be the plantings of new beginnings.  

Strength in Weakness (2 Corinthians 12: 9,10)

In God’s wisdom, weakness opens the door to strength. “When I am weak then I am strong. Christ’s power will rest upon me.”  

In his book, Blue Like Jazz, Donald Miller, tells of the time he and some other Christians decide it is time to do something on their campus. It is a party campus, where cynicism and drugs, drinking and carousing are a way of life. They even have one week-end a year when everything is shut down and it is one long week-end of drunken parties for everyone.  

Don, with a few other Christians, know that just preaching against what they are doing will fall on deaf ears. They know that just sharing Christ will be ignored or laughed at. So they do an interesting thing. They build a makeshift confessional in the center of the campus. Don dressed in a monks outfit to hear confession but begins by confessing himself. He says, ‘I am a Christian not because of Christianity but because of Jesus and he is alive and well in my heart and I am here to confess the wrongs that the institutions of Christianity have done through the years. But these have nothing to do with who Jesus was and what he did.  

Those who enter are so taken back by this confession and this open confrontation with Jesus, they begin to consider their own sins and confession becomes part of what they are about.  

The wisdom and knowledge of God. Who would have thought that the way to cynical university students, whose main object in life was to party, could be reached by the confession of believers that they are not perfect and the church is not perfect and but that Jesus is comfortable with both of those.   

 God knows where we really need help. Not in arranging our clothes and putting them on. Not in looking acceptable. Not in putting on our faces, often just masks of what is going on inside.

What we really need from God is for him to be born in the stable corners of hurt in our lives.

The Power of the Christ (2 Cor. 12:9)

Look at the phrase, “That Christ’s power may rest on me.” 

In one of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia stories, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, Edmund has been seduced by the wicked witch into betraying his better self and the other three children. In the fantasy world of Narnia where animals can talk just like humans, the three remaining children, Peter, Lucy and Susan, meet Mr. and Mrs. Beaver. When the Beavers find out what has happened they know they must leave immediately. What can save us? Asks Lucy. Only Aslan.  Who is Aslan?  Aslan? He’s the King. He’s the Lord of the whole wood.  

Susan asks, “Is he a man?”

Aslan a man? Said Mr. Beaver sternly. “Certainly not. I tell you he is the King of the wood and the son of the great Emporer –beyond the Sea. Aslan is a lion, the Great lion."  (Aslan in the Narnia tales is the Christ-Lion, the one who portrays Christ in the battles of life and of Narnia.)  

Eventually Aslan and the Witch meet. The talk secretly but eventually an arrangement is made which turns out that Aslan will give his life if Edmund will be rescued and released in spite of his betrayal.  So on a night, Aslan, the great Lion, is tied to the Stone Table. The evil of the witch and all of her creatures seem to have won. Aslan is dead.  Susan and Lucy are terrified and heart-sick. 

It seems like the end of everything: of Edmund as well as Peter, of Narnia, of all the good people in Narnia. After a fitful rest they look at the stone table and it has been broken in two.  They go to look for Aslan. Angry at the witch for not even leaving his body for burial, Aslan appears from behind them. Aslan is alive.  

What does it all mean, asks Susan. It means, said Aslan, “That though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. If she could have looked a little further back she would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and death itself would start working backward."

And now, says Lucy, clapping her hands in joy. And now , oh children, I feel my strength coming back to me.   

One of the first things he does it go to all of the creatures that the Wicked Witch has turned into stone and he breathes on them and they come back to life and have a party. 2000 years ago on the night he was betrayed, he broke the bread and said, this is my body which is broken for you.