Christmas Eve sermons are a challenge. For one . . . what can you say that people haven't heard before? For two . . . should you even say anything that people haven't heard before? For three . . . how best approach the evening?  Gently? Boldly? Evangelistically?  Cleverly? I'll let you see how -- or even if -- I answered those questions in 2015. Bottom line:  On Christmas Eve, the infinite became an infant . . . which means you can never trust him again. Tweetable ad lib:  "God is annoying." Best biblical moment:  "While Luke gives us earth tones, John is all about outer space." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Maybe you’ve heard of the little boy who – like many a child you’ve been with this Xmas season – was helping unwrapping the different pieces of the family Nativity set.  And he unwraps the first; a donkey.  “Look!  A donkey!” he cried out.  Then he unwraps the second; a wise man.  “Look!  A king!”  Then he unwraps the third; a shepherd:  “Look! A shepherd with his staff!”  Then he unwraps the fourth one; this the infant Jesus:  “Look!  Baby Jesus in a car seat!” And you have to admit, that is what it looks like, doesn’t it?  But it’s not.  It’s a manger.  And do you iknow what it means when Luke tell us 3x in only 9 verses – 2:7, 12, 16 ⁷ and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no guest room available for them. ¹² This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.” ¹⁶ So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger. – that the boy born this holy night was laid in a manger?  My goodness, it doesn’t mean a car seat and even more especially it doesn’t mean a crib!  It means a feeding trough!  That’s what a manger is – a place where food was put so that animals could snarf it all up.  A place where cattle, sheep, donkeys and pigs stuck their tongues . . . that’s where they put the baby.  In the middle of animal tongue residue; in the midst of animal breath.  Hey – have you ever smelled cow’s breath?  Neither have I! But I can imagine!  The one who grew up and called himself the Bread Of Life started life out in a feeding trough in the middle of . . . the animal’s bread of life.  And think: he didn’t have nurses gathered around Mary aat his birth; he had donkeys.  He didn’t have baby powder adding to the aroma; he had cow dung.  And he didn’t have Muzak / Elevator music soothing the nerves of mom, dad, and new baby; he had mooing, bleating, and oinking in the background.  And maybe most striking of all, when we hear “swaddling clothes,” we imagine this: AV of sweetness.   Actually, swaddling clothes were more like this:  AV of binding, mummy.  They still wrap babies up like this in may parts of China; in some cases to protect them from the elements, in other cases to make sure their feet don’t grow large.  So: that’s what “they laid him in a manger” (3x in 9 verses!) means.  But something more is going on; something almost unseen. Because we are talking about Thrones this Xmas.  And against all odds, in contrast to all appearances, I want to let you know tonight that that baby – reclining, bound, burping – was actually reigning over the universe at that moment.  What looks to us like a trough was actually a throne.  That even while he was sucking his thumb, even while his diapers were being changed, even while he nursed at Mary’s breast, even while he spit that back up! – in short, even while he went through all the phases and stages we go through – he was still on his throne.  Look at how John 1:1-4 begins it:  1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ² He was with God in the beginning. ³ Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. ⁴ In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.  So it starts with INFINITY (AV Infinity symbol).  And then 1:14 completes the thought: ¹⁴ The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.  What Luke has been telling us in earth tones, John tells us from outer space.    Either way, we are left with this incredible conclusion:  The infinite became an infant.  Infinity became contained by, limited to, infancy.  Could two realities be at more polar opposite than the infinite and an infant?  One immense and mind-boggling; the other tiny and mundane.  Who in their right mind would have EVER expected God to make an appearance in that way?  You can’t make this stuff up!  So they didn’t.  It’s so bizarre, so unexpected, it’s true.  It’s like the father who was getting more and more riled up in the days before Christmas.  He wanted everything to be perfect and everyone to get along.  And he summarized it all by telling his kids, “We’re gonna make this the best Xmas EVER!”  And his ten year old answers quietly, “Dad, I don’t see how we could improve on the first one.”  No!  You can’t!  Infinity pressed himself into infancy and thereby started the cycle of unexpected and unpredictable interventions into human life that continues to this day.  I love it when culture tries to tell us that Christmas is about love or family or giving.  No it's not.  It's about this decisive, improbable divine invasion of planet earth, an invasion in which The infinite became an infant.  Because I want you to know that a God who invades earth with cows for attendants and sheeps bleating & donkeys braying their approval can never really be trusted again.  Meaning:  he can’t be trusted to stay away and just leave you alone.  And isn’t that at the heart of all human conflict with God?  We just want to be left alone?  Left alone to decide what’s right.  Left alone to figure things out.  Left alone to do what we want.  Left along to wrestle with our consequences.  Some of you have insisted that God leave you alone for so long that now you are alone.  You insisted on freedom, on making your own rules, and a whole lot of people took their cue from how you treated God and now they’re leaving you alone, too.  I think that’s why the holiday season can be so painfully lonely for so many people – even those who are in the middle of a crowd.  But the fact infinity assumed infancy just shows you that God can’t be trusted to stay away.  He won’t remain remote.  He is always showing up in unlikely places and through unlikely people, gently assaulting you with his grace and his truth.  When you know what to look for, the unusual is the new predictable and the odd is the new normal.  Like the card that someone at GS sent to another person who had a prayer request.  Listen to the impact the prayer card had:  READ.  Now:  just a card!  Get one at the store, put a stamp on it, send it out.  No big deal!  No!  Enormous deal!  It’s an expression of God.  A God who delights in packing the greatest of meaning into the smallest of packages.  So all of you this evening whose general approach to God, Jesus, faith, church is one of avoidance or skepticism or scheming or denial:  you’re not safe.  He’s cleverer than you are.  He’s more persistent than you are.  His love for you is massively stronger than your frustration with him.  He’s already done the most inconceivable miracle – fit infinity into an infant – so what else could be hard for him?  He’s gonna show up.  My gosh, I remember wandering into a Xmas Eve serve just after I turned 17, after coming from a family disconnected to church, and I saw my classmate carrying this big crucifer down the aisle (AV) and something started to click.  And two weeks later I gave Jesus my life.  But he’d started invading my space just using an awkward high school classmate serving as an altar boy.  Or even that other time, a few years later, home for college, no one to go to Xmas Eve with, and so I wandered down the street to a Methodist church.  Loved it. Began thinking: oh my gosh, ministry is what I’d like to do and Methodism is where I’d like to do it.  The infinite became an infant and you’re not safe.  One of my GS friends have been in a federal prison for the last several years.  You know what he tells me . . . and he doesn’t have to because I’m not in charge of lightening up his sentence?  I’ve learned more about God and me here than I ever did on the outside.  Why?  Because the infinitely infant Jesus just started that whole pattern of showing up in unexpected ways and in unexpected places.  If he can rule from a feeding trough, he can reign behind bars as well. The infinite became an infant.  I think this is why the Xn faith is so much less an event (!) than a process.  A process full of massively small steps.  Small things you do, tiny commitments you make, that God then loads up with mercy and with meaning.  It’s why we want you daily getting away and alone.  Away from people and alone with your Father.  It’s why the first series of 2016 is called PrayFast – not so much that we want you to PRAYFAST but we’re gonna talk about these ancient habits of spiritual well being, prayer and fasting.  It’s why the #First15 minutes of your day are so important – why beginning in the Word and not in the world sets the tone for the other ____ minutes you got.  It’s why that rhthym of being, growing, serving – hello!  LifeGroups and ServeTeams! – is just like Jesus breathing. In, out, in, out.  The infinite became an infant.  Yeah, God is continually imposing his infinite love onto our finite, limited, infant understanding.  So car seat?  (AV) No.  Manger?  Pretty much.  Throne for infinity?  Absolutely.  My prayer is that he’d take up the throne of another pretty small space: your heart. 

Here's what we got:  

Here's an unusual Top Five Tuesday . . . the five best things that happened in church this past Sunday at Good Shepherd. 1.  Chris Macedo & Team's haunting, chilling, gorgeous version of Christmas Hallelujah.  So good, in fact, that I want to give you the chance to experience it again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2nVyuiOX6A   2.  Dozens of people raising their hands at the conclusion of the sermon to give Jesus their lives.  I was especially grateful for the response at 11:30. 3.  The palpable silence in the room after I said that when Jesus was "a collection of cells, inches long . . . dare I say it, what some people would label a choice . . . and Elizabeth calls him 'Lord.'" 4.  The guy who told me he'd just received his 30 Day AA sobriety chip that week.  Recovery. 5.  The guy who told me that he'd just received his 10 Year AA sobriety chip that week.  Recovery.

Thrones has kind of taken me by surprise. In a good way. We've had salvations, we've had tears, we've had anointed music, and yesterday we had this as a bottom line: Incomplete knowledge doesn't prevent complete surrender. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I am getting ready to tell you about something in which I have absolutely NO experience; something that the thought of participating in fills me with fear and trembling.  It’s an environment thoroughly alien to my frame of reference and my sphere of influence.  Ready for this?  We’re going to talk about a morning coffee meeting with two pregnant ladies.  Yep. They’re sipping on their latte and likely talking about morning sickness, stretch marks, food cravings, what it’s like when baby kicks and for obvious reasons I got nothing on that.  Why?  Because I don't drink coffee!  So we open up the bible to Luke 1 today and the thought of sharing that scene with these two women gets me all nervous.  But we must.  And yet to get to the scene in question – which is technically in Luke 1:39-45 – we’ve got to back up one scene, to Luke 1:32, where an angel tells Mary (young, the virgin) that she is pregnant:  ³² He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, But note: the son will be, is going to be the Son of the Most High God and look where he will sit!  The throne of David!  Fits with the series – but if you’re wondering why this message isn’t called The David Throne, you gotta wait! In the meantime, Mary is told, there is coming a day when your boy will be recognized as the ruler of all.    And with that rather incredible news, Mary hurries to greet her cousin Elizabeth WHO IS HERSELF PREGNANT WITH JOHN THE BAPTIST.  Now you know why I’m so nervous! But what happens when they get together is the best womb to womb communication ever.  A kind of womb to womb talk that I never experienced, of course, but neither did any mom here!  Not even my 100 year old mom with 8 kids!  Look at Luke 1:41: ⁴¹ When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the baby leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. Quite an in utero leap going on there!  It evidently makes Elizabeth raise her pregnant voice to an outside voice, because look at 1:42:  ⁴² In a loud voice she exclaimed: “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the child you will bear! And all that back and forth and increased volume sets the stage for 1:43, one of the most subtly stunning verses in holy writ: ⁴³ But why am I so favored, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? See that?  See what Aunt Elizabeth calls pre-natal-nephew Jesus?  My Lord.  Whoa!  Jesus in Mary is an embryo, inches long at this stage, a collection of cells, dare I say it, what some would call a choice . . . and to Elizabeth he is already Lord!  Many of us already believe that he is the King of Kings, but it’s fascinating to me to think that at this stage he is Embryo Of Embryos!  Above every embryo ever.  EVER.  And what is so cool is to see the connections between Luke 1:32 and 1:43: READ & READ.  The implication is clear when you allow the word “lord” to seep over you:  the throne that he is going to have is the one he already occupies.  As an embryo, pre-natal Jesus is every bit as much on his throne as he will be when he returns to judge the quick & the dead (Creed that day).  He is already what will be.  The Embryo Throne.  Fabuluous, cool, remarkable & I love what a good writer we have in Dr. Luke.  But through all that literary sort of appreciation, it’s Aunt Elizabeth’s response that gets me.  Think of all the things she doesn’t know at this stage of meeting teenage Mary carrying around some zygotes in her pouch.  She doesn’t know he’s going to be born in a manger and wrapped in swaddling clothes.  She doesn’t know three wise men are going to visit him, establishing a phenomenon that gets stores decorated in October.  She doesn’t know he’s going to teach parables like the Good Sam and the Prodigal Son. She doesn’t know he’s going to claim to be the Light of the World. She doesn’t know he’s going to ride into Jerusalem on a donkey, get convicted by a kangaroo court, live by his own Golden Rule even as his back is being split open by whips. She doesn’t know he’s going to die, humiliated and naked, on a cross.  And she definitely doesn’t know he’s going to be the death of death when he rises again 3 days later.  She knows nothing.    And I don’t know, but there may be a few folks here who are the same way.  Some of you didn’t grow up in church, this seems like a LOT of trouble to go through for something that may or may not even be true.  You don’t know your OT from your NT and you think Jeremiah was a bullfrog and not a major prophet.  Today was the very first time you’ve ever heard the bible is a library, FGS, and you’re thinking, “does that mean Gideon is the librarian?”  You don’t know phrases like premillennial rapture or Five Point Calvinism or postmillennial apocalyptic.  So in a sense, even though you probably don’t have a prenatal baby leaping in the face of embryonic royalty, you know about as much as Aunt Elizabeth.  Which makes her response in 1:43 all the more remarkable: my Lord.  She’s basically clueless about the details, she doesn’t know the agenda, she’s not sure of her schedule, but she knows that God is moving in this and she wants to be part of it.  Her knowledge is not complete but it is enough.  Enough for her to say, “Lord I don’t know it all, but I know enough to know you are supreme.”  It’s this:  Incomplete knowledge doesn’t prevent complete surrender.  yes!  You can have complete surrender to Jesus even if you have incomplete knowledge about Jesus.    It’s like this (light switch).  Do you UNDERSTAND electricity?  Oh a few of you EE studs might, but by and large, no.  We don’t.  But you trust it!  You trust electricity so much you keep flipping switches even when the power goes out!  And it always surprises you when it doesn’t work!  That’s how familiar and trustworthy electricity is.  You don’t understand a thing about it . . . but you depend on it, trust it, keep accessing it even when it’s gone.  That’s something of what it’s like.  Incomplete knowledge doesn’t prevent complete surrender.  Or it’s like Mark Twain said that time:  “It’s not the parts of the bible I DON’T understand that bother me.  It’s the parts that I DO.” Incomplete knowledge doesn’t prevent complete surrender.  Or it’s even like Judge Judy (AV).  Do you know what is a prerequisite of appearing on that show? Some of you are thinking, "Yeah, be an idiot."  No! You have to agree in advance that her decision is final.  Ha!  Incomplete knowledge doesn’t prevent complete surrender.  So, all you GS beginners or skeptics:  do you know that you know more than Elizabeth did on that day?  Very likely – even if this is your first time ever in church, you know that the baby in Mary’s womb was born  in some kind of miraculous way, that he lived a life of unparalleled influence, that how he died on the cross has something to do with paying a price for human sin, and that we in the church believe very firmly that he rose from the dead three days later.  And that in the aftermath of the resurrection we believe nothing was ever the same again. Almost everyone here knows at least some of that story.  Which puts you way ahead of Aunt E.  Incomplete knowledge doesn’t prevent complete surrender.  It’s so funny:  when I became a Xn after not growing up in church, never attending SS, and thinking VBS was just for sissies, I had no comprehension of sin.  I knew there was a hell, but at 17 I was not clear on the connection between my sin and Jesus’ cross.  All I knew as my friend was laying some gospel smackdown on me and the room was spinning (sans marijuana!) was that there were two sides and God was urging me to take his.  So I did!  I got saved first and came to understand what it was about later.  Incomplete knowledge doesn’t prevent complete surrender.  Those of you who are maybe more familiar, spent more time around, have you noticed that more information doesn’t always lead to greater transformation?  Some of you have the books, you’ve bought the studies, you’ve enrolled in the class . . . and yet there’s not been a genuine yielding of the heart.  You still reserve your worst language for the people you should love the most.  You resist connecting with people who look or talk different from you.  You come to church asking what’s in it for me?  but not what’s in it for God.  You’ve been informationed to death but haven’t surrendered to life.  REFRAIN.  It all makes me think of the guy from Boston who was boasting to a friend:  “I’m going to go to the Holy Land and see where the 10 Commandments were given to Moses!” And his friend answered:  “I have a better idea.  Why don’t you stay in Boston and keep them?”  Touche.  REFRAIN  All this really matters at Christmas because there are so many people here today just because it’s the season.  You have quite possibly equated relationship with Christ with religious activity.  Nope.  Completely different.  Sometimes even at odds with each other!  A living relationship with Jesus Christ is a life full of massively small steps, each one committing you more deeply to Jesus.  The steps aren’t all that sexy – time away and alone, growing generosity, connecting in aLifeGroup community – but you add them all up and their cumulative effect is unmistakable.  Ultimately you’ve got someone who is deep in Christ not because of spectacle but because if community.  That’s the kind of depth that lasts.  I believe all this hits home at Xmas because, as someone once said, “God doesn’t show his will to the curious but to the obedient.” (AV)  BOOM!  REFRAIN  At some point curiosity becomes a delay tactic.  And I don’t want anyone hearing my voice to delay until it’s too late.  Because just like I believed in hell at 17 and that helped me choose Jesus’ side, I still believe in it today.  I want it to help you make that choice as well.  Some of you know the phrase that some gospel tracts (hold up) have that says:  God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life (AV)  Sounds great!  But like a lot of things that sound great, it’s not exactly right.  Because what happens is a lot of people spend so much time searching for God’s plan for their life, they never search for the God of the plan.  The whole thing is better said this way:  God has my life for his plan.  Yeah.  Lordship precedes direction.  If Aunt Elizabeth can say that to an embryo sitting on an amniotic throne in Mary’s womb, can’t you say the same to the risen Lord and returning King?  Won’t you hear the urgent invite of Romans 10:13? Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved?  No matter how much – or how little – you know, that much is true today.  Incomplete knowledge doesn’t prevent complete surrender. 

This is not a political statement:   Instead, this is what Jesus looked like when his mother Mary and her cousin Elizabeth had a remarkable conversation we find in Luke 1:39-45. I can't wait to dig into that passage with you on Sunday.  We'll excavate and then celebrate the truths it contains and patterns it reveals. The Embryo Throne. Sunday. 8:30.  10.  11:30.