December 9, 2007
Sermon by Rev. Jeffrey Bell
Providence Presbyterian Church
"Not What We Expected"
Isaiah 11: 1 - 10
An engaged couple wanted to
be married on Christmas Eve. This pair of love birds chose Christmas Eve
because, as they said, their love for each other was the greatest gift they
could give. So romantic, don’t you think?
A few days before the
wedding, the love birds returned to the Pastor’s office with their feathers
definitely ruffled. The young man had given his beloved an early Christmas
present, and she didn’t appreciate it.
“What could be so bad?”
asked the Pastor. The future bride
rolled her eyes and announced, “He gave me a set of tires!”
“They were Michelins!” the young man responded. The couple and the
pastor began a conversation on the differences between men and women, wants
versus needs, and many other mysteries that exist between the sexes.
1
Sometimes at Christmas we
don’t get what we expect. And sometimes we don’t get what we want. That was
true the first Christmas.
The people of
It was a foretaste of the
changes that would someday occur when a new world order would be established.
Isaiah wrote about it in chapter 11.
If you can’t sense a new
world coming, maybe it is because the bright lights of this world obscure the
heavenly light of God’s promise. Maybe if we lived in a harsher world, a world
of more darkness, you could see it.
The promise of Christmas is
that God is at work in the world. Not always in ways that we’ll recognize. Not
even in ways, because of our sinfulness, that we’ll approve. But God is at
work in our world and in the lives of individuals.
It is so important that we do not lose faith in the presence of God in
our world.
Victor Frankl, survivor of
a brutal Nazi concentration camp in World War II, wrote the book From
Death Camp to Existentialism. In it, he noted the desperate need that all
human beings have for hope. Hope keeps us alive.
In the concentration camps
especially, the prisoners needed to have some hope of rescue. Their hopes for a
rescue became especially fervent around Christmas time. Everyone dreamed of
going home for Christmas. As Christmas neared, the prisoners stopped complaining
about lack of food, beatings, freezing temperatures, and all the other inhuman
practices they endured. They focused on the hope of going home.
But then Christmas came and
went with no rescue. A few prisoners committed suicide. Then a few more. And
still more. Some people didn’t take their own lives. They just stopped getting
out of bed. They stopped eating. And one morning, they simply didn’t wake up.
It was as if they had willed themselves to die.
Six months later, when
Allied soldiers took over Frankl’s camp and liberated the prisoners, they
found that almost half of the prisoner population had died since Christmas. They
could not live without hope.
The experience of those
prisoners is sometimes paralleled in our lives. There are times when we must
hold on to hope. Death in the family. Death of a marriage. Disappointment in
someone we admire. A terrifying diagnosis in the doctor’s office. Problems at
school. Rejection by our friends.
It’s vitally important
that we don’t lose hope, that we don’t lose faith.
The promise of Christmas is
that there is a light shining in the midst of the darkness. “The wolf will
live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the
lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them.”
This is the amazing promise
of Christmas--God has not forgotten us and will not forsake us. In fact, the
miracle of the Christmas story is that God becomes one of us. “.
. . a little child will lead them.”
This morning, it doesn’t
matter how wonderful things are or how difficult things might be for us. What
matters solely is that we remember that God has not forsaken His us, but loves
you and delivers us.
1. http://www.lectionarysermons.com/ADV4‑98.html
