A FOOLISH MESSAGE?

Did the Christmas season start even earlier this year then ever, or am I just growing too sensitive in middle age? In my area, public decorations began going up the week before Thanksgiving and visitation to our last year's Christmas page on the web began increasing even a month earlier than that. I can certainly observe that the perceived worldly need for Christ has increased dramatically in the last decade or two. Is this the reason for our growing cultural obsession with the Christmas festival? Or is there simply a greater worldly wallow in the ancient Roman party of all parties thrown around the time of the darkest day of the year after which the days finally begin to grow longer, and the promise of spring and new life begins to lighten the early morning horizon.

Certainly we understand that the early Church Fathers chose to turn the Saturnalia into a more subdued Christian festival honoring the birth of Jesus Christ. Also, as an instructive method, the seasons of the church year were founded with preaching and teaching themes to fill out the remainder of the calendar year. In this country the Thanksgiving holiday was set aside about the time that the corn harvest, the last of the annual crops, was coming in. When this national day was set aside at the time of the Civil War, there was still a whole month separating Thanksgiving and Christmas and only in the last two decades have the two melded together into one commercial season.

About ten years ago I was invited to fill the pulpit in a conservative church during the Christmas season and I was instructed that it was their habit to leave the Incarnation theme to other less excitable times of the year. Ever since, I have wrestled with what to preach at the time of year when the most people are inquisitive about the Christmas message. For that reason my theme this year is "Wise Men Seek Him Still"!

Yes, the original wise men had an even longer Christmas season than most. Very probably they left their homes by camel or horse early in the spring before Pentecost and then traveled for many months to arrive in Jerusalem. There they spent a long period of time waiting for the local authorities to discover from Scripture where the king they were seeking would be born. Finally, if Copernicus is correct, on the evening of 4 December in the year 7 BC, they rode out of the gate towards Bethlehem and saw the star of their hope hanging low in the sky at the horizon just above the village of Bethlehem. Once in that city, they probably found a baby of some maturity but still less than a year old. Their gifts provided the means for Mary and Joseph to flee to Egypt and the wise men returned home by a path other than returning through Jerusalem.

Now the question that I think is pertinate for this Christmas season is: Why did these presumed pagan astrologers go to so much time and effort to make the expensive and time consuming journey to the Holy Land? After all, if this was only a baby's birthday according to the Roman custom, that was a small thing. But these wise men from the east presumably came from outside of the Empire. And obviously they came from a place where star gazing was a profession. To them was given a sign, perhaps long expected, which heralded the the birth of One they must see and know. There is so much in this story that we would like to know, but we do know enough to realize that for them this was an extraordinary once in a life time event. Did their contemporaries make fun of them as did the contemporaries of Noah and Job? Or could it possibly be that there existed outside of Israel a hope for God's nearer presence which led them to bring gifts at His birth?

The worldly love the Christmas story because the Lord of all the Universe is seen as only a helpless baby. And there they would leave Him as only another ancient folk tale. But if we as Christians go on and take the revealed story all the way to the cross, that is another thing indeed! Because as Paul makes it clear in our passage today:

"the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God."

If in this increasingly Christless season of the year you earnestly desire to know full well the One who came into the world by being born of the virgin birth, you would do well to consider the reason for which Christ came. In verse twenty-two of our passage today, Paul tells us that the

"Jews demand miraculous signs and the Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

For the cross the Christ was born, the very Lamb of God given for the great sacrifice that would result in the redemption of all those who have been called to believe in Him as Lord and Savior. The Jews of Jesus' time were disappointed because they were expecting a different kind of miraculous king. They wanted a pre-millennial conqueror to establish an earthly reign. They have many kin in our time. The Greeks were perplexed with the bloody sacrifice for their sins, since they could not appreciate fully the necessity for the atonement. Again, there are many thinkers of this Greek mentality in our time.

Such utter foolishness in a time when we are undefining every single sin so that people may feel good about themselves and put away every aspect of guilt. Such people have no need for a savior and they have no need for a religion that compels them to consider that they are guilty of anything beyond not inviting the poor to an annual meal. And believe me the poor are quick to take advantage of such a minimal religion. Sadly we must record our phone calls to separate the truly spiritual from those who only desire an annual gift in memory of baby Jesus. One year we received a phone call from someone who simply wanted to know when they could pick up a free turkey. After you have worshipped with us was the requirement we gave them. The caller didn't consider that much effort worth a free bird!