Conduct in Christmas Humility - Pastor Wesley
Flakes of snow float in and out of the faint blue light that illuminates the gym exit as I sit in my truck waiting to pick up my daughter from practice. While watching for my daughter to emerge from that roll-up door, the words from my truck speakers reflect the scene in my windshield, "Could've come like a mighty storm / With all the strength of a hurricane / You could've come like a forest fire / With the power of Heaven in Your flame / But you came like a winter snow / Quiet and soft and slow / Falling from the sky in the night / To the earth below" ~["Winter Snow" - Audrey Assad, Chris Tomlin]
As I write this newsletter Christmas is less than two weeks away and in reading the sections of the Gospels detailing Jesus' birth I see God's humility saturating the Christmas story. Christmas is the celebration of Jesus leaving his rightful throne and coming to earth to clean up a mess He didn't make. He did not come with all the pomp and circumstance due the Artist of all Creation. He did not come with even the glory of an angel. But Christ came in the same flesh which makes up those He came to save, afforded not even the dignity of a proper crib but our Lord was bound tightly in cloth and laid in a trough used to feed animals. Power creates pride in men, but the All Powerful Creator was swaddled in humility.
Christians were first called as such at the Church at Antioch, where the locals used the term derisively as referring to a "bunch of little Jesus'". While those Greeks intended insult, we are called to emulate Christ, including His humility. Paul writes to the Church at Philippi in chapter 2 verse 3, "Do nothing out of selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility consider others more important than yourselves." In the Greco-Roman world of Paul's day this idea of humility was as counter-cultural one, so it is also today in America. Today the world of social media seeks to ingrain us with the desire to be "liked" more, "retweeted" more, and "followed" more. Self-help is advertised as the solution to our ills. And the heresy of prosperity teaching focusing on personal health and wealth swell church pews. In today's America perhaps the greatest opportunity for us to distinguish our Christian walk from the gait of our society, is with a humble stride.
In a country so deeply divided on several fronts, the opportunities for us to exercise humility are everywhere. As Christians let us not demonize those who stand on the other side of the political aisle but instead show grace. If we debate, let us debate ideas rather than stereotyping and casting stones at those we declare evil . . . glass houses come in both red and blue. Whether you choose to wear a mask or not, let us recognize that nowhere in the entirety of the Bible do we find, "thus saith the Lord" in regards to wearing a mask. Let us have enough Christian charity to recognize that there are sound Biblical positions held on both sides. And as we discuss race, I pray that we would engage humbly and appreciate that we have spent our entire lives in the skin that we're in, which is one color among many, and that our experiences, as it pertains to our race, are not uniform to those who look different than us. I pray that we would do this so that we, as The Church, would paint an accurate portrait of racial issues as a problem of sin rather than a problem of skin, the realization of which is the foundation of the only hope we have for meaningful reconciliation.
As we begin a new year I believe the ruts of division in our country will not fill themselves in, but will deepen. Yet if I've learned anything from the year of 2020 it is this, that difficult circumstances bring with them increased opportunities for the Gospel. In front yards around town there are signs posted speaking of "hope". While society recognizes its need for hope, it finds it in false securities if it finds it anywhere. As the ruts in our society wash out and grow deeper let us as Christians proclaim to the world the source of hope which we celebrate at Christmas and Easter. Let us not argue as if filled with bolts of lighting, a destructive hurricane, or a blazing fire. Let us operate in our relationships and our conversations with the humility we see in our Lord this Christmas season . . . as a falling snow.
-- Pastor Wesley