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The Scandal of the Nativity

From the Series: Scandal
Speaker: Joel Schmidgall
Date: December 6, 2009

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Transcript

NATIONAL COMMUNITY CHURCH

December 6, 2009

Scandal

Joel Schmidgall

This weekend, we begin our Christmas series entitled ‘Scandal.’ In our culture, we have domesticated a Christmas story that was surrounded by incredible scandal and our country loves scandal. We all love a good scandal. You look at magazine racks, you look at the news and headlines and it is all filled with different kinds of scandal. We love it, we are addicted to it, aren’t we? Last weekend, I turned 33 years old. Someone told me, ‘Man, you don’t look a day older than 40!’ Thanks a lot! I got a gift, Nina gave me a replacement phone and it’s got this cool feature on it where you can just hold it up and speak into it and it is voice recognition. So you speak something into it and it will find that on the web. So I tried it this morning, I spoke ‘top-rated searches’ on the Internet and it pulls up 10 or 20 of the top ten things searched on the net. Anyone want to take a guess at what was number one? Tiger Woods! Yes, to be more specific, Tiger Woods Scandal was what it said. And number two was, I can’t remember her name, but the girl who was supposedly involved in the scandal. If you’ve watched anything having to do with it, you’ll see that people are completely consumed with what’s happening. I don’t fully understand, I don’t get it. There’s almost this attitude of ‘you have to tell the truth, you have to come out and tell exactly what happened,’ but it’s a very private thing though. It is their marriage, yet everyone is so engaged and involved, because it is this juicy scandal, and people in our country love to hear about and be involved in scandal. That’s what makes the story of Christmas so amazing to me. It’s almost like a big cover-up of a completely scandalous story.

It starts with a teenage girl at the age of 14 getting pregnant. We are already on Jerry Springer level and we are only on the first line here! Then it moves on. She not only got pregnant early on but she was not married, which, in this culture, was a very bad thing. There were major consequences for something like that. We see in Matthew 1:19

Joseph didn’t want to expose her to public disgrace, so he was going to divorce her quietly.

So Joseph makes this decision, but then what happens is that Joseph and his fiancé are visited by angels, and the angels tell them that this baby has divinity and God was involved in the conception. Is this weird to anyone else? Maybe even scandalous, but it goes further than this. The baby is the coming Messiah, and instead of being born into a palace, instead of being born with the red carpet rolled out, no, the baby shows up and is put in a cave, on a bale of hay, in this cave next to animals. What a scandalous situation! How did we get such a sweet little nativity narrative?

When we look at this, we see that we have taken a scandalous situation and we’ve prepackaged it into a nativity scene that we can put by our fireplace while listening to Mariah Carey’s Christmas CD and drinking hot chocolate with marshmallows. We’ve made it into this sweet little scene that we love and that we can put into a marketable nativity scene.

But the story continues on in Matthew Chapter 2. The Jewish Messiah, the Son of God has arrived in the world. You would think the nation of Israel would be celebrating at this time and that the church leaders would come out and lead this Messiah to his coming kingdom, but instead, we see the people who welcome Him and who are the first to know who He is are this group of astrologers or magicians called the Magi, in Matthew 2:1-3

After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the East came to Jerusalem and asked, “Where is the One who has been born King of the Jews? We saw his star in the East and have come to worship Him.” When King Herod heard this, he was disturbed and all Jerusalem was with him.

So the next person in line to know the Christ after these magicians is this crazy, power-hungry king who wants to take advantage of the situation and he calls the magicians into his office and tells them to keep this under wrap, keep it between themselves. He tells them to go check it out and then he will come and give him proper worship, but he actually meant that he was going to get rid of the problem. He has wrong motives. It goes on in verse 9

After they had heard the king, they went on their way, and the star they had seen in the east went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they were overjoyed. On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold and of incense and of myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, they returned to their country by another route.

At some point in scandal, the truth is exposed, whether it is an email or a voice mail or a message but somehow a different angle of the scandal is exposed. Here we find this third party, after Mary and Joseph go through this whole situation and circumstances, this third party that doesn’t know anything about the situation comes along and comes into it and they are confronted with scandal, and the truth is exposed. What is their reaction? The Scriptures say they bowed down in worship and they worshipped Him. We can’t help when we are confronted by the truth but to bow down and worship before Him. But then we see Herod confronted with the same scandal, but he has a very different reaction in verse 16

When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under.

The word ‘scandal’ comes from the Greek word ‘scandalant’ which means to cause to stumble, or quite literally, it means a stone in the road that causes someone to fall down. As you see the people in the wake of the Christmas story, two different directions are taken. One is like Herod, it causes him to stumble and to fall down, in a sense, but the other is the direction that the Magi go, using this stone as a way to step toward God and get to know Him in a new way and find faith in a new way. The Christmas story does not allow for non-reaction. It is not this fun little tale or fable but it is a hard-driving scandal that forces you to either stumble or step towards faith.

Author David McCracken said, “You have to recognize scandal as essential to the story of Jesus.” So, here’s what’s so interesting to me when we see this situation. Herod and the wise men, whose actions are completely contradictory to one another, both ultimately their actions and lives speak to the truth of Christ. The scandal exposes authenticity. A philosopher named Mikhail Bakhtin spent much of his work on an idea called polyphonic truth. Here’s the explanation: the polyphonic truth requires many simultaneous voices, it doesn’t not mean that many voices carry partial truth the complement each other, a number of different voices do not make the truth, it is the fact of mutual addressivity, of engagement and of commitment to context of a real life event that distinguishes truth from untruth.

What are you talking about? What I’m talking about is two very different voices, two very different actions and reactions ultimately speak to the truth of the Messianic nature of Christ. They both expose the truth in a similar way. Herod path is to cover it up, but his reaction of trying to cover it up, of hiding the truth, speaks again to the Messianic nature of Christ and to the legitimacy of his presence. So he tries to find and delete this scandal that could knock him out of the place of power that he has been placed in. He tries to control the situation. So before we cartoonize this situation of Herod and his reaction to be totally separate from what we can grasp in our own situation, I think we need to take a step back and do a little bit of reflection. Reflect about what we have done, what have you done with the Christmas story that has been given to us.

In many ways, we’ve dumbed it down. We’ve tried to pull the scandal, the things that don’t fit in our neat little nativity scene and we’ve pulled those things out. The images of Christmas tend to be benign and powerless, a religious display of Christmas that remains safe to our culture because in many cases, we take the baby and we leave Him in the manger scene instead of allowing Christ to come out and infuse our lives. The fact is that Christmas and the Christmas message should shock us! It should jolt us, like Abraham back in Genesis 22, remember the scene where Abraham comes and he brings Isaac and puts him on the altar and almost sacrifices him to God, but then God provides a goat out of the thicket to replace that sacrifice. It’s a story the honestly disgusts me and it shocks my system. How in the world could he even think about a son being sacrificed, but the story of Christmas is God the Father coming before us and giving his Son, sacrificing his Son because of our sins and what we have done. He gives and he sacrifices his Son for each one of us. He gives an incredible gift to all of us.

We have replaced the original scandal of Christmas with our own scandal. A new, modern-day scandal, the fact that we have taken Christmas and taken the giving out of Christmas and replaced it with spending. Now, instead of giving, we’ve created consumers. The fact is that 450 billion dollars is spent around Christmas every single year. It would take 10 billion dollars to cure our problem of clean water for the entire world. Now, clean water, the source of 14,000 deaths per day, the source of 80% of sickness throughout the world, all the U.S. would have to do is give 2% of what we spend around Christmas time to cure the entire world of clean water, but no, Christmas is about getting what I want, about giving what my significant other wants, and it’s the idea of looking in instead of looking out. It is scandalous. We’ve replaced the original scandal of Christmas and we’ve dumbed it down and made it this safe, serene, cozy little scene and we’ve created a whole new scandal of our own. The scandal of modern-day Christmas is the fact that we have covered up the story of Christ and we’ve replaced it with this consumer Hollywood version of Christmas.

Does it bring glory to God for us to go into debt for some expensive jewelry? Does it bring glory to God for us to give over-priced, expensive toys to our kids? To give a gift doesn’t mean that you just ring something up on your credit card, that is spending. Part of the power of the moment of the Magi giving these gifts was the journey that was taken to get there. Part of the magnitude of these gifts that were given were the idea that they were forward-looking gifts, they spoke potential and they prophesied into who Jesus was. The gift of gold signifying his majestic nature; the frankincense, a sweet aroma of worship; the myrrh speaking of the holiness of Christ. They were forward-looking into what Christ would do and into who He would be in our world.

What was the primary difference between Herod and the wise men? The primary difference was that one was a giver and one was a taker. One came yielding a sword and the other came yielding gifts. Giving is the natural response at Christmas. Look at this story for just a moment and let’s compare the story of the Magi with our modern-day Christmas. The result of the Magi encounter with Christ was joy. Verse 11 says they were over-joyed. Then they worshiped. They saw and were confronted with the truth of Christ and they had to bow down and worship Him. Then it was giving. What they had, they gave it to the Christ child. Then it was forward-looking. It was a dream God gave them for their next direction.

Now let’s get out of that story and come back to our lives. What does Christmas look like for each one of you? What encounters are had out of your Christmas experience and what is the result of our Christmas? In many cases, it is stress. It is that ugly sweater we were given that we have to return. It is traffic jams. It is taking what could be an incredibly meaningful experience and feeling empty because we didn’t get that out of it.

One of our favorite Scriptures is John 3:16, For God so loved the world that He gave his Son. He loved, so He gave. He didn’t give a monetary gift, no, He gave life and hope; the most meaningful gift that was given in our entire existence and the existence of the world. The Magi come and they give more than a monetary gift, they give a gift that prophesies to the future of what the Messiah will do in that time period and beyond. Giving is the antidote to consumerism.

So the question is posed for us today, it becomes simple and clear for us. In this Christmas season, how can you give with meaning? Let me give you three challenges today. Jot these down, three simple phrases that will hopefully challenge you as you think about how you can give with meaning.

The first is this: give towards potential and from the heart. Give towards potential and from the heart. It is not the monetary value that determines the worth of the gift; it is not the immediate utility abilities that determine a gift. The Magi gave this gift that saw potential in the life of Christ. My mom has an incredible gift of generosity and hospitality, and when someone gets sick, she is the first person to show up with a meal to give. I’ll see her sometimes on Sunday and maybe she’s got a bag of groceries or something to give away, or maybe a loaf of bread to give me because I said one time it was my favorite kind of bread, so she’ll go get it for me. She’s got this incredible gift of generosity. So we’ve gotten into this tradition every year of trying to speak into that potential and trying to empower it, so we give her a Costco membership every year! I think she is watching today, so we might change it up this year. But what we are doing is looking at her life and how God has made her and how He has gifted her to be so generous to other people and we are trying to give a gift that empowers her to be who she is and to give go generously to the people around us. We give toward potential and from the heart.

When you see a businessman who has this immaculate office and a beautiful desk and expensive paintings on the wall and then you see tacked up next to all this incredible stuff, a little crumpled up paper with scribbling with crayon on it and you wonder why, it’s because it’s little girl gave it to him, a little girl who loves him and wanted to express her love for him gave him this piece of paper. You might say it doesn’t match everything around the room, but the reality is, that is the most valuable thing that he has in that office. Why? Because it was given from the heart, it was given out of love. So we give towards potential and from our hearts.

Number two: give yourself, not your money. What makes God’s gift so meaningful to us? It is that the giver was in the gift. He gave of Himself, He gave the most important precious part of who He is. He gave his Son to be sacrificed for us. How do we give ourselves in gifts? For instance, instead of giving a video game or a video game system, maybe we could give a glove and a baseball that you could go out with your kids and spend time with them and invest in them and teach them something. Maybe instead of going to the mall and going in separate directions, you bake cookies at your house and you sing bad Christmas songs and enjoy one another and spend time together. The idea is, it’s great to receive a monetary gift, we all love that, but when you give your time and your life, we all have only so much time, so when you give someone your time, you are literally giving them yourself. Only you can judge what this gift is. How can you give yourself in a gift?

My favorite gift growing up was a gift that my dad would give. It was to our entire family. He would send us on this scavenger hunt around the room and finally we’d find it. It was Chicago Bulls tickets! Hallelujah! I love the NBA. As a kid, I love a good gift, toys and all that good stuff, but there was something different about this. I think because it was more than a physical object, it was the idea that our family would all do this together and we would share life with one another in this gift. It wasn’t just a gift, it was the giving of life to one another. Give yourself, not your money.

Number three: give as a giver, not a consumer. Give as a giver, not a consumer. The wise men gave to someone who couldn’t give back. Did you ever notice that? They gave these gifts but they didn’t get anything back. The Christmas story did not give us the gift exchange. It just gave us the gift. When I give a gift, I’m doing one of these, where’s mine? The original gift was to give with no expectations. Now, did they get something back? Absolutely! They got joy and worship and peace and love but they gave not as consumers, but as givers. Maybe instead of giving gifts to one another this year, you need to give a gift to God. Maybe instead of giving gifts to one another, you need to give a gift to one of God’s children, to someone in need, to someone who really needs some help.

The big idea of the sermon today is to restore the scandal of yesterday and reverse the scandal of today. So giving a gift to someone in need does exactly that. It reverses the scandal today because to give is the ultimate antidote to our consumerism, to our culture that has created consumerism.

Last year, we had this idea to do an A1:8 catalog, to be able to give Christmas gifts to those in need around the world. And in a few months, we raised over $50,000, and you are a part of that in giving last year. Let me share a few things that we gave as a church community. We gave 303 goats for families in Kenya. We gave 6 mud huts for women in Malawi. We have high school tuition for 35 women and children in Thailand. We gave a classroom for orphans in Uganda, and so much more. Do you think God regrets that you didn’t get that new camera or video system but instead gave it to an orphan in Uganda? Or is that reversing the modern-day scandal of Christmas. It is reversing it, because when you do these things, you are giving with no strings attached, not expecting anything back, not expecting anything in return.

You should have received the new A1:8 magazine on your way in. We are so excited about this! Doesn’t it look good! Dave did an incredible job of putting this thing together and telling the story of mission throughout the world. The idea behind this is to reverse the scandal, to reverse the scandal of Christmas in a way that allows us opportunity to give to needs around the world, to give to the poor around the world. It is an offer to be givers instead of consumers, an offer to be givers instead of spenders.

Jim Larson founded The Well, a ministry to girls coming out of the sex trade industry in Thailand, and Jim and Judy are here today, it’s so good to have you guys here! These guys are incredible examples to us of being givers, because they not only gave their life, they uprooted family from a suburb of Chicago and decided to move their entire family to Thailand. They gave their life and they founded The Well and last year this was one of the recipients of what we gave toward in that catalog. So I asked Jim to share a few thoughts with us and he said this, “For us, money is not simply something we need to operate, it means life.” So when you sponsor someone to come into the program, you are taking them out of the bars and out of the sex trade. When you give money toward the girls’ tuition, you are giving her life. I love that! I love what God can do through the simple act of following his story.

Last year, Nina and I were praying through this catalog, asking God what He would have us to give, and we had one of those moments, one of those moments where you are asking God something and He gives you an answer and it is not what you wanted to hear. And you have to say ‘uh-oh’ because you don’t know what to do with that information. We had been saving up all year to buy a new flat screen, HD TV. Our old TV has the fuss that goes across the middle of it, it is high-blur. So you’re cheering for your team and all of a sudden, you realize that was the other team, you just couldn’t tell because of the HB, the high-blur. And you turn up the volume, if you turn it up a little too much, it starts pulsating, I’m not kidding. So we save up all year to get a new TV, then we get to this moment and God says something to us in our prayers, and I tried to say ‘Amen’ really quick before I got the full version of the prayer, but He got it in, and I realized, uh-oh, I should have bought this thing on black Friday before that dumb catalog came out! So we talked about it and we wrestled a little bit. On one level, it is really a simple thing, it’s not that big a deal, but on the other hand, when you’re saving and looking forward to this thing, and then you have to alter that plan, it is really a sacrifice. So we felt like we needed to do it. It didn’t work to think about it logically because we were like, TV for us or orphans in Uganda. So here’s what happened when we gave that gift. We shared this story with the missionary, and to be honest, I feel like the story was more important than the actual gift to that missionary, because what it spoke was it spoke to our belief of potential in their situation, of potential in their life and ministry. It was more than potential, it was us giving from our heart. It hurt a little bit, we didn’t really want to do it, but we felt like we needed to do it out of obedience and you know what, it was not just giving, it wasn’t just writing a check and doing something nice and giving something helpful, it was us giving part of ourselves. It was the giver being involved in the gift process. And lastly, it was us realizing what Christmas is about and what the Christmas story communicates. We don’t always just need to exchange gifts with one another, but in some cases, God calls us to give to Him and to give to those in need, to give to the poor around the world. To be honest, as your missions pastor, I know they missionaries needs and I see those things, and part of the excitement of that gift for me was the fact that I would be reminded again and again throughout the year to pray for these missionaries, because every time I look at that dumb TV, I’m reminded to pray for that missionary because of the gift we felt like God told us to give. It is a recurrence over and over. A side route here, we had the missionary here this last year, really ironic because we are sitting there, and I turn on the game, and he starts ragging on our TV! He said, “You gotta get a new TV!” I said, “Man, it is your fault! If you wouldn’t go to serve poor people in another country, we’d be watching the game in HD right now!” We had a laugh about it, but it was the right thing to do. We were challenged and felt like we really learned something by stepping out and giving.

You could just give a gift this year, or you could give a gift that’s from your heart. You could give a gift that Christ calls you to give that has meaning. Rick Warren said we are most like God when we are giving, when we are generous. What God looks at is not the amount that you give, but the amount that is left over. In 2007, we raised over $30,000 to build an orphanage in Uganda, including a number of people who went on this trip. We sent 20 people over, after we raised this money to build with our hands this orphanage, and two of the girls who went on the trip were Amy Jones and Jennie [?]. Fast forward to this last year, 2009, and we had the A1:8 marketplace and one of those projects was to build a classroom in Uganda. So this summer, about four or five months ago, we sent another team back there to build a classroom, and two of the people who went were Amy Jones and Jennie. In the meantime, Jennie had begun sponsoring one of the kids there, so we want to share just a little bit of the story, of what you gave toward, what you accomplished, and just the processing that Amy and Jennie had in this process of giving.

[Video clip]

Just a glimpse. I love this story because it’s about the true impact of Christmas. It is about giving a glimpse of what God has done and what He can do. I love that Amy and Jennie don’t say anything about their part or about what they did to bring these kids in or that they were a part of the success. They only share that it was such a privilege to be a part of what God was doing in these kids’ lives. I love that, a glimpse of what is to come in their future. Isn’t that what the wise men received? They received a glimpse. You don’t see them reappear in the gospel of Matthew later on; you don’t see them take silver or other gifts back, no, what they get is a glimpse, a glimpse into an eternal investment; a glimpse into what is to come through the Messiah. Our calling in this Christmas time is to be givers. What we get back is a glimpse into what God can do. There are all different kinds of givers. There are givers on the shallow end of giving and there are givers on the deep end of giving. On one end, you have impulsive givers, that’s good giving but it’s giving out of an emotional response, out of a reaction. But then there is regular giving, which no matter if confronted with a problem in front of your face or not, you decide to give on a faithful basis because you are a generous person before God and want to please and you want to please Him by being like Him. Then there is systematic giving and circumstantial giving, but you come to this giving called sacrificial giving and it is the highest form of giving. It is giving when you can’t afford to give, it is giving when it hurts a little bit. It is giving when you don’t want to give.

Today, I don’t want to ask you to give anything. We are not going to have an offering because I don’t want us to impulsively give today. I want to take some time and just spend some time reading the Scriptures and reading through stories of what God is doing. I pray that we don’t impulsively give but I pray that each one of us in this Christmas season can become sacrificial givers, to give II Corinthians 9:7, to give not under compulsion, not under pressure, but to give what God has called each one of us to give. Let’s recapture the original scandal of Christmas and let’s reverse the scandal of the modern-day Christmas. How do we do that? We do it not by being consumers, not by being spenders, but by being givers.

Gracious Father, we come before You, grateful, thankful for what You have done for us. We pray that You would help us to recapture the scandal of the original story of Christmas and we pray Father that You would help us to reverse the scandal of the modern-day story of Christmas. Father I pray that You would help us to be givers in every sense of the word, to give towards potential, to give from our hearts. Father, help us to give not just monetary but to give of ourselves, that You would help us to give without expecting anything back. We pray this into existence into our lives, speak to each one of us in the Christmas season, in Jesus’ name we pray, amen.

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