Communion Meditation by Dr. George Bryant Wirth
Christmas Eve 2008
A PICTURE OF GOD
Scripture: John
1:18
No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s
heart, who has made Him known.
INTRODUCTION
Two young brothers, who were
mischievous and prone to misbehaving, had pushed their parents to the point of
frustration. So the mother and father
asked their minister to talk with the boys, hoping that a spiritual
conversation might help turn things around.
The pastor invited the
younger brother to come into the office first while the other one sat in the
hallway. This is how the discussion
began – the pastor asked “How can we find God?”
The boy was stunned and didn’t respond, so the question was repeated in
a slightly sterner tone: “How can we
find God?”
At that moment, the younger
brother bolted out of the room and running through the door, he heard the older
brother ask him “What on earth happened, and why are you leaving?” The younger brother replied “We’re in really
big trouble now. The preacher said that
God is missing, and they’re blaming us!”
I
On this Christmas Eve, 2008,
we have come here to worship God and to celebrate what those two young boys
hopefully discovered – God has actually come to find us, in person, in the
person of His Son our Savior Jesus. My
friends, that is both the Divine miracle and the Human reality of the
Incarnation, just as the Gospel of John describes it: And the
Word became flesh and lived among us…full of grace and truth (John
1:14). In other words, Jesus is the
picture of God which has been given to us, alive and in color! And we as Christians believe that this
revelation is the greatest gift of all.
Notice, please, that John
goes on to say: No one has ever seen God
– that is, God in all of His glory, God in all of His power, God in His great
mystery as the Creator of the heavens and the earth – no one has ever seen all
of God.
But John then says It is God the only Son, who is close to the
Father’s heart, who has made Him known.
Do you know what that means?
It means that God has shown
us through the birth and the life, the teaching and preaching, the miracles and
healings, and ultimately the death and the resurrection of Jesus – God has
shown us, through Jesus, what He is like, how He loves and forgives us, and all
that He calls us to be and to become.
Carl Sandburg once wrote “A baby
is God’s opinion that life should go on” (From “Remembrance Rock”), and I
believe that is true. But this baby,
born in
II
Now some of us have a hard
time seeing that picture in our mind’s eye.
We may have grown up with a lot of fear about God, thinking of Him like
the Wizard of Oz with all of that smoke and fire, or as a stern judge pointing
His finger at us like Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor.
Others of us might have
imagined during childhood and perhaps ever since, that God was some kind of
distant Creator, way out there in the stratosphere, but surely not nearby,
close to where you and I live. The 18th
century philosophes in
And there could be still
others who have a kind of comfortable and cozy picture of God, similar to a
gray haired grandparent sitting in a rocking chair on the porch, taking things
nice and easy – which might work all right when the sun is shining and the sky
is blue.
But when the thunder rolls
and the lightning strikes and we are in real trouble, facing an economic crisis
or a serious diagnosis or a broken relationship or a terrorist attack on
unsuspecting, law-abiding citizens, then what can that benign picture of God do
to help us make it through the storm?
To be sure, the pictures many
of us have of God are less than adequate and more difficult than we care to
confess. But this one picture of God,
live and in color – the Christ Child born in the midst of poverty and pain;
this one picture of Jesus coming into the world to save us from our fears and
our sin; this redemptive picture of the Lord, walking beside us to guide us and
provide us with all that we need and more – this holy picture of God has the
power to transform our lives and turn this war-torn weary world upside down and
right side up.
CONCLUSION
Our friend Barbara Brown
Taylor describes that picture in her book of sermons “Home by Another Way,” and
as you listen to the conclusion of this sermon, please open your eyes, your
hearts and your minds to see and to receive this greatest gift from God – His
Son, our Savior Jesus – who comes to find us tonight:
“However different our Christmases
have been, one longing most people have in common this time of year is the
longing for a…more centered life. And
the way most people talk about that life usually has a lot of ‘up words’ in it
– as in ‘rising above our anxiety’ or ‘keeping our heads above water, as if
belonging to God were a matter of being transported up where everything is
beautiful and focused and right. Just
like a Christmas card!
But do you know what? Even the pictures on our Christmas cards are
only moments in time. If we could see
past the edges, we would probably see some pretty familiar sights. I have one card of a cozy little cabin
snuggled in some snowy woods, with one set of tire tracks running up to the
door. But I bet the lot next door has
been clear-cut to make way for a subdivision, and that there is at least one
rusted out refrigerator in the woods…
What I mean is, even the very best
pictures of Emmanuel and His family, the ones where the artist has really
focused in on the softness of the Baby’s skin, the warm bodies of the animals
standing around Him – who might have licked Baby Jesus if Joseph and Mary had
not been standing in the way…as if they were protecting God Himself – even
those pictures do not tell the whole story…
But…God was still there, right in the
middle of the picture – peace and joy and love, not only in the best of times
but also and especially in the worst of times…It was God-with-us, not the
God-up-there-somewhere…the God who comes to us…however far from home we are,
however less than ideal our circumstances (might be)…
You see, none of heaven’s escalators
are going up tonight…everybody up there is coming down…here, right into our own
In the name of the Father and
the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.