Find Love in Our Differences: Rediscover Christmas - Advent 2021, Week 4
This message reminds us that the love of God fills us and fuels us; it calls us and enables us to love each other.
Jesus’ love is fearless love that calls us to cross the borders, to tear down the barriers, to reach out above the disagreements and to love one another. God’s love is radical, unbelievable, and healing.
It’s time for us to ask ourselves: are we showing the love of God to those around us? If not, let’s start today.
This is a season of expectation and preparation, an opportunity to align ourselves with God’s presence and rediscover Christmas.
During this Advent season, we are exploring the attributes of Christ. Looking at his birth and the whole Christmas season: hope, peace, joy, and love. Then we will celebrate the arrival of Jesus, the Christ. Today we continue with rediscovering the love of Christmas.
How will people know we are Christians? By our love.
Advent
Once there were two old farmers. They were neighbors, but they had a feud that lasted years. The grudge grew to the point that one of the farmers dug a ditch to reroute a spring in order to divide their properties.
One day, a carpenter came through the area looking for work. The carpenter knocked on one farmer’s door, and the farmer thought, “If he’s going to divide us with that ditch, then I’ll finish the job with a fence.” So he asked the carpenter to build a big, tall fence across the property. The carpenter said, “OK, I can do that, but it will take a lot of wood.” So the farmer went into town to buy more wood, and the carpenter started working with the wood from the shed.
The farmer started back with a load of wood and as he drove down the road to his home, he looked across the field, but he didn’t see a fence. Instead, he saw that the carpenter had built a bridge across the creek.
And there across the bridge, was his neighbor who came walking toward him with his hand outstretched, a big sheepish grin on his face. “ You’re a brave man,” he said. “I didn’t think you’d want to hear the sound of my voice again. Can you forgive me?” The first farmer was surprised, and as he reached out to shake his neighbor’s hand.
That story is by the singer-songwriter David Wilcox, who uses it as an introduction to his song called “Fearless Love.” The song goes on to weave together another narrative that is about a church protest, and a person that was caught up in it and who remembered Jesus’s teaching to his disciples to love their enemies by using the example of carrying a Roman soldier’s pack twice the distance required. The chorus goes, “Fearless love makes you cross the border.”
The love that Jesus displayed to the world is indeed, fearless love. Lacking any fear, the love of Jesus defies and overcomes fear. Today as we continue our journey through Advent, we choose to focus on the love that Jesus brought into our world and to our lives.
As a quick recap, the word Advent means “coming” or “arrival,” and the season is marked by expectation, waiting, anticipation, and longing. Advent is not just an extension of Christmas—it is a rediscovery of Christmas, a season that links the past, present, and future. Advent offers us the opportunity to share in the ancient longing for the coming of the Messiah, to celebrate his birth, and to be alert for his second coming. Advent looks back in celebration at the hope fulfilled in Jesus’s coming, while at the same time looking forward in hopeful and eager anticipation to the coming of Christ’s kingdom when he returns for his people. During Advent we actively and hopefully wait for both. And each week, we are focusing on a different attribute of God represented in the coming of Jesus: hope, peace, joy, and love.
The Cast of Christmas: Love United
We have been looking at different people in the Nativity story. We have looked at the experience of certain individuals, but today we will take a different approach. Let’s look to everyone in the biblical account of Christ’s birth. As we do, we will realize that the birth of Christ brings together a wide variety of people from across many different lifestyles, ages, and situations.
If we walk through the story in order, we start with Zechariah and Elizabeth along with Mary and Joseph—the old and the young. The prophets of Israel’s past and the fulfillment of the promise of the Messiah and the new spiritual future. The separation and death of the past and the restoration and life that is now present. Then we meet the shepherds and the angels—the beings of earth and of heaven, the physical and the spiritual. As they head to the stable, there are animals and mankind who wittiness the birth of Christ.
Next we meet the Magi in Matthew’s Christmas account. Who were these mysterious visitors from the East? We’re not entirely sure, but we know they had followed a star a long distance to find and worship the promised Messiah. Some scholars think they may have been from China. At any rate, whether they were astrologers or some kind of rulers, the Magi were noble and wealthy men who demonstrated God bridging the divides of mankind. The Magi were clearly the opposite of the lowly shepherds in the social structures. Yet more importantly, they were Gentiles, not Jews, and their inclusion in Jesus’s birth echoes the radical idea that Christ, the Messiah, brings salvation and restoration to all people, not just the Jews. The Magi were also thought to be holy men of some sort. They seem to belong to more of a mystical tradition than the Jewish leaders’, and in contrast the spiritual Jewish leaders of the day.
We find that there were no spiritual VIPS of the time who were invited to Jesus’s birth. Instead, there were these travelers of a different race who received an audience with King Herod, and who were willing to disrupt their lives with a great journey and humble themselves to worship the baby of a poor, unassuming couple in the countryside. A baby thought to be king of the Jews.
The cast of characters that God assembled for the arrival of his Son on earth is far from the expectations that any of us would have imagined. And far from the expectations of the people of that day who lived within that culture and its social divisions. To us, it may seem like a ragtag bunch. To others, it might have seemed blasphemous, that the Messiah would associated with the unclean of humanity and creation.
Could Jesus have united any more a diverse group of individuals by being born? NO! Jesus’ birth united the social and racial spectrum of the day. And in so doing, God revealed his love for mankind.
1. Christ is love embodied.
The Bible talks about love in many places. God is love and the Bible is his love story for all humanity. From the time of Creation, God spent time with mankind (Adam and Eve) in the garden as companions and children. When sin entered the world, it brought death, brokenness, and separation from such a close relationship with God. God did not turn his back on mankind, he continued to work and covenant with mankind.
Through generations and generations, he worked his plans and fulfilled his promise of a Messiah to make a way to restore relationship with humanity. That way is Jesus, who is described as the groom and the church as his bride. This relationship with God is a relationship of love. It is a reunion with love itself.
John the apostle describes the love of God in the fourth chapter of his letter:
“Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 10 This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. 13 This is how we know that we live in him and he in us: He has given us of his Spirit. 14 And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. 15 If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in them and they in God. 16 And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.” (1 John 4:7-16, NIV).
John tells us that God is love. God personifies it. Love is his nature, and he has shown it to us by sending Jesus. When we come to Jesus, giving him our lives, we are restored to love. We are fulfilled in love. We live in him, and he lives in us. You can count on God’s love; he will not let you down. The love of God fills us and fuels us. It calls us and enables us to love each other. And that brings us to our second point.
2. Love defines and propels us.
Jesus brought this restoration to love when he entered the world. Near the end of his earthly ministry, as he is gathered with his twelve disciples for their last Passover meal together, Jesus tells them:
“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. 35 By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:34-35).
As Jesus teaches his disciples, he wanted to make sure that they loved one another, and others, like he loves. And here is the most important part regarding love: How will people know if a person is a follower of Jesus? By the love they show one another and to other people. You’ve heard this before. How will people know we are Christians? By our love.
Friends, the love of Christ is what defines us. It marks us and characterizes us. At least it should. We as the church body don’t always do a great job of this. It’s easy for us to point the finger at wrongs done by others and the Church. And we can all probably think of public Christians and churches in our time who make us cringe with anger or embarrassment at their rigid, unloving actions. But we must also look at our hearts and consider our actions too.
Ask yourself: am I displaying the Love of Christ to those around me?
None of us is perfect, as individuals or as a collective Church. But each of us can certainly find opportunities in this Christmas season and in our current cultural climate to allow God’s love to flow through us to others. On that note, we move to our third point.
3. Love empowers us to cross the borders.
At times we may find ourselves divided or at odds with someone. However, we are to love deeply because love covers over a multitude of sins according to 1 Peter 4:8. I believe God’s love can heal the divide if we only try. It seems our culture, our nation, the world, and people in general find multiple ways to divide us. It seems the us’s and them’s have been on the rise, as of late. But that is no excuse for not displaying Gods love. Yet throughout history, the world has been filled with wars, greed, plunder and oppression. There have always been the weak and the powerful, the haves and the have-nots. There has always been us versus them as far back in history as you can go. Even as Jesus displayed and preached the love of God, the us’s and them’s divided Jew and Gentile. Rich and poor. Religious and non-religious. Godly and ungodly. Sadly, that is still true today.
It’s why Jesus’s teaching was so radical. It’s why God’s love is so radical. Jesus said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:43-44).
Jesus didn’t only tear down the walls of division at his birth, he continuously reached across the divide. Jesus befriended the hated tax collectors, and even invited Matthew, a tax collector, to follow him as one of his twelve disciples. Jesus spoke with the Samaritan woman at the well, which Jews considered to be wrong. Jews did not associate with Samaritans, and Jewish men did not talk with women like that in public. Jesus told his listeners that if a Roman soldier forced them to carry his pack for a mile (something Roman soldiers could demand), to go further and carry it two miles.
The Good Samaritan is one of Jesus’s most powerful stories about this kind of unexpected love.
A traveler was robbed and beaten and left for dead on the side of the road. A priest came along and crossed the road to avoid the bloody scene. Next a Levite priest did the same and passed by on the other side. But finally a Samaritan came by and saw the man, and stopped to help. The Samaritan bandaged the man’s wounds, put him on his donkey, and delivered him to an inn, where he paid the innkeeper to take care of the man until the Samaritan could return (Luke 10:30-35).
This is a good and challenging story for us today, but it was astounding to Jesus’s ancient listeners. The Jews hated the Samaritans. Their racism against the Samaritans went back centuries when the kingdom of Israel split. The Samaritans intermarried with foreigners and established their own temple to worship in. The Jews considered the Samaritans as an inferior race with a corrupt religion and viewed them with great prejudice and disdain. But Jesus was telling the story of a Samaritan as an example of loving our neighbor.
Jesus was reaching across the divide. He reached across the cultural, spiritual, political, and racial divisions and he calls us to do the same. Jesus was illustrating the kind of love John describes in 1 John 4: “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love” (1 John 4:18-19). Jesus’ love is fearless love, that calls us to cross the borders, to tear down the barriers, to reach out above the disagreements and to love one another. The fear that is driven out by love, is the fear that is often found within ourselves. But love will overcome fear. Love overcomes our fears of those who may not look like us or sound like us or share the same perspective or experience as us.
Maybe reaching across the divide begins with you at home and at church. Maybe in your family, in your neighborhood, your workplace, and community. Jesus calls us together into his loving presence and invites us to make room for all, whether we think they deserve to be there or not. We are to love not just at Christmas, but year-round. Every day.
There is a humility in love, a willingness to put someone else first.
Sometimes love means taking the simple step of building a bridge as in the story of the farmer.
Sometimes it means being willing to listen and not defend.
It is always being willing to choose to see someone else as equally loved by God, equally welcomed into his presence, equally drawn into the divine, and all-consuming love of God.
This is God’s love. This is the gift of Christ. This is the message of Christmas. This is the heart of Christmas.
As we rapidly approach Christmas Day, let us rediscover Christmas by rediscovering the overwhelming, all-encompassing, all-welcoming love of God.
“And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, 18 may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, 19 and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:17-19).
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