Mary's Boy Child

Luke 2:1-7

Christmas is a time for music.  People who never sing find themselves singing along with the carols and songs being played on the radio or in the department stores.  

There’s a Christmas song you’re bound to hear that you won’t find in many hymnals.  No, it’s not Santa Claus Is Coming to Town or Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.  Those are not in any hymnals, I hope.  As best as I can determine, the song I’m talking about is found in only four hymnals. One of them is generically Evangelical, one is Church of England, one is Dutch Reformed, and one is from a fellowship in Singapore.  I guess that shows it has a fairly wide appeal even if it’s not found everywhere.

I’m talking about Mary’s Boy Child.

It was written by a man named Jester Hairston.  Jester was born in Atlanta in 1901, grew up in Pittsburgh, and briefly attended Julliard.  But he was bitten by the acting bug and headed off to Hollywood.  From 1936 to the late-1990s he stayed busy in movies and on TV, but it’s his music that we probably remember most, even if we never heard his name.  

Throughout his life he continued to lead choirs and write music.  In 1963, he wrote the song “Amen” that Sydney Poitier “sang” in Lilies of the Field; actually, Hairston sang it and it was dubbed for the scene.  A few years earlier, in 1956, he was asked by a friend to write a Christmas song.  He decided to give the song a Calypso beat.  So, he wrote Mary’s Boy Child.  The lively song was being sung by a choir when Harry Belafonte heard it.  He got permission to record it and the song became a hit.

I going to let that song guide my remarks this morning.  I’m not going to sing it, so you can relax but I’ll just kind of offer some observations.

The song begins simply

Long time ago in Bethlehem,

So the Holy Bible say,

Mary's boy child, Jesus Christ,

Was born on Christmas day,

We’ve heard that so much that we have become immune to the wonder of what it says.  At a particular time in history and at a particular place in this world, God acted.  When we look into “the Holy Bible,” we find that both Matthew and Luke are very specific about the time of Jesus’ birth.  

This was important because the earliest Christians saw those events as the culmination of promises God had given centuries before.  In time, one of the most-often creeds of the church would tie Jesus to real time-space history when it says Jesus “suffered under Pontius Pilate.” 

This tying Christ’s birth to history not only reminds us that God keeps his promises, it reminds us that God has not left us alone.  He is not a remote deity who is content to observe the messes we get ourselves into and then do nothing.  He is willing to act.  In fact, he is willing to enter history himself, to walk among us as one of us.

The song goes on…

Now, Joseph and his wife, Mary,

Come to bethlehem that night,

They found no place to bear her child,

Not a single room was in sight.

By and by, they find a little nook,

In a stable all forlorn,

And in a manger cold and dark,

Mary's little Boy was born!

When God entered our world, when he became one of us, he did not come to live in an opulent palace, he came to live as the Child in a peasant family.  Hairston depicts the announcement to the shepherds this way:  “Hark, now hear the angels sing,

A newborn King today….”  Have you ever thought of the mind-boggling message the angels gave the shepherds?  The angels said, “Today your Savior is born in the city  of David. He is Christ the Lord. This will be a sign for you:You will find a baby wrapped in strips of cloth and lying in a manger….” You can imagine the shepherds saying, “Excuse me.  Savior, manger.  That doesn’t make sense.”  Let’s face it, people who are going to change the world aren’t born in barns.  It’s just not the way it’s supposed to be.

Years after his birth, some of Jesus’ critics would sneer at his humble origins, discounting what he said because he was merely “Joseph’s son.”  One man who would become a follower, on being invited to meet Jesus, muttered a common prejudice, “He’s from Nazareth? What is he, some kind of hillbilly?  What good ever came out of Nazareth?”  Ok, that’s from the “reading between the lines” version.

The point is, he didn’t come to overwhelm us with his good looks, his wealth, his style; he impressed people with his goodness, integrity, and wisdom.  

There’s a phrase, not one I especially like, but admit to using:  “It is what it is.”  It was chosen as USA Today’s “cliche of the year” in 2004 but you still hear it.  Cliches often live long and prosper.  And, even when it goes unspoken, the idea is there.  Things are bad and they’re not going to change.   It suggests a spirit of helplessness and hopelessness.  And it’s contagious. I have Christian friends who cannot imagine any scenario in which the church does not become a meaningless relic of a far-off past, a dinosaur that makes no real difference in the world.  Actually, the dinosaurs help provide fodder for sci-fi movies.  The church, however, is not going to be so lucky.  Of course, that runs contrary to one of my fundamental truths for understanding the history of the church: It is always too soon to publish the church’s obituary.  

The message of the prophets’s could, at times, have been described as “ It is what it is but it won’t be forever.”

The birth of Mary’s Baby Boy made all the difference.

Did you hear President Obama’s speech at the lighting of the national Christmas tree?  In this time of political correctness, it was remarkable.  He spoke of Christ healing people, caring for the poor, and lifting up the outcasts, introducing his comments this way.

"More than 2,000 years ago, a child was born to two faithful travelers who could find rest only in a stable, among the cattle and the sheep. But this was not just any child. Christ’s birth made the angels rejoice and attracted shepherds and kings from afar. He was a manifestation of God’s love for us.”

Okay, he left out a lot and he did try to equate Christianity and other religions but what he did say could inspire a lot of discussion.  So could the refrain of Hairston’s simple song:

Mary's boy child, Jesus Christ,

Was born on Christmas day,

Hark, now hear the angels sing,

A newborn King today,

And man will live forevermore,

Because of Christmas day.

Trumpets sound and angels sing,

Listen to what they say,

That Man will live forevermore,

Because of Christmas day.

That refrain that you hear and may even tap your foot to, begs the question:  Why should the birth of any child have had that impact?

One of the most common complaints Christians make this time of year it that Christmas has become so secularized that we’ve forgotten about Christ.  So, every year some good people put signs on our buses that say “Jesus is the Reason for the Season.”  I’ve always thought that the average adult will say, “What’s your point.”  Knowing the historical origins of the Christmas holiday is not the same as understanding its significance for us.  

People who won’t go to a cantata or hear a Christmas sermon, will hear this peppy little song.  And it contains a seed of the gospel:  “Man will live forevermore, Because of Christmas day.”  We can pray, that somehow, someway people listening to the words might begin to ask “Why?”

Of course, “Mary’s Boy Child” leaves a lot of blanks.  It doesn’t touch on much beyond Bethlehem, the manger, and the shepherds.

When Pat suggested I take a look at this song, I discovered there was a later version sung by a Jamaican group, popular during the disco era, called Boney M.  For some reason, their version of the song has a little more theology in it.  I don't know why they felt the need for more theology but it's there.

Here’s how their version ends:

Hark, now hear the angels sing, a king was born today,

And man will live for evermore, because of Christmas Day.

Mary's boy child Jesus Christ, was born on Christmas Day.

Oh a moment still worth was a glow, all the bells rang out

there were tears of joy and laughter, people shouted

"let everyone know, there is hope for all to find peace".

Oh my Lord

You sent your son to save us

Oh my Lord

Your very self you gave us

Oh my Lord

That sin may not enslave us

And love may reign once more 

Oh my Lord

when in the crib they found him

Oh my Lord

A golden halo crowned him

Oh my Lord

They gathered all around him

To see him and adore

Did you hear those words?  If they don’t fill in the blanks, they open the way to discuss the “why” of Christ’s Birth.

“You sent your Son to save us.”  Save us from what?

“Your very self you gave us.” What does that say about the identity of that Child?  How would he give himself?

“That sin might not enslave us.”  What is sin?  How did the Child born on Christmas deal with sin?

“They gathered all around him/to see him and adore.”  Why should we adore him?  What does that mean for how we are to live?

And don’t miss this:

…all the bells rang out

there were tears of joy and laughter, people shouted

"let everyone know, there is hope for all to find peace".

That’s a great image: Excited people dashing about telling about Mary’s Baby Boy.  It just seems right.  It’s a story worth telling—at least we think so.  Luke says the shepherds overflowed with excitement about what they had seen.  We can’t imagine anyone telling the shepherds to hush because they might offend someone.  Or can we?

Because we can’t put Nativity scenes on the court house lawn, because our children enjoy “winter” break not Christmas break, because our elected officials must temper any good word about Christ with an equally good word about any other religious leader, we think we have been silenced.

But this little song that has found a home in so few hymnals, can be a starting place.  Actually, my point is if we want to “let everyone know,” we can find a way.  

There’s a great little phrase in Mark 7:24 in the Authorized Version.  It tells of how Jesus had sought privacy in a home near the border of Tyre and Sidon.  Then Mark adds, “…but he could not be hid.”

The only way people around us will miss the point about Christmas is if we forget to tell them that we may “live forevermore because of Christmas day.”

Of course, it’s important for me to ask if you somehow may have missed the point of Christmas.

So, ask yourself:  Have I received God’s Gift?  If you haven’t, there’s no better time to accept his offer of life.

New Song

I did not post a sermon this week because our choir presented a special Christmas concert on Sunday.  It was a delightful celebration of the message of Christ’s Advent.

The theme was “Christmas Around the World.”  We heard songs from Europe, Asia, the Caribbean, and elsewhere.  Our church has a special relationship with the Filipino Christian Fellowship that meets at our site to worship and study the Bible.  The group joins us each Sunday for a joint worship service.  This year they joined our choir for part of the concert, singing what was a new song to most of us.

The Fellowship choir presented a Christmas song popular in the Philippines, especially since the nation suffered such damage in recent days.  It's called Tuloy Na Tuloy Parin Ang Pasko.  They sang in Tagalog, providing a written translation for us to follow.

The first stanza of the song, says:

When Christmas comes, it makes me wonder why,

Everyone’s is irritable being caught up with the holiday rush.

Not so sure about giving, when life is challenging;

Will there be caroling and Noche Buena (Christmas Eve Feast)?

When there’s lack and money is barely enough, it’s embarrassing

to bail out again on the gift your god-children expect this Christmas.

I found the second verse a little whimsical, especially since ham is not one of my favorite foods and I’m allergic to shrimp.

Last year was a lot better’ The spread had ham and all the good stuff.

New Year celebration might get dropped for reason now that life is so tough. I guess instead of that juicy ham, we’ll just settle for that salty shrimp paste (a mixture of ground shrimp and krill—look it up, I did).

When Pastor Manuel Badar explained the song, he referred to the resilience of the Filipino people how they would come back.  And, of course, as we might expect from the people of the only Christian nation in Asia, the true foundation of hope is in the One who’s birth is celebrated at Christmas.  The refrain of the song goes:

But come what may, as long as love rules the day,

It’s enough to know Jesus is with us.  Christmas will go on.

The “new song” is really an echo of an old song, one that included the words “Peace on earth….”  What may be the oldest Christmas carol in English is “The First Nowell.”  There’s a debate online about the word “nowell.”  Many believe it comes from the French word Noel or Christmas.  Others insist the word is of English origin and represents an abbreviation for “Now all is well.”  I’d like that to be true but I’m not sure history supports the claim.  Anyway, while the linguistics may be shaky, the theology behind the idea is pretty solid.  

Christ’s birth gives a new perspective to everything.  Whether we face tough times or good times, His birth reminds us of God’s faithfulness and love.

Galatians: A Study of Christian Freedom Lesson 7: Curses.

Galatians 3:10-14

Curses—

This passage, which will be the last we look at before the beginning of the new year, is crucial for understanding Paul’s view of the human condition and what Christ’s work involved.  The ideas will be expanded in his other writings, especially Romans.   It helps us answer the question, What happened on the cross?

Curses—Ours

¹⁰ For all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse; 

This is a clear warning to those who might be tempted to listen to the false teachers who were wooing away the faithful in the Galatian churches.  Rather than being a path to winning God’s favor, relying on  “the works of the law,” that is our keeping the demands of the law leads to being  “being under a curse.”

Decades ago, Robertson said this curse hung over the believer like the sword of Damocles.  Paul was certainly suggesting that we sinners lived with the reality of impending doom.  

To put the matter simply, the person who is under a curse should expect God’s worst, not God’s best. The cursed one experiences the awful wrath of God.  For the Gentiles who may have been hearing the words of this epistle, the notion of the wrath of God (or the gods) would have been familiar.  Much of their religious practice, from formal sacrifices to the daily rituals that marked their every activity were intended to ward off the wrath of one god or another.  This was hardly a new view of God but Paul was about to present a new view of God.

For now, however, Paul makes it clear that despite our best intentions, setting out to win God’s favor by our good works will fail.

for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who does not observe and obey all the things written in the book of the law.” 

Why should this be?  The problem isn’t that the Law isn’t good; the problem is we aren’t good.  Even the best of us have failed to keep the Law.  William MacDonald explains:

It is not enough to keep the law for a day, or a month, or a year. One must continue to keep it. Obedience must be complete. It is not enough to keep just the Ten Commandments. All six hundred and some laws in the five books of Moses must be obeyed!

But it gets worse.  Remember Jesus’ discussion of the Law in the Sermon on the Mount.  He demonstrated that the Law’s demands went beyond the mere “letter of the Law.”  For example, the prohibition against murder carries a prohibition against hatred; the prohibition against adultery means no lusting.

Let me try a simple experiment.  Are you a liar?  Accuse most of people of being a liar and they will respond with anger, indignation.  In some times and places you might have found yourself challenged to a dual.

But have you ever told a lie?  I don’t mean this week or last month, I mean at any time during your life.  Lying is so much a part of our human makeup that if you say, “I’ve never told a lie,” most people will be ready to call you a liar.  Now, how many lies does it take to be a liar?

Ok, there’s no fixed figure.  But if you say, “A few lies hardly makes a person a liar; you’d have to make lying a habit before you could be called a ‘liar’.”  That makes sense but what if we ask the opinion of that man, woman, or child you lied to, that person who had the reasonable expectation of hearing the truth from you?  

At heart here is our picture of God.  If Paul had introduced a picture of God as One who counts our faith for righteousness, he was by no means denying the old view of God as One who is holy and intolerant of sin.  Speaking of this attribute of God, Charles Hodge wrote, “Holiness, on the one hand, implies entire freedom from moral evil; and, upon the other, absolute moral perfection.”

In a vision, the prophet Isaiah found himself in the throne room of heaven.  There he heard the angelic host chanting, “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of hosts, the whole earth is full of his glory.” Specialists in Hebrew literature tell us that when anything is repeated we should pay special attention (consider Jesus introducing some of his remarks with “Verily, Verily” or “Truly, Truly” since Jesus didn’t speak King James English) and when something is repeated three times, you had better pay extra special attention.   Isaiah’s responded to this vision of a “holy, holy, holy” God by crying, “I’m doomed.”  

Now, Isaiah was not necessarily what we would call a bad guy.  Compared to many in the nation at the time he might have stood out as an example of uprightness.  After all, he appears to have been at worship when he received this call to be a prophet.  Yet, when this good guy had the occasion to view himself compared to God, any pretensions of personal rectitude melted away and he saw himself as “unclean,” no better than the people whose lives belied their identity as God’s people.

Paul will better explain the role of the law later in the letter but now he seems to be answering that person who might complain, “No fair, if none of us can keep the law well enough to earn God’s favor, then the fix is in from the beginning.”

¹¹ Now it is evident that no one is justified before God by the law; for “The one who is righteous will live by faith.” 

Now the Jews hearing Paul’s words read would have known that no one ever really kept the law perfectly.  That was why Judaism included the elaborate sacrificial system; it was intended to deal with the moral failure of the people as a whole and of individuals.  But it was always tempting to think that somehow, someway just being Jewish provided a a moral edge.  

To counter any such thinking, Paul returns to the principle he explored earlier:  the only way to be justified before God to any degree is through faith.  On the one hand, our incessant failure to keep the law should make us recognize the imperative of relying on God's promise to justify those who have faith.  Then, too, if any who rely on the law should be able to attain a right standing with God, the principle found in the words "the righteous will live by faith" cannot be universal as Paul seems to say it must be.

Even if we should grant that justification by works is theoretically possible, human experience makes it clear that it has not happened.  

12 The law is not based on faith; on the contrary, it says, "The person who does these things will live by them."

The very nature of the law is contrary to the principle of faith.  Faith is about trust, the law is about doing.  When it comes to the law, the words of the Jedi master apply, "Do or do not, three is no 'try.'"  The law-way to salvation does not involve resting trust, it involves constant activity.  Resting is foreign to the law way of salvation.  The law way of salvation involves the constant anxiety of wondering if you have done enough.

I first heard this story shortly after Mother Theresa’s death.  A woman came into the office one morning with red eyes and looking for a strong cup of coffee.  As she stood with her colleagues, one of them asked, “What’s wrong?  You look like you haven’t slept.” 

“I had a terrible dream,” the woman said, “I dreamed I had died and gone to heaven. And I was in a long line of people waiting for St Peter to review our lives to see if we had done enough good works to get in.”

“Wow,” her co-worker said, “that’s weird but you’re a pretty good person.  You give to charities and go to church pretty often.”

“But you haven’t heard the rest,” the worried woman said, “Mother Theresa was standing in the line in front of me.”

“Ah,” another co-worker said, “that would be a little scary but I still say your a good person and would have nothing to worry about.”

“You don’t understand,” the anxious woman said, “after St Peter reviewed Mother Theresa’s life, he looked at her and said, ‘You could have done more.’”

The demands of the law don’t lend themselves to a restful piety.  But God hasn't left us there.

¹³ Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree”— 

Paul offers a vivid image of Christ’s work on our behalf.  The word “redeemed” suggests a situation in which a slave’s freedom is purchased by another, sometimes at great cost.  Christ paid the price to free us from the curse of the law.  Just what this “curse of the law” has been debated but it seems reasonable to conclude it must include the punishment that comes from failing to keep the law.  For our sake, he became accursed.  

This would have been new to the Gentiles.  A God who exploded in wrath they could understand but this was a God who became the object of his own wrath.  

Paul doesn’t go into great detail in explaining this; instead, he cites a verse from Deuteronomy:  “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.”  The verse refers to a practice which the Bible does not so much endorse as control.  It was a custom to hang the body of any person who had been executed as a criminal on a tree for all to see.  (The practice was followed in many nations for centuries—including medieval England where bodies hung from London Bridge for weeks.)  Those who hung on the tree were not cursed because they were hung on the tree; they were hung on the tree because they were seen as cursed.  In first century, Judea being “hung on a tree” was something of a synonym for being crucified.  So, Jesus being crucified was evidence of his having been cursed.

In Romans, Paul will explain that the cross allowed God to be both “just” (true to his holy demands) and a “justifier” (One who honors the faith of those who trusted him).  So, the cross becomes both a reminder of the heinousness of sin and the depth of God’s love.  Of course, God’s solution was by no means partial or in anyway deficient.  

Again, Paul was silencing the false teachers who were disturbing the peace of the Galatian Christians.  

Welsh preacher Cynddylan Jones says:

The Galatians [influenced by the false teachers] imagined that Christ only half purchased them, and that they had to purchase the rest by their submission to circumcision and other Jewish rites and ceremonies. Hence their readiness to be led away by false teachers and to mix up Christianity and Judaism. Paul says here: (according to the Welsh translation) “Christ hath wholly purchased us from the curse of the law.”

The implications of Paul’s claim were stunning.  He could have easily taught the Galatians the little chorus popular a few years ago:  “I owed a debt I could not pay, he paid a debt he did not owe.”  

The prepositions Paul uses allows us to picture this in away that shows the dynamic of Christ’s work.

According to verst 10 we were “under” (Gk hypo) the curse of the law.  Christ became a curse “above” (Gk hyper) us and even took us “from,” literally “out-from” under the curse. The Contemporary English Version attempts to capture these images:  “But Christ rescued us from the Law’s curse, when he became a curse in our place.”  So did the Living Bible paraphrase:  “But Christ has bought us out from under the doom of that impossible system by taking the curse for our wrongdoing upon himself.”

This is why Christians speak of Christ being our substitute.  He took the wrath that was coming our way.  This resulted, as one writer puts it, in a situation in which “God was satisfied forever; the law was silenced forever; and the believer is saved forever.”

¹⁴ in order that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith. 

The Judaizer’s insistence on being circumcised to be a Christian would have made no sense if Paul were addressing only Jewish-Christians.  He was addressing Gentile-Christians as well.  The blessing of justification by faith was being extended to the Gentiles.  They did not have to submit to circumcision and their Jewish brothers and sisters did not have to resubmit to the tedious dietary and social taboos that had distinguished their lives prior to coming to Christ.

Paul returns to a point that began this section: the basis of the believer’s receiving the Spirit (the token of being a Christian).  Paul had angrily asked, “Did you receive the Spirit by following the demands of the law or by believing the gospel?”  The implied answer, of course, was through their faith.  So, receiving the Spirit and its potential for intimacy with God is a blessing extended to those who had once been considered especially cursed by God, the Gentiles.

This truth reminds us of an old saying that “God had only one Son and he made him a missionary.”

Observations:  As we reflect on the Advent season and all the blessings of Christmas, we need to remind ourselves that what made Christmas necessary was a curse.