God’s Sounds

Many years ago, while speaking at a summer conference at Mt. Hermon in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California, I met Barbara and Stan Adair.  We became, in the years following, close friends.  For years we, with Lillian and her husband, Lee Toms, pastor of the Adairs, celebrated our wives’ birthdays, and finding warm fellowship between those animated annual fun parties together.  Decades later and living about 2,000 miles apart but visiting by E-mail, Stan and I, both making it to the tenth decade of life, were the last of the six.  Stan recently died.  We celebrated the years, especially about the memories of days gone by.  What a gift it was to us – appropriate to life.  Most of our exchanges related to humor, and faith. Toward the end Stan sent me a statement I am ruminating on this year.  I do not remember if it is of his composition or he was quoting from a source: Christmas is love tugging man back to God with the powerful grasp of a tiny hand reaching out from a bed of straw.  At first response some persons would say that we are making up something out of tendencies of emotions.  Not so.  No!  We followed reality life.

More than seventy years ago my wife and I welcomed our first child.  Something happened to me when I looked at our tiny premature daughter.  I felt the presence of God, and I suddenly felt grown up and responsible.  There was a tiny hand reaching out from the incubator tugging at me for something good. I could not have defined it, but it later enlarged in my mind.  I was never the same after the experience.  She is now a grandmother.  Her arrival gave meaning, both physical and spiritual, intensified greatly with the arrival of her two brothers and sister during ten years following.  The impact for good intensified, and has never left me.  The melody lingers in the multiplication of grandchildren and great grandchildren.

Long, long ago Jesus Christ was born in Bethlehem.  The remarkable part of the story, from a human point of view, is that it became remarkable.   Shepherds began walking toward Bethlehem at night to see what it was that was announced to them in an epiphany.  Many miles away, a group of men, students of life and the heavens, saw a star they had not seen before, and went to the trouble of following it while knowing enough to bring gifts for whatever was at the end of the star shaft.  They appear to have been late, and encountered the family close to the place of birth where Joseph cared for his family until mother and child were strong enough to continue travel.  The mother, in her youthful years, felt sustained and elevated to the point of poetry and humility.  Joseph, a good man, knew the story and pressed on in a spirit of obedience to the will of God, and soon departed for Egypt.  Even the king of the land was persuaded that the occasion demanded that he do something to counter any threat to his authority.  Other infants died in an attempt of the king to get the one he felt to be a possible usurper.  (We can be sure that God covered the tragedy of the children in ways we can only imagine, but surmise with confidence.)  What happened?  That baby became, at least in the western world, as it is reported in studies, the most influential person who ever lived.  Of any and all birthdays that have been noted on a date, no one is more to be remembered, honored, understood and known than Jesus Christ.  Even if persons are not drawn to his purpose of redemption and concepts of life and God, they fail themselves in not finding out the meaning of this one solitary life.  Out of his life and words, we learn about love, holiness, redemption and immortality.  From his words we learn why life can go wrong, and what we can do about it to find rescue, and ultimate gratification that we call love and peace.

Here then is the gift of Christmas, Jesus Christ.  He began as we began.  He grew up as we grow up.  He encountered acceptance and rejection in his family as we do.  He was accepted and rejected in society as we are in life.  He was a teacher, not only in what he said, but in what he did.  He was concerned with the welfare of all persons.  Jesus lived offering no prejudice, hatred, hypocrisy, or self-advantage, with nothing beyond concern for the spiritual safety of all persons.  He made clear that life was a level playing field and that each person could take on the responsibility of making the decisions and following the beliefs and conduct by which they could offer legacy to mankind and God in the forever tomorrow.