Jitterbugging for Jesus

James Howell, pastor of Myers Park United Methodist Church in Charlottesville, NC, doubles as a great teacher of preachers at Duke Divinity School.

Rev. Howell advises preachers that a Christmas Eve service is as good a time as any to “quite gently” take on popular atheism in the sermon.

Says Howell:

Among the many anti-Christian bestsellers was God is Not Great, by Christopher Hitchens (may God rest his soul…).

I’d play on that and say, Correct, God is not great. God, rather, is quite small, vulnerable, a God who doesn’t conquer everything but gets defeated in the most profound embodiment of suffering love ever.

Jesus did not rise up miraculously in the manger and denounce his foes. Jesus has a tender place in his heart for Christopher Hitchens.

The greatness and power of Jesus was his strength in weakness and vulnerability. And a tender, vulnerable Jesus was definitely not the Jesus people were expecting to come along and liberate them.

They were fully expecting a larger-than-life warrior God to come galloping in on his trusty white steed from out of nowhere, miraculously taking out legions of Roman soldiers with a blazing sword before he took down Caesar himself.

There weren’t looking for God to come down in the form of baby Jesus meek and mild, born in cave in a livestock yard behind an inn.

They sure didn’t expect their great savior to grow up hammering nails under the tutelage of a nobody of a father in a backwater town like Bethlehem.

So much for Great Expectations. They were looking for a Rambo. They got a Gandhi.

God is not static. God has always done new things. It can typically take hundreds of years for people to grasp the fact that God through the Holy Spirit has in fact done something new thing.

But the new thing God did in sending down Jesus only took about 30 years for people to understand. It took a relatively short time for people to grasp that their savior was like nothing like what they expected.

When Jesus walked, Caesar held all the dangerous power and a lot of Caesars have held lethal power in the world ever since. This is as true at the end of 2017 as it was in the 30 years that Jesus walked.

But God has always had the power of sovereignty. That’s a power that no Caesar will ever match.

And that is Good News for a world desperately in need of Good News.

Tell it.