Steinbach Mennonite Church
29 December 2024
We have been journeying through Advent and now we are in the Christmas Season. We celebrated the birth of the baby on Christmas Day, and we anticipate the coming of the New Year with the promise of God’s salvation. But what does that promise look like? How will we know when God is doing something good, something really, really good? We’ll talk about that question this morning, and you can wrestle with it throughout the week, indeed throughout the year, ahead.
Psalm 131
We began by reading Psalm 131. This psalm has the title “a song of ascents”, which suggests that it was sung as pilgrims to Jerusalem ascended to Mount Zion. There are fifteen psalms with this title (120 to 134), of which this is one of the shortest. Tradition says that David composed them.
Psalm 131, then, describes the state of mind or the heart attitude with which a pilgrim approaches the temple: humility and a holy calmness. The psalmist compares this heart attitude with the peace that a child experiences with its mother – a feeling of complete safety and satisfaction, knowing that one depends completely on the caregiver. With this attitude, then, the pilgrim places his/her hopes in God. The text says, “a weaned child”. I am not sure why. Perhaps we are to think of the independence a toddler feels combined with the toddler’s rush back to mother when any danger is perceived.
Consider the question drawn from our focus statement: What do God’s kept promises look like? The psalm suggests that God’s kept promises are quiet and comforting, like the comfort of a mother with her child.
Luke 2
The gospel reading takes place at the circumcision of Jesus. When Jesus was eight days old, his parents had him circumcised. I assume this took place in Bethlehem, about five or six miles south of Jerusalem.
Verse 22 suggests that a short time later Mary and Joseph took the young infant to the Temple in Jerusalem “when the time came for their purification”. From Leviticus 12, we know that circumcision of a baby boy took place after eight days and the purification of the mother took place a further 33 days later. So, six weeks after the birth of Jesus his parents went to the Temple to make the sacrifice to purify his mother. The terms of this sacrifice (a pair of turtledoves and a young pigeon) make clear that his family were lower than most on the economic scale.
This language is strange to us; we don’t think in terms of pure and impure, clean and unclean. These categories remind us that Jesus entered this world fully and submitted to the cultural categories of his time and place. Although he was and is the Son of God, he was circumcised and his mother was purified, following the Law of Moses given to the Children of Israel.
While all this was happening, an old man named Simeon came up, took Jesus in his arms, and said, “Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word, for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.”
Then he added directly to Joseph and Mary: “This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed—and a sword will pierce your own soul, too.” An old widow named Anna, 84 years old, added her voice to Simeon’s and her blessings to his. These two elderly saints made it clear that the angels had been right: The appearance of Jesus was God’s kept promise to Israel and to the world.
What does God’s kept promise look like? A baby boy six weeks old. A young mother, probably a teen-ager. And two old people who are ready to die, knowing that God has appeared to them. “Now let your servant depart in peace, for my eyes have seen your salvation.”
Promises Kept
There are many themes we could develop from this brief overview, including the political and economic implications of the way that Jesus entered our world. He was the oldest son in a relatively poor family, and yet he was hailed as the Saviour of the world. Most people around him would have assumed that saving them meant saving them politically and economically. Although Jesus went deeper than that, we could still explore the social and structural dimensions of the various prophecies that surround his birth.
Instead, I want to examine the way that God’s kept promises take the shape of simple things. Many years ago, G.K. Chesterton put the case provocatively.
Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.
But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. (From Orthodoxy, quoted by Renovare: Renovaré | A Magical Universe - G.K. Chesterton)
Chesterton is saying in poetic language what some scientists describe as the anthropic principle – that the laws of physics seem designed to make human life possible.
What do God’s kept promises look like? This morning’s sunrise is one example. The falling snow is another. In Luke 2, it was the birth of a child. In our own family, it was the birth of a grandson last April. Indeed, we see God’s promise kept in the birth of every baby.
When I first thought that sentence, preparing this sermon, I wondered if it is true. At Jeremy’s birthday party last August, Corny Rempel sang one of Elvis Presley’s hits, “In the ghetto”. It has the haunting lines, “As the snow flies/ On a cold and gray Chicago mornin’/ A poor little baby child is born/ In the ghetto/ (In the ghetto)/ And his mama cries/ ’Cause if there’s one thing that she don’t need/ It is another hungry mouth to feed.”
Can we really say that we see God’s promise kept in the birth of every baby? The question of evil and the God of Love is a hard one, which we cannot pursue now, but we must keep it in our hearts and minds as we sing and pray and preach. For the moment, I say this much: The birth of every child is indeed a miracle of God’s love, and you don’t know when or which child will be the one that breaks the mould and proves the rule.
Take another commonplace event that shows God keeping promises. Last Fall, Louise brought Lois a caterpillar in a jar with a leaf for some food. The jar sat in our house while the caterpillar made its chrysalis and went into suspension. For a week and a half it lay inside its coffin, and then a remarkable monarch butterfly emerged. It sat drying for several hours and finally flew away into our back yard. God’s kept promise.
Over and over again, in nature, in our families, in the rhythm of the seasons and the sun, we see God’s promise kept for our benefit, for our salvation.
A Story
Let me tell you a story. A true story, one which I have told before. A story of how a small ordinary act was in reality a sacrifice through which God brought salvation to hundreds of thousands of people.
In 1921, David and Svea Flood left Sweden and went to Africa as missionaries. They went to a place called N’dolera. I can’t be sure, but I think it is in South Kivu Province in Congo, not very far from the home of Gaston Mulemba, whom we have known in this congregation. They tried to begin a mission there, but the chief of the local village was unsympathetic. As a result, they were unable to get to know the local people – all except for one young boy that the chief allowed to visit them twice a week to bring them eggs and milk. Svea talked regularly with the boy and told him about Jesus and the love of God. Eventually, he prayed a prayer with her, their only convert.
In 1923, Svea became pregnant and in the midst of their health struggles with fever and malaria, Svea gave birth to a little girl. They named her Aina. But the pregnancy had been hard, and she had not recovered properly from their fevers. When Aina was 17 days old, Svea died. David Flood was heartbroken and turned his back on God. He felt that God had rejected him and that he had no longer any hope, so he in turn rejected God. He lived for a while with another missionary couple nearby named Erickson, but they also died. In despair, unable to care for little Aina, he gave her to a final missionary family named Berg and returned to Sweden.
David remarried in Sweden and had several more children, but he remained a bitter and disillusioned man. Clearly, he thought, God’s promise had not been kept in his life.
Meanwhile, the Bergs (an American couple) returned to their home in South Dakota. So Aina – renamed Aggie – grew up with the Bergs in South Dakota and eventually went off to college in Minneapolis. There she met a man named Dewey Hurst. He went into education and eventually became the president of a Christian college in the Seattle area.
When Dewey and Aggie were in their mid-40s, Aggie found a Swedish magazine with a picture of a grave in Congo, a picture of her mother’s grave. The accompanying story told how a young boy had come to faith through his friendship with Svea Flood and had started a school and church in his village, a church of some 600 people.
Svea did not know what had happened to her father, but she realized that she had to find him and let him know what had grown from her mother’s apparently fruitless sacrifice. For their 25th wedding anniversary, she and Dewey were given a trip to Scandinavia, and she set about finding her father. When she did, she first met her siblings, his children. They told her that whatever else she did, she should not talk about God. Too much bitterness still remained.
Svea finally went to the house where her father lived, now an old man in his 70s, blind from cataracts and struggling with diabetes. When he understood who she was, they embraced and mingled their tears. He said how he had not wanted to leave her with the Bergs, but he found that he was unable to care for her at that time. She replied, “It’s all right, Papa. God took care of me.” He stiffened, but she continued with the story of the young boy who had gone on to bring his village to Christ. “The one seed you planted kept growing and growing. Today there are at least 600 African Christians because you were faithful. Papa, Jesus loves you. He never hated you.”
God came to David Flood that day and healed his bitterness and sorrow. Many years later, Aggie and Dewey Hurst attended a conference in London, England, where that young boy – now the leader of a church that grew out of his ministry – was speaking. They met, and he was able to tell her the story as he had lived it. In time, she and Dewey visited her mother’s grave and celebrated God’s kept promises with the people there.
It is a mark of missionary stories that we sometimes omit the names of the local Christians who were so instrumental in God’s work. I have not been able to find out the name of that young boy, but I know that he became the head of a larger church of over 100,000 that grew out of that first congregation. God’s promise was kept in the birth of a little girl, the death of her mother, and the willingness that she and her husband showed in going to live in N’dolera.
Conclusion
What do God’s kept promises look like? Like the setting and the rising of the sun. Like the hatching of chicks and the growth of crops. Like the resting of the soil beneath the covering of snow. Like care that we receive from doctors and nurses when we are sick. Like the love of our families and friends. Like a visit from a friend when we wonder if anyone remembers us.
God’s promise of salvation for the world was kept in the birth of Jesus, and we keep God’s promises together as we love each other with God’s love. For God loved the world so much that God gave Jesus, the only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him shall have everlasting life. Amen.
