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Hear this reading from Paul's letter to the Galatians. I begin in the third chapter at the 27th verse. "For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ. And if you are

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Christ, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to purpose. I mean that the heir, as long as he is a child, is no better than a slave, though he is the owner of all the estate. But he is under guardians and trustees until the date set by the Father. So with us, when we were children, we were slaves to the

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elemental spirits of the universe. But when the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, saying, 'Abba, Father.' So

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through God, you are no longer a slave, but a son. And if a son, then an heir. And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his Word. Pray with me. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. I would like to think with you tonight about time. The Hampton Court

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Palace is a very well-known historical monument in Great Britain. It was built by Cardinal Wolsey, lived in by Henry VIII, is especially known by us as Protestant Christians as the place where the King James Version of the Bible was written. It's also well known for its maze, a mix of tall hedges so arranged

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that once you have found yourself into the middle of them, it's difficult to find your way out again. In case you're ever there, I'll tell you the secret is to take the first two right turns and then every left turn thereafter. But I think of that at every time of the year that is like this because we've been

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caught up in a kind of maze of days, if you will. December, it seems to me, is one of those particular seasons when this is the case. There are so many dead ends and deadlines and things to be done and confusions and arrangements that when we at last get to this hour, to Christmas Eve, we're a little on the tired side, a

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little on the exhausted side, and yet we are still here. And I think that's because each of us senses that something touches us in the act of Christmas worship. There's something about the mystery of this time which defines all the rest of our times. Shakespeare, speaking of this night, said, "So hallowed

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and so gracious is the time," and we may not be able to explain that, but we understand the truth of it. Not too long ago in a suburb here of our city, a mother with her little four-year-old boy caught up in one of the mall shopping crushes. Somehow they were separated, though only for a minute or two. She went

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back and found the youngster looking through the window at a nativity scene, and as she came up he said, "Hey, mommy, look! It's the baby Jesus lying in the hay!" And she, grabbing his hand angrily, replied, "Come on, we don't have time for that." Well, by being here tonight, we have said we do have time for that. We have

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said that in some way, inexplicable as it may seem, this time defines other times. And that's the reason I have chosen the verse of Scripture which I have for our thinking in these minutes. "And when the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son." What Paul is saying here is that the world was ready for Christmas.

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Historians have observed many times that there was no time before and perhaps no time since that was as appropriate for the birth of Jesus as precisely that time when he was born. For example, the world politically was ready for Christmas. Until that time, the world had been divided. There were many foreign

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frontiers, but here for a brief respite in history, Rome ruled all the known world. There was a peace across the empire, true, it was a military peace, but that in itself was unusual. From the Atlantic to the Caspian, from the Thames to the Euphrates, the world was one Roman neighborhood. Had Jesus been born a

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hundred years earlier, there would have been all kinds of obstacles strewn across the face of the empire. Not only that, but ships regularly pillaged and plundered at sea. Had he come a hundred years later, he would have found the Roman Empire struggling for its very life in a war against the barbarian

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hordes from the north. But he came at just that time when there was a oneness in the empire, the system of Roman roads, the finest that existed until that day, some of those roads still being used now, and the Greek language, the most sublime language that the world has ever known. Oh yes, there were a thousand different

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tongues spoken across the empire, but for every educated person, Greek was his second or first language. This means, you see, that when the truth came to be told, when the troubadours of the gospel went out to tell what had occurred, there was a communication and a transportation system available to them that had never

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existed until that time. The world politically was ready for Christmas and economically it was ready also. Hollywood, when it pictures for us the first century, usually shows it to us in terms of Roman pomp and magnificence, but Hollywood almost invariably lies. Poverty stalked the face of the empire, the vast

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cost of earlier wars, the extravagance of the Roman imperial custom, high civil taxes and religious taxes as well, an increasing population without the ability to increase food production. These led to a great darkness and coldness and hunger across the known world. Just at that time, when a flame

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came to life in a Bethlehem manger, a life entered into the world which would tell the world how it could take care of itself by loving and bearing and sharing. And the world was morally ready for Christmas. One man, writing of the first century at that time, said that the world was full of wickedness, evil, covetousness,

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malice, envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity. They were, he said, people who hated God, filled with foolishness and ruthlessness. And a man of our own time writing of that same first century said, "Rome was a flea market of conquered peoples, a mass of filth, a convoluted intestinal obstruction in time where

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illiterate emperors hurled highly educated slaves to be the food for fish. It was a heap of gold and garbage. The world had sinned away its childhood, had wasted its youth, and now lived in grief, looking for some straw of moral hope. And it got not a straw, but a Savior lying on straw, when the time had fully come.

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And the world was religiously ready for Christmas. The old Lares and Panates, the gods of the Romans, had long ago been forgotten. An attempt had been made to bring strange Eastern religions into the Empire, but they had been laughed at and scorned. Some, for political expediency, had tried to create a cult of the

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Emperor, but you cannot get spiritual support. You cannot find that which heals a broken heart or cleanses a guilty conscience or soothes a ruptured spirit from some frail mortal sitting on a marble throne in a city thousands of miles away. There was a spiritual starvation across the known world then.

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Read the literature of the period, Greek or Hebrew or Roman, and you will find that there was a kind of hush, a hope, a longing for what was eternally true. So politically and logistically and economically and morally and religiously, there had been no time like this and no time since it. And precisely

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then, when the time had fully come, God sent his Son into the world. The world was ready for Christmas, and God was also ready for Christmas. Notice that the passage says, "And when the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son." In the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, we're fortunate to have one of the

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great masterpieces of Pablo Picasso. It's a painting called "The Family of the Saltenbanks." Now this picture has become very important, especially in the last few months. You see, like most great artists, Picasso went through periods of development, and one of his periods is called the Harlequin period. He painted

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many circus pictures at that time, and always in these pictures he would put a Harlequin figure. Now a friend of Picasso's named Apollinaire, in a letter which he wrote at the time when he and Picasso were spending much time together, told about a Harlequin picture which Picasso had done which was especially

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magnificent. He described it, a Harlequin and a woman and a small girl wearing a ballet skirt. Strange to say that picture had never been found. Though Picasso's works were always carefully preserved and numbered, no one had ever seen this picture which Apollinaire described in such detail. And then a young scholar

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working in our National Gallery on that masterpiece, "The Family of the Saltenbanks," noticed that the Harlequin in that picture was much like the one that Apollinaire described as being in the other picture. And also there was a little girl in this picture, though there were also four other figures. Well you've

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already guessed, I suppose, the end of the story. They x-rayed the painting and they found that under "The Family of the Saltenbanks" was the painting which Apollinaire had described so many years before. Picasso had painted one picture on top of the other. Now that's often true in

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art and it's also often true in life. How many times God is painting one picture behind the picture that we see? Here was the world waiting for Christmas and all the while God was at work bringing Christmas to pass. God was planning Christmas long before the world ever thought of it. The right time and the

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right place and the right scene so that all things might work together for good for those who loved him and were called according to his purpose. You know, every successful person works on a schedule and because God is the most successful of all persons, he too works on a schedule, but it's not for us to know

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that schedule and it's easy to understand why. Suppose, for example, that we had known that the Son of God was to be born in Bethlehem that first Christmas night. Mary and Joseph would not have been put in a stable but in the bridal suite. The shepherds would probably have never gotten to see the

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baby because the security would have been very very tight so that only international big shots could get in for the scene and one of those undoubtedly admitted would have been Herod who would have promptly murdered the baby in the bridal suite bathtub. But that's not the way it was. There would have been no

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mystery in that, no marvel in that, no factor that captures the imagination 2,000 years after the event. Can you imagine what it would be like if the word got out that the Son of God was going to be born in Bethlehem tonight? Saturday Night Live would be preempted.

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Ted Koppel would have a debate between the Arabs and the Jews. The Likud would announce that the whole thing was a PLO plot and they would not negotiate. Geraldo Rivera would wonder if Mary was really a virgin and would bring in six women who had conceived out of wedlock to shed their knowledge on the subject.

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Morton Downey Jr. would have gathered a bunch of ignorant loud-mouthed people to shed their dark light on the scene. Robin Leach would put out a special show, Lifestyles of the Poor and Humble, and Michael Jackson would write a new song which he would sing live on TV just as he placed one white glove beside the

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gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. But God would not have it that way. The God who moves behind the scenes came down a secret stair with a baby in his arms and so taught the world about humility and lowliness and love and grace. He chose two peasants and an obscure village and a baby and a manger. That's the way he

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scheduled it. That's the way he timed it when he was ready for Christmas and that is why it worked. And when the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son. The world was ready and God was ready. Which leaves, of course, only one question. Are we ready for Christmas? Do you know

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how the wristwatch came to be invented? It comes from the time of Alexander the Great. His armies were so large that it was impossible to coordinate their activities. You couldn't see from one end of the force to the other. So one of his generals got the idea of all of the commanding officers getting together at

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the same time and they would take a strip of cloth and they would tear it into smaller strips and they would soak them all in the same wine. Then each one of them would tie such a strip around his wrist and then they would go back to their separate legions and divisions. And by pre-arrangement, they would watch that

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piece of wet cloth as it dried and they would have decided on a particular shade and when the shade of the cloth colored by the wine became precisely that agreed upon, they would all attack and the army would move as one. I'm surprised that an erudite group like this didn't know about the origin of the wristwatch. Have

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none of you ever heard of Alexander's rag time band? I could have resisted that but I didn't and I didn't because not of the pun but of the point. You see, the joke pivots about the necessity of the army moving in synchronicity in a coordinated way and what I'm asking tonight is if the

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world is ready for Christmas and God is ready for Christmas, are we ready for Christmas? Are we coordinated with the event? I miss Alex Kerr who was a member of this church for so many years. A couple of years ago he told me about a man named Jack Sheehan who works for Mellon Bank here in Pittsburgh over in

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the Fifth Avenue office and at one end of the office they have a large marble wall and in that wall they have two bronze doors. Now it's actually an elevator but it's rather hard to tell that that's what it is. And he was standing in the bank one day and there were two little children standing

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watching those doors and they looked a bit apprehensive. Their parents were over at one of the desks doing their business so he walked over to the youngsters and said "Would you like to take a ride on the elevator?" and they didn't know what an elevator was so he said "Well it's this right over here" and as soon as he

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said this they jumped back. When the parents returned they did go for a ride on the elevator but only after it had been explained what an elevator was. You see those youngsters had been watching and the doors would open and people would go in and the doors would close and when the doors opened nobody was

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there or the people who were there were completely different from the people who had gone in. It was a magic contraption that they beheld. Well as you came through the doors tonight did you expect an elevating experience where things would change? What about it? Do we come here expecting the same old thing, the

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same old carols and the same old poinsettias and the same old preacher with the same old sermon? Or did we come expecting something else? Did we come expecting God to come down a secret stairway into our hearts with a child in his arms and so leave that child there that we are changed politically and

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economically and morally and religiously and we learn things about humility and loneliness and love and grace that we had never known before? The real issues tonight my friends are very personal. Our needs, our hopes, our broken hearts, our dreams. Yesterday the Wall Street Journal on the front page had a story about how

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because of Glasnost environmentalists in the Soviet Union are now feeling free to criticize the government because of environmental concerns specifically related to the reindeer. And as I read this story it reminded me of one of the most unusual migratory events which takes place in the world each year. It

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concerns the Baraba Step in Siberia where wild geese are and they summer there and then in wintertime they fly to the Ganges River 2,200 miles away. But what's interesting about their migration is that they walk the first hundred miles. Toward the end of August there's a stirring in the flock and one day they

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all start to walk off. They can only make about 10 miles a day on their short legs. Many of them fall over from hunger and exhaustion and become food for predators. For 10 days they march on that way about 10 miles a day and about a hundred miles they come to an area of lakes and there they stay in those lakes for a few days.

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And then having been there for a few days one day they suddenly take flight and they fly the 2,100 remaining miles across China to India. We don't exactly know why it is. It's believed it's because of some climatic changes or perhaps some industrial pollution. But you see what happens is this. The

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internal timepiece of these wild geese, that which leads them to migrate, has somehow become confused so that they start while their feathers are still molting, while the feathers are not strong enough to be used in flight. That's the reason they walk for 10 days and then spend some time in the water

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and at the end of that time the molting process is over and the feathers are firm and strong and so they take flight and complete the rest of the journey in relative ease and without difficulty. It's all, you see, a matter of timing. So have we come here tonight prepared to fly or just to die again? How is it with us?

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Are we ready for Christmas? Are we just going to kind of slog our way through the days? Or do we expect something to happen in these minutes which can transform it all when our hearts beat in rhythm with the heart of God? Only one person, you know, missed it all in Bethlehem that night and that was the

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innkeeper and it was because he didn't have time. So is your heart prepared? Are you ready for a new dimension of joy and love and peace and faith and hope? If you are ready, if you have prepared yourself, he will come as wonderful counselor, mighty God, eternal Father, and Prince of Peace. All you have to do is be ready. He

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already says, "Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and sup with him and he with me." So the time is now, but we must be ready because time never looks back. Time never pauses to listen to those who refused the sound of its coming, who would not pay heed to the

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rhythm of its drum. May Christmas be for you and all those whom you love a very blessed time. Let us pray. O God of Bethlehem and Pittsburgh, bless this simple witness in your name that it

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might help to make ready the hearts of some who long for the birth of the Prince of Peace in their lives. We pray our prayer in his name. Amen. you [BLANK_AUDIO]