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[ Music ] [ Singing ] [ Music ] >> Does Santa Claus believe in you?

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A message by Dr. Bruce W. Thielman. >> Let us continue in worship. By hearing the reading of God's word, as it is recorded in the letter of Paul to the Philippians,

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chapter two, beginning the reading at the verse numbered five. "Have this mind among yourselves, which you have in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God,

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did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.

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And being found in human form, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.

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Therefore God has highly exalted him, and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

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and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father." And may the same spirit that inspired these words

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incline our hearts to the hearing of them. Pray with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son,

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and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. I would like to talk with you tonight about the mind of Christ.

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It has been said that the three earliest Christmas carols are these. First, the Magnificat, the Song of Mary,

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after she had been told by Gabriel that she was to bear the Son of God. Second, the Glory in its Chelseas, the Song of the Angels,

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as they sang over Bethlehem's fields on the night in which our Savior was born. And third, this Song from Scripture,

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from the second chapter of Paul's letter to the Philippians, which I have just read in your hearing. Scholars are agreed that Paul, guided by the Holy Spirit,

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has made use here in his letter of a song commonly sung by the Christians from the first century. It is a brief song, but a lovely one.

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It is a simple song, but a marvelously profound one. For in this song, Paul introduces us to the Savior of the world

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from before his coming until after he ascended his throne once again. Whenever I contemplate this song, these words so used by Paul,

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I'm reminded of the earliest work of art which we have from the hand of Michelangelo. It is a sculpted low relief which we call today the Madonna of the Stairs.

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Mary is depicted with the infant Jesus asleep in her lap. Behind her a set of stairs with two boys going up the stairs holding a large cloth and a railing at the top.

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The work of art is remarkable for three reasons. First of all, that such a magnificent thing should come from a young artist not yet sixteen years old. Secondly, that the stone should be carved so tenderly

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that it seems to be not stone, but living flesh. And thirdly, that Michelangelo has, in one carving, told two stories. He speaks very plainly of the birth of Christ,

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the infant in the mother's lap. But there is another story told in the carving also. For the form of the railing behind Mary is that of a cross.

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And the two young boys carrying the cloth carry it in the shape of a shroud. And the very stairs become the ladder which was mounted by the men

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who lifted the body of the crucified Christ from the cross and brought it to the arms of those who loved Him. In one carving, the coming, the borning, and the going, the dying of our Lord Savior.

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And just what Michelangelo did in that stone, this song and the apostle under the influence of the Spirit do in this passage of Scripture. Paul says to the Philippians, and thus to us,

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"Have in you the mind of Christ." And then he defines that mind, first of all in verse 6, by saying that our Lord Jesus, though He was in the form of God, counted equality with God not a thing to be grasped.

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Now this word "form" is a very unique word. It appears only in this passage in all of the Scripture. And it means essential oneness. If I were to hold before you a cluster of flowers,

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a rose and a lilac and an adjuratum and a poinsettia and a tulip, you would identify them all as flowers, though their color and their shape would be different. There is about them, you see, an essential flowerness,

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a basic unity. And Paul says that Jesus Christ, our Lord, had this basic essential unity with the Father. They were one.

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One at the very center of all that is important. You see, Paul in speaking of Christ begins by telling us of how high He is, that we might be all the more touched with how low He stooped. Paul shows us a Christ who stirred the whole cosmos

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and brought into being before the dawn of time the biosphere. A Christ who gave to the earth the birth of thought and instinct. A Jesus who ruled over everything that was during all the eras of expectancy. Who moved in the anonymous hearts and minds of primitive men.

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Who was behind the strange mysteries of Egypt. Who brooded over the anxious wanderings of the Israel people. Who was the guiding light of the actor of oriental mysticism. Who presided over all that refinement of wisdom which came from the Greeks.

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Paul offers us a cosmic Christ. Very God of very God. I know not what your idea of God is tonight, how you would choose to describe Him,

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but Jesus is the very essence of that God. And Paul says in the next verse, verse 7, that Jesus emptied Himself of this and took upon Himself the form of a servant.

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Now theologians argue about this word "emptied". Some interpret it to mean that Jesus laid aside His divine attributes of omniscience and omnipotence and omnipresence. Others say that it simply means He laid aside the life of the Spirit

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and took upon Himself the limitations of the flesh. We cannot settle that issue, but we can know at least this. The Apostle tells us that our Lord Jesus did not count His equality with God something to be hung on to, something to be grasped,

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but emptied Himself of it out of love for us and took upon Himself the form, and it's the same word as earlier, the essential nature of a man. He didn't just look like a man.

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He was a man. He came from the mansions of eternity to a manger, laid aside royalty for rags, the crown jewel of heaven in a fork of hay.

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And we must not idealize that. A manger was a cave, and the place was filled with the smell of hay and also the droppings of the animals. And the only one who was there to see were the beasts of the field.

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There was perhaps off in the distance of the darkness the barking of dogs over shepherds who were for some reason hurrying into the town. And there was the heavy breathing of the woman in labor, and Mary probably brought her own son into the world.

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There is no record of anyone else being there, and it was forbidden under the law for a man to be so engaged. And so she births her own baby, and there is that cry of pain.

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And then she falls back as the red and wrinkled child is lifted by his father, so exhausted is she looking at the stony ceiling above her that perhaps for a moment she forgot about the child. And Joseph picks up a coarse piece of cloth

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and wraps the naked baby against the coldness of the night, and perhaps a mouse who had been hiding in the straw there hurried into a deeper shadow, and don't make that mouse a Walt Disney mouse.

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It was unclean, and it was afraid. Paul is no doubt remembering Isaiah's prophecy of the coming servant. And Paul says in verse 8 that Jesus coming into the world like this humbled himself even farther.

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He was obedient unto death, and that the death of the cross. The shadow of Calvary falls across Bethlehem, and why should it not? You can travel from Calvary to Bethlehem in just 20 minutes on a bus. Paul is saying to us through this song what Michelangelo said a long time ago,

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that the borning and the dying were not far apart. Dying on a cross. Paul's countryman, Cicero, said of crucifixion that it was so execrable an enormity that he could not describe it.

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And Paul himself was appalled at the thought of the cross. It is not incidental, I believe, that tradition tells us that Peter was crucified like his Lord, but Paul not so. Paul was beheaded.

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I understand that bringing thoughts of the cross and the dying of our Savior into the beauty of this Christmas service somehow seems uncomfortable and inappropriate. We all want the truth to be delivered to us purely.

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We want the liquid of the loveliness of it to come to us without the staining taint of history. We are thrilled with the thought that Jesus comes into time, but the sight and the smell of afterbirth on a mud floor makes us uneasy.

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We are moved when we hear how He healed the blind, but when we contemplate His spitting into the mud and making a potion to anoint the eyes of those who He heals, we back away. We want the beauty of abstraction without the brutality of the concrete.

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That's the reason we're so much fascinated by the writings of people like Kahlil Gibran and Rod McEwan. They're all so out of touch with the blood and sweat and tears and vomit and spit and flies of life. And precisely because of that, they lie.

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For any theology or philosophy that will stand must be a philosophy and a theology that meets the barbarity of man and the callousness of life head on. And that's what Jesus did. And Paul says because of this in verse 9, "He has been mightily exalted."

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He has been lifted to the very throne of God with whom He is one. And Paul uses a word to describe Jesus there, that he only uses four other times in all of his epistles. "Jesus Christ," he says, "the Lord."

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And the word he uses is the same word that is used in the Greek Old Testament to describe God Himself. Christ, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, becomes finite, suffers, and dies, and then is exalted.

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Linus and Charlie Brown looking at a starry sky. And Charlie Brown says, "Beautiful." And Linus says, "Yes." And Charlie Brown says, "Would you like to see a falling star?"

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And Linus says, "Yes, I would, but on second thought, I wouldn't want anyone to go to all that trouble just for me." The gospel is that the bright and morning star, the Lord Jesus Christ, fell from heaven to earth for each one of us.

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And the challenge of the gospel is that we, like Him, are to fall in the service of others. For notice that all these words of Paul are introduced with this call, "Have in you the same mind that we see in Christ Jesus." Paul tells us this story in order that we might be like him.

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Have you ever noticed that whenever you follow God's star, you end up in humble places? The wise men certainly did. Or here's a young girl into whose life God brings the star of a wonderful man, and they are married, and she follows that star and ends up in the humble place

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before a sink of dirty dishes or a pile of dirty diapers. Or here's a young woman who gives herself to medical school. She follows the star of the talents and the gifts that God has given to her, and she pursues that star, and it brings her to the place of suffering and blood and hurt.

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When you follow the star, you always come to humble places. God says to us, "It is not by might and it is not by power, it is by my spirit." And the Spirit of God is one of self-emptying love shown to us in Jesus. Paul picks up the theme at another place.

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He says, "God chooses what is weak in the world to shame that which is strong." Or again at another place, "God's power is made perfect in weakness." Have you ever thought about the consummate gentleness of God? He chooses Israel. Why? He says in Deuteronomy 7,

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"Because you are the fewest of the people of the earth." He selects Sarah to be the mother of a people, and she is so old and weak she laughs at the thought. He brings his line of Messiahship through Joseph, and Joseph is one who comes to prominence out of slavery and a jail term.

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He chooses to lead his people out of Egypt, Moses, the son of slaves, a wanted criminal, living in obscurity, married to a person of another race, and so stammering in speech that he cannot even address the multitudes. God brings his people into the Promised Land, not with battering rams,

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but with trumpets that blow down Jericho's walls. The first king he chooses is Saul, and Saul describes himself as coming from the least of the tribes and from the least of the families of that tribe. And David, the greatest king that Israel ever knew, is chosen because he is the least of his family,

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his older, stronger, wiser brothers, passed over in God's providence. He always chooses the humble, always the gentle, always the unassuming. And this is supremely so in the Incarnation. Isaiah says that God came amongst us without form or comeliness.

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He did not come as an emperor, but as a carpenter. They tried to make him a king; he turned away. Instead, he taught people lessons by washing dirty feet. And the lessons he taught were about taking up your cross

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and laying aside the wealth which moth and rust consume, and dying in order that you might live, and accepting the slaps that others give to you, and giving everything to everyone who asks of you,

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and being so simple in your faith that you're like a child. Oh, those who are wise in the world's ways don't believe that. And Jesus expected this to be so. "I thank you, my Father," he said, "that thou hast kept these things from the wise

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and given them to little children." But those little children, those babes in the faith, those who have the mind of Christ, know the victories and the exaltations

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that only the children of Christ can know. I learned this last summer from Hans Kung, the great Roman Catholic theologian, that in the year 41 B.C., Virgil, in his fourth Ecologue, predicted that a savior of the world would soon be born.

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And he had reference to Octavius, who was the nephew of Julius Caesar. And when Octavius took the throne of the Roman Empire in 29 B.C., after defeating Antony and Cleopatra, he closed up the temple of Janus, the two-faced god of war,

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and said that he had brought peace to all the earth. And he called himself "the child of the Divine One," which was translated in the eastern provinces "the Son of God." And in 9 B.C., Octavius sent out an announcement of his own birthday.

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And he called the announcement, and we know this from the Prienne inscription and other inscriptions which corroborate it, he called his birthday announcement "the Evangelion," "the Gospel," "the Good News,"

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and promised to all the world peace and joy and salvation. And the early writers of Scripture sat down and, taking up that challenge, called Jesus "the only Son of God." And they announced that his story was the only gospel.

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Those words were not casually chosen. They were setting the gentle, self-emptying, sacrificial love of God over against the power and the might of Caesar. They were saying that God's ways, so vast they cannot be seen,

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so silent they're virtually inaudible, so subtle they cannot be measured, that God's ways, no matter how frail they might be, in the end prevail.

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For prophets preach Christ, not Caesar. And priests lift prayers in the name of Christ, not Caesar. And healers by His Spirit make bodies and minds straight in Christ, not in Caesar.

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And prisoners beg for mercy in the name of Jesus, and not of Caesar. And kings take their thrones, and presidents put their hands, as they take the oath of office, on Bibles, not on the fasces.

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And this is the victory of love. This is the triumph which belongs to those who have the mind of Christ. [bell rings] Please turn your cassette to the other side.

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It is to be ours. Paul says in Galatians, "I groan till Christ is formed in you." He says in Colossians, "Christ in you is the hope of glory." Jesus is recorded as saying in John's Gospel,

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"As I am in my Father, and my Father is in me, so may you be in us." We are to be, you see, like Him. Self-emptying, sacrificing. Carlisle Marnie tells of a tough little kid he used to have in Sunday school class.

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The kid's name was Rusty Dixon. And out of his eight years of life, Rusty Dixon one day delivered himself of this theological affirmation. He said, "I ain't never run into God direct anywhere,

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but I've seen some real Jesuses around, and that's what we're to be, real Jesuses." If you went to Molinare today, you'd find it wasn't like it was when I was a boy. Molinare was a little mining town not far from where I lived,

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and the houses were gray, and the facilities were all outdoors, and the streets were mud. It was a very poor place. The unions had won no victories for the miners then.

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But there was a small general store there that sold marvelous ice cream. And one night my best high school friend and I, John, went in his dad's green and white Oldsmobile to that store. I can still remember how incongruous that car looked in little Molinare.

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As we approached the door to the store, it was the only building in the place that had Christmas lights. All the houses on the hills were gray and drab and without any sign of the season. But there was seated on the cold sidewalk a miner,

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an old miner who'd lost both his legs in the mines. You saw a lot of that in those days. It still costs a great deal in flesh and blood to bring the coal to the service. He had a tin cup in his ungloved hands,

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and we began fingering in our pockets for our cold change. And then just as we approached him, a couple coming out of the store got between him and us. They were each carrying brown bags, big ones like the kind you get at the supermarket. And she was pleading with him.

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She said, "Oh, let's give him everything." And he replied, "Oh, we can't do that. There's so little left." She said, "We've got Christmas for ourselves and for the kids in these bags. We have no other needs."

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He said, "If you give him anything, it'll mean a long walk home because there's not much more than bus fare there." And then he surrendered and said, "Okay." And he put her brown bag into his arms, and then she reached into his pocket

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and brought out a little black purse with silver clips that held it together. Those of you who are older know exactly that to which I refer. And she opened it, and she went over, and turning it upside down, she emptied it into the old man's cup.

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And as she did so, she said, "We're wishing you a Merry Christmas." And I saw the glint of a melted snowflake on the old man's cheek. At least I think it was a snowflake. She'd said, "We have Christmas enough for ourselves and for the kids in these brown bags."

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And I said, "Oh, no. They had Christmas in their hearts." Or take Earl Scott of New York City. It was two weeks before Christmas. He was working in his shop when the telephone rang

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that his five-year-old son had been hit by a car. "Come to the hospital." There was a boy, 15 years old. He already had a juvenile record. He was in a home made full of bitterness and rebellion, mostly because of alcohol.

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And one night there had been a quarrel, a violent quarrel, and he grabbed the car keys and ran out of the house and roared off in the car at 70 miles an hour and never saw the little five-year-old crossing the street.

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And Earl Scott got to the hospital in time to hold his little son in his arms as the youngster died. And the next day, learning that the boy who had hit his child had been caught, Earl Scott went to his attorney and said,

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"I know they'll judge him under juvenile law, but I want everything I can get. I want him put in jail for as long as we can keep him there. For all of his life, if we can do it." Two weeks later, Earl and his wife went to church on Christmas Eve.

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They were not in the mood for Christmas, and the service didn't help. And the preacher talked about love and sacrifice and offering as Jesus. And to neither of them did it mean a thing. But that night when he went home and fell asleep, Earl Scott dreamed a dream.

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And in that dream he saw his son now grown to the age of a young man. And the young man said to him, "Dad, I'm okay. But the one who hit me, he needs your love, Dad. Take him in. Let him be the son you've lost in me."

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And this troubled Earl Scott very much, though he slept that night the first peaceful sleep he'd had. And the next morning he went to the jail, and he met the 15-year-old boy. His name was Al Masters.

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Oh, how hard it was to open his heart and empty out all the hate and anger and revenge that were there. But he did. And he gave Al Masters a job in his shop.

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And he took to taking the boy home. And today Al Masters thinks that Earl Scott's the greatest man who ever lived. And Earl Scott and his wife have a fine son in Al Masters. And Rusty Dixon said, "But I've seen some real Jesuses around."

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This afternoon, as I thought of what I'd say tonight, I wondered what Jesus would say if he stood in this pulpit. I don't think he would say anything to us about inner peace and contentment. This is not the kind of world or the kind of time in which those words are appropriate.

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They would be nothing more than an affirmation of Marx's statement that religion is the opiate of the people. No, I think Jesus would say what he said again and again throughout the centuries. "Take up your cross and follow me.

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Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least, ye have done it unto me. As I am in my Father and my Father is in me, so you be in us." I think he'd call us to the manger. He always used visual aids when he preached, you know.

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The lilies of the field, the kids playing in the marketplace, the vineyard, the farmer sowing the seed. Perhaps if he stood in this place he would say, "Consider, if you will, my servant Nicholas, born of wealthy parents,

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280 A.D. in a small town called Patara in Asia Minor. Lost his parents early by an epidemic, but not before they had given him the gift of faith. And then little Nicholas went to Myra and lived there, lived a life that other people called Bethlehem.

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So full it was of self-offering and the giving of himself. So full of sacrifice and love in the spirit of Jesus. Nicholas lived in the mind of Christ so that when the town needed a bishop, he was elected. He was imprisoned for his faith by the Emperor Diocletian

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and released later by the Emperor Constantine. And many stories of his generosity collected and spread about how he begged for food for the poor, of how he would give girls money so that they would have a dowry in order to get a husband.

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And the story that was most often repeated about how he would don a disguise and go out and give gifts to poor children. He gave away everything that he had and everything that he could gain from others. And at 341 he died.

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His body was later moved to Italy. His remains are there still. The story of Nicholas has spread around the world. There are more churches in the world named after St. Nicholas than any other person in all the history of the church.

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Oh, other people have done things to him. The poet Clement Moore gave him a red nose and ate tiny reindeer. And Thomas Nast, the illustrator, made him big and fat and gave him a red suit with white fur. And others have given him names.

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Belsnickle, Kris Kringle, Santa Claus. But what's important about him is that he lived in the mind of Christ. And because he lived like that, in gentle, self-offering, emptying love, he touched the whole world.

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Make no mistake about it. Life is very hard. There is no place for sentimental optimism in our believing. Sin is ghastly.

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And the plight of the poor is desperate. And moral depravity is at every hand. And selfish indulgence surrounds us every day. But love is still the greatest thing in the world because Jesus is love.

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And service is still the greatest thing in the world because service is the expression of love. And sacrifice is still the greatest thing in the world because sacrifice is the ultimate expression of service.

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And all of these things, this love, this service, this sacrifice, this is the mind of Jesus. The same mind that is to be in us. So the question I think he'd ask us tonight,

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were he, our risen, regnant Lord, to stand here, would be this. Not, "Do you believe in Rusty Dixon or Al Masters or Earl Scott or that miner's wife in Molnar or Saint Nicholas or Santa Claus, call him what you will."

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I think he'd ask instead, "Are you manger people?" I think he'd say, "I don't care whether you believe in Santa Claus. I'd like to know if Santa Claus believes in you." May God bless to you this simple witness in his name.

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Amen. [ends]