Sermons

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The Turn of the Tide
Christmas Eve 2003
Pastor Dan Baumgartner
John 1:14

I love stories. You need to know that, I love stories. The American novelist John Gardner once said there were “only two plots to all of the stories ever told: a stranger came to town, someone went on a journey.”

Tonight, we have listened to the story, to the story, in music, song, and scripture. At least, we’ve listened to how the story begins. Maybe Gardner was right:

A stranger does come to town:

• a small child comes to Bethlehem
• the Son of God becomes the son of the carpenter and his wife
• the God of heaven and earth finds himself a stranger to human beings
  
• He was in the world, and the world came into being through him,
  yet the world did not know him.

A stranger came to town, not so much because he needed a place to go, but because the town is in desperate need, and doesn’t even know it.

Someone goes on a journey:

In fact, lot of people:

• Joseph, Mary…plain, ordinary people
• shepherds…even more plain and more ordinary
• eventually some wisemen…decidedly extraordinary

All go on long journeys, either in miles, or faith or both and by the end of their journeys they are all…Different People.

It’s an amazing story. One of most amazing things about it is that it calls us to find our own story:

Has someone come to my town?
What journey am I on?

I love hearing people’s stories, and by now I’ve heard hundreds of them. They all look different and sound different, but in the end we all arrive, one way or another, at the same intersection. It’s the place where we find that our story intersects with the story, with God’s story.

And so each year we come on December twenty-fourth to this place, and it seems so hallowed, holy and quiet. It seems as though the clock surely stops for a few minutes, and we wonder breathlessly if the story will begin again.

Many of you know C.S. Lewis as a writer, but may not know that he wrote poetry as well. One of his poems is called “The Turn of the Tide.” The poem is about the birth of Christ, two full pages of images of what happened in the world as the Christ child was about to be born in Bethlehem. In a nutshell, what happens is that the world stops. Just stops. Caesar pauses in mid-signature signing his documents of the empire, animals stop in their tracks,

Great galactal lords stood back to back with swords
half-drawn, awaiting the event,
And a whisper among them passed, “Is this perhaps the last
of our story and the glories of our crown?”
…the tide lay motionless at ebb.

Then it happens. Christ is born. The world moves and breathes again, the waves resume their pattern, and the story begins. A stranger has come to town, the God we have turned away from or never even known comes in Jesus Christ to tell us that he is no stranger…and our journeys begin.

Tonight, we are invited to come to the Lord’s table and share in his supper. Here truly is the intersection of our story, and God’s story: the pouring out of God’s mercy and forgiveness in Christ’s death, and resurrection, that we might not be strangers anymore.

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