How not to preach at Christmas part 2
A couple of weeks ago, I posted on one of the ways that sermons can go off target at Christmas. In an effort to preach relevant sermons, preachers sometimes miss the theocentric purpose of the passage.
In this post, I want to look at the second way that many Christmas sermons go anthropocentric. Warning: this one is controversial. Sometimes, especially at Christmas, we preach exemplary or “be like” messages that make a biblical character, apart from God, the focus of the message.
a couple of years ago i went to a few christmas services across the UK (visiting family/friends)… first we were told that the christmas story was all about Mary… then at the next one that it’s all about Joseph…. felt like standing up to shout, but I’m British and we don’t do that.
I’m not saying that the biblical characters don’t have virtues, or that we shouldn’t learn from their lives. I am arguing, however, that the biblical characters aren’t the hero of the text. God is. The Christmas passages are not about the greatness of Joseph, Mary, the Magi, or Zechariah. The focus is about God. The Christmas story is a pivotal moment within redemptive history. Who would think that God would become one of us in order to save us? That, not the virtues of the other characters, is the main focus of the story.
You can still, of course, preach about Mary and Joseph and the other characters. But in doing so we must never lose sight of the fact that God has acted, and that we at best respond to what he is doing, and when we respond it is only because he has given us the grace to do so. God is always the hero of every passage.
December 12th, 2006 at 2:11 pm
I read an example of a “don’t be like this” message in John MacArthur’s book ‘God With Us: The Miracle of Christmas.’ Chapter five is on the people who missed Christmas, and he uses the various reactions of the Innkeeper (preoccupation), Herod (jealous fear), the chief priests and scribes (indifference), the inhabitants of Jerusalem (hollow religion), the Romans (paganism and idolatry), the people of Nazareth (over-familiarity) as negative examples of how we ought not respond. To be fair this is a book, though I’ve heard him preach this as a sermon on WDCX. It makes for a cool topical study and I used it last year for a girl’s bible study.
I guess it’s not wrong to do it because Paul seems to invite this approach by leaving behind Israel as a negative illustration for the Corinthian church in 1 Cor. 10. What do you think? Is Paul modeling? Though come to think of it in the case of the innkeeper, for example, he or she is not even mentioned at all in the text let alone connected with the gospel writer’s intent for writing. If anything maybe it was a positive and generous act to give them a room in the barn or cave or whatever. So maybe a topical-type lesson like this is cool but should be used more sparingly and always spun theocentrically through the back door. If God is always the hero then in terms of negative examples like these they should be preached satan-centrically (first step) in order to expose the originator of disbelief as the arch-enemy of Almighty God and his greater purposes (second step).
December 15th, 2006 at 9:28 am
Trish,
Thanks for the comment. I think there are times that Scripture does use people as positive and negative examples, and it’s okay to follow their lead in these cases. Even then, the focus is not usually on the people’s innate goodness, but on the grace that enabled them to obey God.
As Bryan Chappell says, it’s not that “be like” messages are wrong; they are just wrong by themselves. They always need to be tied to the Gospel.