“Godfather”
Pr. David Hewitt - Jan. 2 & 3, 2010
Here it is, January 3rd: according to Christmas tradition, we are in the very heart of the Christmas season yet, in the culture around us, is very much after – long after – the end of the Christmas season. For goodness sakes, it’s even after New Year’s Day!
I have grown up living with our society’s view of Christmas, and so I, too, am less likely to want to hear a Christmas carol after December 25th, after we’ve all opened our Christmas gifts. Why is this? Well, one might put it this way: the all-important “money” aspect of the Christmas holiday is gone, opened and put away; and after that, what is left? You see, to our society around us, there are no 12 days of Christmas; instead, there are at least 55 days of Christmas – from November 1st until December 25th.
The fact that elements of the Church still celebrate the 12 days is to me a kind of silent protest worthy of the prophets of olden days – and, if we see it right, a real statement about what the “Christ” part of Christmas is really all about, not only at Christmas, but on the other 364 days out of every year.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as some of you know, was a German Lutheran pastor and theologian who joined in a plot against Hitler and the Nazi government at the height of World War Two. He was captured and executed by the Nazis in the closing days of that war. Before he died, he wrote some truly spiritual and insightful things about Christmas, which in turn, I hope, will tell us a lot about what our faith is really consists of.
He wrote, “For those who are great and powerful in this world, there are two places where their courage fails them, which terrify them to the very depth of their souls, and which they dearly avoid. These are the manger and the cross of Jesus Christ.” How wonderful it is that the manger and the cross were both made of the same material – wood! – so that we could connect the two in our hearts and minds. For Jesus was just as vulnerable as a newborn baby in a manger as He was dangling in torment and pain from a cross. And it is that very vulnerability that the powerful of this world refuse to show. Take, for example, Bonhoeffer’s enemy, Adolf Hitler. He once said, “Those who live, let them fight, and those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live.” It is the man or woman who sees no point to peace – who sees, as Hitler did, that one should constantly struggle to get one’s own way – it is those people who do not want to be truly loving and truly vulnerable to anyone else around them. Certainly Hitler – and many others, if they were as honest about their intentions as he was – have never understood Jesus’ surrender to death on a cross.
But it is not just those powerful people, those who cling to their power, who act this way. We, too – tempted, for instance, in the Christmas time to spend a lot to prove our love for others – are rather afraid to become vulnerable; in our sinful view of life, we are often afraid to be put in a position where control of the destiny of our lives is put into another person’s hands. Yet, in the manger and on the cross, God puts Himself in the hands of humans. He dares to come down and be among us where we humans can hit Him and hurt Him badly.
St. John received this strange good news of God’s loving vulnerability as he wrote his gospel. The Apostle John trumpets the amazing truth to you and me today that Jesus is not just the Son of God who was a perfectly sinless human…that Jesus is not just the earthly Messiah prophesied of old…that Jesus is not just the One who died for our sins and rose again to eternal life…no, not just all of that; St. John, guided by the Holy Spirit, also makes the extremely audacious claim that Jesus lived long before He came down to earth as a baby…that Jesus is the Word of God who helped to create the whole universe…and that, most incredibly, Jesus is “the Word made flesh who dwelt among us”…that, since the Word is God, then Jesus is God – God the Son – and that – and I quote from today’s Gospel, “No one has ever seen God. It is God the Only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made Him known.” (read John 1:1-18)
That we cannot see “God” – and by “God,” John means “God the Father” – is very important for us to realize. Since we cannot see God, nor feel God, nor smell, hear, or taste God – not naturally, not without God’s help – since we cannot “experience” God the Father directly, the way we humans view God the Father and Creator can be different – VERY DIFFERENT! – from each other. And, as Luther was so keen to point out, our view of God really is a big clue to what we ourselves feel is important about life. Our view of what’s most important about God leads us to decide what’s most important about life. Let me use Hitler again as an example. He believed there was a God, and he believed God worked in the world a certain way, and Hitler tried to live the same way. “I believe today,” he once said, “that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator.” But Hitler’s God was not Jesus’ God. Hitler believed God, being cruel, had made a cruel world; Hitler believed therefore that nature was cruel, and so we should be cruel, too. That’s why he once said, “I do not see why man should not be as cruel as nature.” From that point of view Hitler justified “the survival only of the fittest,” and therefore brought about the sterilization of those who were mentally handicapped in even the slightest way…because the highest value in Hitler’s world – and we can all act like little Hitlers – is not love for the weak and vulnerable, the outcast and the losers in life – but rather that might makes right; that it is not love but power that is all important.
Luther himself understood the Roman Church of his day as too closely concerned with power and control among the kings and queens of Europe. The God that Luther saw around him in Rome was not the plain God of the stable, of the little town of Nazareth in the out of the way place called Galilee, not the plain God of Jesus the poor carpenter, of Peter the fisherman, of Paul the murderer, of Mary Magdalene – the woman plagued with seven kinds of sinfulness. What Luther saw instead at the Vatican was the biggest cathedral ever, in the process of being built through the contributions of many coins forced out of people’s pockets by stoking their fears for the lengths of the torments of Grandpa Karl or Grandma Maria in purgatory. What Luther saw instead of the God of Jesus Christ was a God celebrated with expensive silver and gold, so that the altar would look as beautiful as a grand sunset.
But Luther saw a different God working in the manger and the cross. He once proclaimed, “This is clear: he who does not know Christ does not know the God that is hidden in suffering. Therefore that person prefers great works to suffering, prefers glory to the cross, [and] prefers strength to weakness…
These are the people whom the apostle calls ‘enemies of the cross of Christ’ [Philippians 3:18], for they hate the cross and suffering and love works and the glory of works….God can only be found in suffering and the cross.”
Phew! That’s a load to bear, isn’t it? But our anti-Nazi pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, understood the gospel. He knew that since God became flesh in Jesus and dwelt among us, he would, in the 1930s, leave the safety of America and go back to the dangers of Nazi Germany; he would become, again, a German among Germans. He would, by dwelling in the flesh among his own people, help to save them, even at the risk of his life. He, like St. Paul once wrote, by becoming weak, would become strong – strong in God’s love. He once wrote, in his writings about the manger and the cross, that “There, where our understanding is outraged, where our nature rebels, where our piety fearfully keeps its distance – there, precisely there, is where God loves to be.”
So, to use a more modern way of putting it, we should ask ourselves: What kind of “Godfather” do we believe in? During the Last Supper Philip, one of the disciples, asked Jesus out of frustration, “Show us the Father!” He and the other disciples wanted Jesus to do something spectacular to fully convince themselves and others that Jesus was indeed the Messiah. Jesus responds, “Whoever has seen Me has seen the Father.” (John 14:8-9) Jesus is telling Philip – and you, and me, and everybody who ever lived – that God the Father desires to show love rather than power and rule from Above; that God prefers touching lepers to heal them rather than remain distant in His purity; that God-in-Jesus prefers, during a meal, to allow a very sinful woman to wash His feet with her tears, tempting His Pharisee host, in his spiritual blindness, to think that this God-in-Jesus is not even a holy man, let alone God Himself. But God-in-Jesus tells that Pharisee that this woman has treated Him better than this so-called religious man did, concluding, “Her sins, which were many, have been forgiven; that’s why she has shown great love.” It’s in her great humility that God’s love shines through – through her to others around her.
Do we believe in that Godfather, or the Godfather of the famous movies? The Godfather of the Gospels is very weak, is born in some squalor, and is later arrested and tortured, dying on a cross. The Godfather of the movies makes offers that can’t be refused, controlling people like a puppeteer by threatening death if his directives are not followed.
In the Godfather movies, after a terrible amount of revenge and bloodshed, bloodshed even against his own family, the younger Godfather, the son, Michael, asks his mama a very thoughtful question. “Tell me something, mama,” he asks. “What did Papa think – deep in his heart? He was being strong – strong for his family. But by being strong for his family – could he – lose it?” (Lose his family.) She denies that it is possible to lose family, to lose love, through power, through what Michael Corleone calls “strength.” But it is possible. In fact, after Mama dies, Michael, unforgiving to the end, has his brother Fredo executed for a betrayal that occurred many years earlier. We later find Michael, at the end of the second Godfather movie, alone, without love, without joy.
Thank the Lord that on this, the tenth day of Christmas, we worship a different kind of Godfather – the kind that forgives, that dies for us, that rises again in our lives even after our failures to give us new hope, new joy, and new life – the kind of joyful life of humility that we are called to share with others. As Bonhoeffer wrote, “A sort of joy exists that knows nothing at all of the heart’s pain, anguish, and dread; it does not last. It can only numb a person for the moment. The joy of God has gone through the poverty of the manger and the agony of the cross; that is why it is invincible, irrefutable.” God’s love is such that the worst the world can throw at it cannot defeat it. That is why Paul says that “nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.” Luther once had Christ say, in a Christmas hymn he wrote, the following: “From heav’n above to earth I come, to bear good news to ev’ry home!” In order to come to earth, Paul says that Christ had to “empty Himself” (Phil. 2:7).
Do you want a piece of that “invincible, irrefultable” joy in your life? Well, then, follow Paul’s advice: “Be imitators of God, as His beloved children.” (Eph. 5:1) Let us empty ourselves for others, just as God – the Father and the Son – have emptied themselves for us and our eternal salvation!
For me personally, living with that “invincible, irrefutable Joy” in my life starts with seeing the world the way God Himself sees it – which makes me see my life in a new way. I leave you with a little example. There are many wonderful blessings that occurred to me over this Christmas season. But if you were to ask me what my highlight is, in the light of the Gospel, it is this: that when we visited one of the area nursing homes as carolers a few weeks ago, we sang to a very old, very weak-looking man. He seemed near death. His legs were exposed, and they were covered with ugly sores. He could only whisper thanks to us after every song, but I will always remember how his eyes glowed as we sang. He knew he presented what some might call a horrible sight to us. He knew and couldn’t do anything about it. And yet we all felt blessed by his laser-beam attention to our singing; his light was not hidden under a bushel, but overcame the sight of his sores to shine in our hearts “full on.” It was one more occasion where John was right about Christ when he said, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” I’ve been visiting that old man ever since. Amen.
