On not apologizing for Christmas

This past Advent, I preached a sermon series on the women mentioned in Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus—Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, and of course Mary. (If you’re interested, you can find the texts of the series here, starting at the bottom of the page and working up.) It was the second time for that particular series, as I had preached it four years before in Colorado (though of course all the sermons were revised to one degree or another, since I’m a better preacher now than I was then; at least, I hope I am). It didn’t meet with the same degree of acceptance here as it had there, though; that probably shouldn’t have surprised me, since I know well the difference in culture between the small-town Midwest and the West, but it did. This was probably the first time I’ve ever met significant congregational resistance to an entire sermon series, with a number of people pronouncing themselves offended because “the sermons were so explicit” (or so I was told, at least; nobody would tell me who was offended, of course, since then I might actually be able to talk with them about it), and even the suggestion being made that perhaps I should apologize for the series.

I do not apologize for it; in fact, I insist on it, for good theological reasons. For one thing, I do not share the evident presumption of many that any pastoral offense must necessarily be grounds for apology. Indeed, though there are certainly exceptions, I believe that the problem with most American pastors is not offensiveness but inoffensiveness—we fail far less often because we offend people than because we water down the truth and dodge necessary conflict in a determined effort to avoid doing so at any cost. Though I do not compare myself to Jesus (as no one should, except to see just how incredibly far short we fall), I can’t help remembering that we worship a Savior who was frequently, bluntly, and often spectacularly offensive to the respectable people of his day. He was only “gentle Jesus, meek and mild” to the sinners who knew they were sinners in desperate need of grace. To those who thought they were doing just fine, if he ever pulled a punch, I’ve yet to find it.

This is not of course to say, or even to suggest, that offending people is therefore a good thing in and of itself, or that it’s always defensible; far from it. It is, however, to say that there is such a thing as holy offense, and that sometimes the only way to avoid offending people is to avoid preaching the word of God, and particularly the gospel of Jesus Christ. Put another way, if we are going to be faithful representatives of Jesus Christ on this earth, sometimes we’re going to offend people, and sometimes that’s absolutely necessary and important. The only question is, are we offending people for the right reasons?

Of course, even when the answer to that question might be “yes,” it can be at best a qualified “yes,” because our own flaws, limitations, errors in judgment, and of course sin always mar even our most excellent efforts. I have no doubt, for instance, that there were things in those messages that I did not do as I should have. For one thing, I manifestly failed to make clear to the congregation what I was doing with the series, and what my purposes were in preaching it—perhaps in part because, though I could easily have done a better job on the first part, I hadn’t really stopped to clearly articulate my purposes beyond a vague sense as to what I was doing. To make it sufficiently clear to them, I would first have had to do that work for myself.

Which isn’t to say that I didn’t know what I was on about, merely that I hadn’t taken enough time to bring that fully into focus (a fact which no doubt weakened the messages). In the first place, this series was (and is) aimed squarely at the debilitating sentimentality that clings in sticky cotton-candy clouds to our celebration of Christmas and our understanding of the Incarnation. We have this powerful image of Jesus the innocent and helpless, the perfect baby boy, which is certainly all true enough—but we’ve let it grow like kudzu all across the December landscape, choking out our ability to see anything else.

If we take Christmas seriously, this must be in truth a disturbing and unsettling holiday, the first intimation that we worship a God who is profoundly and disquietingly unsafe, not because he isn’t good, but because he utterly defies either our prediction or our control. It’s the first hint that we don’t worship a nice, respectable, moral God, but one who—while, yes, he certainly does proclaim a moral code—refuses to be constrained by any moral code we would consider reasonable (or to allow his commandments to be so constrained, either). It’s the first warning that God will not respect our conventions and our standards, but in fact is on about subverting them. It’s the first indication that reality is not going to conform to our expectations, that there is indeed more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophy—and that in fact, in the last analysis, the fool may know more of how things really work than the wise.

In other words, at the heart of the message of Christmas is an announcement that God is not going to play by our rules or abide by our proprieties and protocols; it is the grand upending of our expectations and the complete upskittling of our comfortable assumptions. It isn’t a Hallmark-card moment in history, but a crashing, rocketing, tearing scandal—and as Matthew shows us, and as I was at some pains to show in that sermon series, that scandal is embedded in the story going all the way back to the early days of Jesus’ family line. It is implicit in the story of Jesus, as it must be, because Jesus comes among us as the ultimate subversive: he must necessarily subvert our expectations of him, because he comes to subvert the governing tragedy of all of human history.

Jesus wasn’t born to be nice, and he wasn’t born to teach us to be nice; respectability and propriety, while they have their place, weren’t what he was about, and he would not be bound by them if they were being used for purposes contrary to his own. The stories of Jesus’ ancestresses show us clearly that God can work to carry out his plan even through people whose morality is uncertain and whose grasp on his character is sketchy at best, and that he can turn even deeds which scandalize the upright, done by those who are outside the pale, into elements of his glorious work—and if we do not understand this, then we cannot understand why Jesus was born to an unwed mother among the common people, why he was feared and loathed by the most religious people of his day, or why they contrived to have him killed.

Indeed, if we do not understand this, then we cannot understand why he died, much less why he rose again, for this is the reality and the mystery of redemption. Redemption isn’t for the worthy—whether for those we consider worthy, or those who consider themselves worthy—it’s for those who know and confess themselves unworthy. Which fact is, inevitably, offensive to many who are unwilling to do so, including many whose unwillingness is rooted in their perception of themselves as “nice Christian people.” Which is, in the end, why these are the stories the church needs to hear, if we’re to be true followers of the Christ whose name we claim.