They say that "seeing is believing". Well, that depends. That depends on whether you can trust your eyesight. And it depends on whether you have decided to see what is really there or just what you think is there.
"Seeing is believing." It depends on whether you can trust your eyesight. My mother-in-law is suffering from macular degeneration; that means that a small structure in the eyes has declined and her vision is often blurred. She says that one of the greatest frustrations she has is that she cannot read people's faces; she can hear what you are saying, but if you are across the room, she cannot see your face well enough to read your expression. And so she does not feel she really knows what you are saying, even though she can hear the words perfectly. "Seeing is believing" only if you can trust your eyesight to read what is happening.
And seeing is believing, too, only if you see what is really there and not what you think will be there. Optical illusions occur because our minds fill in things that are not really there.
A couple of weeks ago my wife was using a game with some of her students. It was a little like a crossword puzzle: you were supposed to guess a variety of Christmas words from various clues. One of the clues seemed to be nothing more than a printout of the alphabet. What Christmas word would that suggest? What Christmas word would you get from a clue that just read "abcdefghijkmnopqrstuvwxyz"? Did anybody get it? "No L". Noel, No "L", abcdefghijk … m. But the mind tends to fill in what the eye expects to see, or the ear expects to hear.
"Seeing is believing" is true only if you choose to see what is really there, not what you expected to see.
As the apostle Peter neared the end of his life and career, he began to fear that some of Christians were about to lose sight of reality. He began to sense that their central, keystone commitment, their core confession was about to get lost. Peter began to worry that, of all things, these folks were losing sight of who Jesus Christ is.
In the passage I've read for you, Peter speaks about people being "blind" and "shortsighted". He is afraid they will forget some key realities. And so Peter, in a pungent phrase, calls Christians to rivet their attention on exactly who Jesus Christ is and what He is like. Peter insists that when he taught them about Christ, he was teaching no myth, nor was he promoting an optical illusion. Peter insists, on the contrary, that he and his fellow believers were "eyewitnesses of majesty".
Hear the key text again: "For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. "
"Eyewitnesses of majesty" The trouble is that eyewitnesses don’t always see everything there is to see; the trouble is, too, that even eyewitnesses sometimes see only what they expect to see.
I
Beneath the tinsel and the golden glow of Christmas there is one and only one central message, and that is Incarnation, enfleshment. The central fact of Christmas is that the word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld, we saw, His glory.
And yet, you see, even that central fact, that core confession, gets lost, covered over in the mad scramble to do all of the things Christmas was never designed for. And, as always, the issue is what we choose to see, what we expect to see.
I do not intend this morning to be the Grinch that stole Christmas, but I do have to wonder with you what has happened to the peculiar paradox of Christmas. Is it possible that even believers become blind and shortsighted about who this Jesus really is and what He means? Have we too forgotten what we are looking for?
For example, we seem to have decided that we have to celebrate Christmas worrying about whether we have properly impressed those we love and who love us. Would our spouses and children love us any the less if we did not spend hundreds of dollars to give them things they do not need and have decided they want only because some TV commercial tells them to want it? Where is Jesus in all of that? How does that help us become eyewitnesses of his majesty?
Again, we seem as a nation to have determined that the purpose of Christmas is to stimulate a sagging economy. When the business columns of the newspapers are full of articles describing the tactics of the retailers, who hope to reap as much as 40% of their sales during this season; and when at the same time, charities and churches and mission agencies are starving for funds to do their work …when that happens, we have to wonder, has somebody forgotten that we are eyewitnesses of His majesty? Have we lost sight of the one central truth, the core confession: that Jesus the Christ is God come in human wrappings? You and I seem to prefer to keep the wrappings and throw away the gift!
Last week in Louisville I saw my former pastor, now retired. I remember that every year he used to urge us to give to foreign missions at least as much as we spent for our most expensive Christmas present. Most of us, I suspect, just smiled indulgently and forgot all about it, throwing away the prize and keeping the wrappings!
You know they say that the storekeepers are the only ones who get religion at Christmas time! Their favorite hymn becomes, "What a Friend We Have in Jesus!"
But Peter says that we are eyewitnesses of majesty. The problem is that, eyewitnesses or not, we haven't seen it for what it is. We've seen only what we have wanted to see.
So let me one more time, try to help you become an eyewitness to his majesty. Let me help you on this Christmas to see, really see, who He is and what He is about.
II
We are eyewitnesses of the majesty of the eternal God becoming confined to space and time. Incredible as it seems, when we see Jesus, we are seeing the infinite become finite. We are seeing the one who is Alpha and Omega, who is and who was and who is to come, squeezed into one tiny human body, confined to three and thirty years of life, all of it lived out in an obscure corner of the planet. It would be easy to miss that. It would be easy to forget that that is his majesty and his glory; it looks so ordinary. But do not forget that in seeing the infinite become finite we are eyewitnesses of his majesty, not just His ordinariness but His majesty.
We are eyewitnesses of the majesty of all-embracing wisdom becoming incomplete and vulnerable. We are eyewitnesses, when we choose to see Jesus as He really is, of one whose knowledge is complete and whose understanding is unsearchable, now becoming a blank page. An infant, needing an education, needing to grow, needing to be disciplined. It would be easy to forget that this is his majesty and his glory; it looks so tentative and so incomplete. But do not forget that in seeing the wisdom of God becoming subject to the ignorance of humanity, we are eyewitnesses of his greatness, his majesty.
Indeed, we are eyewitnesses of the majesty of life becoming subject to death, when we see and remember the whole story. We are not only seeing the infinite become finite, having to cope with the limitations of daily life; we are not only seeing the complete become incomplete, having to struggle with the same questions and concerns that preoccupy us; we are also watching life become subject to death, we are watching as the giver of life subjects Himself to the hammer-blows of cruel men. And a cross becomes a part of the reality even of Christmas. It would be easy indeed to forget that this is a part of his majesty; it looks so terrible, so bloody, so very out of place. But I tell you that there is no moment in his life when His majesty was more visible if you have eyes to see it than when his life hung in the balance. Eyewitnesses of his majesty, the cross his throne.
I am trying to say to you this morning that his majesty and his glory are always clouded and cloaked in the indignities which he had to suffer. If you do not choose to see Him for who and what He truly is, you will miss it, because His glory is shrouded, His majesty is cloaked, the word is in flesh.
But if you do see that, if you do know that, then you are today "eyewitnesses of majesty"
III
I conclude today, then, not only by echoing Peter and his concern that we not forget who this Jesus is, but also by grasping the vision of another eyewitness, the seer John on the Isle of Patmos.
John sang in the cadences of the Book of Revelation, '"I am the Alpha and the Omega', says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty … 'Write what you see … and send it to the churches. '" John is telling us that the church needs a message about the majesty of the Alpha and Onega who has come in such an unlikely disguise.
Remember now my basic premise for today: that we see what we choose to see; and that if we are not careful we will not see the majesty of Christ, because that majesty is cloaked and shrouded in human wrappings. Remember that I've said that the issue is that at Christmas we keep the wrappings and overlook the prize inside; the issue is that we are eyewitnesses of his majesty but are likely to miss it.
So, you eyewitnesses, look with me in the hospitals and children's agencies and foster care homes. See there boarder babies, abandoned infants, abused children, some without either parent, a whole lot of them without active fathers. We are tempted to write them off as a part of a permanent underclass, without any hope or promise. We are tempted to wonder if it would not have been better for them to have been aborted. But then, eyewitnesses, choose to see an announcement to an unwed mother that her child will become the savior of the world, and remember that in these little ones, however fragile and puny, the future of God's kingdom is cloaked. And there you are eyewitnesses of his majesty. Write what you really see, church, when you see the children, and take it as a message for you this Christmas.
You eyewitnesses, look at family life and its brokenness. See husbands and wives split apart by economic circumstances, see marriages pushed beyond the limit by the stresses and demands we place on one another. The temptation is to write off family life, the temptation is to shrug a cynical shoulder and say, "Well, let them divorce, let them separate. Easy come, easy go." But then, eyewitnesses, choose to see a young couple driven by taxes to David's royal city, pushed to Egypt by Herod's royal rage, but doing what they had to do committed to one another, and you begin to see that even in the tensions and heartaches of family life, there is the majesty of Christ. You are eyewitnesses of His redeeming majesty. Write what you see, church, when you see conflicted families, and take it as a message for this Christmas.
You eyewitnesses, look at the young people of this community. We are afraid of them, some of us. We think that in their exuberance and in their language they have an attitude, that they don't respect us, that they probably are out to do us some harm or cause us grief. The temptation is for some of us to stay as far away from young people as possible. They make us uncomfortable. We are like the mother I know who invariably refers to her children as "the monsters". Or like the mother of one of my old acquaintances who re-introduced herself to me this past week in Louisville, "You remember me. I am the mother of the worst kid in the world". Afraid of young people.
But then, eyewitnesses, remember a young man standing in the Temple, with an attitude, asking impertinent questions and making Mary and Joseph thoroughly upset. And see there, masked in the irritating style that only a pre-teen boy can pull off, the very majesty of God, growing and learning with us. You are eyewitnesses of the majesty of learning. Write down what you see, church, when you see our youth, and take that as a message this Christmas.
Last but not least, you eyewitnesses, look into the streets and into the dismal places; look into the shelters and under the bridge abutments; look down the cold, gray corridors of the jails and the smelly wards of the hospices. What do you see there? Do you see human misery, degradation? Do you see human garbage which ought to be thrown away and forgotten about?
Or is it possible, is it just barely possible, that there you may see instead the majesty of the King of kings? Is it possible that instead of no-good bums you might see one who had no place to lay his head, yet for whom all the earth is but a footstool?
Is it possible that instead of mere jailbirds you might see one despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, but wounded for our transgressions and bruised because of our iniquities? Write it down, church, write what you see when you see the outcasts of our day, and take it as a message for Christmas.
The message of Christmas is that every man and every woman on this earth can be redeemed; the message of Christmas is that our God counts all His creatures in love; the good news of Christmas is that He will go to any length, bear any burden, pay any price, to bring us home. For us the word became flesh; for us the infinite finite; for us the all-knowing became incomplete; for us the giver of life even embraced death.
And we beheld his glory, the glory as of the Father, full of grace and truth; we are eyewitnesses, if we choose to see it, eyewitnesses of His majesty.
