God told us through the
Hebrew prophet Amos, “Surely the Lord God does nothing
unless He reveals His secret counsel To His servants the prophets."(Amos
3:7)
Now, before we move
further into this message on this last Sunday of Advent, let me pause a moment
and focus our attention on that point: God does NOTHING unless He first reveals
His secret counsel to His servants the prophets. And WHY is that? Why does God
first reveal Himself to humanity BEFORE He acts? I would think one reason is, as
the Lord Jesus said to His disciples, (John 14:29) “Now I have told you
before it happens, so that when it happens, you may believe.”
So that we might
believe.
And so, some 700 years
before the birth of the eternal Son of God in that little town south of
Jerusalem, God told humanity through the prophet Isaiah, “Behold, a virgin
will be with child and bear a son, and she will call His
name Immanuel. (Isaiah 7:14). Many of you remember the name,
Immanuel, means “God [is] with us.”
A little later in the
same prophecy, the Holy Spirit told us of the Child: “For to us a child
is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And
he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince
of Peace.
Peace. That’s what I
want to focus our attention on this fourth Sunday of Advent. Luke writes of the
night Jesus was born: “And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of
the heavenly host, praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest
heaven, and on earth peace . . .” (Luke 2:13-14)
Speaking of that Holy
Night, millions – perhaps billions of people, even those who have never set
foot in a church, know the song, Silent Night, Holy Night – if not the lyrics,
then certainly the melody.
Silent night, holy
night/All is calm and all is bright/'Round yon virgin Mother and Child/Holy
infant so tender and mild/Sleep in heavenly peace/Sleep in heavenly peace
Silent night, holy
night/Shepherds quake at the sight/Glories stream from heaven afar/Heavenly
hosts sing out "Alleluia"/Christ the Savior is born/Christ the Savior
is born.
The words of this
beloved Christmas song were penned in 1816 by a young Austrian priest, not long
after the Napoleonic wars had wreaked their horrific toll of death and
destruction on more than five million men, women, and children. The inspiration
for the song occurred to Fr. Mohr as he walked one evening along a path
overlooking a quiet, snow-laden town.
Nearly 100 years later,
in 1914, that song stirred the spirits of approximately 100,000 cold, tired,
and frightened soldiers scattered across the Western Front during the first World
War. And indeed, the story of that 1914 Christmas Eve reads more like a
miraculous event than a chance happening.
That Christmas Eve was
a particularly frigid, bloody, and deadly for the soldiers along the Western
Front. But, inexplicably, on Christmas Eve Allied and German troops
warily climbed out of their trenches and guardedly walked toward each other
across ‘No Man’s Land.” The frozen corpses of soldiers from both sides littered
the ghastly landscape.
Most accounts report
the truce began when the Allied soldiers heard the Germans singing in their
trenches, ‘Stille Nacht’. Although the Allies didn’t understand the words, the
melody of Silent Night was unmistakable. Before long, the
Allied troops joined in song from their own trenches.
One soldier wrote about
that night this way: “First the Germans would sing one of their carols and
then we would sing one of ours. [When we] started up ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful’
the Germans immediately joined in singing the same hymn to the Latin words
Adeste Fideles. And I thought, well, this is really a most extraordinary thing –
two nations both singing the same carol in the middle of a war.”
Extraordinary? I call
it nothing less than miraculous. To my knowledge, nothing like it ever occurred
before that time, or since that time – when mortal enemies who only hours
earlier were slaughtering each other, were now taken up with the Spirit of Christ
on Christmas Eve. And they came out of their holes of hell, and shared peace
with each other.
They shared photos of
their families. They gave each other food they’d prepared in their trenches for
Christmas. Some accounts tell of impromptu soccer games that sprang up here and
there between the two armies.
In many places along
the Western Front, ‘No Man’s Land’ was often just 30 or 40 yards wide. Allied
and German troops were sometimes so close they could hear each other talking,
and even smell their cooking. In other words, enemy troops could not help but
recognize the common humanity of one another – which is probably why the
commander of the British Second Corps wrote: “Troops in trenches in
close proximity to the enemy slide very easily, if permitted to do so, into a
‘live and let live’ theory of life.”
Wow. Wouldn’t that have
been a terrible thing – to live and let live.
The commander was
right. Several years later a former British soldier said that if both armies
had been left to themselves, “There would never have been another shot
fired.”
Of course, not everyone
felt that way. One young German corporal in one of those trenches rebuked his
fellow soldiers, declaring, “Such a thing should not happen in wartime.
Have you no German sense of honor?”
The corporal’s name was
Adolf Hitler.
So, what is the point
of my message about that Christmas Eve more than 100 years ago in a place that
resembled hell more than it did earth?
Even today in 2024, the
Holy Spirit, hovering over our homes, our apartments, our Christmas gatherings
this Christmas, the Holy Spirit can infuse His supernatural presence into the
hearts of those who know and love what happened under that silent night over
the little town of Bethlehem 2000 years ago.
Every year and through
the year, most of us – if not all of us – live in life’s trenches where
conflicts and fears swirl around us without letting up. Some face daily and
desperate struggles with depression or chronic pain, or cancers, or overdue
bills. Some are nearly consumed by hatred and anger and frustration. Many live
with a morbid and consuming fear of death. Others live with a fear of living.
But then, once a year, somehow and very mysteriously, a supernatural peace
tries to make its way across the wasteland of our lives. We come out of our
trenches for a short time, and we try to let Christmas peace into our lives.
Twinkling lights adorn our homes. We listen to Christmas carols on radio. We
lovingly wrap brightly colored gifts to place under trees. We even smile at
strangers and wish them a ‘Merry Christmas.’
But then, as it always happens, the enemy of our souls, like little Adolf
Hitlers, calls us back to those trenches. The so-called ‘Spirit of Christmas’
fades from our faces and our hearts, and for the next 364 days life remains
stuck in the frigid, bloody, and incessant battle in our personal trenches.
During the terrible
decade of the 1960s, America was embroiled in a bloody no-win war in Vietnam.
Young people, and likely a few older ones – especially parents who lost their
child in the rice paddies of those Vietnamese jungles – they asked, “What
if they gave a war and nobody came?”
As I researched that 1914 Christmas Eve Truce, I read reports of soldiers in
those trenches who wondered that same thing. “What if we stop fighting?
What if we stop doing what the politicians and the generals tell us to do? What
if they gave us a war and nobody came?”
And we can – and SHOULD – ask the same question during the 364 days after
Christmas: What if we don’t participate in the hatred and the violence and the
anger and the fear? What if we extend the Christmas truce to our individual
trenches beyond Christmas day and into the new year – and then into Easter, and
then into the summer – and back around into the fall and then Christmas next
year?
But how can we do that? How can we permit the Holy Spirit, who gave us
Christmas in the first place, how can we keep Him in our own hearts, and then
in our homes, and then bring that peace to our relationships with our neighbors
and with strangers?
At the risk of sounding
wearingly trite and boringly redundant, let me remind you what is God’s answer
to that question, “How can we do it?” God’s answer is this: “WE can’t.
But He CAN.”
Why do we think King
David prayed: “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast
spirit within me. . . . Restore to me the joy of Your salvation and
sustain me with a willing spirit” (Psalm 51:10-12)? David knew, as we need to know, that in our
own strength and abilities, we are as unable to let peace reign in our hearts
as we are unable to lift this building with our pinky. The Lord Jesus was not
joking when He said: “[A]part from Me you can do nothing.” (John
15)
Although we are born
again and the Holy Spirit lives in each believer, our Old Nature is still
active. And anyone who thinks it is not a moment-by-moment battle to keep that
old nature under wraps is fooling only himself or herself.
You remember what the
godly St. Paul lamented in the latter part of Romans 7: “For what I am
doing, I do not understand; for I am not practicing what I
would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate . . .
For the good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I
do not want . . .I find then the principle that evil is present in
me, the one who wants to do good. For I joyfully concur with the law of
God in the inner man, but I see a different law in the
members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a
prisoner of the law of sin which is in my members. Wretched man that
I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death?”
Hear me, please. Our
old nature is alive and well, and it wants to drag us back into our hellish
trenches from which Jesus rescued us. For good reason, the Holy Spirit inspired
Isaiah to tell us “[God] will keep him in perfect peace,
whose mind is stayed on [Him].” (Isaiah 26:3).
Did you catch that? “[God] will
keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on
[Him]”
In other words, peace
of heart reigns when Christ reigns in our hearts. And just as we cannot expect
health to reign in our bodies if we drink a daily dose of poison, we cannot
expect God’s peace to reign in our hearts if we let our minds imbibe the
worldly spirit of anger and frustration and hatred and deceit that is all
around us – and especially in the media.
Some of you may be
familiar with the old Cherokee legend. I’ve referred to it in the past. An old
Cherokee, teaching his grandson about life, tells him, “A fight is going on
inside us. It is a terrible fight, and it is between two wolves. One is evil –
he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt,
resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.”
“The other wolf is good
– he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence,
empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on
inside you – and inside every other person, too.”
The grandson thought
about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?”
The old Cherokee simply
replied, “The one you feed.”
God tells us that the
peace of Christ is available to us, but we have to LET that peace of Christ
rule in our hearts. And to do that, along with prayer and reflecting on God’s
word, it is also most helpful if we starve the bad wolf within us and FEED our
spirits with things that are godly.
Do we really need to
spend 30 minutes or more every day with CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, or other media
sites? Wouldn’t our time be better spent listening to a sermon on television or
radio; Or reading the Bible or a spiritually nourishing book? Wouldn’t our time
be better spend memorizing a Bible verse from time to time?
We are now in the
middle of the Christmas season. For some, this year in particular was a
difficult one, shrouded by illness, by the death of loved ones, by financial
difficulties . . . the list is long for
some of us.
But the Holy Spirit can
still draw us from our trenches to experience what life can truly be like – if only
for a day – what life in Christ can really be like if we refuse to bite and
devour one another. And if we can do it for a day, then why not extend it to
the next day? And the next? And the next?
Let’s ask the Holy
Spirit today, and tomorrow, and the next day, and the next to please, by His
much-needed mercy, help us to determine every day to NOT go back into the
trenches of anger and fear and hatred and depression. Let us pray each day for
His utterly essential help that we not feed the bad wolf, but instead to every
day strive with His supernatural help to feed the good one. Only then, and only
with His help, will anyone be able to extend the peace of Christmas throughout
2025.
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