Scandalous Love *

Christmas Is Not Your Birthday – Scandalous Love *
Sycamore Creek Church
Tom Arthur
December 22/23, 2013

Merry Christmas Friends!  Christmas is for dysfunctional family love, isn’t it?  I mean, come on, we’ve all got a cousin Eddy in our families.  Our lives and our families are a mess.  My own family story includes adoption, adultery, divorce, porn addiction, suicide attempts, running away (multiple times), juvenile detention, jail, prison, drugs, alcoholism, addictions, coming out of the closet (and the whole gamut of responses), bankruptcy, anxiety, denial, poor health decisions, smoking, overeating, diabetes, Child Protective Services, power struggles, greed, covetousness, and judgmentalism (my own personal favorite given that I always wanted a perfect family!), and a whole lot of attempts (some successful and some not) at mercy, grace, and love.

Some of us are cousin Eddy!  I’ve got to admit it.  I’ve played the role before.  At one of our first Christmases after getting married, I was at Sarah’s parents’ house.  They do great damage to the traditional magical Christmas morning by actually showering and eating breakfast before getting to open presents.  Sarah’s mom goes to great lengths to set out a stunning table for Christmas.  She’s got the family heirloom silver with engraved family initials.  Then there’s the super nice china.  Beautiful candles.  Everything!  And it’s all sitting on top of an amazing embroidered heirloom table cloth and napkins.  So we’re all sitting there having eaten our breakfast, and I’ve never had to wait this long in my life to open presents.  I’m getting antsy.  So I start fidgeting with whatever is around me.  For some reason, or perhaps because for no reason at all because my brain is beginning to shut down, I begin fidgeting with those beautiful red candles.  Before I know what’s happened the candle is knocked over and red wax splashes across that beautiful embroidered heirloom table cloth.  I am cousin Eddy.  I wasn’t alone though.  Several years later, Sarah’s sister got married and our new brother-in-law did the SAME EXACT THING!  We’re all cousin Eddy at some point or another.

Christmas is the season for messy families.  Our own church has families struggling.  A church is just a community of broken and wounded people seeking to share with one another and anyone who will listen where they’re finding medicine for the soul.  When we find that medicine, our dysfunction spills over into our relationship with God.  Christmas becomes a season where we see God’s scandalous love for us!  How could anybody love cousin Eddy?  God does.

Hosea – a Crazy Marriage
There’s a crazy insane story about God’s love in the book of Hosea in the Old Testament.  Hosea was one of God’s prophets, and one day God told Hosea to do something unthinkable:

Then the Lord said to me, “Go and love your wife again, even though she commits adultery with another lover. This will illustrate that the Lord still loves Israel, even though the people have turned to other gods and love to worship them [their raisin cakes].”
Hosea 3:1 NLT

God told Hosea to go marry a woman who would not be faithful to him!  Why?  So that we would have a visual representation of what God’s love looks like for us when we are not faithful to God, which is more often than we would like to admit and always for things that seem to pale in comparison, like raisin cakes.

The Hebrew word at the end of this passage that is usually translated simply as “them” is literally “raisin cakes.”  Raisin cakes were a delicacy and used as a sacrificial worship of other gods.  It seems somehow appropriate at Christmas to talk about raisin cakes.  Think of all the Christmas delicacies: turkey, ham, stuffing, gravy, potatoes, stocking stuffer candy, egg nog, fruit cake, pound cake, cookies, pie, fudge (my Grandma Arthur made the best peanut butter fudge and my self discipline always evaporates when the tin of fudge shows up), caramels, and more and more and more.  We turn the birthday of Jesus into an excuse for gluttony.

Christmas is a time when we sell our bodies to the god of our taste buds.  We put on weight.  Too much weight.  By the way, in February we’re going to do a four week series and twelve-week health and weight loss campaign called Bod4God.  Wait for it (no pun intended).

But we don’t just show our unfaithfulness in what we eat.  We show it by the entire way that we celebrate Christmas.  Mike Slaughter says, “We sell ourselves out to…consumerism…materialism and greed.  Imagine Gomer saying, “Happy Birthday, Hosea!  To celebrate, I’m going to party with my other friends!’…What God wants from us for Jesus’ birthday and every day, is love.  God craves that we return God’s scandalous love with our own, demonstrated by how we treat those in need.”

God’s Scandalous Love
Hosea’s marriage to Gomer is INCOMPREHENSIBLE!  What would you do?  Kick her to the curb.  Right?  Eventually Gomer is sold into slavery.  Hosea takes his commitment to their marriage one step past insanity: he buys her back!  What would you do?  Certainly NOT buy her back!  Hosea must be co-dependent or something.  Or he’s being faithful to God’s call to scandalous love.

Jesus shows us what God’s love looks like.  When God creates us and calls us good, very good, and we run the other way, our will is turned in on itself.  We become very self-centered and focused on “ME.”  We search after what “I” want and ignore the one who created us and loved us.  We do great damage to ourselves, those around us, and the rest of God’s creation.  Then God does the unthinkable!  God buys us back after our infidelity.  God takes on the form of a human and willingly submits to execution to pay for the debt of our sin and heal the woundedness of humanity.  Like Captain America, he throws himself on the grenade to save others:

There’s one big difference between that scene from Captain America and what Jesus does.  Jesus dies not just for his allies, but also for his enemies.  He dies not just for those who are faithful, but those who are unfaithful.  He dies not just for Hosea, but also for Gomer.  He dies not just for Clark Griswold, but also for cousin Eddy!

Jesus doesn’t just love the perfect and powerful.  He especially loves the down and out.  When Mary finds out she’s going to be pregnant, she sings a song:

My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.
Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.
Luke 1:46-49 NRSV

Mary trusted God’s promise of love, even if it came with some scandal.  Mary’s song continues:

He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.
Luke 1:51-53 NRSV

If we’re going to practice this same scandalous love, we’re going to need to reach out to the least, last, and lost.  Even the cousin Eddyies in your family.  No matter who we are, what we’ve done, where we’ve been, God buys us back from our own brokenness.  This is a life orientation, not just something we do during the holidays.  Sometimes this is going to be our own families that we show scandalous love to.

Recently my dad decided that he had administered the family cell phone plan for long enough.  He had also been paying for it all!  He gave us all a deadline: figure something else out by December 15.  My first thought was to talk to my mom and step-dad about joining their plan, but we’d pay for our portion.  So I called and talked to my mom, and she passed me on to my step-dad, Dave.  Dave is recently retired so he has lots of time to fill.  He spent the next several days researching how they could best use their plan to help other people.  He came back to me with an offer that included administering a family cell phone plan for Sarah and me, my brother, his daughter, and his employee who recently bought his business and her husband.  What he said next floored me.  He said, “I’ve also offered this to my ex-wife and if your dad and step-mom want to join it, that’s fine too.”  What?  I said back to him, “Are you sure you want to administer a family cell phone plan for your ex-wife and your wife’s ex-husband and his wife?”  He replied, “I guess that’s what Jesus’ love and forgiveness does for someone.”  Whoa!  That’s scandalous love.

Friends, we’re inviting you this Christmas to join a scandal.  Give up on the perfect Christmas and quit celebrating Christmas like it’s your birthday.  Instead, this year (and for years to come) celebrate Christmas like it’s Jesus’ birthday, because it is.  This year, give away as much as you spend on yourself.  We’ll be taking a Christmas Eve offering that we’ll then be giving away 100%.  We’ll use that offering to support our medical missions in Nicaragua, the second-poorest country in the Americas.  We send medical teams twice a year to bring life-giving medicine and medical knowledge and spiritual help to places that no one else goes.  We work with a local doctor who is planting a church out of her home and feeds lunch to fifty kids a day, the only meal that many of them receive.  Two years ago I went on one of these trips.  Here’s what I saw:

Over the twelve years of our life, we’ve given away a total of $31,000 from Christmas Eve offerings.  Last year, 2012, we were able to give away $3800.  2011 was our record year.  We gave away $5800.  Can we make this our biggest year ever?  Can we give away $6000?  Can we take it a step further?  Can we make this a miracle year?  Can we give away $10,000?  We can, but only if you buy into God’s scandalous love and decide that this Christmas you’re going to celebrate it as Jesus’ birthday rather than your own.  After all, Christmas is Jesus’ birthday.

*This sermon and series are based on the book, Christmas Is Not Your Birthday by Mike Slaughter.