A couple of years ago some folks invited us to go caroling with them in the neighborhood.  Toward the end of the evening (which never comes soon enough for me when I’m caroling in the neighborhood) we stopped at one house not far from our own to offer our music.  After singing a couple of songs to nothing but the front door, the people in the house finally came out and stood on their lawn to listen.  But, about halfway into the song, they just turned around and went back in the house and closed the door.  It wasn’t that we expected applause or anything.  But, the courtesy of being heard through to the end would have been nice.  We went ahead and finished the song.  They just didn’t get to hear how it came out because they closed the door too soon. 

We all do that sometimes, don’t we?  We close the door on the possibility of what might be just a little too soon.  We close the door on others.  We close the door on God.  In the end, mostly, we close the door on ourselves.

Recently, a young man, a student in one of our local high schools, took his own life.  It’s been difficult to imagine the unbearable pain his parents are left to manage.  It’s been painful enough for some of our folks who knew the family well.  So very many have been left to wonder, as always, what brings someone only fourteen years of age to such a point of despair when, from every indication, his life was full of promise and hope to everyone looking at him from the outside in.  Apparently, it was what he could only see from the inside out that made him close the door too soon.  I wonder what it was he saw.

NSYNC, a popular rock group, starts one of their current hits with these words, “when the visions around you bring tears to your eyes, and all that surround you are secrets and lies . . ..”  That’s not how the song ends, but you have to listen to the music all the way through to the end to get to the hopeful part.  Maybe, for reasons no one will ever know, all this young man could see were visions that brought tears to his eyes.  Maybe the only music he could hear was the music that made him want to close the door.  So, he did.  How about you?

Perhaps, like me, you came to church this morning wanting to hear the music that only the gospel can make.  This is the morning before Christmas.  So, let’s listen.  See if you can hear the melody.  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was in the beginning with God.  All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.  What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.  The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.  And, the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.  He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.  But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of man, but of God.”  (John 1:1-5, 14, 11-12)

Into the spiritual and moral darkness of a world whose visions bring tears to our eyes, God has sent the Light of the world, his only son.  Some, for reasons it’s so very difficult to understand, have chosen not to open their lives to that Light.  But, the gospel promise is that, to all who received the Light that has come into this very dark world, who open the door instead of close it, God has given his power to become his very own children.  Light to see and know.  Power to become all that he created them to be.  That is the gospel.

Whatever else that gospel tells you, I genuinely pray that you hear it saying that, when God thinks about you, he thinks about you in terms of what you can become.  That is what Christmas means as much as it means anything else.  It is not just that God sent his child to us.  It is that God sees in us the possibility of becoming his children, too.  Children of a new birth and a new hope.  Though we often, every one of us, close the door on the possibilities of what might be, God never does.  God never does.  He never measures our possibilities in terms of our sin or our failure but only in terms of what could happen if we would open our hearts to the Light he has sent.

The story is told of a man being released from prison after a twenty-year confinement.  The day he was released, his family went to get him and take him home.  As the car left the prison grounds, it rounded a bend in the road and, looking across a valley, he saw mountains in the distance.  As he gazed toward the horizon, he quietly spoke these words to his family, “I haven’t looked more than 200 yards in front of me for more than twenty years.”  (Stan Allcorn, “From the Pastor’s Heart,” in The Pioneer Vision, Pioneer Drive Baptist Church, Abilene, TX, December 20, 2000)  God has come, in the person of his son, to break down the walls that have kept our visions limited only to the possibilities of the failures that have imprisoned us.

This is the story of stories.  It is the story that ties all the stories of the Bible together.  Over and over the Bible tells it and it comes out like this.  In what can be nothing less than a preamble to the gospel to be recorded hundreds of years later, God spoke these words through the prophet Jeremiah to his children who were being held captive in Babylon.  “Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce.  Take wives and have sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease.  Do not let the prophets and the diviners among you deceive you, and do not listen to the dreams they dream . . . for I will visit you and I will fulfill my promise . . . for surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.”  (Jeremiah 29:5-6, 8, 10-11) 

Those words may have been spoken to a specific people at a specific time.  But, what they show us is the character of a God who will not give up on his people.  A God who wants us to embrace and live life to the fullest.  To keep getting married and bringing new life into this world.  To keep planting crops and expecting bountiful harvests because this life, all of it, is a gift to us from the God who always thinks of his children in terms of what he will make of them. 

And, after Jesus had come and gone, the apostle Paul wrote these words to those who had received the good news and believed it.  “In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy . . . being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Jesus Christ.”  (Philippians 1:4,6)  Like bookends holding the gospel novel between them, the words of the Old Testament prophet and the New Testament apostle both promise us the possibilities that, from the very beginning to the very end, God will not give up on us.  He doesn’t look at us or measure our worth in terms of what we have been, only what we are becoming through his grace.

You could hardly turn on the T.V. this past week without seeing Tom Hanks.  His latest film, Castaway, promises to be one of the top pictures of the year.  So, everyone wants to interview him.  Someone asked him what got him into acting.  It turns out, it was failure.  In high school, he tried out for the track team and found out that he wasn’t much made for it.  So, he went back to the school and got on stage.  And, when he heard the applause, he knew he’d found his place.  He’s now the highest paid actor in Hollywood.  And, all he did was follow the applause.

In some ways, his story is similar to mine.  I’ve told you before that, in high school, I wanted to be an athlete because, in small West Texas towns, if you were male and you weren’t an athlete, your social status was as close to the bottom as it could get and still register.  At least that’s what I thought before I knew there were people who would love me long after all of us forgot who scored what.  Anyway, I tried football and track.  I was miserable because my performance was even more so.  One day, during Spring training, in an exercise I have never understood, our coaches tied a rope from the top of the stadium bleachers down, at a treacherous angle, to a fence about thirty feet below.  We all had to climb the rope from the top to the bottom.  I was one of the last to go.  As I was getting in position to climb, I lost my grip and fell some thirty feet onto a concrete sidewalk.  How nothing was broken, I don’t know.  But, I will never forget that, while I was lying on the ground, the whole football team was laughing.  I’m sure from the outside looking in it was quite humorous.  From the inside out, it was something else altogether.  When you’re fifteen, nothing hurts more than getting laughed at, not even falling thirty feet.  (When you’re forty-six, not much has changed.)  Needless to say, not long after that, I left the stadium and went to the stage.  And, there, I heard applause.  It turns out that I had an instinct for saying words in front of people and acting (not a bad combination for preachers).  I decided to follow the applause.  As I look back, it wasn’t just the applause of people I heard, either.  So, I just followed the applause.  And, here I am.  Not exactly in Tom Hanks situation, mind you, but one I wouldn’t trade for his, either.

Think of Christmas in these terms, if you will.  Into the middle of our sin, our darkest and our worst, as unbelievable as it may sound, if you listen, you won’t hear God laughing.  If you listen, closely, it is the applause of heaven you hear.  In Jesus, it is the applause of heaven you can see.  Not applause for our failures.  But, the applause of a father who just absolutely refuses to quit loving us.  Jesus is God’s way of saying, “you can never fail so badly that I won’t believe in what you could become.”  If . . . if what?

On a nearby church marquee I read these words just this week.  “Directions to Heaven:  Turn right.  Go straight.”  Sounds good.  If it would only work.  The problem is, that even when we turn what we think is right we find ourselves going left on crooked paths.  (Romans 7)  Here is the gospel, straight from the Bible.  Any one of us who will receive the God who has come in the person of Jesus will receive the very power of God to become what he always knew we could be despite our miserable inability to turn the right way and go straight even when someone points the way.  That’s it.  Just open the door.  Let him in.  Receive him.  Trust him.  The only people who end up in any kind of hell are those who, for whatever reason, choose to close the door on God before he has a chance to finish what he started before they were even born. 

One day I made mention of NSYNC’s song to Cameron.  I’m sure you will never confuse me with the typical NSYNC fan.  But, I’d heard the song and not only did the tune catch my attention, the words did, too.  This past Thursday night, when we had our Christmas, Cameron gave me the NSYNC CD with that song, “This I Promise You,” on it.  It’s the song I mentioned at the beginning of the sermon.  It’s a song of one lover to another.  Anyway, as we were driving along the other day listening to it, I made the comment to Cameron that, if you listen, some of the words could almost be turned to have a Christian meaning.  Something God might sing to us.  See what you think.

“When the visions around you, bring tears to your eyes, and all that surround you are secrets and lies, I’ll be your strength.  I’ll give you hope, keeping your faith when it’s gone.  The one you should call was standing here all along.  I’ve loved you forever in lifetimes before.  I give you my word, I give you my heart.  This is a battle we’ve won.  And, with this vow, forever has now begun.”

It’s a beautiful sentiment.  Something any human would love to hear their lover say, much less sing, to them.  But, it’s nothing more.  It’s just a song on a CD.  But, that night in the car, Cameron and I shared a little Christmas joy.  We thought about how, in Christ, God has sung those words to us.  More than sing them, he has lived them, died for them and lived yet again for them.  God did more than give us his word that he would love us.  He has loved us in lifetimes before ours began.  He knows the plans he has for us.  In Christ, the one in whom everyone came into being, he started you and me.  What he started, he intends to finish.  He gave us his word.  In Christ, he gave us more than that.  He gave us his very heart. 

All he wants is for us to give him ours.  Jesus, the very heart of God, is the vow of God that, the moment you choose to leave the door of your heart open to the God who never closed his on you, that very moment, no matter where you are or what you’ve done, forever has now begun.