“At Long Last!”

Scripture: Hebrews 1:1-12

Did you know that the Lord goes to great lengths to get his people to listen to him? Last week, we considered the various ways that he got Moses, Jonah, Esther and others to listen to the word that he had for their lives. For others, He has used the prophets to bring his word to life – many of them, spread over hundreds of years – and for the most part, the people discounted their every word, they refused to believe. God must get very frustrated with us, don’t you think? But frustrated or not, he never gives up!

Pastor John Stendahl writes:
This Word, then, is not simply a message you can put into words. It comes as a person, a life enfleshed and enacted. It has to do with compassion and vision, but there is also something frightening about it, a kind of desperate insistence. “IF YOU WON'T LISTEN TO THE LAW AND THE PROPHETS, MAYBE NOW YOU'LL SEE.”
God, so vulnerable, casting this unphilosophical proposition into our world, this baby, is dependent on our response. Now even the cross that lies ahead takes on a seemingly strange and eerie reality: “THEN maybe their hearts will be moved, THEN they'll know how I love them.”
The messenger and the message are thus joined. Even in those tellings of the gospel in which Jesus struggles against this identification, it proves finally to be so. The Word is enfleshed, and born to die.
--John Stendahl, The message and the messenger, Christian Century, December 17, 1997, 1187.

And God said “Do you think they’ll listen to my Son?”

Read Hebrews 1:1-4

Jesus – heir of all things - present, past and future; jointly involved in creation of the entire universe; the radiance of heavenly glory; the exact representation of the Father; the source of purification for our sins.
What an incredible statement of faith! If we truly believe all of this, why wouldn’t we listen? I would think that every follower of Jesus would want to hang on every single word that he has to say to us. Think about some of these attributes: heir of all things – there is nothing that isn’t his; a co-creator with the Father – he pre-existed creation, he has always been and always will be, and his signature is on the created order; radiance of glory – he isn’t just filled with heavenly glory – he is the glory; the exact representation of God – whoever God is, whatever God gives, whatever God says, it’s also true of Jesus. There is no difference. They are not copies. They are exactly the same; purification for our sin – he doesn’t just redeem, he doesn’t just forgive – he is the redemption and the forgiveness for our lives.
This is what God wants us to know, this is what he has been trying to tell us for two millennium!

Read Hebrews 1:5-9

Some folks tend to get hung up on the significance of the angels, and some even believe that we should worship these heavenly beings. The writer of Hebrews, though, wants us to see them differently. Angels are not divine – they are simply the ones who carry out the desires and the message of God – they are not God themselves.
The text tells us that angels are not sons of God - but who is? First, Jesus is the one and only begotten Son, and through him, we also can become children of God. Not angels. Believers! Jesus is the first-born of God, and by being born again in Christ, we then can also come to the Father as his children.
In verse 7, we are given something else that we need to think about – our relationship with the angels. Angels, scripture tells us, are the winds, and we are the flame. Have you ever watched the fire department fight a grass or brush fire? If there is no wind, the fire moves very slowly, and sometimes, it even burns itself out. Those are the easy ones. But if even a little wind stirs up, the flames jump and you will be hard pressed to catch them. It’s a real race trying to get to the head of the fire, because that is the only place you can stop its spread.
Imagine – God’s messengers are the winds that fan the flames of our faith! And rightly so. Consider the effect that the angel had on Mary and Joseph! The fire of their spirit was fanned into a full blown blaze, to the point that nothing could interfere with their faithful completion of the task God had given them. How about the angels that visited the shepherds on that first Christmas? Were they on fire or what? You’d better believe that they were! How about the disciples on Pentecost? Paul on the Road to Damascus? You and me when we discovered how personal and loving and close Jesus actually is to us?
The angels carry a message that comes directly from God’s heart, and how could his servants not burst into a roaring inferno?

But does Jesus need to be fanned into flame? Of course not. He is God, and he is already full of the holy fire. “therefore, God, your God, has set you above your companions by anointing you with the oil of joy.” The angels are the constant companions of the Lord. They are available to provide for any of Jesus’ human needs, such as after his 40 day fast in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1-11), but he has no need of spiritual encouragement. He is the encouragement for our lives.

Read Hebrews 1:10-12

This is the Lord God Almighty. Eternal, imperishable, unchanging, and yet, humble, gentle, loving, forgiving. An enigma, a puzzle, if you will. The heavenly home of our Eternal God, the place that has been promised to us, is going to perish and then be remade in a whole new way. Don’t try to figure that out, just claim it. God can never perish, but everything else will either completely disappear or will be radically changed. And that includes you and me. 1 Corinthians 15:53, a passage that is used quite often in our funeral liturgy, tells us that the perishable must put on imperishability, and the mortal must put on immortality. Nothing that is created is eternal – it all is perishable, and that includes you and me.
But for those who are in Christ, for those who “are clothed with Christ” (Galatians 3:26-28), they are embraced in eternity, and are changed forever. Jesus told the parable of a wedding banquet (Matthew 22:1-14). The parable ends with the words “Many are invited, but few are chosen.” In the story, everyone was expected to be wearing wedding clothes, and those who were not were escorted out of the hall, to their eternal dismay.

“They will perish, but you remain; they will all wear out like a garment.” (v.11) On that first Christmas day, everything began to change. The Newborn of Bethlehem, even though he came in a perishable human form, was the eternal and imperishable God who is both before and beyond creation. The Child who would be nourished by a human mother’s milk would, himself, bring spiritual nourishment – eternal sustenance – for the entire world. That helpless Infant who had to be held and fed and carried wherever he went, would be the One who would redeem humanity from their self-destructive existence, the One who would carry the entire burden of worldly sin all the way to Calvary.

Christmas is our beginning. It is the first ray of hope in an otherwise dark and forbidding life; it is the dawn of a new day; it is the offer to be clothed in the Immortal and Incarnate Christ; it is the gift of imperishability and the hope for eternity.
But as with any gift, it has to be accepted. In the wedding banquet parable that was mentioned before, many had been invited to come to the celebration, but many were just too busy to attend. And they soon found themselves “on the outs” with the King.

Parable after parable is offered to show us the necessity for Christ in our lives (eg. Rich man and Lazarus; The Tenants; and others). Without the Baby Jesus, the perishable world would just continue on their merry way, believing that doing “good things” is good enough.
Without Jesus of Bethlehem, mortality and finality would be our sentence. But in Christ, we will never “wear out like a garment and be rolled up like a used up robe.” His garment is forever. Hallelujah! At Last!