You have the text on page six if you'd like to follow along. The very first four verses of Luke's Gospel, which gets us to Luke telling, sharing with us some of the purposes for his writing. And then we're going to read one of the most famous of the Christmas portions, which is Mary, who is modeling for us what it is to absolutely celebrate and rejoice in what's happening at this first Christmas. Luke one, one to four, and then forty-six to fifty-five. Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who were from the first eyewitnesses and servants of the Word. Therefore, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, it seemed good also to me to write an orderly account for you, but excellent theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught. And Mary said, my soul glorifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God, my Savior, for He has been mindful of the humble state of His servant, for now on all generations will call me blessed, for the mighty one has done great things for me, holiest His name. His mercy extends to those who fear Him from generation to generation. He has performed mighty deeds with His arm. He has scattered those who were proud in their innermost thoughts. He has brought down rulers from their thrones, but He has lifted up the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things, and He has sent the rich away empty. He has helped to serve in Israel remembering to be merciful to Abraham and to His descendants forever, even as He said to our fathers. This is the word of the Lord. As we said last week, I had a brief reflection for you in our special Christmas musical service last week. We began by saying that Christmas is, frankly, for many, many people at the time of spiritual searching. It's the time when people are looking at the claims of Jesus and considering whether there's anything to it or not. You can see that in media coverage and the documentaries and generally the news covers. I heard that Jesus got bumped off of Newsweek by the capture of Sodom Hussein, but He almost made the cover of Newsweek. But generally speaking, He makes the cover most of the magazines every Christmas time. People are thinking about it and people are considering His claims. And as you look at the Gospel of Luke and consider these first four verses, you see that this Gospel, I haven't said really all the gospels are given to us as a tool so that people can move from not only encountering the light but seeing the light become sight. Last week, we looked at Mary and we saw that Mary shows us that, frankly, coming to it with doubt that is sincere and honest and genuine is not a bad thing at all. As a matter of fact, it's the only way with integrity to genuinely come to faith. It's to face your doubts so that you can face the light. Luke here lays out for us the genuineness of his desire to do that very thing to show the light of what he's researched. And notice that what he says there is that his desire is that you be able to see it not only clearly but with certainty. That's why he's written it down. I want you to have certainty about Christmas, about these things we're claiming about Jesus. Now I want to talk to you this morning just a little bit about the process of turning the light into sight. That is being able to really move to Christ to Christmas and believe, especially if you're someone who's just not sure. Can you really buy this and can you really stake your life on it? The first thing I want you to see is that Luke shows us that you need to see the reality of the church. You need to see the reality of the church that was born, formed and has believed this gospel all along. Let me re-read those first two verses. Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us just as they were handed down to us by those who were the first eyewitnesses and servants of the word. A more literal translation of that might be actually to say those who were eyewitnesses and stewards of the word. He's talking here about that first community of Christians who, those who were called apostles at the very heart of that idea, was that these were people who were eyewitnesses. They saw what happened. They heard Jesus teach. They saw him die and they saw him risen. And that is sort of how it begins. Jesus ironically does not like a lot of religious founders. He doesn't leave a book. He wasn't a writer. Some of you academics can take comfort in that if you're not publishing. Jesus never wrote. He never published. He didn't leave a book. He left a community. A community of eyewitnesses. Now, this is very important to understand how the gospel of Jesus became so credible and how it was so easily or so readily spread and believed. In the ancient world, I hope this isn't news to you. There wasn't no internet. There weren't even newspapers. There wasn't even the six o'clock news. If something happened that was of great note, let's say there was a war. A rebellion put down. Or the emperor came to town. Something dramatic happened. The way that news was passed was through almost in every village. There would be in pre-modern times where what sociologists called oral tradition existed. There were storytellers. And the storytellers job was the one to find out the story and get it with remarkable accuracy. And that would have become very settled within a few days. And that's how the form was handed down. In fact, the Greek word there for handed down paradosis is a technical reference to that kind of memory and remembering. The handing down exactly of what has been seen and what has been heard. Sociologists today, there are still a few societies around the world where you have this pre-modern way of remembering and sociologists frankly marvel. They marvel at the incredible accuracy in oral tradition cultures to remember everything from genealogy to what happened. And if you go from town to town or village to village, you'll find that those stories are exact. They're incredibly accurate. When funny little thing I came across in researching this was someone in T. Wright, a New Testament scholar who's influenced me a lot, found a quote from Plato who lived several years before the time of Christ. But in his society even he said there's a danger in writing things down because human memory is the best way to get it right. I just, that just depresses me more than I could say. But clearly, you know, things have changed over these many millennia. What this at least begins us with, Luke begins with the eyewitnesses because that's what Jesus left. And what he says about them is listen. They are handing down what they saw, what happened. And I've done the research and I want to tell you it's credible. It's credible what they saw. It helps us also remember what the church is all about because you see the reason we have the scriptures to proclaim is because they were given to you by a living church. That those scriptures and not only create but continue to feed and nourish and keep alive. And that is really what the church is for. The church exists, Amel Brunner said, in the same way that the flame exists by burning. The church exists to pass on the story of Jesus to tell what God has done to him. That's why we're here. And an important part of seeing, I want to say to you, if you're seeking, it's not just an intellectual quest. One of the ways you experience this truth and bring it into your life is by coming into a community of people who believe it and are seeking. That's how it began. That's how those first Christians launched. That's how it continued to spread around the world. Now look very quickly, that brings us to, when it comes to seeing, becoming persuaded and certain, he also brings us to these scriptures, specifically the gospels. So you see the church, you see the witness, the eyewitnesses, but then he says you see the gospels. You see what he's doing. Now notice what he says there in verse 1, we looked at this a year ago, this particular text, and it's surprising, I think, that he honestly begins saying many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled. Today you'll hear scholars who found some other gospels that people never heard of as though this is some great amazing discovery that various people tried to write this up. And it was suppressed right here in the New Testament. Luke says, there are a lot of people who thought it would be a good idea to write this stuff down. There are a lot of people. And Luke says, but I decided to do it and to carefully research it. Now why? After what I just said to you about a world tradition as a fundamental fabric in their culture, why write it down? Well Luke doesn't exactly tell us, but you can sort of intuit from what we know about what was happening in the situation at the time, really on two counts. On the one hand the eyewitnesses were being decimated. This is about perhaps 40 years or so after the time of Jesus. And the villages of Palestine were being absolutely wiped out by a Roman invader. And so around the time most scholars think this gospel was being written, many of the people who had were among those tens and hundreds of thousands who actually witnessed Jesus and saw Him, experienced His teachings, many of them were being killed off. So there's probably that necessity. There's also the fact that this has in a way that is unprecedented in the history of the world, this movement has become radically global within a generation. So there's a message that is now being spread to the four corners of the world in every known language and every known corner. There is a burgeoning multi-ethnic, multicultural, multilingual movement that's happening. And so there's a sense in which the movement kind of has to grow up into what it means to the community that is possessed by that many people. God leads Luke to pen this faithful account. And notice what He tells us specifically about His writing of this gospel in verse three. He says, I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning. It seemed good to me also to write an orderly account for you most excellent. And the awful is so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught. And I see saying the scriptures are actually an essential part. It's not just a teaching of the message, but God wants them recorded in Scripture to through those scriptures, bring Him to a deeper certainty. And Luke, he doesn't claim himself to be an eyewitness. We don't know a lot about this writer. What we do know is that he got it from the, he went to Mary. He went to the people who were living and he got the truth from the horse's mouth, so to speak. He went and he did his research. And scholars will tell you that the phrase there, what he says, what I'm doing here, most excellent, the awful is. That's a word, whether that's a real person, or it could be a device. The word means lover of God. It could be a way of saying to anyone who really wants to love and know God. I'm recording these things for you so that you can know the truth. And in the Mediterranean world, that, the structure of that sentence was a way of saying to a scholarly audience. To a learned community, again, the community is really exploding in various places. You have four gospels that have different agendas, different purposes. In this particular gospel, he's saying, please know that what I'm giving you is based on research. So you see the community, and now you see what claims to be a gospel that is well researched and therefore reliable. I want to take just a moment to wrestle with that for us, particularly those of you who say, I don't know that that's going to help me move into the light. How could I be certain these things have happened looking at a nearly 2000 year old document? I mean, you know, I read something somebody said was well researched 2000 years ago. One objection somebody would say is, you know, that's going to be a low standard of research by our modern standards of research. It's going to be a low standard of research. I have to comment. I've heard that from many people that is somewhat dismissive of other times and other cultures, which hopefully we will outgrow someday. But what I want to challenge you with is this, the audience Luke originally wrote this to was a tougher cell than you are and a tougher cell, frankly, than most modern people. It's a tougher audience. Why? A couple of reasons. First of all, this is written within the lifetime of tens of thousands of people who would have heard Jesus teach. He was an itinerant teacher. There's things you read about in the gospels from Jesus. Jesus said them over and over day after day, place after place, village after village in an oral tradition culture. People heard and they knew and they remembered what Jesus said. So to set about and say, I've researched and hear the accurate sayings for that to survive and be accepted by that community. That's a tough audience to sell because they had an experience of Jesus. This is actually something you see in the pages of other New Testament letters, like the letter to the Ephesians, one of the early letters of Paul. Paul is taking leave. He's telling of taking leave of the Ephesian elders and we read in the book of Acts about his time in Ephesus. He says, I said to them, remember the words of our Lord Jesus Christ who said. It is more blessed to give than to receive. Where did our Lord Jesus Christ say that? Was that Matthew, Mark, Luke or John? It's not recorded in any of those. And what you see is here is Paul all the way in Asia Minor. All the way in Ephesus and there are among those people, there are people who simply know many of the things that Jesus Christ said. That's a honeycomb we got because Paul has been a sort of an extra saying of Jesus that we get. But my point is look at the context of who these people are. One thing you'll hear about in the media is that some people will say, well actually they're these new gospels and frankly we like them a lot better. The gospel of Thomas, these things. They suit as much better. And the fact is the church was full of patriarchal bad guys and they just put these junk gospels out here because they didn't like the really beautiful New Agey gospels. You've probably heard this here or there. And what I want to say to you is there's a reason why some of these later gospels, second century attempts that came up didn't fly. There is no historical evidence, by the way, at all of any church authorities burning books or stamping out any of these gospels. That is pure speculation. There is no evidence of this at all. What there is evidence of is that within these immediate generations of memory, gospels that were fraudulent simply didn't fly. I'll use an example by the scholar I mentioned earlier in T. Wright. He puts it this way. Now it's been, wow, 40 years since the 60s. That's why I'm in my 40s. It's been 40 years since the 60s. That's about somewhere around the distance of Luke. A lot of you, whether you were all about to remember or you've seen it on television, you know about the peace protest in the rallies and the music of the 60s. If I tried to write down for you or stand up here and proclaim to you that there was, you know, a great folk music phenomenon and one of the rallying songs of the 60s was this song. The answer my friend is blowing in the breeze. How many, I don't hold your hands up, but don't, aren't many of you going, no, no, that's not how the song goes. It's blowing in the wind. There are many people looking at me going, what is he talking about? Okay, well, but if you are around or if you are around, you know you can't get away with that. It's blowing in the wind. We know that. In the same way, for a gospel to be launched and accepted as credible, the sayings have got to resonate with those communities that heard it and know it. And that's what's amazing about Luke's gospel is that on the one hand, it's credible in the intellectual world he lived in and at the same time in those illiterate oral communities. It's embraced and loved as this is who he was and this is what he said. Secondly, some people would say, all right, all right, let's say it is accurate on what they thought. Aren't pre-modern people more inclined to believe this kind of thing than we are. I mean, wasn't this just, you know, people dying rising from the dead is this kind of thing, they, you know, they just pre-modern, they believe that kind of stuff. Let me just say not only was there a higher standard of authentic persuasion because of Luke's audience first. There was also a need to be effective in a less credulous community. That is, people who first would have heard this gospel were less likely to believe it than you are. Why? Who's the first audience? First of all, they're Jews. They're Orthodox Jews. And here is a claim that there was a man who came and took every symbol of Judaism there was from the temple to the sacrifice to what you eat all the way down and radically reinterpreted it around himself and actually said I'm a human being and I'm God and thousands of them believed it. Let me tell you, these are the most unlikely people in the world to believe that. And if you want to just, you know, ramp it up a little more, it explodes out into the Greek-speaking world who had this vast, proud treasury of philosophy and in that platonic philosophical way of thinking, right? The mind, the nominal was celebrated, the physical was despised. It was illusory. It didn't matter. You transcend it. And here is a gospel, a message of a man who actually fully embraces the physical and the very essence of his spirituality is that his corrupted dead bodies raised. And that if you want to know him, you need to know that your body, too, will be raised and this world is going to be made new. Do you think the Greeks were apt to believe? Listen, this was the most unlikely audience in the world to believe these things and you have to ask yourself, how is it that a movement could be launched where literally within a generation millions of people? Thousands of Orthodox Jews, millions of pagans radically abandoned their most cherished worldviews, their most cherished ways of living in order to believe this. How is it that this is a reality and I will tell you? You know that the scholars will tell you that the gospels are actually a new literary genre to exist. If you read the ancient religious writings, most of them read like myth and legend. They celebrate the exploits of their heroes. They sort of embroider their words in gold and their followers are blessed and wonderful. There's just a legendary character in everything that has. When you read the gospels, you get something that you won't find anywhere else in the world. First of all, you get the foibles of the founders. Each one of these, each one of the gospel writers, the disciples, for example, are presented as sort of bumbling idiots. Honestly, if you're honest, they get it wrong over and over again. They're slow to believe they couldn't be more humble in their portrayal of themselves. They're willing to say, Jesus himself would say, you're slow. You don't get it. You really don't get it at all. And you see their moral failings woven right into the text. Secondly, you see historical narrative, historical narrative never existed in ancient religious writing. You see historical narrative that is woven in without spiritual significance. For example, they go fishing and the gospel writer says, and we call it a hundred and fifty three fish. That's not how you invent a myth. Why would you mention there a hundred and fifty three fish? Jesus prepares for a healing and we say, and he knelt down and doodled in the sand. What is the spiritual significance of doodling in the sand? There is no recorded spiritual significance of sand doodling. You can go doodle for hours. You won't be transformed. The point is they just were there and they saw it. This is what happened. People who were unlikely to believe it preached to people who were just as unlikely to believe it. And their lives were changed because it happened. It was real. Luke says, study it. Look at us. Look at our lives. Look at the church. And look at the gospels. Research it. Face your doubts and face the light. Now, there's a why. I want to close. There's one last why. You see, why could you be certain? There's the church, the witnesses, there's the scriptures, the authentic, frankly, historically unprecedented and their reliability through antiquity. But finally, there's really the big why Luke wants to hold out for you, which is Jesus. See the witness. See the church. See the gospels. But above all, Luke is saying, look at Jesus. Look at Jesus. You'll notice what he says there in that very first verse is this. Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us. That word fulfilled if literally translated would probably be this way accomplished. Many have tried to show what was accomplished by God in Christ Jesus. Now, I want to take just a moment, just one moment, to look at Mary and her song. Because Mary shows you somebody who actually believes what God accomplished. I'm sure as Luke sat down with her and she had witnessed the life of her son his death and his resurrection and she tells them of the song she sang when she finally came to embrace and believe this. Notice what Mary sees. Let me just read you just two verses from that song of Mary in verse 51. She says, he has performed mighty deeds with his arm. He has scattered those who are proud in their most thoughts. He has brought down rulers from their thrones and lifted up the humble. She goes on to talk about God acting and accomplishing what was promised. What Mary, and this is not some Latin beautiful composed piece in a cathedral, this is a teenage girl jumping up and down and just shouting at the top of her lungs. She's so thrilled. Why is she thrilled? She is thrilled because everything that was promised by God is coming true. The hero who was promised is here. Abraham, David, Moses, they all were great. They were instruments of God's deliverance, acting for justice, acting to bring peace and wholeness into the world. And yet every one of them, breathe the first testament. Every one of them said there's another one coming after me. I'm not the one. Keep looking. There's another one coming. Mary has moved into the light of being able to say, he's the one. God is acted. And what she shows us is how Advent faith really exists. That is, living between the first and the second coming of Christ. She shows us that on the one hand, Mary and those first Christians show us that what you see is that God in Christ has accomplished something that can change my life now. I can sing a dance no matter what Mary's life was no picnic. It was a hard, painful life, not only in the early years, but right up to the end. I was always turbulent, always troubled, and yet she's singing. Advent faith is able to say, even though we're in the middle, he is acted to accomplish something. I can experience right now knowing that in Jesus, I'm forgiven by God. His death, his resurrection for me, mean my sins will not be held against me. I'm free. The power of evil and death over me, eternal death, the great threat will never touch me. I will live forever with him. You can experience that now. Don't you see it in Mary? She's in Advent. She's between the first coming and the second coming. She shows you how you see it. I'm forgiven. I'm going to live forever, and I have a purpose in my life. I'm longing for the second coming where his justice will completely write all wrongs and make this world new. Listen, I tell you one last story. Like many of you, I saw the Lord of the Rings this week. I saw it. I went to Trilogy Tuesday and saw all three of them back to back, which is another story. But because I know there's like five of you haven't seen it, I'm not going to say anything about the movie. I will tell you what's not in the movie is one of my favorite parts of the book. It's called The Scouring of the Shire. And what happens in The Scouring of the Shire is this. You see, the great story happens. The heroes prevail. They go to Mount Doom, and I hate to blow this for you, but they do destroy the evil ring. The great power of the dark one is broken. The ring is destroyed. The true king is crowned. The king of men is crowned. And then they return to their home, the Shire, and they find that it's an absolute mess. And so they go in and because of what has been accomplished, because they have been transformed into warriors, because they have been a part of seeing that ring destroyed. They go back, and they're not quite little habits anymore. They're warriors, and they go back, and they completely turn the Shire back upside down. They completely transform it with their valor and their courage, and they restored justice there. And then you get to see their life once they're there. And nobody understands them, because now they're not like ordinary habits. They're full of courage. They're full of hope. They sing songs all the time, and people are going, what are they singing about? I don't understand. It's because what has been accomplished is part of their reality that enables them to see. And my question to you is, has Christmas done that for you? Have you seen what God did in Jesus Christ, what he accomplished, the great victory, the hero's story happened? And if you can see that, you actually will become one of the ones in this world awaiting the final end of the story. You see what's going on clearly. You'll sing differently, you'll live differently, you'll be transformed. Let's pray. Lord, my prayer for each person here is that the realities of Christmas, the realities of what you've done in Christ, will become more clear for each one. As we let the story of Jesus from the Scriptures wash over us again, help us to face our doubts, face our questions, but above all help us to face up to what it really means that all this is true. And give us a vision for our lives that is radical, that is beautiful, courageous, because it's true. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.