Since some of you asked for the quotes I shared yesterday in the service…
“It is John’s Spirit-appointed task to supplement the work of Matthew and Luke so that the nativity cannot be sentimentalized into coziness, nor domesticated into worldliness. This is not the nativity story we grew up with, but it is the nativity story all the same. Jesus’ birth excites more than wonder; it excites evil. Evil knows what this birth means for evil.” Eugene Peterson
C. S Lewis in Mere Christianity – “Enemy occupied territory-that is what the world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed… and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage!”
And another in keeping with these two…
“The church has a better story to tell” by Gerrit Scott Dawson
“The location of her Lord draws the church to lift her gaze up from the lure and press of the world. Here a thousand thousand completing stories urge humanity to look for the meaning of life in this world, in autonomy and self-interested pursuits. Men and women walk about with the eyes of their minds and hearts cast downwards, blind to greater realities. But the church has a better story to tell. We lift up our hearts to the Lord because He is in heaven, drawing us homeward. In this way, the ascension is a safeguard against minimizing estimates of the person and work of Jesus Christ. A full regard for the greatness of Christ and His work causes the church continually to draw its life from the biblical story, and the narrative of Jesus in particular. This is the story that makes sense of the world and our place in it. In contrast to the stories the world tells to justify its existence and activities, the church lives from a heavenly story and speaks that story into the world through word and work. The ascension of Jesus not only demands but also creates a sense of heavenly citizenship in the church.”
-Gerrit Scott Dawson, Jesus Ascended: The Meaning of Christ’s Continuing Incarnation (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2004), p. 155.