Bad Religion, Pt 5: Why Christmas? - Audio
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We're continuing our series, Bad Religion. This is Bad Religion the Christmas version. Based, of course, on the Los Angeles punk band, Bad Religion, led by Greg Grafen, world famous atheist, and awesome vocalist. We're coming up on Christmas, and if you are aware of the culture around us, you're also very aware that Christmas is a joke to most people. The idea that God was born as like a little baby is just silly, and it gets made fun of pretty frequently, and oftentimes in a pretty funny way. If you saw that movie, The Talladega Nights, you remember that one with Will Ferrell, where he's praying to baby Jesus, and in his world, Jesus never grew up. He only likes baby Jesus, and so he's like, "Oh dear, baby God," or whatever. And it's funny because Will Ferrell, but it's also pretty sacrilegious, and it's a little bit offensive for Christians, but it kind of shows why and how the world thinks about what we're celebrating, because if we're being honest, what we're saying is something a little bit absurd, right, that the whole glory of God, that God in all of God's fullness is somehow present in a baby. And so it's kind of a joke to a lot of the world, but what the world doesn't understand is that this proclamation, this confession, that this happens is absolutely essential to us knowing and understanding who God is and what the world is like. And so we're just gonna be looking at our verse of the month today, and we're gonna see how bad religion is countered by the good religion of the incarnation, the incarnation being the coming of the sun in flesh. And so let's read this, John 1.14, "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. Well, at the beginning there, it's hard for people to translate. The word became flesh, that's pretty normal, but then, and lived among us. Hanoo is the Greek there behind it, and it literally means to pitch a tent.
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In our message today, we'll see the deeper meaning behind the incarnation of Christ and how His coming dramatically pushes against the Bad Religious tendencies that humans have.