Message in a Bottle – christianityworks

Episode 1. Let’s Get Real for Just One Minute

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There’s an old Song by Sting called “Message in a Bottle”. Maybe that’s what Christmas is – a message in a bottle. But who’s it for? Me? …….no, surely not! Why don’t you join …

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Song writers have a funny way of well “cutting to the quick”, telling us how things really are. Like the song that Sting wrote, “Message in a Bottle”. It starts out with these lyrics:

Just a castaway, an island lost at sea.
Another lonely day with no-one there but me.
Oh more loneliness that any man could bear,
rescue me before I fall into despair.
I will send an S.O.S to the world;
I hope that someone gets my message in a bottle.

And it finishes up like this?:

Walked out this morning,
don’t believe what I saw.
Hundred billion bottles washed up on the shore.
Seems I’m not alone at being alone,
hundred billion castaways looking for a home.
I’ll send an S.O.S to the world,
I hope that someone gets my message in a bottle.”

It’s a song that connected with a lot of people, a song that tells it just the way things are for so many. It slips under that thin veneer of so called success, the glossy successful images that the advertising industry uses to get us to buy their stuff. Somehow this song, “Message in a Bottle” speaks to the heart, it’s real.

So what are you saying Berni, that we’re all a bunch of losers? No, not that, I mean look, there are so many people succeeding, doing amazing things. They’re talented and they’re able and they’re committed, there are lots of good things happening in the world but mixed up with that, a lot of bad things too and it’s alway been like that. I guess though, I want to think for a moment about this whole ‘message in a bottle’ thing. Is it true? Are there a whole bunch of lonely people out there?

I was reading an article in the weekend newspaper just the other day about the internet and blogging. Now the word blog is short for Web Log and its where people, mostly young but plenty of not so young as well, they get on line on the internet and they share their thoughts and their photos and their videos on a personal billboard for the world to see.

I remember when a young girls diary was something she locked up, it was secret, the deepest thoughts of her heart but these days, young folk get on the internet and tell the world. How many people do you think there are on internet sites blogging at the moment? You know people with their own personal blog sites. You know there’s over a hundred million. A hundred million all sending out their message in a bottle, all crying out to be noticed, all wanting to be significant.

I asked my daughter, I mean she’s one of these people that blogs, she has her own blog site, why do you do it? What’s it all about? And she said, “It’s all about how many friends you can have subscribing to your blog.” Whether it’s on www.myspace.com or www.youtube.com it seems like this message in a bottle thing is happening in a way today that Sting could never had imagined when he wrote that song.

Maybe you’re not a blogger, I’m not, but you know what I’m talking about. This deep search for significance, people looking for that place where finally I’ve found myself, I’ve just discovered who I am, I have a deep sense of satisfaction about my life and me and how I fit in. It’s not so much about circumstances often but just about who we are and where we fit and so many, many people send out their messages in a bottle in the most amazing ways.

So much crime is about attention seeking, about wanting to be noticed and to be needed and it’s a cry for help. The vast majority of us though, I believe live out life without ever really discovering who we are and why we’re here and where we’re going.

Well here we are, the beginning of December hurtling towards Christmas. I know what you’re thinking, “It’s a bit early for you to be talking about Christmas Berni.” Well not really, I mean the shops have had their Christmas decorations up for weeks and Santa’s been there having his photo taken. We’re taking an early look at Christmas on the program this week because Christmas started well before Christmas, at least the first Christmas did.

We know that Christmas probably wasn’t in December because the shepherds were pretty unlikely to be out in the middle of winter at night tending their flocks. Oh, we all know the Christmas story, baby Jesus born in a manger, Mary, Joseph, the whole donkey thing, the shepherds and the wise men from the East and all that stuff and we’ve seen the pantomimes and the Christmas cards and stuff and my hunch is, the whole Christmas thing did start well before Christmas, that night in Bethlehem. We know it did.

You read through the Old Testament, the Hebrew scriptures, the 39 books written by different people in many centuries before Jesus was born and there are a whole bunch of very specific predictions about Jesus like, He would be born in Bethlehem, He would be born of a virgin, He would be born of the tribe of Judah and the house of David and He would be crucified and they would gamble over His clothes. I mean over 100 and that’s a conservative estimate. Things that Jesus himself would have found pretty hard to arrange unless of course, He is who He says He is.

A kind of a weird thing, what was God up to? Why are these predictions through the Old Testament about Jesus? In fact can I ask a more direct question? Why Jesus at all? I mean, why send Jesus, His only Son to become a man and ultimately to die for you and me? Why not just forgive us and be done with it? Why the theatrics?

One of the places in the Old Testament gives us a clue to this is in Ezekiel, chapter 34. I’m going to read it to you; it’s about the shepherd heart of God. This is what God said:

I will search for my sheep and look after them. As a shepherd looks after his scattered flock when he is with them, so I will look after my sheep. I’ll rescue them from all the places where they were scattered on the day of clouds and darkness, I will search for the lost and bring back the strays, I will bind up the injured and strengthen the weak but the sleek and the strong I will destroy. I will shepherd the flock with justice.

God has this amazing shepherd’s heart, this heart that you see time and time again as you read through the Old Testament where He says:

I will be your God and you will be my people and I will walk in your midst and as shepherd I will give my sheep peace.

You read it in Psalm 23:

You make me to lie down in green pastures…

… is all about sheep who never lie down unless they feel safe and they’re at peace and so Gods plan is to be in our midst and to give us a peace and a joy and at Christmas time He kind of quietly slipped into the world in this stable in Bethlehem. We’ll look at that during the program this week.

What if God saw all our bottles lying on that beach? What if He heard the cry of our hearts? What if God always knew that the only way to still my heart, to still your heart, to satisfy our souls was for us to know Him? What if this Jesus is Gods message in a bottle to us, to you and me? What if Gods plan was always for God to become a man and to step into our world? God in the flesh, Gods message in a bottle.

It’s an amazing plan and it’s a plan that was born out of the shepherd heart of God, to be in our midst, for Him to be our God and us to be His people. What if that’s what Christmas is?

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Episode 2. Walking on the Beach

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You’re walking along the beach…you see a bottle lying there. An old bottle. Glass – there’s a message inside. So –what do you do, pick it up, or walk on by? Why don’t you join …

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So … you’re walking along the beach … you see a bottle lying there. An old bottle, and … and there’s a message inside. So –what do you do, pick it up, or walk on by?

The beach is a great place Ever walked along the sand in the cool of the evening, you know one of those warm nights just as the sun dips below the horizon? Or maybe, maybe on one of those cold stormy days and the wind blows the sand and the ocean spray into your face? I sometimes wonder whether I don’t actually prefer it on those days. There’s something so constant and majestic about the ocean.

How long have those waves been pounding the shoreline? How many grains of sand lie on this one little beach? How vast, how beautiful, how wild is the ocean? It seems timeless and beneath the surface is a whole other world that runs down to the deepest, darkest depths. Imagine then, imagine you’re walking along the beach and in the distance you see a glint, you come closer and what you see is a bottle, an old bottle and inside that bottle is a message.

There’s a great old line that goes like this, “Every woman should marry an archaeologist because the older she gets the more interested he is in her.” We have a love/hate relationship with things of old, with the past. On the one hand, you know a lot of people are into plasma TV’s and the latest cars and fashions and gizmos and people seem to aspire to all this stuff, you know it’s all about the next thing, the next toy.

My wife Jacqui and I talk about the things of our childhood sometimes at the dinner table, you know the days before dishwashers and our 16 year old daughter, Melissa, rolls her eyes and says, “Here we go again, in the olden days.” Which is exactly what I used to say to my parents when I was her age. “I mean really Dad, how can you possibly think that anything from back there was even remotely cool or relevant or anything today?” is really what she’s saying. I used to say the same to my cousin’s fiancé who was studying his PHD in history, “Who wants to study history, it’s all out of date?” It used to get him quite hot under the collar.

On the one hand we want to dismiss the things of old, live under the assumption that today’s life, today’s thoughts, today’s ideas and outlooks and truths, today’s morality, there all so much better than the past. On the other hand, when a movie maker brings the past to life it can be so incredibly engaging. Over this year I went to see the movie about William Wilberforce called, “Amazing Grace”, it’s based on a true story.

William Wilberforce was the driving force behind the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. And it was so deeply moving and empowering and it makes you realise people are people are people whether they live today or lived three centuries ago. And actually, the older I get the more I value the things of the past. The more I remember the great afternoons we used to have, the Sunday afternoons when we’d visit my Grandmother and Dad and my Grandmother would sit there and ponder when Dad was growing up in a little village in Romania.

I really enjoy the past. But we do, we kind of have a love/hate relationship with things of old and that’s no more evident in this really strange eclectic celebration that we call Christmas. On the one hand we remember the things of old, you know I remember the Fir Tree smell in the house when I was a kid at Christmas and the things my mother used to cook and the little traditions we had around our home for Christmas. On the other hand, we’re all so busy these days, these weeks of December leading up to Christmas are all about consuming ourselves silly.

Christmas is a place where there’s contradiction, this past and present love/hate thing comes together. The first Christmas, the very first Christmas was almost certainly not in December. December is the winter in the northern hemisphere and it wasn’t likely that shepherds would have been out tending their flocks by night in the middle of winter, generally they bought the sheep in at night because of the cold.

The timing of Christmas has actually a lot more to do with a Roman harvest festival, the winter solstice festival, than the birth of Jesus and generally, you know we see the ageing clergy on TV extolling us to have peace on earth when there really is none and not to forget the true meaning of Christmas, whatever that maybe.

I’m sorry to sound cynical, but that seems to be about it, I mean what does your Christmas look like, Christian or not? So often it’s more about the pressures of getting the family together than it is about anything else. So busy, we’re not even walking on the beach, we’re so focused on the here and now the things of the past, the things that God may have done 2,000 years ago seem utterly irrelevant. Let me ask you something? If you’re walking along that beach though and you see that old bottle washed up by the ocean, would you bend over and pick it up or would you walk past? You see we have no idea what the message inside the bottle says.

Perhaps it’s some rude obscenity scrawled by a kid last Thursday and thrown into the water or maybe it’s 100 years old, maybe it’s from someone stranded on a desert island, who knows? That’s the whole point, you don’t know unless you open it. Let me ask you the question again? You’re walking along the beach, you see the bottle lying there, would you walk past or would you bend over, pick it up and open it? Go on, walk past or ignore it? Maybe leave it for the next person, I mean it’s probably just some prank isn’t it? I mean would you open it or ignore it?

Let me ask you another question, in these weeks leading up to Christmas which is about remembering, celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ who claims to be Gods Son and in fact claims to be a message from God. The apostle John talks about Him being “the Word”, the expression of God, kind of like a message in a bottle. He claims to be the very first Christmas present and here it is, Christmas lying at your feet in the sand, what do you do? Do you open it or walk past it?

I mean after all it’s probably some hoax, it’s probably some old wives tale; it’s probably something those boring old Bishops that they trot out on TV for Easter and Christmas invented. I mean it’s some religious thing isn’t it? That’s what it is isn’t it? The problem is you don’t know unless you pick it up and open it. Maybe it is a hoax or maybe it’s what it claims to be. A message in a bottle, a message from God, who knows? That’s the whole point; you don’t know unless you open it, I don’t know unless I open it.

You know my job in this program here is not to shove anything down anyone’s throat. I for one hate it when people try and shove stuff down my throat. In these busy weeks leading up to Christmas, what I’m challenging you to do is to look at this bottle lying on the beach, this bottle called Christmas and think about it and say, ‘do I actually want to open it up and find out what the message is inside or am I going to walk past and ignore it and let it wash back into the ocean?’ It’s a choice that each one of us has to make.

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Episode 3. Opening the Bottle

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You spot a bottle on the beach. You get close, pick it up…..there’s a message inside. The cork looks really old. Question – what do you do, toss, it back, leave it for someone else, or …

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You spot a bottle on the beach. You get close, you pick it up and … there’s a message inside. The cork looks really old. So here’s the question – what do you do? Do you toss it back in the ocean, leave it for someone else … or do you open it?

One of the things that seems to happen all too much around Christmas time is that people hit the bottle. You know what I mean, people drink altogether too much. Domestic violence goes up, women and children are beaten, families are torn apart.

I don’t think I’m over-stating it, it’s a big issue and it’s not that I’m against drinking alcohol, Jesus drank, in fact He made the stuff, He handed it to His disciples at the “Last Supper”. No it’s not that but drinking to excess, getting drunk is a madness, it’s so sad to see it, it’s so destructive, it’s so painful.

Psalm 104, verse 15 says that God made wine to gladden the human heart but so often, especially at Christmas, we take the good things that God gives us and twist them into something horrible. Not everyone but it does happen, more than we’d like to admit.

The last few days on the program we’ve been talking about Christmas from a different perspective. You know that song by Sting, “Message in a Bottle” well it starts out with these lyrics:

Just a castaway, an island lost at sea.
Oh another lonely day with no-one here but me.
Oh more loneliness than any man can bear,
rescue me before I fall into despair.
I will send an S.O.S. to the world;
I hope that someone gets my message in a bottle.

And it finishes up like this,

Walked out this morning, don’t believe what I saw.
A hundred billion bottles washed up on the shore.
Seems I’m not alone at being alone,
a hundred billion castaways looking for a home.
I’ll send an S.O.S. to the world;
I hope that someone gets my message in a bottle.

A song that connected with a lot of people, a song that tells it just the way things are for so many, kind of slipping under that thin veneer of so called success, this glossy successful image that we all aspire to. Somehow this song, “Message in a Bottle“, tells it the way it is. As we’re heading towards Christmas, as we are this time of year, the line, “A hundred billion bottles washed up on the shore. Seems I’m not alone at being alone, a hundred billion castaways looking for a home,” is a really poignant one.

However we look at Christmas, instinctively we know it’s meant to be a time of peace and joy and celebration but for so many its not. Whether it’s domestic violence fuelled by alcohol or just a nagging sense that something’s missing in my life this Christmas.

So many people, well their lives are just one of those bottles lying on the beach. A message, an S.O.S. crying out for something so people turn to all different types of bottles, the bottle of alcohol, the genie in a bottle. I mean after all that’s what the advertising industry tells us to do, rub this bottle, open it up, buy this and all your problems will be solved. Buy this margarine; you’ll have a happy, well adjusted family. Come on!

We turn to a celebration of humanity, you know the “global group hug”, peace and goodwill and white doves and happy singing children and candles and all that sort of stuff but still there’s no peace, even nativity scenes in our shopping centres and department stores that we all look at but don’t really think about what the nativity scene is all about.

All these things somehow are strangely empty, as though something is missing. For me for years Christmas was just one of those poignant times where I tried to live out what the world said I should live out. I tried to live it out by buying lots of presents and lots of food and lots of alcohol and all that stuff and somehow Christmas was just a clanger, it was an empty vessel, it never met expectations.

But there’s one bottle, one bottle lying on the beach with a message in it, authentic, not glitzy, not razzamattazzee like the other ones, no hype or anything like that. A simple message of a child, a baby in a manger. Not some cutesy nativity scene, a stable with animals, it stinks, it’s drafty, it’s uncomfortable.

God chose that and He’s saying something, something. Maybe it’s obscured by all the noise and the glitz. Maybe down through the centuries since that first Christmas, well we’re not kind of exactly sure what it means anymore but with all that’s happened that bottle still lies on the beach. There’s a message inside, the message of Christmas – Jesus. He contains the message; He is God in human form, message in a bottle.

It’s a simple message:

God loves us so much, SO MUCH He sends His one and only Son so that whoever believes in Him won’t ever perish but instead will have eternal life.

You might know that that comes from John chapter 3, verse 16 but what does the very next verse say? John 3:17. It says this:

God didn’t send Jesus into the world to condemn us but to save us.

You know the problem I have with religion; I always have, is that somehow religion points its bony finger at you and me and tells us all the things we’ve done wrong. There’s plenty of that going around but that’s not the message inside the bottle.

God’s message in the bottle is one of His love for us, His heart for us, to know Him and enjoy Him and spend eternity with Him. A message that Jesus is the way, the only way into that kind of a relationship with God and just to make sure we don’t dismiss it as cheap talk, God sends Jesus to this earth specifically to suffer and die and pay for our rejection of God.

What happened in that stable that night is Gods declaration of His love for you and for me.

Father,
as we look at the Christmas message we just want to strip away all the commercial hype, all the cultural stuff we wrap up into Christmas, all the misconceptions and preconceptions, all the cutesy little nativity stuff. We just want to look at Christmas for what it is, a simple quiet celebration of that night when Your Son quietly slipped into this world. Just remembering how much you love us, that you sent your only Son, not to point the bony finger of condemnation at us but to open the door to a relationship with you. To save us from all our stupidities and mistakes and to save us from turning away from you. Christmas Lord is when you sent Your Son; write that message on our hearts.
In Jesus name we pray.

Christmas, Jesus, a message in a bottle. But heres the question, the question for each one of us. Will we pick the bottle up, pull out the cork, open up the message and read it? It’s a choice, a choice that we all have on the other hand we can just get the credit card out and buy something else.

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Episode 4. God’s Handwriting

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Christmas – God becomes a man. Jesus. Kind of like a message in a bottle. You find the bottle, pick it up, pull out the cork….you’re about to pull out the message. I wonder what it …

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Christmas – God becomes a man. Jesus. Kind of like a message in a bottle. You find the bottle, pick it up, pull out the cork … you’re about to pull out the message. I wonder what it says …

We’ve been on a bit of a journey, so far on the program this week, a little series that I’ve called, “Message in a Bottle”. We’ve been walking along a beach, seen a bottle on the sand with a message inside it and wondered, “Gee … do I open the bottle or do I pass it by?”

It seems to me that that’s what Christmas is like, sure we do family things but at it’s heart Christmas is about the birth of Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, a message in a bottle. And just like that bottle lying in the sand, we have a choice. Pass it by or stop, bend over, pull out the cork, read the message.

If you’ve been able to catch the programs over the last few days my prayer is that you’re ready, ready to open the bottle because that’s what we’re going to do today. Bend down, pick it up, pull out the cork and read the message. What is the thing that God is wanting to say to us through this little baby in a manger? As you and I unroll the crumpled old message, I wonder, what we are expecting it to say.

Well I can tell you what I expected it to say. “Berni, you stuff up!” I expected it to be a great long list of the things that I’d done wrong. I mean I remember them all, why wouldn’t God? And any how, isn’t that what religion is all about? One big guilt trip. All these years later I still sometimes expect Him to unroll that great long list but He never has. In fact I could swear, well it seems like He’s forgotten all those things.

So what’s the heart of Gods message at Christmas time? Why send Jesus at all? Why not just be done with it? If we stuffed up, wait for us to say sorry, forgive us and let’s get on with it. I mean, that’s what we do with our kid’s right? Why the theatrics, why Christmas and Easter? I’m sorry to be blunt but that’s what I used to think. God’s God, He makes the rules, why bother with Christmas?

Let me share today with you some of my journey because in part, all those things were going through my head when I stooped down to pick up that bottle and as I pulled out the cork and as I started unrolling the message. The thing that first hit me about Christmas is that Christmas is so different to the Christmas that I’d celebrated.

Maybe you go to Church in the morning and then there’s family, friends, BBQ or roast turkey or whatever it is. A bit of a snooze in the afternoon but when you look at the brutal reality of that first Christmas in detail, and we’ll do that in a few weeks time, it’s pretty tough.

Here’s a pretty quick, executive summary. Mary and Joseph have a tough journey over several weeks from Nazareth in the north to Jerusalem in the south, she’s pregnant, they get there, there’s nowhere to stay, they end up in a grotty stable, the baby is born. What was God saying to me through that? I mean, He’s stepped out of the air conditioned comfort of Heaven to the bottom of the heap in my world.

I don’t know about you but that speaks volumes to me, why would He do that? Because I’d always thought of religion as being big and institutional with big majestic cathedrals and crimson clad clergy and pomp and ceremony and rules and regulations.

God didn’t choose any of that; He picked a stable in Bethlehem. He stepped into my world and the more I learned the more I discovered that for the couple of thousand years leading up to this, God had been talking to Israel, His chosen people. Why did He choose them? I don’t know He just did.

He’s talking to them through men called prophets and Israel rejected them all, they rejected God over and over again. They killed most of the prophets and here Jesus comes in to Israel during the Roman occupation, a brutal rule, into the malaise that God sends His Son. Jesus went on later to tell this story in a parable. He said:

Listen to this parable. There was this land owner who planted a vineyard. He put a wall around it, dug a wine press in it and built a watch tower. Then he rented the vineyard out to some farmers and he went away on a journey. At harvest time he sent his servants to the tenants to collect his fruit.

The tenants seized the servants, they beat one, killed another, stoned the third and then he sent other servants to them, more than the first time and the tenants treated them the same way. Last of all he sent his son, ‘they’ll respect my son’ he thought but when the tenants saw the son they said to each other, “This is the heir, come on lets kill him and take his inheritance.” So they took him and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him.

The thing that gets me about God and Jesus and Christmas is that God always knew His son would be killed at the hands of His chosen people. So the servants, He’s talking about the prophets of old. The son of course He’s talking about Jesus, the message in the bottle. They smashed the bottle and tore up the message. A weird thing for God to do, don’t you think? Until you realise that Jesus rose from the dead again. Until we realise that this was always part of Gods plan, for Jesus to die and to suffer and to pay for our sins.

You can read about it, the Prophet Isaiah wrote about it centuries before. It’s in Isaiah chapter 53, verses 2-10. Have a listen; he’s talking about Jesus here:

He grew up before him like a tender shoot and like a root out of the dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to Him, nothing in His appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men would hide their faces, He was despised and we esteemed Him not.

Surely He took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered Him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted. But He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon Him and by His wounds we are healed.

We all, like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the Lord has laid upon Him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed and afflicted, yet He did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so He did not open His mouth.

By oppression and judgement He was taken away and who can speak of His descendants? For He was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgressions of my people He was stricken.

He was assigned a grave with the wicked and with the rich in His death, though He had done no violence nor was there any deceit in His mouth. Yet it was the Lord’s will to crush Him and cause Him to suffer and though the Lord makes His life a guilt offering He will see His offspring and prolong His days and the will of the Lord will prosper in His hand.

You see, this prophecy by Isaiah was written about Jesus centuries before it actually happened with amazing accuracy and when you and I take a fresh look at Christmas through these eyes, the eyes of God, this heart that God had to send His Son to pay for all our mistakes, Christmas speaks to us of a love so great that there just aren’t any words to describe it. Just maybe one word – Jesus.

Christmas was never a plan B, Christmas wasn’t about, “Gee … my relationship with my people doesn’t work, I’ll send someone else.” God always knew when He created us, humanity, that we’d turn away from Him and one day, one day He would have to send His Son to slip quietly into this world. One day He would send His Son, through that stable in Bethlehem, to say to you and me, “Don’t you realise how much I love you?”

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Episode 5. The Rest of My Life

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Christmas. Jesus. A message. God Speaking. A Word. Jesus. A baby. A manger. Plain. Profound. What do you do with that? I mean – do you let it change things?! Or not… Why …

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Christmas – God becomes a man. Jesus. Kind of like a message in a bottle. You find the bottle, pick it up, pull out the cork … you’re about to pull out the message. I wonder what it says …

You can read about it, the Prophet Isaiah wrote about it centuries before. It’s in Isaiah chapter 53, verses 2-10. Have a listen; he’s talking about Jesus here:

By oppression and judgement He was taken away and who can speak of His descendants? For He was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgressions of my people He was stricken.

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Series: Message in a Bottle

We're glad you like it!

Episode 1. Let’s Get Real for Just One Minute

Episode 2. Walking on the Beach

Episode 3. Opening the Bottle

Episode 4. God’s Handwriting

Episode 5. The Rest of My Life

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