From All Angles

“What on earth am I going to preach about for Advent THIS year?!”  I had only been a pastor for a few years when I began to dread the repetition of the Advent season.  How am I supposed to keep the Christmas season fresh for my church when we read the same passages and light the same candles and sing the same songs year after year after year? Am I really expected to find something original to say?

I ran into the same dilemma at Easter a few years later.  I know that the resurrection of Christ is the single most amazing, life-changing, earth-shattering event in human history, but I’d already told them that last year, and the year before that, and the year before that, and… Surely, they were getting tired of this, right?  Surely, I’ve said all that I can say.

And yet, Advent comes ‘round again, and Easter follows soon after.  These are yearly rhythms that unify the church around the two major acts of Jesus’ life—the incarnation and the resurrection—the moment God became a human and the moment God saved humans from death.  It is good to recenter ourselves on these two moments year after year, but the question remains: as a preacher, how do I keep these events fresh for myself and my congregation so that we continue to live our lives out of this reality of what God has done.

Could it be that, rather than needing fresh takes to keep people interested and excited, the repetition itself can generate genuine interest and excitement? I’ve started to believe it can, and that this yearly cycle of repetition is necessary for us to fully appreciate what God has done in Jesus.

Oddly enough, my favorite soccer team helped me to see this recently.  I follow an English Premier League team called Everton. Occasionally, when an Everton player scores a really magnificent goal, the team will post a video called From All Angles.  The From All Angles video shows the same goal over and over and over from different perspectives all around the stadium: high above, ground level, from behind, from inside the goal, close up, shot from a fan’s phone… It’s the same shot, the same moves, the same sounds, the same cheers, and the same celebration on repeat for five minutes, but from a different angle each time.

A funny thing happens as I watch the From All Angles clips.  At first, I think it is silly.  Why do I need to watch the same goal 14 times?  But as the video goes on, I get more and more excited, not less excited.  Each time I hear the crowd roar as the goal rips into the net, my heart jumps a little more, until by the end I’m pumping my fist in the air and convinced that Everton is the greatest soccer team on earth.  (Spoiler: we are not.) 

There was a new From All Angles clip posted this week after Demarai Gray scored a beautiful goal in the second minute of stoppage time to give us the win over Arsenal.  As the video goes on, I begin noticing fine details in the play that I hadn’t noticed at first: the little finesse kick Gray makes to give himself space so he can take the shot around the defender, the pass from André Gomes that sets him up, how the goalie barely even moves from his spot, how Seamus Coleman always sprints down the field to congratulate his teammate.  These are unimportant details on their own, but together they tell a complete story with layer and depth. (To see the clip, you can go here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NBNsdRoNIM)

As I watched Demarai Gray score from all angles, I realized that this is Christmas.  This is Easter.  By the time you’ve been a Christian 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years, you’ve heard the story ‘from all angles’ more than once.  More than enough times to practically quote it.

“And there were shepherds in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks at night…”  “Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been rolled away… “

Your mind wants to let the words become background noise, something you hear but no longer really listen to.  The story begins to feel stale, cliché. 

And then…

God is born, and the angels are rejoicing in a field outside Bethlehem… 

God is born and the shepherds are going nuts in the streets… 

God is born, and Joseph and Mary are just trying to be obedient… 

God is born, and Herod trembles… 

God is born, and light enters the world…

God is born, and the darkness has not overcome the light… 

God is born, and the eternal Word of God has taken on flesh… 

God is born, and we have seen God…

And then…

Jesus rises, and the soldiers fall to the ground like dead men… 

Jesus rises, and he calls Mary by name… 

Jesus rises, and John races Peter to the tomb… 

Jesus rises, and Thomas can’t believe it… 

Jesus rises, and he is the Resurrection and the Life…

Jesus rises, and whoever believes in him will never die…

Jesus rises, and he puts his enemies under his feet…

Jesus rises, and death has no sting… 

It seems like God gave us four Gospels to serve as four cameras set up around a field capturing different angles of the same moment.  (Plus we’ve got Paul up in the stands sharing his perspective.)  We need all the angles just as much as we need the repetition, so that we are not just grounded in a story, but grounded in a story with as many dimensions and characters and reactions as real life. 

Preaching these same stories year after year from all the different angles awakens us to the power and beauty of our story.  It isn’t the preaching that keeps the story fresh, but the story itself that comes alive in new ways every year.  My words may get stale, but the stories of incarnation and resurrection never will.