Love is an Open Door

Series: Let There Be PEACE on Earth

 “Love is An Open Door”

 Message @ Jericho Ridge Community Church – Tuesday, December 24, 2019

Text: Revelation

 

Pardon my voice – yesterday I came down with a head cold and it’s gone to my throat and my chest.  It’s good to have you here with us.    

 

Like me, perhaps some of you have eclectic family members.  I grew up with an aunt who was a movie producer and an uncle who owned a vintage model T car and who was a photographer.  He travelled the world taking pictures, which sounded like a glamourous life to me.  One of the books he published was a coffee table book with photographs of DOORS that he had seen all over the globe.  He was drawn not just to the doors themselves but what they represented.  To him, doors represented hospitality. He imagined the stories of welcome that loomed beyond them. Or stories of security and what those doors protected behind them. 

 

There’s a real cultural and emotional resonance in our thinking around doors.  We even have a metaphorical expression connected to them:  We think in terms of doors being open... by which we mean that we should step forward or keep moving with an opportunity.  And we also think in terms of doors being closed.  Meaning that the way is barred and there’s no possibility for us to proceed down that pathway of action. 

 

I’m not sure if you’ve ever thought about it, but there is a significant part played in the first Christmas story by what doors are open and what doors are closed.  Part of the Christmas Story is about CLOSED DOORS.

 

Think about Joseph and Mary, who is pregnant and in her third trimester, have been forced by a government degree to leave them home town of Nazareth and travel along a dangerous desert road down to the city of Bethlehem so that they can participate in a national census.  But when they arrive in this small hamlet where they don’t know a soul, the doors are all closed to them.  No one will open up their home to this young couple.  And so Luke’s gospel records that “She gave birth to her firstborn son. She wrapped him snugly in strips of cloth and laid him in a manger, because there was no lodging available for them.”

 

There was no lodging available for them.  One thing that we sometimes miss as North Americans who have access to modern hotel chains and Air BnB’s is how shameful and indicting this statement is on the citizens of Bethlehem.  In middle eastern culture, your door is ALWAYS open.  There is an obligatory hospitality that extends to strangers, and especially to people who are in need – like a pregnant mother about to give birth.  You do not say that you have no room or this is not a good time or that your life is really full.  In middle eastern culture, you open the door and welcome those who are on the outside to come in. The door is always open.

 

During my teen years we lived in suburban Toronto and we had some new Canadian friends who have moved from Lebanon named Hassan and Waifa.  One Christmas, I was making the rounds dropped of gifts from our family to the neighbours, and I rang their doorbell and like a polite Canadian, told them I didn’t want to intrude but I was just dropping off a small gift as a token of our friendship.  Well, some of you who have spent time in Africa or the Middle East or Central America know what happened next!  The door was FLUG open and I was immediately escorted / dragged inside and welcomed, first for tea.  Then a meal was prepared.  There was no just dropping in for a brief, polite Canadian visit.  In the middle east, you don’t just stand at the doorway… if you choose not to come in or if your host refuses to open the door for you, it is considered very, very rude!   Right relationship meant to Hassan and Waifa that their door was always to be open to us and our door was always open to them. 

 

You see, friends, one of the things that God had promised from centuries prior to that First Christmas, was that God was not content to have a world in which God was waiting and watching outside the door of our world.  The Old Testament prophet Isaiah is quoted in Matthew’s gospel:  

Look! The virgin will conceive a child! She will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel, which means ‘God is with us.’”  

 

God With Us.  What a powerful statement!  On that first Christmas night so long ago, God did something unique that would forever change our world: God flung wide open the door between heaven & earth and God stepped across the doorway into our space.  The very God who created humankind had taken on flesh & was now with us. Immanuel:God With Us.

 

One of Jesus’ disciples, John, who spent a lot of time with Jesus while He was walking this earth some 2000 years ago, used the metaphor of a door to help us understand the significance of this event.  In Revelation 3:20, John pictures Jesus saying: “Look! I stand at the door and knock. If you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in, and we will share a meal together as friends.”

 

Opening the door and sharing a meal is the height of ancient middle eastern hospitality.  It signifies a warmth of relationship that transcends differences. Unlike our culture in which you can share a turkey or roast beef dinner with those you mildly tolerate or even dislike because they are related to you, this meal together is shared as friends.  A loving, voluntary connection based on mutual respect for each other.   God with US.

 

So just like part of the Christmas story is about closed doors, part of it is also about OPEN DOORS.  By standing at that metaphorical door, the door to your life; Jesus is saying to each and every one of you tonight: “I love you.  I care enough to call out to you.  I want to know you and have to you know me.” Maybe for you that is a new idea for you.  Maybe God has seemed like a distance impersonal force or an eclectic uncle up in the sky somewhere.  But tonight feels different for you.  There’s something stirring in you that says that God is real, that God is personal and that God wants to know you and is inviting you to know God.  I would challenge you to act on that.  Don’t let that invitation pass you by.  

 

I love the way that Romans 5 again uses the image of a door to describe what our response to God is to look like:

“We throw open our doors to God and discover at the same moment that God has already thrown open His door to us. We find ourselves standing where we always hoped we might stand—out in the wide open spaces of God’s grace and glory, standing tall and shouting our praise.”     

 

Friends, this is the message of Christmas…. That one unique and holy night, in a little village on the other side of the world, the door between heaven and earth was thrown open, not a crack, but WIDE OPEN!  God has thrown open the door to you and God is inviting you to thrown open the door of your life to God.  God is with us.  Hope has come to live among us.  Peace with God and others is possible.  Joy can be yours.  Or to steal a line out of Disney’s song book: Love, God’s love for you, means that between heaven and earth: there is always an Open Door.  

 

Let’s pray together.  

 

 

 

We use the metaphor of doors being closed or open to help us understand if we are welcome to proceed. But at Christmas we are reminded that because of love, God opened a door that remains open (hey, that would make a great song title: "Love is an Open Door")

Speaker: Brad Sumner

December 24, 2019
Revelation 3:20

Brad Sumner

Lead Pastor

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