And the Second Wiseman Brought Milk

My friend told a part of his family's history to a group of high school students at their Sunday evening worship service at our church.  During the Great Depression his grandfather was a teenager in the rural Midwest and he rounded with a milkman.  The young man noticed that the milkman was different.  Despite the economic hardships and gloomy uncertainty of the future, he was giving.  The milk was never withheld if a family couldn't pay for it.  Someone walking down a road was offered a lift.  Kindness was shown.

During their hours together, the two men likely talked about many things including sports, town events and personalities, and national and world events.  We don't know their words.  My friend doesn't know.  Probably because for whatever they seemed at the time, the words they spoke weren't that important.  The people that they discussed are long gone and the events are dusty memories in scrapbooks found in attics and antique stores.  From the eternal perspective they were non-events.

There was something else that the milkman talked about, however, that is known.  He shared the life and words of Jesus.  He told the young man that the original relationship between God and man became broken because another young man, Adam, chose to go his own way.  And that decision was sin.  He explained that all of us have sinned against this Holy God, and that a division between the created and the Creator exists which can never be bridged by man's efforts, however well-intended or good or "holy" they seem to him.  He shared that God, in the form of Jesus, humbled himself by leaving the unknown glories of heaven and the constant presence of God the Father and the Spirit to be born to an unmarried teenager in a manure-strewn barn in an insignificant village in the land of a conquered people who were in the process of being counted and taxed.  The milkman spoke about the words and actions of Jesus, and how those words and actions caused him to be hated by the elite.  He told how one of his followers betrayed him for the amount of money that a slave was worth.  He told how his friends ran away when he was arrested, and how one of his best friends, a man named Peter, denied that he even knew him.  Finally, the milkman told how Jesus remained obedient to God the Father, and allowed himself to be hung on a cross, died, and then rose from the dead to forever bridge the great division between men like the milkman and the teenager and God.

The teenager accepted the truth of the milkman's words and chose to follow Jesus.  His actions caused his family to disown him and throw him out of their home.  Alone, he chose to learn more about Jesus and he hitch-hiked to a large city where he studied and became a minister.  Like the milkman he too told the story of Jesus.  Many believed, including some of his family, and their lives and the world have been changed because of it.

In this time of Christmas tell the story.  Go tell it on the mountains, over the hills, and everywhere.