A Story We'll Never Forget

The following is my message at the communion service at Oahe Manor Thursday, December 8.  The scripture is Luke 2:1-20.

Our reading today is probably the most popular version of the Christmas story.  When you think about it, it’s easy to see why.  It’s got everything:  love, adventure, family, kings, commoners, even angels.  And, of course, the birth of a baby, who was the Son of God.

Did you ever wonder why God did it this way?  I mean, you read lots of things about why it was important for the Son to come to earth, and why it was important that he come by a virgin birth.  You also read a lot about why it was important that he was born to Mary and Joseph, to fulfill the Old Testament prophecies about the Messiah being a descendant of King David.  But I don’t know that I’ve ever read anything about why God would have the Son born in this precise way.

           

God could’ve had Jesus born in lots of ways, you know.  God could’ve had Jesus born with lots of advance publicity.  God could’ve had Jesus born to wealth and privilege—that’s what lots of people expected.  God could’ve had Jesus born with lots of people around.  God could’ve had Jesus born anonymously, so that there’d be no record of Jesus’ birth whatsoever.  God could’ve had Jesus born in any number of ways.  Why would God choose this particular way?

           

It seems like there must be a reason.  I don’t think God does anything just at random, and I certainly don’t think any of the details of something as important as the birth of the Son would be left to chance.  But what would the reason be?  Why would God have Jesus be born with such high drama?

Well, I’m not going to sit here tonight and tell you that I can read the mind of God.  But it seems to me that one of the reasons might be that God wanted this to be a very memorable story.  God wanted the story of the birth of the Son to be told over and over again.  God wanted it to be a compelling story, one that people would remember.

It’s important that people know that Jesus was both fully divine and fully human.  If the story of Jesus’ birth was not known, if all we knew about Jesus was his teaching and his miracles and his rising from the dead, it would be easy for the human side of Jesus to be lost.  It would be easy for us to see Jesus only as a powerful, divine figure.  If we only saw Jesus that way, we would still know he was great and important, but that’s all.  We would not know that Jesus knows exactly what it’s like to be human.  We would not know that Jesus knows exactly what we go through on earth, because he went through it himself.  Even Jesus’ resurrection would be suspect—we could not really say that Jesus had died, because we would not know that he had ever lived, the way we humans define living, in the first place.

It’s only because we know how Jesus was born—in the same way that all humans are born—that we can say that Jesus really was fully human, as well as fully divine.  It’s only because we know of Jesus’ humanity that we can know that Jesus understands how we feel, how we think, how we are.  It’s only because we know of Jesus’ humanity that we can truly say that Jesus died so that our sins would be forgiven.

You know, these days we have lots of Christmas stories.  We have Rudolph and Frosty and the Grinch; we have any number of stories about Santa Claus; we have all kinds of Christmas-themed movies and TV specials and all sorts of other stories that talk about Christmas.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with those stories.  The thing is, though, that because there are so many of them, they could very easily have crowded out the real Christmas story:  the story of Jesus’ birth.  If that had happened, the fact of Jesus’ humanity could have been lost.

By having Jesus born in such an unusual and dramatic way, God saw to it that would not happen.  The story of Jesus’ birth is so compelling that no matter how many stories are told about Christmas, the first Christmas story, the real Christmas story, is never going to be forgotten.  It has existed for over two thousand years, and we still tell it and listen to it and read it all over again every year.  The story of Jesus’ birth is a constant reminder to us that not only did Jesus live as one of us, Jesus was one of us.  Jesus lived, and Jesus died.  Then, Jesus was resurrected, through the great glory of God.  Because of that we know our sins are forgiven.

God wanted to make sure we knew that.  That’s one of the reasons the Christmas story happened in the way that it did. 

Because of the way Jesus was born, the Christmas story will be told every year.  It will never go away, and it will never grow old.  It will be told until that day when an even greater story comes along:  the story of when Jesus comes again.