Well, here we are
again. Once again, it’s time to hear the
Christmas story.
We do this every
year. An you know, no matter how much we
try to change things up, no matter how many variations we try to do, the Christmas
Eve service still pretty much comes down to singing the Christmas songs and
telling the Christmas story. That’s just
the way it is.
And you know,
that’s okay. In fact, it’s good. After all, the Christmas story is one of the
most popular stories in the Bible, maybe the most popular story in the
Bible. And when you think about it, it’s
easy to see why. It’s got
everything. It’s got love. It’s got adventure. It’s got family. It has good guys and bad guys. It has kings and commoners. It even has angels. And, of course, it has the birth of a baby,
who was the Son of God.
Did you ever
wonder why God had the story go 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’ve had the divine Son come to earth in this precise way,
why God would’ve chosen to have the divine Son be born to two ordinary people,
people who were a long way from home and could find no place to stay, so that
the divine Son of God wound up being born in a barn with no one around but a
bunch of animals.
I sometimes think
we’ve heard the Christmas story so many times that we kind of take it for
granted. But you know, God could’ve done
this in lots of other ways. God could’ve
had Jesus come to earth with lots of advance publicity. God could’ve had angels appearing everywhere
on earth, blowing trumpets and announcing that here was the divine Son of
God. Or, God could’ve had Jesus born to
a powerful family with lots of wealth and privilege. That’s what lots of people expected would
happen. Or, God could’ve had Jesus born
with a huge crowd of people around, so the story would be spread far and wide. Or, God could’ve had Jesus born anonymously,
so that there’d be no record of Jesus’ birth whatsoever. In fact, there was no real reason that Jesus
had to be “born” at all. He could’ve
simply appeared, fully formed, ready to begin his ministry immediately. God had all kinds of choices for how the
divine Son would come to earth. Why
would God choose this particular way?
It seems like
there must be some reason, maybe lots of reasons. 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 coming of the divine Son to earth would be left to
chance. But what would the reason
be? Why would God have Jesus be born
with such high drama like this?
Well, I’m
certainly not going to stand here tonight and tell you that I can read the mind
of God. But it seems to me that at least
one of the reasons God chose to do it this way might be that God wanted the
coming of the Savior to the earth to be a very memorable story. God wanted the story of the birth of Jesus to
be told over and over again. God wanted
it to be a compelling story, one that people would remember.
I think one of
the things God wanted was us to know is that Jesus was both fully divine and
fully human. If the story of Jesus’
birth was not known, or if Jesus had simply come to earth fully formed—in other
words, 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
Jesus was physically born, and because we know the story of how Jesus was born—
that he was born in the same way that all humans are born— it’s only because of
that, that we can say that Jesus really was fully human, as well as fully
divine. And 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.
It used to be
that the story of Jesus birth was the only Christmas story there was. But now, these days, we have lots of
Christmas stories. We have Rudolph and
Frosty. We have the Grinch. We have any number of stories about Santa
Claus. We have all kinds of
Christmas-themed movies on the Hallmark Channel that Wanda loves to watch. We have all kinds of TV specials and all
sorts of other stories that talk about Christmas. And there’s nothing inherently wrong or bad
about any of those stories. It’s just
that, because there are so many other Christmas stories, the real Christmas
story, the story of Jesus’ birth, could easily have been crowded out. 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 the story of
Jesus’ birth, the real Christmas story, would not be crowded out. The story of Jesus’ birth is so compelling
that no matter how many other stories are told about Christmas, that first
Christmas story, the real Christmas story, is never going to be forgotten. It has existed for over two thousand
years. Some of us have heard it more
times than we can count. And yet, 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. And because of that,
we know our sins are forgiven.
God wanted to
make sure we knew that. God wanted to
make sure we remembered it. 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 every year, in churches all over the world, until that day when an even greater story comes along: the story of when Jesus comes again.
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