The message given in the Sunday night worship service in the Gettysburg United Methodist church on December 4, 2022. The Bible verses used are Luke 2:1-20.
So everyone knows that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, was
born in a stable, and was placed in a manger. I mean, even people who
don’t believe in Jesus know that’s what the Bible says. We talk about it
every year. We sing “O Little Town of Bethlehem”. We sing “Away in
a Manger.” It’s one of the basic things of the Christmas story that Jesus
was born in Bethlehem and was found in a manger.
But why? Why Bethlehem? Why a stable? Why
a manger? Of all the decisions God made about how the divine Son of God
would be born, this has to be the strangest. We’ve heard this story so
much that we stop thinking about it, but in human terms this is something that
makes no sense whatsoever. If you had not heard this story, and somebody
asked you how the Savior of the world should be born, something like this would
never occur to you.
Just choosing Bethlehem in the first place is a strange
decision. Why Bethlehem? Bethlehem was nowhere. Bethlehem was
this little dink town. Sure, it was the City of David, but that was a
long time ago. Now, it was just a little place about six or seven miles
from Jerusalem. Jerusalem was where the action was. Bethlehem? It
was hardly worth the time it took to go there. It’d be like having the
Savior be born in Vivian. I mean, no offense to Vivian--some of Wanda’s
family came from there--but it’s not like it’s this thriving metropolis that
you’d expect someone important to come from.
One answer might be that Jesus had to be born in Bethlehem
to fulfill Old Testament prophesies. After all, the prophet Micah had
said that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. But that begs the
question. All that shows is that God had already decided Jesus would be
born in Bethlehem at the time God talked to Micah, right? If God had
decided Jesus should be born in Jerusalem, or Nazareth, or Corinth, or anyplace
else God would’ve told that to Micah, and that would’ve been the fulfillment of
Old Testament prophecy. So while the birth in Bethlehem did fulfill Old
Testament prophecy, it does not tells us why God gave that prophecy to Micah in
the first place.
When you think about it, it almost seems like God went out
of His way to have the birth be in Bethlehem. After all, Bethlehem was
not a place that Joseph and Mary would’ve chosen to go to on their own.
They only went there because the government told them they had to. They
had to report to Bethlehem because that was Joseph’s ancestral home, and they
had to go there for the census. It was about eighty to a hundred miles
from Nazareth to Bethlehem, and of course it was all on foot back then, so it’s
not like they’d have gone there very often. It looks like God timed this
out deliberately. It looks like God made the deliberate choice to have
the divine Son be born to Mary and Joseph at the one time that they would be in
Bethlehem.
And
why a stable? Why a manger? You’d think the least God could do is
to arrange to have Jesus be born in a decent place. A house, at
least. With a midwife, or a friend, or someone there to
help. You know, when the angel Gabriel told Mary that she would be the
mother of the divine Son of God, Gabriel somehow forgot to mention this part of
it. Mary and Joseph both had to be wondering, what’s going on here?
This is what God wants? This is how the divine Son is
supposed to be born? In a barn? With a bunch of smelly animals
around? What’s going on here?
The Bible does not give us answers to any of these
questions, of course. The Bible does that to us a lot, you know?
Don’t get me wrong, that’s not a criticism of the Bible. The Bible is
God’s word to us, and I understand that I have no right to criticize God’s
word. God, through the Bible, has told us everything we need to
know. But God has not told us everything we’d like to know. And I’d
really like to know this: why was the divine Son of God born in such a
strange way?
So here’s what I think. I think God’s choice was an
act of love. I think God’s choice of having the divine Son of God born in
this way was made as a way for God to tell us how much God loves
us.
I think that God knew it was
very important for people to know and remember that Jesus was born in the same
way that every human being is born. Why? Well, think about
this. Suppose we did not know the story of Jesus’ birth. Suppose we
knew nothing of his parents, of his early life, any of that. Suppose the
first thing we knew about Jesus was when he was an adult, thirty years old or
so, and started working miracles, beginning with the miracle at Cana.
If Jesus had burst on the scene in that way, Jesus would
still be an awesome figure. But think of what we’d lose. We’d lose
the human side of Jesus. He’d come to us fully formed, as a prophet, as a
miracle worker, as a God. We could still acknowledge his greatness.
We could still admire his wisdom. We could even still worship him.
But it would be a lot harder to love him. It would seem like Jesus was
totally beyond and above anything we’d ever seen or ever would see. Jesus
would be on a higher plane, on a level we could never reach.
We’d still respect him.
Maybe we’d even fear him. But we would not be able to relate to
him. It would be a lot harder to believe that Jesus could really know
what we’re going through. It would be a lot harder to believe that Jesus
could really understand our struggles. It would be harder, basically, to
believe that Jesus could know what it’s like to be a human being. And so,
it would be harder for us to love Jesus, or to believe that Jesus could really
love us.
The reason we can know that
Jesus does understand our struggles, the reason we can believe that Jesus does
know what we go through, does know what it’s like to be a human being, is
because we know the story of his birth. We know that Jesus was born as a
baby, in the same way that you and I and everyone else is born. We know
that he had human parents who raised him. We know that he had to go
through all the stages of growth that you and I do. He had to be a baby,
and then a little kid, and then an older kid, and then a young adult. He
had to learn all the things about being an adult that you and I had to
learn. He had to make some mistakes and grow and learn from
them.
In saying that, I’m not saying
that Jesus sinned. I’m just saying that, for example, the first time
Joseph had Jesus try to build something in the carpenter’s shop by himself, it
probably did not turn out to be perfect. Joseph had to show him how to do
it, and then show him again, and then show him again, until Jesus learned how
to do it right. That’s how all of us learn how to do stuff--by trying, by
making some mistakes, by trying again, and by continuing to try until we get it
right. And Jesus had to go through that.
Jesus had to go through all the
things we go through. He had to learn how to make friends. He had
to learn how to deal with it when people did not like him. He had to
learn how to deal with it when people he thought were his friends betrayed
him. And I could go on and on. All the things we deal with--all the
things that make life what it is--Jesus went through all that. And
because we know he went through all that, we can relate to Jesus. We can
know that Jesus does understand. We can know that Jesus does love
us. And we can love him, too. But it’s only possible because we
know the human side of Jesus.
Because it was so important
that we know the human side of Jesus, God had to have Jesus’ birth happen in a
really memorable way. It happened in the little dink town of Bethlehem
because that’s where a traveling woman giving birth would be noticed. If
it’d happened in Jerusalem, no one would’ve thought anything about it.
It’d be like a birth in New York City--there’s a bunch of them every day, and
other than the people involved no one knows and no one cares. But in
Bethlehem, everybody noticed. Probably everyone in town knew about this
woman who’d just had a child.
And just to make sure everyone
knew, Jesus was born in a barn. Out with the animals. Jesus was
born in this strange, unusual way so that everyone would know the story, and
everyone would remember the story. Remember, the gospel of Luke was
written, as far as we can tell, in about 70 A. D. That means it was
written about seventy years after Jesus was born. Luke was not there,
obviously. As far as we know, he never even met Jesus. He was learning
of all these things after the fact. Which means that he must have found
people who remembered this story, or at least were told about this story,
seventy years after it happened. The only way people would remember
something like that so many years later is if it happened in a really strange,
unusual way that people would remember.
God wants us to know
that God knows what it’s like to be human. God wants us to know that God
understands what we’re going through. God wants us to know that God loves
us. And God wants us to be able to relate to God, so that we can love
God. And God chose this strange, unusual way for the divine Son of God to
be born so that we’d know all that.
As we celebrate the incredible
gift of Christmas, let’s make sure we celebrate what God did to make sure we’d
know and remember that gift. Let’s truly be grateful to God that we know
and can remember the strange, unusual, wonderful story of the birth of Jesus
Christ.
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