(For Christmas this year, I am going back to a sermon I preached in Durango jail back in 2011. All Scripture quotes here are from the NIV.)
People say that the two days most likely for people to go to Church, even if they do not go the rest of the year, are Christmas and Easter – Resurrection Sunday. Of these, I think Christmas has the more powerful draw because it is connected with memories of childhood. Now, I don’t know how that childhood was for you, maybe it was not perfect. But seeing it as we saw it, as children, I bet it was always filled with optimism. I mean children always have a way of finding the best in everything. Children are always willing to believe the best, to hope the best, to expect the best without hesitation. Right?
If Christmas has that kind of hold in your heart, still tugging at you with that feeling of hope, no matter what we have gone through the rest of our lives then I think we need to thank God for that, because in that feeling is the seed of Faith. I say that because in that feeling is the memory of being a child, and Jesus told us precisely that the right way to believe is to believe like a little child.
So what is it that we need to believe? Well, maybe for starters, the Christmas story. I bet most of us have heard it lots of times. And I bet most of us have no trouble believing that everything it says in there really did happen. I mean, why not?
We can relate to Mary and Joseph, traveling alone far from home. Really having no one to lean on because, you know, it was a scandal. Mary was pregnant before they got married. And Joseph almost divorced her until an Angel told him not to fear, that she was pregnant by the power of God, and that this was all His plan… to save the world.
We can relate to them being poor. And we know they were because the offering they made at Jesus’ dedication in the Temple was the most humble offering allowed by the Law, two pigeons.
We can relate to them in their amazement: Angels spoke to them in person and in dreams, an army of Angels told shepherds about the birth, and then prophets in the temple came to see him and spoke about him. And then, if you follow the chronology, when they go back to Bethlehem, a caravan of Wise Men from the East arrives to worship the baby.
Think about it. What would your reaction be? You’d be like wow… We’d be just as amazed as they were, and I think we’d be just as clueless as they were… It’s an understatement when it says Mary treasured all these things and pondered them in her heart. I don’t think either of them could even conceive what this child was going to do for the whole world.
And maybe that’s still our problem today. Many times we read the story, believe it happened, we are happy it happened, but when it gets to asking, ‘what does it mean in my life?’ or ‘how does this change my life?’ we fall short, we don’t follow through because, like for Mary and Joseph, the concept of the Incarnation is almost unfathomable.
God became human.
John 1: 9-14 The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.
The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
This is the whole point of the Christmas story. God became man. Why? Because He loved us.
There is a story written in the 19th century by theologian and philosopher Soren Kierkegaard that tries to explain this. Let me read it to you, it is called “The King and the Humble Maiden (as retold by Scott Ragan.)
There once was a king who loved a humble maiden. This king was of uncommon royal lineage. He was a king above kings, with power and might to make all others humble before him. Statesmen trembled at his pronouncements. None dared breathe a word against him, for he had the strength to crush all who opposed him. The wealth of his holdings was unfathomable. Tribute arrived on a daily basis from lesser kings who hoped to gain his favor.
And yet this mighty king was melted by love for a humble maiden who lived in the poorest village in his vast kingdom. He longed to go to this maiden and announce his love for her, but here arose the king’s dilemma: how to declare his love? Certainly, he could appear before her resplendent in his royal robes and surrounded with the Royal Guard, ready to carry her away in a carriage inlaid with gold and precious stones. He could bring her to the palace and crown her head with jewels and clothe her in the finest silks. She would surely not resist this type of proposal, for no one dared to resist the king.
But would she love him?
She might say she loved him. She might be awed by his royal splendor and tremble at the thought of being blessed with such an amazing opportunity. She might tell herself that she would be foolish to reject such a marriage proposal. But would she love him, or would she go through the motions all the while living a life of empty duty, nursing a private grief for the life she had left behind? Would she love him or regret the moment of being face to face with the overwhelming grandeur of the king?
Or would she be happy at his side, loving him for himself and not for his title or riches or power?
He did not want a wife who behaved as a subject to his royal decrees, cringing at his word and unwilling to do anything but agree with all he said and did. Instead, he wanted an equal, a queen whose love knew no restrictions or limitations. He wanted an equal whose voice would speak to him at all times without hesitation. Love with his beloved maiden must mean equality with her. He wanted a relationship with the woman that had neither barriers nor walls, in which he was not a king and she was not a poor subject of the crown. The love shared between them would cross the chasm that threatened to keep them apart, bringing the king and peasant together and making the unequal equal. In short, he wanted the maiden to love him for himself and not for any other reason.
He had to find a way to win the maiden’s love without overwhelming her and without destroying her free will to choose. The king realized that to win the maiden’s love, he had only one choice. He had to become like her, without power or riches and without the title of king. Only then would she be able to see him simply for who he was and not for what his position made him. He had to become her equal, and to do this he must leave all that he had.
And so one night, after all within the castle were asleep, he laid aside his golden crown and removed his rings of state. He took off his royal robes of silk and linen and redressed himself in the common clothes of the poorest of the kingdom. Leaving by way of the servant’s entrance, the king left his crown, his castle, and his kingdom behind. As the next day’s sun rose in the east, the maiden emerged from her humble cottage to find herself face to face with a stranger, a common man with kindly eyes who requested an opportunity to speak with her and, in time, to court her for her hand in marriage.
That’s the story and it is obviously a parable: God is the King and mankind is the humble maiden. And I really think it makes the point that we could easily miss if we look at the Christmas story as something that simply happened. Because it is much more than that. The Christmas Story is something that had to happen because that was the only way in which God’s love for us could be made comprehensible, could be made manifest, could be made real to us.
And if, as I say this, you are thinking, couldn’t just God have told us He loved us? The answer is No, He had to show us because that kind of Love, the Love of God, is something our natural mind, our flesh can’t really comprehend. You see, Paul tells us of the Incarnation this way:
Phil 2:5-8 In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death— even death on a cross!
And that’s the point of the Christmas Story. Yes it is about a baby born in Bethlehem, poor and defenseless, it is about shepherds and Angels and Wise Men who worshipped Him, it is about two parents who loved God and obeyed Him even if they could not fully comprehend what this was all about, but most of all it is about God’s Love that He would send His Son to die for us.
Romans 5:6-8 You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
That’s the meaning of Love and that is why the Christmas Story had to happen because only by becoming man, like us, could Jesus take on Himself the sins of all humanity, take them all and all their consequences, and nail them to that cross. Only by dying could He take them as far as the East is from the West and only then, free from that weight of sin and the blindness and the despair it brings, could we be free to understand and respond to God’s Love.
This is the meaning of Christmas and when you look at it this way, you realize that the Christmas story is the One story that runs through the whole Bible, from beginning to end. From the beginning of Genesis when man chose to sin and reject God, this story has been in the making. For God told Eve in that Garden that He would put enmity between her seed and the seed of the serpent. And that that seed (The Messiah) would come one day to crush the serpent’s head.
(I think it’s interesting that the story that started in the Garden of Eden, reached its deciding moment in another garden, the Garden of Gethsemane, and then reached its culmination in a third garden, the Garden Tomb, where Jesus was buried and from where He rose in triumph: to open for us the way to the Father’s Love.)
And that is the meaning of the Christmas Story. Jesus was born to die that we might have a place in the Father’s house. It doesn’t matter where you come from, it doesn’t matter where you’ve gone, it doesn’t matter if your life is full of thorns. All that matters is: Am I wiling to receive His Love?
