God’s Messy Plan For Christmas

God’s Messy Plan for Christmas

Luke 2:1-7

Charlie Brown stopped at Lucy’s psychology booth for some advice about life.

She said, “Life is like a deck chair, Charlie Brown. On the cruise ship of life, some people place their deck chair at the rear of the ship so they can see where they’ve been. Others place their deck chairs at the front of the ship so they can see where they’re going.” And then she asked, “Which way is your deck chair facing?”

Without hesitating Charlie replies, “I can’t even get my deck chair unfolded.”

Trouble doesn’t take a holiday even at Christmas. In fact, Christmas kind of emphasizes all the messy stuff we’ve been trying to hide.

If we were truly honest with ourselves we would realize that the messiness of life surrounds us. We live in a mess. Our world is not as neat and tidy as most of us would like to think.

We’ve got some real problems. We’ve got some real messes in our lives. Now some of us try to hide the mess. We think that if we don’t see the mess then the mess doesn’t exist. We think that by not talking about the mess that the mess isn’t real. But that’s like someone refusing to watch the news and then say that wars, poverty, and evil don’t exist. Or it’s like a teenager who throws their dirty laundry in the closet and says that they’ve cleaned the room.

But with all the wars, death, poverty, environmental and economic problems it’s hard NOT to see that our world is in a mess. And the mess isn’t just in other people’s lives; it extends to every one of our lives.

All our lives are messy. There are just things that are not quite right. There are things still left undone, or things that we wish we never had done. There are relationships that are broken and in need of repair, especially our relationship with God.

But no matter how hard we try to hide it, not talk about it, God still knows every detail of our messy messed up lives. But still He came.

You see Jesus came to a messy world to get messy with us so that our lives could be less messy. It was to fulfill what the Lord spoke through the prophet Isaiah so long ago,

“‘Come now, let us reason together,’ says the Lord. ‘Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool’” (Isaiah 1:18 NIV)

Despite knowing how messy our world has gotten and how messy it would get; despite knowing how messy our lives are, Jesus came and entered into our mess to make it right; to make us right. Right not only with one another, but right with God. And sin is the great messer upper. It messes up our relationship with God and others.

What I find is amazing is that here we are trying to make our Christmas perfect, and in the process, we’ve messed it up. Because Jesus came into a messy world, not the sterile one we promote with all our Christmas decorations.

You know what I am talking about. With Christmas lights and beautiful bulbs hanging from the tree. With our manger scenes all nice and neat, looking serene and calm. What I find interesting is just how wrong we’ve got it. The first Christmas wasn’t with a beautiful Christmas tree all decorated up, with the smells of pumpkin pie and turkey slow roasting. It wasn’t serene and calm. It was filled with the smells of animal dung. It was filled with the sounds of a woman giving birth, of a baby crying, and animals that were doing more than merely lowing.

And there were all these unscrupulous people involved in the story of Jesus’s birth. First there were shepherds, whom most people equated with the lowest of the low, and then there were the pagan philosophers, those who look to the stars and other gods, rather than the Lord God.

Let’s take a moment and read the account: Read Luke 2:1-7

The Lord put into motion that night what He had ordained from the very foundations of the universe, which was His plan to save humanity from itself.

Now, this wasn’t a plan that any of us would have or could have ever thought up, not even in our wildest dreams. And the reason is because it was a really messy plan. It was a plan where God’s Son, Jesus, would come down to the earth that He had created, and get all messed up in the process.

Think about that for a moment. The Lord God of all creation’s plan for humanity’s salvation involved sending His Son, Jesus Christ to this messed-up, sin-ladened planet.