Christ is Just the Beginning
Luke 2:1-7
When will you begin to take down your Christmas decorations? In our family, my wife begins no later than December 28th. The reality is that the decorations may come down but I’m responsible for dragging the tree upstairs to the attic and so it may stay up for another week or two until she threatens me. When we finally get everything put away, we think we’re done, Christmas is over and now we can go on with life. The reality is that even if we have put away our decorations, Christmas is not really done but is just beginning.
Dietriech Bonhoeffer was a pastor and theologian who spoke out against Hitler and the Nazis. As a result he was arrested, imprisoned and then executed just hours before the Allies liberated the concentration camp where he was held. While there, he wrote a series of meditations on Christmas. In one he wrote, “It is not a light thing to God that we celebrate Christmas and do not take it seriously.” The challenge after a season of shopping, decorating, wrapping presents and attending parties is to pause tonight and take Christmas seriously and consider what it really means that God came in human form as a helpless babe.
Let’s begins with the scandal of the Christmas faith and the almost absurd and unbelievable claim that the God who created the heavens and the earth actually visited our planet in human form. Christians call this the Doctrine of Incarnation that God came in human form and took up residence among us to say, “I do exist. I am with you and in case you had any doubts as to what I am, I have come to show you.” That’s the claim that God visited the planet in Jesus Christ. The Gospel of John put it this way, “God became flesh and dwelt among us.” The Gospel of Matthew says, “All of this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, “Look, the virgin shall conceive a son and they shall name Him “Emmanuel,” which means God is with us.”
That is difficult enough for us to believe but it gets even more difficult because most of us would expect that if God showed up, perhaps not like Morgan Freeman in the movie “Bruce Alimighty” or George Burns in the 1970’s film, “Oh God!” but that he might show up like Thor, the mighty warrior down from heaven to defeat the wicked and evil. But that’s not what the Christmas story says. It says he came into this world in an ordinary way, like you and me. And that God came to visit this planet as a helpless baby, completely dependent on others to feed him, change him, bathe him and clothe him. This baby would grow into a child and would throw temper tantrums. This child who would say yes to God and the cross would go through the terrible twos and say no to everything. He who would fearless take on the religious powers of his day and even go to the cropss would be scared of things that go bump in the night and have nightmares. This child who would be a great healer of people would get sick and have a runny nose. He would be teased by other children. He would fall and scrape his knees. He would grow up to be a teenager, rebel against his parents, yell “I hate you” at them, have his hormones range and be confused about the changes going on in his body. He would grow up to be a man who would be tempted by greed, lust, pride and all of the things we wrestle with. He would experience everything we do in life so he might know what it’s like to be us.
We would think that God would be born into riches and power and comfort. Instead, he was born into abject poverty. When his parents looked for a place for them to stay, there was not even a hotel room available so that they had to take shelter in a barn where animals, eat, sleep and relieve themselves. Instead of growing up in a world-class city, at the crossroads of trade, art and culture, he lived in Nazareth wracked by poverty and drought, a backwater town of less than 100 people which was so insignificant that it didn’t even appear on the maps of the day.
So the scriptures say that God came to us so that we might know that he knows what it means to be human. How powerful it is to know He understands. But he just doesn’t understand, before he left this earth, he said this: “I will never leave you and I will never forsake you. I will always be with you. And when you mess up, you can come to me because I’ve been there. I am with you.” That is the message of Christmas. How do you box that up and say, “I don’t really need that for the rest of the year.” Don’t you need that every day?
Second, Luke tells us in the Christmas story the kind of bed that Jesus slept in. Who does that? Who says, Our baby was born yesterday and he slept in a “Graco Shelby Classic 4 in 1 Convertible Crib.” Nobody talks about the crib. But Luke says 3 times that Jesus slept in a manger which was a feeding trough. Now many of us think of a manger made out of wood. But in Jesus’ day, Israel had been deforested by the Romans and so wood was very scarce. The manger was hewn out of stone, kind of like our baptismal font. But rather than smooth, the stone would have been rough. It was hard and cold and not very inviting as a bed. Why was this so important for Luke to mention it three times? First, Luke wants us to know of the Christ child’s poverty. This is about as low as you can get when you are born into the world. For the 1 billion people who live in poverty in the world and the child who was born in the back of a taxi or on a piece of plastic in a grass hut in Africa or in a tin shed in the barrios of Mexico, Jesus is saying, “I’ve been there. I identify with you.”
But there’s more. Luke is saying that Jesus was laid to rest where God’s creatures eat. Listen carefully, the child who was born at Christmas will satisfy the hunger you have in your heart. Jesus would grow up and say, “I am the living water, those who drink of me will never thirst” and “I am bread of life, those who eat of me will never hunger.” Jesus when he was in the wilderness and tempted by the devil who wanted to give him everything, said, “Man does not live by bread alone but by every word that precedes from the mouth of God.” The physical and material cannot satisfy us. Our hearts and souls need something much more to satisfy of us. The problem is that we try to fill those needs with other things: the right spouse, the right house, the right neighborhood, the right job, the right schools, the right clothing and the right cars, then I will be happy. But they don’t satisfy. Even if we do attain those things, we will find that there is still a hunger within us. Jesus came to satisfy the hunger within you that nothing else can satisfy. You know this. The things under the tree, how long can they satisfy you? A couple of hours or maybe days but then that hunger returns. Jesus came to satisfy the hunger within you that nothing else can satisfy. Jesus said he came that we might have life and have it abundantly. And if that’s the case, how do you put that in a box, cart it up the attic and put it away?
Third is Jesus’ name. In Jesus’ day, you were given a name by your father and mother. But in the case of Jesus, he was given that name because an angel told Mary she was to name him Joshua which in the Hebrew is pronounced Yoshua which means ‘Yahweh saves.’ In Greek it became Yasus which in English became Jesus. So the name basically means Savior. So the child who was born in the manger was to be a Savior. Now some Jews thought the Savior was going to be a mighty warrior to help Israel throw off the bonds of Rome. But that was not the kind of Savior Jesus was. Instead, he was to save the people from their sins. The word sin in the Greek means to stray from the path or miss the mark. God not only created us but he has a path for us to walk but the reality is that most of us veer off this way or that way. And so we stray off the path God has for us and when we do, we not only hurt other people and sometimes ourselves but we distance ourselves from God. Well, Jesus came to free us from the things which lay hold of us or cause us to stray from the path of God. Jesus at the end of his life hangs on a cross and cries out, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” He sets us free.
Healing House is in Kansas City, Ks. It’s a home for drug addicts started by a woman named Bobbie Jo. Bobbie Jo had been walking the streets for many years but then someone cared enough to share the Gospel with her and she was born again. At the same time, her mother died and left her an inheritance. She knew that many of the women who were drug addicts turned to the streets to support their habits. When they were arrested, put in jail and then released, they had no place to go. So they went back to working the streets. So with her inheritance, Bobbie Jo bought an old retirement home that was boarded up and rehabbed it. She invited the ladies to come and live there and as they did, she would share the Gospel with them. Well, that home got filled up and then a pimp moved next door. She started praying for that house, gathered some more resources and bought that house. It filled up and she bought another and then an apartment complex. One woman whose life was racked with sin but who had been freed from it, then passed on the Good news through which they became free.
At Christmas time, they would take an offering from the ladies who would give out of their meager earnings. They would buy presents and then take them to the homeless on the streets that they knew saying, “This is a Christmas gift for you to remind you that there is still hope and there’s a Savior who can save you.” Last Christmas Eve, they pulled into a gas station to fill up the house van and two police officers were there. He recognized one of the girls in the van and walked over and said to her, “What are you doing here? I thought you were dead.” He recognized another and then another and said, to all of them, “I thought you all were dead”! He called his partner over and showed him the women saying, “They’re alive!” And in truth, they were dead, dead in their sins but now they were alive in a Savior who was born as a babe 2000 years ago. This I know: all of us need to be saved from something and this Jesus came to save you. This is why you can’t box Christmas up until next Thanksgiving because you’re going to need this Savior and the grace he has to offer again and again and again.
Tonight, I want to encourage you to keep one decoration out this year as a reminder that Christmas is just the beginning. Display it in a prominent place as a reminder that the meaning and purpose of Christmas that God knows you and He knows the struggles, disappointments and pains of your life, that the hunger and thirst you feel in your heart and life can only be satisfied by the Bread of Life and the Living Water. And finally, God came to save you, to save you from yourself, from your struggles, your addictions, your bad habits and your sins. And in the Christ child, God’s love and hope is offered for you this night. Amen.
