If a good fairy appeared and said you could make a list to put together your perfect Christmas, what would you put on your list?
Every year around Christmas time we get several chances to watch various versions of Charles Dickens’ classic story about Ebenezer Scrooge and the various spirits of Christmas who help him end his mean-spirited ways. There are at least 5 Hollywood movies. We may be able to see it live on stage from a school group or professionals downtown. We can even see a cartoon starring Mr. Magoo.
And in all the productions, Ebenezer Scrooge spends Christmas Eve with a succession of spirits. Each one wakes him up, warns him about the error of his ways and takes him on a magic journey to see things from a new perspective. All he has to do is hold on to their sleeves and he enters into a new dimension. He is invisible to others. He can fly. He can travel backwards and forwards through time. He can travel through walls. He enters a new dimension.
Christmas is a lot like the sleeves of the various Christmas spirits. Anyone who is touched by Christmas is also lifted into a different dimension. I hope we are all touched by it. If Christ has been born, it gives a whole new perspective on everything. It brings us into a new dimension.
But just what is that dimension? The angels told the shepherds that the birth of Christ would bring peace. But I’m afraid that we often misunderstand what kind of peace Jesus brings to this earth. When Jesus came, did he take away everyone’s problems? Did he come to save us from any conceivable irritation? Not all all. Our Christmas carols often talk about the time of Jesus’ birth in very idealistic terms, that that night was more beautiful than other nights, that the town of Bethlehem was more beautiful than other towns, that that night was quieter than all other nights. The Christmas carol, “Away in a Manger,” says,
“The cattle are lowing, the Baby awakes,
But little Lord Jesus, no crying He makes.”
Now for anyone who has raised a baby, that sounds heavenly. But I’m sure that little baby Jesus cried like other babies. If he didn’t cry when he was hungry, Mary wouldn’t know when to feed him. If he didn’t cry when he needed to be changed, he’d probably end up with one horrible diaper rash. And I’m sure he cried when he was getting tired and cranky. He was a real baby, born into a real world. We all long for a time of escape at times, but escape isn’t the meaning of Christmas.
Jesus did not come into the best of all possible worlds, totally calm and peaceful, safe and secure. He came into a profoundly fallen world and a very difficult world, not that much different from ours. And he came precisely because it was fallen and dirty and painful, not because it was so nice and sweet.
Is your Christmas coming together a bit ragged? Are some family members not getting along? Are there some things you’d like to do but you can’t afford them this year? Are you feeling stressed out trying to get it all done?
Sometimes we get so discouraged because our world doesn’t measure up to what we think it should be. It can feel like our world is just too tough for God to handle, that God isn’t doing his job right.
So, what was the world really like when Jesus was born? Was it really all that peaceful? Was it really all that different from our world today?
Our scripture lesson for today is Luke 2:1-7.
1 In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. 2 This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. 3 All went to their own towns to be registered. 4 Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David. 5 He went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child. 6 While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. 7 And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.
Was that an ideal world? No.
We say that one of the most inevitable circumstances of our world is that we have to pay taxes. Nobody likes tax time. Did they pay taxes in Jesus’ time? That was probably one of the reasons that the Romans called for the census, to figure out how much tax money they would squeeze out of each district.
And I think of tax time as a major pain. It’s a lot of work. I get my TurboTax software and spend quite a few hours putting my numbers into the computer.
But that’s nothing compared to what Mary and Joseph went through. Israel was a conquered province in the Roman Empire when Jesus was born and the Jews were a major pain for the Romans. They just wouldn’t submit to Roman gods and Roman government. It took extra soldiers to keep them under control. So, the Romans also charged them some of the highest taxes in the Roman Empire to pay for the occupation army and the conquests going on elsewhere. The tax rates were usually higher than most of us pay, and Israel was a very poor country. They set up a system that was just rife with abuse. A really rich guy would pay the governor a lump sum up front to be appointed tax collector for a village or a city. He would pay everybody’s taxes up front. And then he could charge pretty much whatever he thought he could get from the people in his village. That wasn’t a good system. It attracted greedy crooks and that’s why people hated tax collectors. And this time they were taking a census to help them better know how much money to expect from each town.
Someone decided that people should be counted in the town where their ancestors came from, so Mary and Joseph had to travel some 85 miles from Nazareth down to Bethlehem. That’s a long trip. And they hadn’t built Interstate 80 or 90 yet. Not even Route 72, or Hickory Street. Even our local gravel roads would seem like super highways to them. They get graded several times a year! You don’t sink into the mud after it rains! The pictures show Mary riding on a donkey with Joseph walking beside. We don’t know how they traveled, but that’s about the best we can hope for. She may well have walked 85 miles, late in her pregnancy. Neither one sounds very nice.
Our second child, Luke was born in Nepal. And when Kathy was very late in the pregnancy and getting tired of lugging that huge weight around, one of our missionary friends joked to us that if she wants to speed things up, we could take a drive up to the Tibetan border. You have to get a jeep or a Land Rover on that road because cars couldn’t make it. But the bumps might get the delivery started.
We all know about Murphy’s Law today, that if something can go wrong it usually will. Think about Mary and Joseph. They are about to have their first child, the most special child ever born. You can be sure they wanted everything to be just right. Mary was planning out the bedding and the clothes and some decorations for the baby. They were dirt poor, but you know they wanted the best they could provide. Then Joseph gets word that they have to travel to Bethlehem for the census and he goes and marks it on the calendar and he says, ‘Whoa, Mary, that’s way too close to your due date.’ They had to travel 85 miles, on rough roads, with no McDonalds, no gas stations with clean bathrooms, no Walgreens where they can pick up some handy wipes in case the baby comes before they get home, maybe with one donkey for Mary, maybe not, and she was very far along in her pregnancy. That is not the ideal way for it to happen.
We can get pretty depressed when our Christmas isn’t just right, when we can’t afford all the nice things we’d like to give to our loved ones, when there is conflict in the family or a loved one is missing.
How about Mary and Joseph on the first Christmas? Don’t you think they had things planned for a nice delivery at home, with family around them? Can you imagine how alone this young Mary felt, a three or four day trip away from home and family, having to make due with a feeding trough to lay her baby in? Can you imagine how Joseph might have felt, angry at the government for messing up the birth of their child, feeling very guilty that he was not providing what Mary deserved? We don’t know. It could have felt like events were really getting out of control.
But it wasn’t out of God’s control. God had used some bureaucrat somewhere to engineer the fulfillment of one of the Old Testament prophecies, that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. God knew exactly what he was doing! It was all the crazy circumstances that made it work out right, for the Messiah to be born where the prophecies had said he would be born. It wasn’t the way Mary and Joseph planned. But it was exactly right for God’s eternal, loving purposes, for the salvation of God’s people.
And when Christmas doesn’t meet up to our ideals of what a Christmas can be, and the expectations seem to get set higher and higher every year, if we are missing a loved one, the right amount of snow, missing our health, or whatever it may be, we can go and sulk in a corner and feel sorry for ourselves and accuse God of not being on top of things, not doing his job.
Or we can receive our Christmas by faith. We can say, ‘Lord, this is not the way I want my Christmas to be, but I know you are working on something good and important in my life. Open my eyes to see what it is. I guess it’s not going to be the Christmas that I envisioned, but I’ll trust that you can make something good out of it.’
‘And Lord, show me how I can make this a special Christmas for someone else who really needs you right now.’
Getting your eyes off of yourself and helping someone in need always makes life richer.
A savior who only comes for the good times isn’t much of a savior. We serve a savior who was born into dangerous and trying times, who demonstrated for us that God can keep safe even a homeless newborn, even in dangerous times.
We serve a savior who comes to the small people, a humble small-town carpenter, a pious teenage girl, shepherds, the people who are so easily overlooked and forgotten, who so easily live on the edge of making it.
We serve a savior who chose to sacrifice his own good times, who deserved to be born safely into a royal palace with all the honor and the best of everything, but chose to come to us in full vulnerability, homeless, poor, unnoticed at first, then persecuted and eventually executed.
The Christmas spirit does not magically transport us away from the pain and struggles of this world. It gives us hope and joy in the pain and struggles of the world. And it sends us out to bring that hope to those who most need it. AMEN
