Luke 2.1-20
Christmas Day Sermon at St Matthew’s Church Shenton Park
I greet you all in the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ. That is how an African would begin his sermon, and I feel it is appropriate this Christmas morning. We gather in his Name, and how thankful I am to be here with you. Christianity is going through a period of great unpopularity and worldliness. How precious it is to come here Sunday by Sunday and be reminded of who I am, a child of God, and who we are, the people of God. I have been looking again at Luke 2 and want to share some thoughts, mostly about those words the angel said to the shepherds: “This will be the sign to you; you will find a babe wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”
I often tell the story of how my Chemistry professor took me to his office and tried to persuade me to continue my studies to PhD. He had heard that I was thinking about Christian studies. After reassuring me that he had gone through a “religious phase” when he was young, but it had passed, he reminded me of all the bottles of untested substances in the organic chemistry laboratory, noted that one of them might contain a cure for cancer and said I could be the one to discover it. I didn’t think there was much chance of that, but I loved and enjoyed science very much, so the decision was a struggle. It was discovering that Christianity was true that had changed everything for me. This was better than a cure for cancer because it meant an answer to death itself. Age is eating away at us all and the prognosis is 100% negative.
Of course, the majority of people don’t believe what Christianity teaches is true, and nowhere is this more so than with the Christmas story. The rationalist mind hates the Christmas story like it hates all miracles. The virgin birth and angel choirs are easily dismissed as myth and legend. So people are not ready to undertake the cure, which means they will die without any good future. This was the second reason I changed course: People need to be persuaded of the truth; they also need to see what is at stake.
I want to look rather at an aspect of the meaning of the Christmas story, but I want you to know that the meaning of the story is only of significance if the story is true. And I don’t believe Luke and Matthew made it up.
Someone asked me last week how to keep Christmas fresh. I have been thinking about that. As a child Christmas was always fresh: holiday, waking up on Christmas morning to a stocking that had mysteriously appeared in the night, presents, relations, food, picnics. The only trouble was that it took so long to come around. Then came the cynical years: all I could see was hype, sentimentality, commercialism. A man in his twenties does not resonate much with the babe in the manger. My unfavourite carol was Away in a Manger, and it disappointed me that as gutsy a guy as Martin Luther wrote it. That was when the challenge of making Christmas fresh was difficult. The best way was to try to see it through the eyes of children and make it something for them. As a preacher I always looked for a new theme I hadn’t explored before. Christmas is rich pickings; I never ran out, but I cant remember that I ever got to preaching about the babe in the manger. But thinking about it last week I realized that things were changing for me. Age was catching up; the cynicism is fading and the wonder quietly pushes its way back.
God has filled the world with signs and Christmas is one of them. The world pushes God to the margins, would push him right out if it could. In our secular world children grow up without encountering God, not at home, nor at school, nor on TV, nor in their books. It is as though he did not exist. But he has surrounded us with signs, signs which we may or may not see or understand, but they are there, and maybe one day the veil will be lifted from our eyes and we will understand. Churches, crosses, Christians, gospel, love, marriage, sunsets: these are all signs, and so I have come to think is Christmas
Isn’t it an amazing thing that our society which hates Jesus and is embarrassed at any mention of him is rubbed in the face with him every Christmas.
Let’s hear the story! It is the story of the birth of a king, so it is fitting that Luke would tell us about the other king that ruled when all this took place. Caesar Augustus ordered a census, prior to the famous one that took place in the time of governor Quirinius. Poor Quinrinius! – we know these men. Quirinius lost a legion in a forest on the Danube; he lost his own life there too. Luke is telling us real history. But in 4BC Judaea was still a semi-independent kingdom ruled by King Herod; it fits that he organized it along traditional Israelite lines. Everyone was to go to the town of his clan and there be enrolled. Joseph and Mary lived in Nazareth a bit south west of the Sea of Galilee, but their clan home was Bethlehem. That is 120 kms as the crow flies. I guess the road they followed would have been a good 200 kms, quite an effort for a heavily pregnant woman. Joseph knew she was carrying a special child so he probably made the journey as early as possible, before Mary was up to her term. In Bethlehem there was no accommodation; the best they could find was a cattle stall. Tradition (Justin Martyr) says it was a cave. You can still go into it today in Bethlehem. Mary’s labour began and the child was born, wrapped in whatever cloths they had, and placed in a straw-lined trough. It was not what a mother would choose for her firstborn, nor what a husband would wish for his new bride, but I imagine they were grateful enough, given the situation. You may be sure that last night on the trek out of Syria there was a woman who faced worse.
Twelve months previous an angel had told Mary she would be the mother of the promised King, who would inherit the throne of Israel and reign over an eternal kingdom. Sometime later she found she was pregnant. Joseph too had had an angel visitor, but nothing of a supernatural nature has happened since. In an unwelcoming town, in a dirty cattle shelter, in the midst of a premature labour, Mary worrying about the safety of her little one, Joseph worrying secretly for the safety of his young wife – it must have been a struggle to hang on to that promise.
But now angels appear again, but not where you would expect, at the place of the birth, lighting up the cave with supernatural light, and flooding the background with heavenly music. Everything there was gloomy and dark. Only now, I think, they were over the shock of their surroundings and focused on the baby: wrapping it, trying to get it to attach to the breast. It could have been a tiny thing. But in a field outside Bethlehem another angel appears and announces to a group of shepherds that Messiah has been born in Bethlehem. He gives them a sign: “You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.” And then the heavenly music. This is the embarrassing bit for those trying to commend the faith to rationalists: an angel choir! But if you give it some thought it is not irrational. It has always puzzled me that people who are eager for clues of extra-terrestrial life laugh at the idea of God having spirit messengers. And if, as the Bible says, “the angels sang for joy” when he created the world, why would they not when he comes to the earth in human form? The really unexpected thing is that God should make such a poor entry into his world, and that a group of shepherds would be the witnessess.
It is true that there are myths about women being impregnated by gods. Zeus spent three nights cavorting with Alcmene before Hercules was born. And there were legends about great historical characters like Alexander the Great and Plato having a god for a father. But these gods were a far cry from the Creator God whom Jews worshipped. And there is nothing in the Christmas story that suggests any kind of bodily union. Mary conceived by the power of the Spirit that formed the first humans and created the world. Also, these stories, especially those that are about historical characters were intended to boost the greatness of the hero by giving him a fitting birth. The Jesus story is the exact opposite. Shepherding was an unclean occupation. No room in the inn. A birth in a feed trough. Christmas has given these things a romantic glow, provided the missing music and lights, but we need to think behind that to a culture where they would have been cringe factors. Most surely this story was not made up.
Luke tells us Mary treasured all these things in her heart. She didn’t hear the angel choir. All she got was a visit from some shepherds. Still, their message must have encouraged her, given the angelic greeting she herself had received a year before. That was the stuff of fairy tales: a young girl carrying the king of the future world. I wonder how she dreamed it all might happen when her time came? But this was a different kind of king, and God was bringing him into the world in his own way. She would have to be content to roll with the punches and see where it all unfolded.
But what about the sign? The shepherds needed a sign to identify the right babe. And finding a newborn in an animal’s feed trough would have been unusual. So the sign was effective, as far as that went. But perhaps there is more to it.
There are two kinds of signs: proofs and pointers. People were always asking Jesus for a sign. What they wanted was unmistakably miraculous proof that would convince them he came from God.
But signs can also be pointers. When God brought his Son into the world he gave a sign that was the very opposite of miracle. Not power, but powerlessness. Not wealth, but poverty. No lights, no music. Not beauty, but plainness, perhaps even ugliness. Not welcome, but “sorry we do not know you”. What is this sign meant to point to?
It is the sign which stands over the whole life of the Son of God. “He came to his own and his own received him not,” wrote St John, meaning his coming to the world and the world’s rejection of him, but surely John knows the story of the manger. “Foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head,” Jesus once said. His exit from the world would be on a gallows, and his last resting place to be wrapped in cloths and laid in a rock tomb. Even today his name is a swear word.
But for those with minds there is something very wonderful in this sign. This is no Greek demi-god or supernatural being, but Yahweh, the God of Abraham, the creator of all there is, the one whose yes or no will decide yours and my eternal future for happiness or sorrow. The God-Man King comes not to the best, and to be given the best, but with nothing and amongst nobodies. If shepherds are welcome in the presence of this king, then so are you and I.
Recently I came upon a little book by Charles Dickens, called The Life of Christ. It was never published in his lifetime, I suppose was never meant to be. It was a handwritten manuscript he wrote for his children. Mostly he tells the story of Jesus without comment, but at points he addresses his children directly. Listen to this and remember he is writing in the middle of the nineteenth century when the Industrial Revolution has made the gap between rich and poor a running sore. Do not be put off by his theology, reflect on the way Jesus has touched his mind.
“Jesus chose his disciples from among Poor Men, in order that the poor might know – always after that; in all years to come – that Heaven was made for them as well as for the rich, and that God makes no difference between those who wear good clothes and those who go barefoot and in rags. The most miserable, the most ugly, deformed, wretched creatures that live, will be bright Angels in Heaven if they are good here on earth. Never forget this, when you are grown up. Never be proud or unkind, my dears, to any poor man, woman or child…. And when people speak ill of the Poor and Miserable, think how Jesus Christ went among them and taught them, and thought them worthy of his care.” (27-28)
So the manner of Jesus’ birth points us to the character of the man who is to be our everlasting king, and to the character of his kingdom.
And now I wonder can we move a step further and reflect on the fact that this story and this sign has lived on. I doubt we can ever fully know the profound impact the story of Christmas has had upon the minds and imaginations of men. When God gave us this sign – sending his Son into the world from the womb of a virgin to be laid in a manger in Bethlehem – he knew and intended that it would never be lost. It is ike a parable that is not understood, yet penetrates and lies like a seed in our psyche. Humans would outgrow their need for God – Jesus would not be welcome in their science or politics or their conversation, but as often as seasons would come and go the story of the Christ-child in the manger would be storied and sung and the sign would stand pointing for anyone whose mind is open to understand. The enigma of the cross and the enigma of Bethlehem bookend the life of Jesus. To what do they point? To God, of course, and to eternity. But God has come not to overpower and overawe us, but in powerlessness, allowing us to do with him as we would, but in his rejection he would make the great atonement that would enable all who want this king to find peace with God and a place in his eternal new world.
I commented before on the contempt of the modern mind for the child in the manger. One who lived in the midst of the burgeoning rationalism and scientism of the nineteenth century was the Danish story writer, Hans Christian Anderson. In 1844 he wrote The Snow Queen. If I understand it correctly it is his protest against those who thought that they could find the complete answer to everything in science and rationality. In the first “Story” (there are seven) a wicked goblin who is the Devil makes a mirror that reflects everything good as evil and deformed, and everything ugly as beautiful. The goblins have fun taking this mirror out into the world and looking at the distortions. Then one of them has the idea of taking it to heaven to see what it would look like in the mirror, but it fell to earth and shattered into a million pieces.
Two children were playing together one day when a fragment of the glass lodged in the boy’s eye and a sliver in his heart. His name was Kai. He destroyed the garden of roses where they were playing, and found fault with everything from then on. And to cut a long story short finished up a prisoner of the Snow Queen in her palace near the North Pole. The girl, Gerda, goes off in search of him and after many adventures arrives at the palace, where she finds Kai trying to solve a puzzle the Snow Queen has left him. Her throne is in the midst of a frozen lake broken into a thousand pieces. She calls it the Mirror of Understanding. If Kai can form letters with the pieces and make a certain word he will go free, but the pieces slip and slide and he never can. His meaning I think is that those whose thoughts are limited to nature and the world will never find the meaning they seek, and never discover their real self.
At first Kai does not recognize the little girl; his heart is frozen. But she throws her arms around him and weeps tears of love and the glass in his heart is dissolved. Then he begins to weep and the splinter in his eye is washed away. And the ice blocks begin to dance, and when they are tired and lie down they form the word that Kai has been trying to form in vain: Eternity.
I have left out a part of the story which I think may be the most important. When I began to think of how the story of Jesus’ birth – 2000 years on – still points us to eternity, I thought of the Snow Queen and started phoning bookshops to find a copy. After three disappointments I was referred to Diabolik Bookshop. That was the last place I expected to find something so good, but that is the genius of God. His signs are found in the places you would never think. Sure enough they had it, in two different versions. As I compared the two, wondering which I would buy, I discovered that one had been censored. In the original when Gerda weeps over Kai she repeats one of the Christmas rhymes they used to sing as children: “The roses fade and die, but we – our infant Lord shall see.” That is the gospel magic that frees the boy. But all Christian traces have been removed from the modern version.
Christmas has become fresh for me again this year by the thought that throughout much of this God-denying, Christ-hating world God has set a sign that will not go away. What has so often displeased me as sentimental hype may be the sign which points lost souls to God and to eternity. I would hate to think that you should pass through this Christmas with the mirror shard still in your eye. Perhaps you would ask me to send you a copy of my booklet, The Universal Compass about reading the Bible. It is the message of the Bible which will lead you to peace with God and eternal life.