The Songs of Luke's Gospel

Jesus: Song of Love

TEXT: LUKE 2:1-20

LISTENING TO THE TEXT
The text for today is the familiar section of Luke's gospel that many recognize as "the Christmas story." That familiarity presents special challenges for the preacher. Sometimes we know a text so well that we stop hearing it.

Amazingly, after all of the grandiose predictions of the coming Messiah and the upheaval that His coming would bring, the climax of the Advent story ends up in a makeshift nursery. A baby is born. So what? Luke begins this part of his story telling about a poor, scared little couple from an insignificant town giving birth to their first child while on the road.

And yet, this simple birth makes heaven burst forth in song. The "song focus" of this passage is the doxology of the angels in verse 14. They know and announce just how significant is this Boy born in a stable. The tension between the expectations of a people regarding how Messiah would come, and the way God actually did it provides fruitful ground for preaching this familiar story with fresh insight.

ENGAGING THE TEXT
The Need
Most of the people in our congregations week after week have at least a dull sense that they need God to do something for them. However, many of them also have rather nonbiblical ideas about how God works in the world and in the lives of people. They assume that if God acts, it must be spectacular and miraculous. Or they assume that if God acted in any significant way in their lives it would be with judgment and punishment. People hold God at arm's length because they are afraid if they really open their hearts to Him they will get a God who will crush them and condemn them.

God's Answer
When God comes, His manner of coming is completely unexpected. These people had very particular expectations of what Messiah would be. They were tired of being political pawns in the hands of the Romans. They were tired of being dragged into captivity and slavery by stronger neighbors. They were sick of being crushed underfoot by malicious dictators. All of that kept alive their hope for a Messiah. So it's easy to see how they missed a baby. Just when they expected a conquering king, God came as a harmless baby boy. When you're dealing with God, you often don't get what you might have expected. But there's the good news in this passage! When God comes, He does not come in angry retribution. He comes as a song of love.

Our Response
The message of God coming as a baby shows something powerful about His nature. God wants us to know His unconditional love, like a baby gives. He wants us to know His acceptance, the kind a baby gives. God wants so much for us to understand that, He risked coming to this world as a vulnerable baby. He entrusted His only begotten Son to the very creatures He wanted to save.

The call we can sound to our people is then, "Respond to God as you would respond to a baby. Don't hold Him at arm's length and push Him away. Don't be afraid of Him. Embrace Him and receive Him. Welcome Him and let Him fill you with a song of love.

PREACHING THE TEXT
One might open this sermon by reminding the congregation of the effect that babies have on people. Take a group of normally sober-minded adults, put them in a room, introduce the presence of a gurgling, bright-eyed baby, and it's amazing to watch what happens.

Tie in the fact that on this Sunday we are celebrating how God took the world by surprise when He came to us as a baby. Babies have a great impact on people, but in this case the world barely noticed. Here is where we can unfold the expectations that the people of Jesus' day had regarding the Messiah. They had God so "figured out" that they missed what He was really doing. The connection to us is rather obvious. We do the same thing when we construct neat categories of how God works and almost always get surprised.

Unpacking in some detail the particular messianic expectations that Israel carried will help make the next sermonic move. This move is simply to say that it's easy to see why the people missed the coming of Messiah. It's not what they expected. They wanted a political giant, a revolutionary leader, a military strong man. After all, isn't that how we would do it?

There's the problem. We make huge assumptions about how God can and will act in our lives, based on our own prejudices about who God is and how He acts. But the Advent story is of how God surprised us by coming not as a conquering king but as a baby.

This is good news to a people who have assumed that if God really comes into their lives it will be to beat them into submission, not to love them to transformation. God comes as a song of love, not as a song of judgment. The call of the sermon is to embrace the surprise of how God comes to us in Immanuel.