Contrasts and surprises characterize the story of Jesus’
birth. An extraordinary event comes shrouded in commonness. God’s strong
arm and mighty right hand work salvation in the fragility of an infant. The
splendor of the angelic announcement of favor pierces an oppressive darkness.
God’s good news seeks out the poor, the humble, and the outsider but
not the rich or religious. The King of kings and Lord of lords invades human
experience through the womb of an insignificant peasant girl from a backwater
nation. God operates in obscurity. Jesus’ birth story is not what we
would expect.
In these contrasts and surprises we hear the gospel. Luke packages
the good news of Jesus’ coming in this startling intensity of shattered
expectations. This truth creates a danger for us. We are so familiar with
the story of Jesus’ birth that the contrasts and surprises are often
lost on us. The result is that we hear Luke 2:1-20 as a sweet birth narrative
to be dusted off and read on Christmas Eve, and we miss the dynamic, world-transforming
movement of God it proclaims. A “fairy tale” quality develops around
the Christmas story (we read it alongside The Night before Christmas), and
we lose its message of hope for a real world, for our world. Therefore, we
need to listen to the narrative with fresh wonder and astonishment.
The text is shrouded in darkness. There are the oppressive Romans.
Caesar Augustus has issued a decree that a census should be taken. This is
necessary work related to taxation. The overlord is shaking the servant’s
shackles. Dictatorial, repressive, impersonal; the act forces a pregnant woman
to travel when the time of her delivery is near. The stay in Bethlehem deepens
the darkness. The accommodations for the birth of the Christ-child aren’t
exactly deserving of five stars. In fact, the cold, harsh declaration is that
there is no room for this peasant couple, so a stable becomes the labor and
delivery area. Poor, unwelcome, unwanted; we typically call a birth of this
nature a tragedy. So when we hear it is night (v. 8), all we can do is shake
our heads in agreement. It is night. There is a heavy darkness.
Then glory punctures the darkness. Jesus is born and the Lord’s
splendor accompanies the birth announcement. An angel greets shepherds watching
over their flocks with words of good news, “Today in the town of David
a Savior has been born to you, He is Christ the Lord.” The brilliance
intensifies as one angel is joined by the heavenly host singing glory to God
for His gift of peace. Light comes in the midst of darkness, and the sign
of God’s invasion of hope is “a baby wrapped in cloths and lying
in a manger” (v. 12). Jesus, the babe of Bethlehem, is the hope of the
world.
The angel’s message of good news focuses on three salvation
names. The babe is Savior. In this child God is on the move to redeem His
people (Luke 1:68), to rescue His children from the hand of their enemies
(Luke 1:74), and to forgive sins (Luke 1:77). The babe is also the Christ,
the promised Messiah. The child is the sign that God has not forgotten His
people but is performing mighty deeds of promise and mercy on their behalf
(Luke 1:51, 54-55). Finally, the babe is Lord. The child “will be great
and called the Son of the Most High” (Luke 1:32). The fragile infant
is the exalted Lord of creation and exactly the light this present darkness
needs. Only Jesus can come to us “living in darkness and in the shadow
of death, to guide our feet into the path of peace” (Luke 1:79). He is
the light that shatters the darkness of the text and of our lives. Jesus is
our hope.
Christmas comes and Christmas goes, but what difference does
the celebration of Christmas make in our lives? We often knock on the door
of December 25, unwillingly bringing heartache and brokenness as companions
to dinner. Does the narrative of God’s coming have hope for us in a real
world? Can we celebrate Christmas when a loved one has died, or the finances
are stressed, or the world is in turmoil? Can we rejoice even as we grieve
or suffer? We sometimes relegate the message of Christmas to placebo status,
a biblical pacifier that becomes woefully inadequate in the face of life’s
very real darkness. “How can I celebrate Christmas,” we ask, “when
life has broken, and darkness has come rushing over the landscape of my soul?”
Do we betray our true belief about Christmas in such a statement? If Christmas
is only tinsel and toys, darkness will definitely squash our fragile joy.
Is that all there is to Christmas, a sweet story, decorations, and dinner?
Jesus’ birth narrative is not fantasy, or the latest “feel
good” attempt to inoculate the human spirit to reality. It is real to
life, filled with darkness, hardship, and sorrow. When we read of oppressive
Romans and stable births, we are to recognize that God is intimately familiar
with the brokenness of our world. The Lord comes to His people in such distress.
Not beyond the struggle and pain, not outside the darkness, but within it,
the Lord comes to us. He invades our darkness and, in so doing, births light
into our reality. Jesus is that light. He is real hope for a real world. In
His person we find a salvation greater than our sin, a promise sufficient
for our every need, and an answer for our troubles. Jesus and Jesus alone
is light greater than our darkness, healing greater than our brokenness, and
joy greater than our sorrow. In Him, there is reason to celebrate and hope,
even when the darkness presses.
God overwhelms our darkness with the radiance of the gift of
Jesus our Savior, Christ, and Lord. Christmas celebrates this gift not in
spite of the darkness of our broken world, but in light of it. Christmas is
not a day to bury “our head in the sand” in a vain effort to forget
or ignore the darkness. Neither is it an euphoric drug designed to give us
a brief buzz as a coping mechanism. Christmas is the celebration God has provided
as an answer to our problem and a light greater than our darkness. The salvation
name on God’s gift is Jesus. His coming is our hope. Our response to
this word of good news, to this wondrous gift of God, follows the pattern
of Mary’s. We need to ponder or hold Jesus and the story of His birth
in our hearts, until the hope of the world becomes our hope as well. When
we do, our response is sure to change and follow the example of the shepherds:
we will find ourselves glorifying and praising God.
(For the full manuscript of this sermon
go to www.preachersmagazine.org and click on “Sermons”)
There is a challenge to preaching from a familiar passage like
the narrative about Jesus’ birth. Familiarity might not breed contempt
in this instance, but it does often dull the ears of the hearer. The excitement
of Christmas day may also prove distracting. Here is where the contrasts inherent
in the text help us. Jesus’ birth narrative starts in darkness. If we
start there in the preaching of the text, we will startle our listeners into
sitting up straight, for we will have violated their expectations. We can
then draw our hearers into the gospel narrative by naming the brokenness of
life with which so many in our congregations readily identify. This common
ground will enable the account of Jesus’ coming as light to a world of
darkness on that first Christmas to become a story of His coming to us in
our present sin, sorrow, and suffering.
There is a driving pastoral concern in meshing these stories
of the text with our people’s lives. The people of God sometimes live
as if the brokenness of life trumps God’s work of salvation. It shows
up in our dejected countenances and bleak declarations. Never is this attitude
more tragic than during the Christmas season. This is the season we light
candles of hope and celebrate a light greater than the darkness. This is the
season where fear is met by hope, and hope overcomes. Jesus comes as one who
conquers the darkness. The Body of Christ needs to encounter this victorious
advent in the midst of their current struggles and experience a rebirth of
hope.
The passage invites us to do this by going and seeing what has happened (2:15). We are to plunge ourselves into the narrative with its gospel contrasts and salvation names and experience it for ourselves. This is the task of the sermon. When it reaches its conclusion, the prayer is that the Spirit will take the message and stir each hearer to hold Jesus in his or her heart in a fresh way on this Christmas day. Then the hope of the world will be praised as our hope and as the only hope worth having.
