Come to the Manger: See Jesus by Cheri Holdridge (with an assist by Kurt Young)

I think it might be presumptuous for me to say that I know God’s heart. I think I know something about God’s heart. I cannot say I know the fullness of God’s heart. But I do definitely believe this. God knows my heart, and God knows your heart.   Don’t you think God knows your heart?

And I believe in the time before Jesus was born, God’s heart was sad. God saw the suffering of God’s people. God saw that because God has given us the freedom to make our own choices that we were making bad choices. 

Human beings, for some reason, choose to hurt one another. We make selfish choices. We resort to violence, we’ve seen quite a bit too much of that lately. We are envious. We draw lines of separation. We could choose compassion, and we could choose to build relationships and form strong communities, and sometimes we do. But sometimes we don’t. And those are the times when God grieves. 

When God created the world, I believe God had a vision of a world of love and perfect harmony. But with human choice, sin came into the picture and things went down from there. 

If you study the Old Testament, we see in human history, before Jesus, a pattern of the people being in relationship with God for awhile.  They worship God and love God, and then they make big mistakes and fall away from God. Then they repent and God forgives them and things get better for awhile. And then the whole cycle repeats over, and over, and over again. 

Finally, God decides to do something dramatic. God opens up God’s heart to us. If you think of God like a mother, the most loving sacrifice a mother can give is her own child. Think about it. When a mother opens up her heart and soul, her most precious gift would be a child of her own flesh and blood.   So God said, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll send my own child, my flesh and blood to Earth, to be one of us.  Our Father-Mother God asks Mary and Joseph to be the surrogate parents of Jesus – so that God’s own child can be born in the world. 

That’s how we got to Christmas, the first Christmas: because God’s own heart was breaking for the world. God wanted to make things better.

We human beings, then and now, don’t know how to love one another, and so God sends Jesus to show us how. And we tell the story every year, because in telling the story, we begin to live into God’s way. So we tell the story tonight, again.  There are three scenes in the story. 

In the First Scene, Mary and Joseph travel to Bethlehem. They are forced to travel because of a census. Remember that their country is under control of the Roman government. The Romans have little concern of whether or not a census which demands everyone go to the town of their family’s origin is convenient for the locals. This kind of social-political tension might be unfamiliar to most of us. However there are many people in our world who live under threat from the political leaders in their own country every day.  Imagine what it would be like to live in the Middle East of today.  Of course, we know of the unending political tension in the Middle East which was the birthplace of Jesus. But even in our own country there are immigrant children, born in this country, living in fear of deportation because the government has the right to send them away. Though Mary and Joseph lived with the honor of being the parents of the child of God, they suffered the degradation of living under the rule of Rome. 

In the second scene, when they get to Bethlehem, they have no home of their own. There is no guestroom for them. By the way, here is a side note, for those kids and adults out there who have discovered that sometimes history has to be relearned. Those Christmas pageant’s that show the innkeepers slamming the doors and sending Mary and Joseph out to a barn? Those are dramatic versions, which sort of took some liberty with the text. It’s more likely that their relatives’ guest rooms were full. The guests would then stay in the living room.  The living rooms in those days had space for the animals to come in at night. There was sometimes a large living area with a step or two between the people area and the animal area, and the manger was actually between the two. It’s possible that Mary and Joseph were sleeping the in living room of their relatives, with the animals. That’s why the manger was a handy place for the baby. 

But clearly, they are not wealthy. They are possibly doubling up with family and crowding in with the animals. It was not comfortable.

In the third scene, shepherds come to visit. Shepherds are NOT the elite class of society.  They are not the light, fluffy, clean cut ones you’ve seen in Christmas pageants.   Hmmm, now WHY would God choose shepherds as the ones to whom the angel would visit? Wow! That is a great question. You see, shepherds were smelly, uneducated, and the outcast. 

You got it. Got loves the people on the margins! God love us. God wanted to be sure that the people know Jesus was coming for everyone. So, what better way to get that message out, than to have the angels go tell some smelly group of outcasts that no one liked and let them be the first to visit Jesus!

I suppose if Jesus were coming today, God would probably send the angel to a group of drunks in recovery at an AA meeting. Or maybe God would send the angel to the Transgender support group that The Village helped to start. Or maybe down the street to The Village Idiot on a summer day when a bunch of the bikers stop by for a drink on one of their poker runs? That’s not where YOU would expect the angels would go.  The list of people living on the edge is really endless isn’t it?

Well here is what happened (from Luke 2 for those following along from afar). You see the angel had said to the shepherds: I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: ¹¹to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. ¹²This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.”

 

And so they went to see Jesus. And when they saw him lying in the manger they told everyone what the angels had said, “and all who heard it were amazed.”¹⁹But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.  ²⁰The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them. 

          They were all changed.  And we are changed too. Every year, when we hear this story again.  It changes us.  It gives us hope.  

Our children want to be changed. And they have been changed. I started out this message by saying, that God knows our hearts.  God knows our hearts because God lives in our hearts, and when we open our hearts to Jesus, then he can use us to change the world. 

Two little girls at The Village learned that their parents were giving money to our Christmas offering to give Hope for Children Near and Far and those two children each gave $5 each, from their own money. Another10 year old boy from The Village, for the first time, isn’t so concerned about what gifts he is getting this year. He asked his parents for money so he could donate to his school’s project provide food for hungry families. He said he’s beginning to see that Christmas is more about giving than getting. 

Our small congregation is going to raise $5000 with our Christmas offering. We are going to help send young people who have grown up in an orphanage in Zimbabwe to get job training so that when they turn 18 they will be able to go to work and contribute to their communities.  That’s a lot of money for a congregation our size to raise in a few weeks.  

We tell the same simple story of Jesus’ birth every year, because we want to be changed by God every year. God knows our hearts. Our hearts are broken for people who live in fear, for people who are homeless and for people who live on the margins.  Because we are some of those people, we live next to some of those people, and we are in relationships with some of those people.  God sent Jesus to change our hearts and to change the world. 

This is the Christmas miracle. God does the impossible through us. We come to the manger to see Jesus. Because Jesus lives in us. As the offering basket is passed a little later I want you to take a tiny mirror out of it, and take it with you as a reminder that you are a reflection of Jesus.  We reflect Jesus out into the world.

So, have a Merry Christmas everyone. Let it be a Merry Christmas for you as you remember that God sent God’s light, the love of Jesus into the world and that light shines through you. Amen.