I always enjoy the chance to meet people from different cultures and learn how 2 people from 2 different cultures can look at the same event and see it differently.
Years ago, we lived in New Delhi India. Kathy and I had to take a bus to a shop in the old city, so I brought my Bible along to read on the bus. We got off the bus and walked through a very crowded bazaar in front of the largest mosque in Delhi, the Jama Masjid. There was a vendor selling julabis, a very sweet snack, pretty greasy, so I got one for a snack.
I went into a tiny shop with my Bible in one hand and my julabi in the other, sat down to talk business, and put my Bible on the floor right at my feet so I wouldn’t forget it.
And the shopkeeper gave me a very strange look. Before we did any business, he looked at my Bible and said, “That’s a holy book, isn’t it? I would never eat greasy snacks while I carried a holy book. And I would never put a holy book on the floor by my feet. When I am done reading it, I put it on a shelf that’s higher than my head to honor it.” For him the floor and a holy book just didn’t go together. That was interesting. I do honor my Bible, but I do it by reading it almost every day and working very hard to live out what it tells me. And I still might put it on the floor sometimes. I don’t think that’s the point of honoring the Bible. But to that man, a holy book just didn’t go together with greasy snacks or the floor.
Some time later we moved to the Netherlands, where we were on staff in a sort of Bible School. Every Saturday the kitchen crew would put out a big tub of peanut butter, a big can of jelly, and loaves and loaves of bread for everybody to help themselves for a simple lunch. Our Dutch friends would watch us Americans make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and once one commented that they would never put both peanut butter and jelly in the same sandwich. They would take one slice of bread and spread just peanut butter on it, or just jelly. And they would always spread that peanut butter out, pretty thin across the bread.
And they would watch us Americans put a huge glob of peanut butter on the bread, so thick that it would just stick in your throat if you ate it alone. But that’s what the jelly is for. If you put enough jelly on top of the peanut butter, it works as a lubricant to get the sandwich down. And our Dutch friends watched this with the strangest look on their faces.
That was a puzzle to me for a while, but I finally understood why they saw it differently. To the Dutch mind you eat a sandwich for the nutrition in the bread. And they had wonderful, whole grained breads. And you would put a little bit of topping on top of the bread, but it was only for taste. The bread is the important part and if you got carried away with the fillings, that was decadent.
But for us Americans, we were used to highly processed bread that didn’t have much nutrition at all. We saw the peanut butter as the purpose for eating a sandwich and the bread was just to keep it from sticking to your fingers. It all depends on how you see the bread.
This Christmas Eve I want us to look again at two verses in Luke’s account of the birth of Jesus. It seems pretty simple and straightforward to us, but it puts two things together that just wouldn’t seem to fit to a first century Hebrew mind at all. The two verses come from the message of the angels to the shepherds. We find it in Luke 2:11 and 12.
11 to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. 12 This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger."
Now we’ve all heard that story before. We’ve heard it many, many times. Of course baby Jesus was laid in a manger, everybody knows that! But have you ever realized that those two things, the Christ and a manger, just didn’t go together! The Christ should never be laid in a feeding trough!
Every little Jewish boy or girl that had any religious training in Jesus’ day knew that God had promised that some day he would send someone very special to save the nation of Israel. They called him the ‘anointed one,’ the one that God had singled out for a very special ministry. In the Hebrew language the anointed one was called the “Messiah.” In the Greek language he would be called “Christ.” Christ isn’t Jesus’ last name, it’s a title and Christ and Messiah mean the same thing.
What did the people expect that the Christ would be like? The prophet Isaiah had said that the Christ would “be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and peace there will be no end. He will reign on David’s throne and over his kingdom…”
The Messiah would be, first of all, a king over Israel. He would bring peace. He would chase the Roman occupation army out. He would come from the royal line of the descendants of the great King David in the Old Testament. His reign would never end. He would be called ‘Mighty God.” The Messiah is much more than just an ordinary prophet.
And where should a special person like that be born? In the best hospital, of course, or maybe in a royal palace, with great fanfare and luxury. A royal baby should sleep on the cleanest of silk sheets, be bathed in a silver basin, cared for by the best doctors, be waited upon by servants who would meet every need, sleep in a nursery that will be warm and safe and brightly decorated.
But the Messiah wasn’t born in a palace, not even a 5-star hotel, or even a two star hotel. He wasn’t born in any hotel. There wasn’t room for him in the hotel.
He wasn’t even born in a house. He was born in a cowshed. Instead of a crib, his parents had to do the best job they could of cleaning out a manger, a feed trough, and lay their new baby down there. Maybe cows or sheep had been eating out of it just the morning before. You can be sure there were flies around. You can be sure the floor needed a lot of work to get it cleaned up.
Was there any royal fanfare? Soft sheets? Silver basin? Doctors? Servants? None of those. In fact, on a night when just about everyone else in Bethlehem had a nice warm bed to sleep in, Mary and Joseph and their new baby may have had the roughest sleeping accommodations of anyone else in town. You can’t get much lower of a start in life than that.
The Christ was laid in a manger, a feed trough. That just doesn’t make sense. What in the world did God have in mind? Had God forgotten to make the proper arrangements? Had God messed up? Had he overlooked something?
No, it all happened just the way that God wanted it to be.
Is God bigger and smarter and better than us mortals down here on earth? Everybody knows that.
But if God is so big and smart and exalted, can He understand what this world is like? Can God understand that an awful lot of things go wrong down here, that often times we get neglected, often times there just isn’t the money to provide for our families as we would like. Economies go through rough times, families get stressed. Often times things are dirty. Often times there just isn’t room available for the way things ought to be. Often times people are coldhearted towards someone needing help.
Jesus, the Christ, was born in a cowshed because God wanted it to be clear to everyone that he came to be side by side with us in all of our disappointments, frustrations and difficulties. He didn’t come to stand above us and say, “Shape up, or else!” He came to stand beside us, and say, “I’ve been there, too. I understand. I’m on your side.”
And the prophets didn’t have it wrong. Some day he will come again and then he will reign as king of all the earth. Someday we’ll see God’s power displayed on earth. And it will be awesome.
But there is something much greater and more awesome about God that we need to see first. And that is his love. He sacrificed his own comforts in order to bless us. He came to serve. He took our sins away. He went out of his way to find those among us who were the least lovely. There were those sinners who went to those parties that the good people frowned on. Jesus went, too, not to be wild, not to be irresponsible, but to love the people who were there. There were those shepherds who slept outside with the animals and always looked so dirty. But they were the first to be told the good news. Later on there would be lepers who had such a disfigured appearance that people usually chased them out of town. But Jesus welcomed them and touched them and healed them.
The Christ in a manger. It just didn’t fit. I hope you will never be comfortable with it again. He had no business being there. He didn’t deserve it. He didn’t have to do it. But he did. And when he did we saw something totally unexpected in the very heart of God. He wants to stand beside us, not over us. He wants to share our life, not destroy it. He wants to understand, not just condemn. He wants to love us, not threaten us. What could be less threatening than a newborn baby?
I saw a newborn this Tuesday. Her name is Evelyn. She was so tiny. Her eyes were closed. She was oblivious to everything around her, except that she was really sucking on her knuckles, so you could see she had only one thing on her mind. What could be less threatening than a newborn baby?
When Christmas is going right, the feelings are wonderful, we feel hope. We feel love. We feel joy. We feel peace. But God didn’t go through all of what he did for us to feel good for a couple of days. He came to us in such an amazing way because he really loves us. He doesn’t want to bless us with just the echoes of what he did centuries ago. He wants to bless us with knowing him here and now. He comes to us with his still small voice, calling us to meet with him, not just on Christmas, but throughout the year. He calls us to come to know him deep in our hearts and enjoy the wonder of who he is.
Because he has gone so far to reach out to very one of us, I invite every one on you to join us each Sunday to learn more about this wonderful God who has reached out to us. In the New Year we will start a new sermon series on …
