When you think about it, if Jesus is who He says He is then He was able to choose the time and the place of His birth.  So what does that tell us about God?

Now, I don’t know about you but Christmas is a time, well it’s a time that makes me think; think about a lot of things. If God is God, why have Christmas at all? If Christmas is Christmas, why do we celebrate Christmas the way we do? I mean the name makes it pretty clear what it is, Christ – Christ-mas and yet it’s about turkeys and trees, presents and parties, holidays that people take whether or not they believe in this Christmas thing.

Now, I’m not one for the hype and the razzamatazz of Christmas, I like it quiet and intimate and what I love to do in these weeks heading towards Christmas is to head back to where it all began 2,000 years ago in Bethlehem in that stable. I’m not into the pantomimey Christmas either, no I like to head back and immerse myself in the reality. The donkey, the stable, that starry night, Gods story and as I was doing that recently I thought to myself, “what has this Christmas, Gods Christmas, tell me about God?”

Now, it’s funny, when you look at the symbols of Christmas, amazing what we do with them. Look at the candy cane, now here it is this white cane and it has 3 small red stripes around it and it has 1 big, red thick stripe on the white. What’s that candy cane all about? Have you ever wondered, “oh okay, we trot out these candy canes at Christmas time but why?” Well the confectioner who first invented the candy cane, he didn’t make it a candy cane at all.

Turn it the other way round and it’s a “J”, he actually made it a “J” for Jesus and the white was to symbolise the purity of the Son of God and the 3 small stripes were there to symbolise the stripes on His back when He was beaten at His crucifixion and the 1 big thick red stripe is to symbolise His blood. Yet we take the things of Christmas, the symbols, and we change their meaning, we reinterpret them.

I had quite a bit of time at Bible College to think about Christmas and God and a whole bunch of other things and you know the most profound thing I learned? At Bible College you learn to be a theologian, you take the stories of the Bible and you snip them up and put them in little piles, neat little piles. So I have a pile called the doctrine of the Trinity and I have a pile called the doctrine of original sin, I have a pile called the doctrine of incarnation. These little snippets of scripture and we think, “wow, you know, I think I understand God now.”

In a sense it’s not a bad thing to look through Gods word and to bring together “like” things and to get a really solid foundation from what we believe and what we understand. I mean the aim of that is to learn about and understand God and that’s why we have theologians, that’s what they do and you can kind of sit back satisfied and think, “that’s it, I’ve got God in a box and now I understand”.

But you know, the thing that I learned is that if I think that’s the end point, I think I’ve missed the point because God’s chosen way of talking to us is through the story in the Bible and one of those stories is the story of Christmas. It’s not some nice, neat, little doctrine of the incarnation, God speaks to us powerfully through His story and nowhere is that more true than in Jesus.

John, in his gospel, calls Jesus, “The Word. In the beginning was The Word” In other words, Jesus is God talking to us saying, ‘this is what I’m like’ and Jesus is unique, He’s the only person in all of history who could choose the place and the time and the circumstances of His birth. Let’s just think about that for a minute, He is unique, if Jesus is the Son of God, if He is who He says He is, then He got to choose where He would be born, when He would be born, what was going on around Him when He was born.

So the fact that Jesus was born in that little stable in Bethlehem, around the time of Herod and all that other stuff that was going on, was a deliberate choice by God, either that or He made a mistake. The question I have when I look at Gods stories is, “what is God saying to us about Himself through this story? What’s God wanting to say to you and me 2,000 years on about the way that Jesus came into the world?”

You see, as we look at this story on the program this week because we’re kind of heading towards Christmas and why wouldn’t we do that at this time of the year? As we look at this what we’re going to see is that’s it’s not some neat, theological text but it’s an outrageous story, it’s a startling story about how Jesus came into this world and for me, I’m someone who likes to think a lot and use my brain a lot and for me it’s a whole bunch easier to get immersed into the theology of the story. I love to use my brain but as much as that’s true the story itself is so much more real and engaging and it touches your heart.

We all kind of know how the Christmas thing goes I guess. Mary, she was a virgin and she was engaged to Joseph to be married and then an angel came and she fell pregnant through the Holy Spirit, well that’s what she said.

Do you ever think of what it was like for her, what a scandal it must have been? And then they had to trek to Bethlehem, this tough grind and they made it, this smelly horrible stable where Jesus was born. And then the visitors came, the shepherds and the wise men. What were they all about? And then King Herod tried to have Jesus killed and so Mary, Joseph and Jesus had to flee down to Egypt as refugees and all the 2 year olds around Bethlehem were murdered. And then they went back to Nazareth, this “nowheresville” where Jesus became a carpenter.

I mean, if Jesus is who He says He is, the Son of God, then it makes Him the only person in history who could have chosen that time, that place, those circumstances in which to be born.

Bing! Wow! I never quite thought of it that way but this whole Christmas story is a deliberate choice of God. Okay, if that’s true, what does it tell us about God? Here’s Mary, this virgin, she’s engaged, she lives in a society where having kids outside marriage is something you get stoned to death for. Rumours, innuendo’s, scandal, God chose that and this horrible trek to Bethlehem when she’s almost at full term on a donkey. God chose that and there’s no room, there’s no palace, there’s no nothing except this stable. God chose that. And then they had to flee for fear of their lives. God chose that!

What does it tell us about God? When we go beyond the nice trite little pantomime, beyond the theology, we look at the story of God, the story of Christmas the way He chose to reveal Himself to us.

You know when I go into a crowded room with my wife Jacqui, I often don’t read well what’s going on in peoples faces and we’ll come away and Jacqui will say, “Gee, so and so didn’t look well today” or “So and so looked a bit testy today.” And I’ll go, “Ooh, did they?” I think there’s a danger, we look at this story in the same way, we miss what God is trying to say.

Christmas is about you and me, it’s about God speaking to you and me and today is just about asking the question, when you look at this Christmas story afresh and anew, as we’re going to do together on the program this week, what do you see? What does it speak about God? This deliberate choice of Bethlehem, the stable, the fleeing, the being a refugee.

What does it say to you about God? Come on, hard question. What does Christmas tell you and me about God, about Jesus?

Let’s just stop for a moment and imagine how Mary felt when she had to explain her pregnancy to Joseph.  What a scandal!  Yet it’s this very scandal in the eyes of humanity that was all part of God’s plan.

These days in most cultures having a child outside wedlock is no big deal. In fact the whole notion of wedlock, for many people, has a kind of old fashioned ring about it but I’m old enough to remember the days when a girl falling pregnant before she was married, well it brought great shame and scandal to the family. So go back a couple of thousand years to a culture that used to stone people to death for adultery.

Put yourself in the shoes of that teenage girl called Mary, engaged to a young carpenter Joseph and she falls pregnant. Forget the reason for a minute but put yourself in her shoes, her family, her fiancé, her friends. What did they think? How did they react? How did she feel?

Well you know, it’s an amazing thing when you look at how Jesus came into the world. I just want to read this little story of Mary and how she fell pregnant, how all this panned out. Now this is coming by the way from Matthew, chapter 1, verse 18. Now the birth of Jesus, the Messiah, took place like this.

When His mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph but before they lived together, she was found to be with a child from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, well he was a righteous man, he wasn’t willing to expose her to public disgrace so he planned to dismiss her quietly but just when he’d resolved to do that, an angel of the Lord appears to him in a dream and says, “Joseph, son of David, don’t be afraid to take Mary as your wife for the child in her was conceived by the Holy Spirit.

She will bear a son and you are to name him Jesus because he will save his people from their sins.” All this took place to fulfil what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet. Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son and they will name him Immanuel which means ‘God is with us’. When Joseph awoke from the sleep he did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him, he took her as his wife but had no marital relations with her until she had born a son and he named that son Jesus.

Can you imagine? This teenage girl Mary, right, she comes to her fiancé with this story, “well, well you know Joseph, umm I didn’t do anything wrong, I’m pregnant from the Holy Spirit. God did this.” What do you think Joseph thought? I mean, come on! A single teenage girl from nowhere, wanders in with her belly swollen, if you were Joseph would you believe her? “I didn’t sleep with anyone, God did this.” Joseph didn’t believe her because he planned to dismiss her quietly, to let her go and end the engagement, not get married to her ’cause here is a social context that’s quite different from, I guess, today.

I mean these days in most societies, a woman falling pregnant and not being married, well it’s not big deal really; it’s just a lifestyle choice. In fact around where I live, very few people are married and have the same surname, most people seem to just live together but not back then.

Back then it was a big deal, I mean even just 30 or 40 years ago, I remember when I was a kid, if a girl became pregnant and she wasn’t married, well that was a source of huge shame for the family, an embarrassment and back in 1st century Israel, people got stoned to death for being adulterers and yet Joseph has a dream, you know, he doesn’t have a Bible to read, he doesn’t know how this ends. We can look back and say, “well, you know, it was Jesus and He was the Son of God”, we know all that stuff now but he didn’t and what pain he must have gone through.

How many times do you think Mary went over the angels words, over and over again? How many times did Joseph second guess this dream? How breathtakingly reckless was God to allow the whole future of humanity to hang on the responses of these two poorly educated rural teenagers? As I said, we know Him as Lord, we know that He’s Christ, the Son of God but His parents and His family and His friends, well there’s this scandal hanging around. It must have followed Him around when He was a young kid. Yet that’s what Jesus chose.

You see, you go back and look at Christmas, look at the very first one, the birth of Jesus, it’s not some pantomime and nor do I want to look at it as some dry theology of incarnation. It’s just a simple story and there are some hard realities to this story. If God is God, if Jesus is Jesus and He’s able to choose the time and the place and the people and the circumstances of your birth, He had to have a plan and a purpose when He made those deliberate choices and that timing, as far as history, is a tough time.

Israel was occupied, there was Roman rule, there were illegitimate kings from the Herodian dynasty and they were puppets of the Roman emperor. Everybody in Israel was expecting a messiah some time soon. God has a plan but it begins to unfold with this Mary and Joseph and this scandal.

Okay, lets just assume a few things here for a minute. Firstly that God is God, that He made a deliberate choice. He picks out this Mary, the Holy Spirit does in fact cause her to fall pregnant, God knew how the people around her would react because it was a scandal but God chose this anyway, this humble, simple couple, nobody’s, Mary and Joseph.

Question; what does that tell you and me, here and now about God and who He is and how He operates? I mean, come on, when we confront this reality that Christmas is not a pantomime, that it was a hard reality, what is God saying about who He is? I mean, God’s God, He could have sent Jesus with a fanfare and with trumpets and palaces and ceremonies and He could have announced His arrival, He could have made it clear and unmistakable and powerful and spectacular. I mean, God’s entitled isn’t He? But that’s not what He chooses, instead He chooses Mary.

You see Gods not a power dresser, God comes real and humble, down here with you and me, not as a king but as a carpenter, not as a prince but as a pauper. God chose a set of circumstances that somehow you and I can relate to. He chose normality, He chose a time and a place when the geopolitical situation was, was difficult and people were in danger and the country was under Roman rule.

He doesn’t put Jesus up there on a pedestal but right down into the realities of life, right down at the bottom. You know what that says to me? It’s says that Jesus is here for everybody, not just a few special important people, not just the beautiful people, not just the good people, not just the “holier than thou” people but He was prepared to come into this lowly place to be miraculous and misunderstood, to be for real.

I just struggle all the time with this notion that God chose to make Mary pregnant through the Holy Spirit and to withstand the scandal that they must have experienced, that must have followed the young Jesus around. God was prepared to be misunderstood so that He could send a message to you and me. A message of humility, a message that says, “I am prepared to get down and dirty, to be one of you.” Not a king but a carpenter.

As you’ve looked at the story of Christmas over the years, have you ever wondered about those wise men from the east, the magi? What were they doing there?

This week on the program we’re unpacking together an interesting question, what does Christmas tell us about God? Here’s the central idea, if God is God and Jesus is the Son of God, then Jesus is the only person in all of history who could have chosen the time, the place and the circumstances of His birth beforehand.

Think about it. And if that’s the case, if He deliberately chose what we now call Christmas as His way of becoming one of us, what was He trying to say to us through that choice? What does Christmas tell us about God? Yesterday we looked at the scandal that must have surrounded Mary when she fell pregnant before she married Joseph. Today on the program we’re going to have a look at a group of men who came to visit Jesus. Wise men from the East, Magi they were called. What was all that about? What were they doing there?

When you and I have a party at home, homes our territory right, who do we invite to the party? I guess we invite people we want to invite, would you invite someone you really didn’t like? Someone who offended you, an enemy? Probably not, you see we like to be surrounded by people in our home that we like, people who don’t offend us, people who don’t have a go at us, people who like us. That’s why I find the story of the wise men, the Magi who came to Jesus after He was born, so fascinating. Let’s have a look at it, if you have a Bible you can pick it up in Matthew, chapter 2 but I’ll just read it to you now.

In the time of King Herod after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East, Magi came to Jerusalem and they were asking, “Where is this child who’s been born the King of the Jews because we observed His star at it’s rising and we’ve come to pay homage to Him?” 

When King Herod heard about this he was frightened and all Jerusalem with him and calling together the chief priests and the scribes of the people, he enquired of them where this Messiah was to be born. They told him, “In Bethlehem of Judea because it was written by the prophet, “You Bethlehem in the land of Judea are by no means the least amongst the rulers of Judah for from you shall become a ruler who is to be shepherd of my people of Israel.”  

Then Herod secretly called for the wise men and learned from them the exact time when the star had appeared. Then he sent them to Bethlehem saying, “Go and search diligently for the child and when you’ve found Him bring me word so that I may go and pay Him homage too.” When they had heard the King they set out and there ahead of them went the star that they had seen at it’s rising until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw that the star had stopped they were overwhelmed with joy.

On entering the house they saw the child with Mary, His mother and they knelt down and worshipped Him. Then opening their treasure chest they offered Him gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh and having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.

Now these guys, these wise men from the east, sometimes we sing the song of “The 3 Wise Men”. Well, we don’t actually know how many there were we just know that they were wise men, they were called Magi. Now what’s a Magi? Well a Magi is someone who’s an astrologist, someone who’s into soothsaying and divination and all that sort of “occultish” type stuff and they come from the East.

Well what’s to the East of Jerusalem? You look at your map and it’s Babylon is what’s to the East and Babylon was really special to the Israel mind because in 586/587 B.C. the Babylonians had come and destroyed Jerusalem and taken the whole of the nation of Israel captive as slaves, so the Babylonians, to the Jews of the 1st century were really bad people.

So here were these Magi, these astrologers and soothsayers who were into divination from Babylon. Now astrology was against the Old Testament law. Let me read you 2 passages, Deuteronomy chapter 17:

If a man or woman living among you in one of your towns the Lord gives to you, is found doing evil things in Gods eyes and contrary to my commandments as worship to other gods or bows down to them or to the sun or the moon or the stars and has been brought to your attention, you have to investigate it and if it’s true and it’s proved that this detestable thing is being done, take the man or woman who has done this evil thing and stone them to death.

Chapter 18, verse 10 of Deuteronomy:

Let no-one be found among you who sacrifices his son or daughter in the fire, who practices divination or sorcery or interprets omens, engages in witchcrafts or cast spells or who is a medium or a spiritist or who consults with the dead. Anyone who does these things is detestable to God and because of these detestable practices the Lord God will drive out those nations before you. You must be blameless before God.

So what these Magi were into was absolutely detestable to God and yet, God invites them to the party. God invites them to come and worship His Son, now if you or I had been God, would we have invited them? Tell you what, I wouldn’t have because they transgressed against what God said was right but God did invite them and not only did God invite them, He went out of His way to go and get them.

How did He get them to come all the way from Babylon to Bethlehem? Did He send them a letter or a telegram or an email? Did He send them a prophet like John the Baptist? Did He send them the Scriptures? Did He send someone to scream in their face, “you’re very, very bad people?” He didn’t do any of those things. To these astrologers, even though He detested their astrology, God sends a star. You see, it’s this star that they observed as it rose in the East and they followed the star from Babylon to Bethlehem.

What does that tell us about God? You see, these Magi were not Jews, they were not Gods chosen people, they were into things that were detestable and under the Old Testament law, they should have been stoned to death. They were Babylonians, they were evil and yet God invites them anyway. Not just an invitation but through a star. You know what that tells me about God; He may well hate their sin but He loves them so much more than He hates their sin. He goes out of His way to bring these Magi to His Son, to worship Jesus.

That’s profound, what does that say to you and me, here and now? You know what I think it says; that we’re welcome too. In the Magi God chose the worst of the worst, couldn’t have been anymore unacceptable or detestable to Him and He went out there to get them like a shepherd to get that one sheep that’s lost.

I spent a lot of my life believing I just wasn’t good enough for God but in this story of the Magi, God is saying to us, ‘I sent my Son for all.’ Jesus came for all of us. None of us is good enough, that’s the point. In Jesus, the Christ, the Saviour the door to God is wide open. Jesus came for me, He came for you.

Somehow when I looked at religion I always thought of how far I’d strayed from God but the point is that through Jesus, God comes so close to us. Jesus is for you and for me.

If you or I were God would we have let Jesus be born in a time and a place where His life was under threat?  Would we have allowed Him to have to flee for His life and become a refugee, really?

Did you know the official UN statistics on refugees are absolutely frightening? At last count there were 32.9 million refugees in this world. Let’s just run by that number again. 32.9 million! The misery of just one refugee is beyond comprehension for me but 32.9 million. This program you know is heard in prisons and in refugee camps as well as in the homes of the powerful and the wealthy.

One of the things that sometimes is so hard for me is that I’ve never been a refugee, I’ve never been so poor as to not have enough food to eat. My parents have during World War 2 but I haven’t and part of the struggle I always have in putting together these programs is whether what I have to say works for the man whose child is starving in the refugee camp in Sierra Leon as well as the woman who lives in a large home with 3 TV’s in a wealthy country and when you think about it, God has so much more than any of us, how easy would it be for us to see God as a God for just the wealthy and the privileged.

Over this week on the program we’ve been looking at the story of Christmas, just the cold hard reality of where Jesus was born and what He had to go through. We’ve seen Mary’s pregnancy when she fell pregnant to the Holy Spirit but she wasn’t married, she was only engaged and who would have believed her, you know Joseph didn’t believe her to start with.

What a scandal it must have been and yesterday we saw the wise men from the East, the Magi, these astrologers who did things that were just detestable to God and yet God opened up Jesus and the ability to worship Him to these Magi by sending them a star of all things. And today we’re going to look at the reality of what Jesus was born into and discover that He too became a refugee.

You see, when Jesus was born these Magi came and they stopped by King Herod. Herod was a despot, he was kind of an illegitimate king, he was in cahoots with the Romans who occupied the land and he was part of that brutal Roman oppression and Herod, if you want to read it you can read it in the book of Matthew, the very first book of the New Testament, chapter 2 beginning at verse 7:

Herod secretly called for the wise men and learned from them the exact time when the star had appeared to them. Then he sent them to Bethlehem saying, “Go and search diligently for this child and when you’ve found Him, let me know so that I can go and worship Him as well.” When they heard the king they set out and there ahead of them went this star that they had seen at it’s rising in the East until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw the star had stopped they were overwhelmed with joy.  

On entering the house they saw the child with Mary, His mother and they knelt down and they worshipped Him and then, opening their treasure chest they offered Him gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh and having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road. Now after they left an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Get up, take the child and His mother to Egypt and flee and remain there until I tell you for Herod is about the search for the child and destroy Him.” So Joseph got up, took the child and His mother by night and went to Egypt and there they remained until the death of Herod. This was to fulfil what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, “Out of Egypt I have called My Son.”

But when Herod saw that he’d been tricked by these wise men, these Magi from the East, he was infuriated and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were 2 years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah, “A voice was heard from Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children, she refused to be consoled because they are no more.”

What a story, I mean this Jesus is the Son of God and God brings Him into the world, into this precarious place with Mary and Joseph, two young kids really and He’s in this place and Herod wants to kill Him. Herod thinks that this is a Jewish uprising, Herod thinks there’s going to be another King David, you know, who’s come to threaten his throne. So Herod wants Jesus killed and in a dream, now I want you to remember something, Joseph doesn’t have the Bible like we have it, Joseph doesn’t have the New Testament, Joseph doesn’t know how it all turns out.

There’s nothing, he gets a dream, this subjective thing and Gods says, ‘pick up your wife and your child and flee to Egypt, run like the wind.’ So they get up in the middle of the night and they’ve become refugees with no rights, no possessions, no home and no United Nations charter on refugees to protect them. They’re completely at the mercy of kings and rulers and local despots.

Herod wants Him killed and then, after He’s fled, Herod has this genocide of all the young children, under 2, in and around Bethlehem. Mary and Joseph were so young, for Joseph this Jesus wasn’t even his natural child. The whole of Gods plan, this little baby, was entrusted to these teenagers and they were up against a king who wanted Jesus dead and the only reason Jesus escaped was because God gave Joseph a dream and God gave the astrologers a dream not to go back to Herod.

Is that how you or I would have handled things? If we were God, would we have let Jesus be born in this place and put Him at risk and entrusted Him to a couple of hapless teenagers who weren’t even married? Huh, what does it tell you about God? What can you and I take away from this Christmas story today and treasure in our hearts for the rest of our lives? You know what it tells me; firstly, Gods ways aren’t our ways, He does miracles in adversity, He works through the super natural to achieve His purposes.

You know when you and I face adversity, sometimes we want to panic or get depressed or run around in a flap or give up or fix the problem in our own strength but when God wants to do something, He steps into this world in the most unexpected way. Right in the middle of conflict and danger and fear in a lowly and humble way and He does miraculous things.

God is a miraculous God and secondly, He was prepared to let His Son be a refugee so that He could speak to the refugee in the refugee camp. So that He could speak to the prisoner in the jail, so that He could speak to the sick in the hospital and speak to all of us who are afraid and who suffer and who wonders what’s going to happen next. So He could whisper into our hearts, “I know, I understand, I’ve been there. I’m here in this place with you.”

Theologians talk about the doctrine of the incarnation where God becomes man but this story, this story speaks about the incarnation in a way that our hearts can digest. In a way that brings peace and comfort and love to our hearts. God’s story, God chose this way, God means to say something to you and me about this Herod and the massacred infants and His Son fleeing into exile. God is speaking through this story.

Let me ask you again; what does this Christmas story speak into your heart about who God is?

When you look back at the story of that first Christmas what becomes pretty obvious is that if you or I were God we wouldn’t have done it that way. Truly.  So why did He?

This week on the program we’ve been unravelling the story of Christmas, not from a pantomime perspective, not from some commercial perspective, not from a “phew, finally a few days off” perspective but just looking at the plain, simple story that God recorded for us and asking, “what does it tell us about God?”

We’ve looked this week at Mary and the scandal of her pregnancy while she was still engaged to Joseph. We’ve looked at the wise men from the East, the Magi, the astrologers and how God went out of His way to call them to His Son. We’ve looked at the danger that Jesus was in, the murder of the infants, fleeing for His life as a refugee to Egypt and I’m pretty sure that none of us, were we in Gods shoes, would have chosen any of things for our Son, would we?

What about that carpenters shop in Nazareth when they return from Egypt. Imagine, you’re God and you bring your Son into the world and you think, “well if you or I were God, wouldn’t we make Him a king or someone important or at least a lecturer at a Bible College?”

But it’s not what happened, if you read about the story in Matthew chapter 2 beginning at verse 19 when Herod died, an angel of the Lord suddenly appeared to a dream to Joseph in Egypt ’cause they were refugees, they had to flee for their lives ’cause Herod wanted to kill Jesus. In this dream the angel said:

Get up, take the child and His mother and go to the land of Israel for those who are seeking the child’s life are now dead. So Joseph got up, took the child and His mother and went to the land of Israel but he heard that Archelaus was ruling over Judea in place of his father, Herod and he was afraid to go there and after being warned in a dream, he went…” (Another dream; God uses these dreams you know) “After being warned in a dream he went to a town called Nazareth in the district of Galilee so that what was spoken through the prophet might be fulfilled, “Jesus will be called a Nazarene.

Now Jesus grows up as a little boy and then a teenager and then as a young man as a poor carpenter in nowheresville in Nazareth. So He has this kind of ignominious beginning to His life as the Son of God on this earth. So if Jesus came to reveal God to us, what do we learn about God through this first Christmas? I mean the Old Testament talks about a God who is sovereign and powerful and transcendent and huge. In the book of Isaiah God says:

To whom will you compare me? Who is my equal says the Holy One? Go on lift up your eyes, look at all the stars and see who created these.

But here at Christmas we see this greatness of God reduced to the size of a single fertilised egg not even visible to the human eye, born in a stable with the stench of cow dung and urine on the floor, hunted down, made a refugee, the massacre of the infants who were around the same age as Jesus, slinking back into Nazareth to eek out this ignominious existence as a carpenter. Relying on two teenage bumpkins, Mary and Joseph, for safety and nurture while He was being brought up and when He was a refugee and always this hint of the scandal of Mary’s little illegitimate child because she fell pregnant while she was still engaged to Joseph.

God may well be great and powerful and huge and transcendent but in this Christmas story, I have to say, “hang on a minute, my God became small, for me. My God is a humble God.” You see, if you look at our understanding or let me use the word “doctrine” of the incarnation, Jesus is the Son of God and the son of man; He’s fully God and fully man.

He’s the same yet He’s different but if we really asked ourselves the question, “is He more the same as me or is He more different to me?” we will probably come to the conclusion that Jesus was, fundamentally different to us but like Luther, I believe that if we are even to begin to understand what God is saying to us through this Jesus through Christmas, we have to understand that Jesus is God, deep graven in the flesh.

Like that candy cane, on the one hand it’s white and pure and blameless and so Jesus is different. On the other hand it has the red stripes on it, the stripes of blood, He’s like us. He lived, He suffered, He cried, He struggled – like us, just like you and me and we can have the best theological doctrine of incarnation yet completely miss the point that in Jesus, God is humble.

He showed us that in a profound way at Christmas. He chose His time, He chose His circumstances, He chose the stable and the animals, He chose to become a refugee, He chose to have His life threatened by Herod. That’s why Jesus was later able to say:

Come to me all you who are weary and carry burdens for I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me for I am gentle and humble in heart and you will find rest for you souls.

What a contradiction, the God who created all the universe, all the stars, all the galaxies, this whole earth, all the people, everything in it. This amazingly powerful God becomes a humble God but then everything about Jesus is a contradiction. On the one hand He was the lion of Judah and He was, you could see Him when He railed against the religious hypocrisy and yet on the other, He was the Lamb of God who was sacrificed for the sins of this world, Who stood there in front of Pontius Pilate and never stood up for Himself.

And when I look at this Jesus, there’s something real, there’s something authentic about this God and He has a humility about Him that we can take on ourselves, that we can carry around in our hearts. “Come to me for I am gentle and humble of heart.” Says Jesus.

Wow! What do you get out of this story, this Christmas story when you look at it? This, this Mary and Joseph and having to ride the donkey all those miles to Bethlehem and then getting there and having nowhere to stay and, I mean if you’re a woman and you’ve ever had children you know what it’s like to be towards the end of your pregnancy and how uncomfortable it is, can you imagine riding a donkey for a couple of weeks? Can you imagine going and giving birth in a stable? The Son of God, how must they have felt, you know all the promises from the angels and everything and here they were, the cold, hard reality in some draughty, smelly stable.

We know how it ends, we’ve got the New Testament, you know we can see that Jesus was the Son of God, He did miraculous things. He was crucified, He rose again, the Church grew out of that and for the last 2,000 years has been thriving but Joseph and Mary and the people at that time, they didn’t know how it was going to end, they knew none of that.

Phillip Yantsy summed it up this way; he said “He is the image of the invisible God, the first born over all creation, an apostle would later write. He is before all things and in Him all things hold together but the few eyewitnesses on Christmas night, they saw none of that, they saw an infant struggling to work His never before used lungs.”

God becomes a man in a stable and through that He says to you and me, “I am humble of heart.” I didn’t come just for the rich and the powerful and the famous and the wealthy and the “holier than thous”. I became low to speak this truth into your heart, I came for everyone, I came for you.