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Dear Friends in
Christ,
I
doubt that any of you have ever heard of Elmer Cline before, but I would
bet that you have heard of a product that he was responsible for. Back
in 1921 Elmer was a bakery manager who was given the job of coming up
with a name for his company’s new loaf of bread. He soon found out that
this was not going to be an easy task. And as he struggled to come up
with something “catchy,” he found his answer in a most unlikely place.
While visiting the grounds of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway he stopped
to watch the International Balloon Festival. Later he described the
sight of these beautiful hot air balloons launching into the Indiana sky
as one of “awe and wonderment.” That word “wonderment” stuck in his
mind so he suggested that his company’s new loaf of bread be
called…Wonder Bread. To this day that is why the packaging for Wonder
Bread is decorated with bright colorful balloons.
That word wonder, however, is a word that evokes something more
than images of a loaf of bread. My computer Thesaurus offers the
following synonyms for it: surprise, astonishment, awe, amazement,
admiration – all of which are words that very accurately describe the
emotions and experiences of those who serve as the key players in the
1st Christmas event that we have come together this evening to
celebrate. Indeed, trying to wrap their minds around what had happened
that night – the birth of God’s Son in a barn, the appearance of angels
to shepherds, the unexpected appearance of the shepherds at the manger
bed of the Christ Child, the spreading of the news by those same
shepherds that the Messiah had finally come – all of these things and
much, much more proved to be a real exercise in wonder for the original
participants in the Christmas story. So tonight I want to spend my time
exploring with you what I’m calling in my sermon title “The Wonders of
Christmas” in the hopes of increasing your awe and amazement of
what really took place that holy night so long ago.
We begin then with the wonder of the incarnation. Now don’t let
that big theological word incarnation scare you. You see in that
word the Latin word carna which you should be familiar with. If
you eat chili con carne, what is that? It’s chili with meat. Or you’ve
heard of a carnivorous animal, right, which is what? It’s a meat-eating
or flesh-eating animal. So the incarnation refers to the enfleshment,
if you will, of the Son of God, that time when he who was spirit took on
our human skin and became one of us. And I suppose if there is one part
of the Christmas story that will never cease to amaze me and fill me
with awe and wonder it is that. To think of the Son of God, the 2nd
Person of the Holy Trinity who prior to coming to this earth was
worshiped and adored by countless throngs of angels and who was an
almighty, eternal, immortal, and infinite Being, allowing himself to be
squeezed into the form of a tiny human embryo and confined to the womb
of a teenage Jewish peasant girl for 9 months just goes way beyond my
ability to comprehend. Perhaps no one does a better job of describing
the incarnation for us than my favorite author Max Lucado in one of the
first books he ever wrote called God Came Near. In fact, I like
to read this section for myself at this time every year to remind me of
the tremendous sacrifice Jesus made for us when he left heaven behind
and came down to this earth. So listen as I share this description of
the incarnation with you…
So the wonder of Christmas first of all contains the wonder of the
incarnation. Then secondly, it also includes the wonder of
the virgin birth. While the Christmas story is filled with one
miracle after another that we really don’t have time to get into this
evening, I believe the one that sits at the top of the list is the
miracle of the virgin birth. And I think Mary would agree with that for
when the angel Gabriel first appeared to her and announced to her that
she had been hand picked by God to deliver his Son, the long-awaited
Messiah to the world, her initial response was: “How will this be
since I am a virgin?” What a great question for Mary to ask for she
knew the facts of life. And she knew that since she had never had a
sexual encounter with a man it was impossible for her to get pregnant.
So Gabriel had a little explaining to do. He told her: “The Holy
Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow
you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God…For
nothing is impossible with God.” And so it was that this virgin
named Mary conceived and this virgin named Mary gave birth.
Now the question is, Why? Not why did she conceive and give birth, but
why did she have to be a virgin? And there are really 2 answers to that
question that I can think of. First of all, she had to be a virgin to
fulfill prophecy. Some 700 years before the birth of Christ the prophet
Isaiah had foretold the virgin birth in that verse of Scripture that we
often hear at this time of the year. In Isaiah 7:14 we read:
“Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be
with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.”
So the credibility and reliability of God’s promises as found in the
pages of Holy Scripture were dependent upon the virgin birth. But there
was more.
Another reason why Mary had to be a virgin was to prevent Jesus from
being born with original sin. If he had had both a human mother and
a human father, he would have been no different from you and me in that
he would have inherited from them the same sinful nature that every
other human being is born with and that David referred to in Ps. 51:5:
“Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother
conceived me.” But since the Holy Spirit was the one responsible
for planting Jesus in the womb of Mary, the angel Gabriel could say to
her: “So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of
God.”
Now I want you to just think for a moment about the miracle of the
virgin birth and what it can mean for you this evening. If God could
cause a virgin like Mary to be with child and thereby prove that he can
do the undo-able, the unthinkable, and the impossible, then don’t you
think he just might be able to help you with any problems that may be
burdening your heart this evening? Though this is supposed to be such a
joyous time of the year, I suspect that some of you are struggling right
now to just get through it. Yeah, you put your smiley face mask on when
you go out in public, but when you’re alone, you have an ache in your
heart or a hurt in your body or a worry in your mind or a sorrow in your
spirit that robs you of the joy that so many others seem to have right
now. And you wonder whether it’s ever going to get better. If that
describes you this evening, then let the wonder of the virgin birth
encourage you. Let it comfort you. Let it remind you that the God who
left heaven behind and came down to this earth to take care of your
biggest problem in life, which is the problem of your sin, has a love
for you that knows no limits or bounds and therefore he can be counted
on to be there for you, to walk with you, to carry you, and to help you
whenever the roller coaster that we call life gets a bit gut-wrenching
or heart-breaking for you.
And that takes us to one more wonder of Christmas that we want to look
at this evening and that would be the wonder of the shepherds.
When God searched all of humanity for the individuals who would be the
first ones to hear the news of the Savior’s birth, he didn’t settle on
princes and kings in palaces or priests and prophets in temples or
professors and scholars in the learning institutions of the day.
Instead, his gaze settled upon some lowly shepherds whose job during the
nighttime hours was to watch sheep sleep. Not exactly what you would
call a glamorous or exciting career. Not exactly what you would call
the higher echelon of Jewish society. In fact, shepherds were considered
to be about as low as one could go on the social scale, sometimes even
being denied access to the temple in Jerusalem. And perhaps for good
reason. For since shepherds hung around sheep all day long, in all
likelihood they began to smell like sheep. Have you ever smelled a
sheep before? I have. Some years ago in one of our Vacation Bible
Schools my job each morning was to give a lesson to the children about
some animal in the Bible. Well, one day I had to talk about sheep. And
our VBS director at the time, Jeanette Rich, bless her sweet heart,
arranged to have a lamb brought to our church so I could have a live
object lesson to show the kids. Well, it rained the night before so
this lamb was wet. And when it arrived in its cage, it had gone to the
bathroom and laid in its own mess. So needless to say, it smelled. No,
it stunk to put it bluntly. And that smell that sheep are known for
would undoubtedly adhere to the shepherds’ clothing and cause them to be
shunned by the more refined people of Jewish society.
So why do you think God chose to announce the birth of his Son to
shepherds before anyone else? Well, some might say because he came from
a long line of shepherds as some of the great patriarchs of old who were
part of the Messianic line were shepherds, guys like Abraham, Isaac,
Jacob, Moses, and David. Others might say because Jesus would one day
identify himself as a shepherd, the Good Shepherd of John chapter 10 who
knows his sheep and lays down his life for them. All of which is true.
But I think there might be another reason for the role the shepherds
play in the Christmas story. By allowing shepherds to be the first ones
to hear the news and see the Christ Child, I believe God was letting us
know that Jesus is for everyone. Dr. Paul Maier hints at this in his
book entitled In the Fullness of Time when he says: “If the
wise men represented privilege, wealth, and intelligence, so the
shepherds stood for the cross-sectional, average Judean – quite
literally... ‘the man on the night shift.’” I like that because no
matter where we are on the social scale, whether we’re a dock worker or
a doctor, a secretary or a supervisor, a bum or a boss, a pastor or a
politician, we all need a Savior, don’t we? And Jesus is the only one
who fits the bill. In fact, he not only became our shepherd, as we
heard before, he became our lamb too, the precious Lamb of God who would
be sacrificed on the altar of the cross so that our sins could be
forgiven and we could reside with him for all eternity.
So there they are, three wonders of Christmas: the wonder of the
incarnation, the wonder of the virgin birth, and the wonder of the
shepherds. May each one of these wonders fill your heart with amazement
and awe as you celebrate once again this evening and tomorrow all that
this special time of the year means for you, for me, and for all of us
who know the Babe of Bethlehem as our personal Savior and Lord.
Amen.
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