Christmas Eve Meditation
December 24, 2008
We as humans are wired to be concerned about origins. Scientists who are not content with the Bible’s word on origins have spent billions of dollars trying to figure out where we as humans come from. Films such as the Jason Bourne movies or X-Men have characters consumed with discovering who they really are by finding out where they came from. On a more ground level, when I came to this church 3.5 years ago, I was taken aback by how many people knew their family roots, like being able to pinpoint the village in Serbia where their great-grandfather grew up. And, much to my wife’s chagrin, I engaged in my own fierce pursuit of my family origins, and have a Scottish flag hanging in my office to show for it.
But our pursuit of origins, if we are honest, can be like a dog chasing after a car. What are we going to do when we actually catch it? Does it matter if my ancestors in Scotland 1,000 year ago were stealing sheep or writing ballads? There is a lot we could find out about where we come from that would not necessarily change us.
And that is my question to us this evening as we consider our Lord’s birth. This moment of time in Bethlehem that took place over 2,000 years ago is an integral part of our origins. But as we enter into this nativity scene, we have to ask ourselves, will we allow what we see to change us? Will we open ourselves to be affected by these roots? Or will we simply say, “Oh, that’s interesting”?
Because what we find in this stable tells us a lot more about ourselves than we would like to admit. This helpless baby-wrapped in strips of cloth, lying in a feeding trough, surrounded by animals-this baby’s “humble origins” says as much about us as it does about him. This divine child is here to walk in our skin, to experience our grief, to suffer for our sins. And he begins this life at the lowest point imaginable.
It is not our nature to see this and own what it says about our own poverty and need. I experienced this dynamic on an economic level when, after college, I moved from my upper-middle class suburb in Atlanta to a poverty stricken area of Appalachia. What struck me the most was that poor people I knew there did not see themselves as poor. They knew others had more than they did, but they were not eager to assume the title and implications of being poor.
In their case, I think that was a good thing. But for us, as we look on this scene of poverty, as we smell the stench of this make-shift maternity ward, we cannot, we must not disassociate ourselves from its implications. The Apostle Paul reminds us in 2 Corinthians 8:9, “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich.”
As we enter this nativity scene and smell the stench and inch away from the shepherds-not exactly the cleanest job of the day-and avoid the sheep droppings, we must not allow our sanitized American sensibilities to deprive us of hearing the crucial phrase in Paul’s words: “for your sake.” These humble origins, this unsanitary, messy birth was the beginning of Jesus’ becoming poor for my sake.
This filthy stable is where we begin finding out who we are: that there is a poverty about us. Regardless of our socio-economic, ethnic, or educational backgrounds, who we are at the fundamental level required the Son of God to step out of his place of glory into this. Into this mess. Into this filth. Into this poverty.
But our possessions or means are not the deepest parts of our origins that we come to terms with as we see this baby in a manger. It’s not like Jesus simply takes off his Rolex, parks his Bentley, and trades his Armani suit for blue jeans to “live like the common man.” His birth was only the beginning of his condescension to meet us where we live.
In another letter of Paul’s we get a picture of how far down Jesus had to come to associate with us. In Philippians 2:7 Paul tells us that Jesus, in his incarnation, “made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.” But that was not the end of his humiliation. He goes on in verse 8, “And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”
If we really want to connect with our origins, if we truly want to learn what Jesus’ life says about who we are, we must go to the cross. For there we discover the atrocity of our rebellion against God. There, we see the display of one who not only associated with our humanity, but with our sinful humanity. There we see what our sin deserves. The cross takes us back to the first man, Adam, and shows us our true origins as sinners deserving the full wrath of God.
Yet because Jesus came to live in our skin, to bear our sorrows, to suffer for our transgressions, he himself represents a shift in our origins. If we trust in Jesus, we are no longer defined by Adam’s sinfulness, because Jesus has borne that shame for us. No longer are we defined by the death that Adam brought into this world through his rebellion against God, for Christ has been raised from the dead. Jesus Christ-not Adam-is now our source, our origin, the one whose life and works defines everything that we are.
So as we return to the manger scene, we can both celebrate that Jesus brought himself down to our deepest poverty, and remain humbled by what that says about our origins. But we can also stand with the shepherds and hear the heavenly host singing praises to God, and know that the same celestial entourage that accompanied the Son of God will one day be our fellow choristers around the throne of the Almighty because of our new origin: this baby in the manger, this Christ the Savior, this one who came to bear our poverty so that we, through him, might be eternally rich.