Creekside Church Sermon of December 20, 1998 "Unto Us a Child is Born" Matthew 1:18-25	Rev. David Bibbee
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Christmas and birth and babies go together. The birth of a child is wondrous, miraculous thing. For nine months you wait in expectation and anticipation for this little ball of baby you've planned for and longed to hold, and when it happens, your world is never the same again. The predictable, ordered, "come and go as you please" lives you had before the birth are history. Babies are obviously a source of deep joy, but also a deep disruption that turns your ordered existence end for end.

Babies don't come on our terms; we conform to theirs. They let you know when they are sleepy or wide awake. They let you know if they are hungry or in need of a fresh diaper. Just ask Mary and Joseph. No couple knew better than they about the disruption a baby is capable of creating. Matthew gives the circumstances of this unconventional event. Mary and Joseph were not married. The subject of children hadn't come up yet, but Mary must tell Joseph she is in a motherly way. It wasn't a planned pregnancy, and the pro-choice movement hadn't caught on yet.

For a moment, imagine you could craft the biography of Jesus. God is ready to visit the world with the fullest revelation of Himself ever, and make the greatest impact possible, leaving no doubt about who God is and the purpose He ordained for the world. How would the script read? Would a message be written in the stars heralding the arrival of a being endowed with power, intellect, and spiritual strength like no other who would move the world to fall on bended knee to serve God and God alone? I dare say few of you would bring Jesus onto the scene in a manger.

What sort of God would choose to be revealed as Matthew describes it? A carpenter and young woman are engaged and she becomes pregnant before, "I do." Then shock on shock, Joseph learns he's not the father! After gaining consciousness, Joseph turns through the yellow pages looking for a divorce lawyer. An angel then came to him in a dream and said, "Don't be afraid." Easy for the angel to say when it was Joseph who had to deal with the looks he and Mary got out in public. Erase those Christmas card portraits of a serene, sentimental, pastel, nativity from your mind. There was nothing normal about this pregnancy at all. It was embarrassing! Mary and Joseph's predictable existence just went out the window.

Unto us a "child" is born. The Creator King of the cosmos; the Lord Almighty and Omnipotent; the Potentate of Time came to us in Bethlehem as a baby born of a peasant girl in a cattle stall. We hear this and hardly bat an eye. We picture a warm, nostalgic sentiment scene, and I think we do it to shield ourselves. To hear the story, as Matthew wants us to hear it, is an assault on our sensibilities. Pay attention to the story and expect the unexpected. Baby Jesus, a.k.a., Emmanuel, is God with us. Baby Jesus tilted the axis of Mary and Joseph's lives, and he intrudes upon our notions of who God is and how God is found.

Through the ages people have said, "If only I might know God. If only God would show Himself...not just in the ancient events of history, not only in wondrous works of beauty or acts of raw power, but up close and personal in a way we can grasp...to have no doubts about who God is, how God works, and what God wants done." None of this would happen if God remained confined to his heavenly quarters.

Christmas tells us the plea has been answered. Divinity put on humanity. In the film, "Dances With Wolves", Captain John Dunbar was sent to a command post in the Dakota Territory. There, he encountered the Lakota Sioux Indians. Communication was difficult. Neither knew the other's language. Dunbar wanted in the worst way to learn about their culture and befriend them, and wanted the Sioux to know him. They were curious, but also very fearful and suspicious of him. After repeated attempts, he concluded that the only way to get close to them was to be one of them. He shed his military garb and dressed as they dressed, spoke as they spoke, lived as they lived. It was only until he came into their world that they received him.

In Jesus, God came to us, became one of us, so we could come to Him. In other religions, God is aloof and remote, but not the God of Jesus Christ. Unto us a child is born. But keep your foot off the brake because we can't stop here. Consider this...God's descent also intrudes upon our picture of God. An awesome, powerful God we can accept, but what about a vulnerable God...a God who bares Himself to us, to treat as we will?

When we hear the dreadful stories of little children and babies being abused and even killed at the hands of adults, we shudder in disbelief. Is anything as fragile, frail, totally dependent and defenseless as a baby? Look at little Jesus. God's Son needs someone to bottle-feed and burp him. He needs someone to change his diapers. God can't care for himself or defend himself. Jesus' skull could be crushed in the hands of a Roman soldier. And it would have happened had Herod's plan succeeded. Jesus needed protection until he grew in wisdom and stature. The carpenter's shop gave him strong, hard muscles, but his greatest strength was His vulnerability.

God is no politician. He is no Senator Snort who just before the election, visits the ward where the poor folks live, shaking hands, promising more city services and police protection, assuring them that in him, they will have a voice at the state house. Then the cameras are turned off and the good senator retires to his townhouse in an exclusive development. God is no politician...He's Emmanuel, God "with" us. He escapes none of the trials and tribulations and temptations we face.

God knew the need, weighed the dangers and came to Bethlehem anyway. Herod tried to kill him. The folks at his home church ran him out of town after his first sermon. He healed people and was condemned for it. He taught love, and was shown contempt. He gave himself to his disciples, and they deserted him in his hour of need. He was the Prince of Peace and the world declared war on him. Unto us a child is born...in the lonely manger, defenseless, vulnerable. No armed guard to protect him. He was nailed to a cross, and no rescue party came to free him. He was vulnerable from start to finish.

"Have this mind among yourselves which you have in Christ Jesus," Paul says in Philippians, "who, though he was in the form of God, did not grasp equality with God, but emptied himself, became a servant, born in the likeness of men." Here we have this incredible story about the intrusion of a baby so tender and mild into our world. This little calls into question our pursuit of the first, the highest, and the greatest. While we await a brilliant revelation of God's power and glory, God comes unnoticed behind the inn.

The good news of Christmas has difficulty penetrating the hearts and minds of strong, resourceful folks like us who have it under control. Maybe this is why Jesus said we must become like children to enter the kingdom of heaven. For our sakes, God brought Himself down to size-a little great one who humbles our pride and asks us to become humble, vulnerable, and little ourselves so we, like the shepherds and wise men, will find him and worship him.

The meaning of the incarnation isn't lost on those people who are poor and broken and on the outside. It was Christmas Eve, 1983...four days after Lisa was born. The Christmas Eve worship was over and I was turning off the church lights, anxious to get home and resume my daddy lessons. The sanctuary that had been full of people and the sounds of carols was now quiet and perfumed with the smell of smoke from extinguished candles. Then just as I reached to turn off the last light, I heard something. A young man was sitting in the front pew, leaning with his head in his hands.

I went up and spoke with him. He had seen the cars and the lights and decided to check out the service, but I was just finishing the benediction when he slipped in. "I really needed to hear some Christmas music tonight," he said. He was home on break from Purdue. Alcohol was becoming a problem for him. His girlfriend of two years had just dumped him. And he came home to have his parents inform him they were contemplating a divorce. "I need Christmas music," he said again, and now he was sobbing. This big, strapping young man was reduced to tears. I still hear him crying like a baby, brought low...a dependent child, instinctively knowing he needed not just the Christmas music, but the music's subject...the wondrous gift that God had given.

Unto us, a child is born. God came to us so we could come to Him, not as one who would force us to follow. Not as one who would overpower us by His will and twist us into submission. No...God left the throne and for our sakes, invaded our lives as a baby to show us God, to show us love, and show us how to love.

A poet sums the meaning of it all like this:

To lay bare your heart, your very soul,
Is wholesome and good,
But also daring and dangerous,
For it makes you vulnerable.

God, with daring and dangerous abandon,
Bared His heart to people in Bethlehem,
Laying Himself open to accident and disease,
To insanity and poverty,
To human ridicule and rejection and wounding and killing.
God became vulnerable on Christmas Day --
As do all who say, "I love you."

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