My name is Joseph.  I am a carpenter from Nazareth, but if things had gone differently for my people, I might be their king.  Ten centuries or 28 generations ago, my ancestor David was king of all Israel.  The might of his army and the prosperity of his country would rival any nation that has ever existed.  David was said to be a man after God’s own heart, and even when he sinned against God, he was humble and repented.  But my people have not repented.  Fourteen generations ago, after generations of unfaithfulness to God, our nation collapsed in defeat.  Our leaders were taken away as captives in Babylon, and we have been an impoverished people living in a land ruled by foreigners.  Our people have also been enslaved to sin, and the prophets have promised that God would send a descendant of David to restore our people to righteousness and independence.  I believe my son Jesus will be that ruler, and as you hear my story, you will see that it is much more than paternal pride that causes me to believe this!

In my business as a carpenter, I was employed to build some cabinets for a neighbor.  That man had a lovely and inquisitive daughter named Mary who enjoyed watching me work, and she enjoyed talking with me about the meaning of the scriptures. Her deep dedication to God was known by everyone in our town, but I got to see that dedication every day for several months.  After completing my work at her father’s house, I found that I missed our daily conversations about God, and so I made up excuses to go by to see Mary.  There was the time that I told her father that I wanted to see if rain had caused any of my cabinets to warp, and he reminded me that we hadn’t had any rain in many months.  In fact, we were experiencing one of the driest summers that any of us could remember!  As is the custom among our people, my parents contacted Mary’s parents to see if a marriage could be arranged between us, and to our great joy, her father agreed.

And so, Mary and I began making plans for our wedding and our lives together.  Then there came a day when Mary seemed preoccupied and very distant.  She said that she was going away for a few weeks to see her cousin Elizabeth but that she would be back.  I didn’t understand the sudden change in Mary, and I could only think that she was having second thoughts about our marriage but that she didn’t want her father to contact my father to break our formal engagement.  I finally could stand it no longer and so I asked Mary to tell me what was going on.  After a lengthy silence, she said something about a baby that she was going to have.  I didn’t hear any more of what she said.  All I knew was that any baby she was talking about could not be mine, and my worst fears seemed to be confirmed.  Mary no longer loved me and she was in love with someone else, and she was carrying his child.  I left without saying a word, in spite of Mary’s pleadings to me to stay.  But what else could be said?  The next day I began my plans to break off our engagement, and in our culture, that process was much like a divorce.  I could easily divorce Mary by charging her with unfaithfulness to me, but I just couldn’t bring myself to cause Mary that degree of shame and public ridicule.  I still remembered that lovely young woman who talked with me about God as I built those cabinets for her father.  Her road as a single parent of a baby would be difficult enough without my accusations.  I decided that I would go to our synagogue to get a letter of divorce prepared.  There would be no public ridicule for Mary – not from this descendant of David!

I was still thinking about these things one night as I was drifting off to sleep.  I still do not know whether this was a dream or a vision that came to me in that half-asleep state, but there in my room appeared a figure in dazzling white garments.  He identified himself as the angel of the Lord and he told me not to hesitate in marrying Mary.  She had not been unfaithful to me; she was being faithful to God.  Then he said that she was carrying a very special child that I should name “Jesus” – a name that sounds like our word for “savior” – because he will save our people.  Because of her deep devotion to God, He had chosen Mary to be the mother of that special child.  In a flash, I was fully awake and the angelic figure was gone.

I couldn’t sleep that night, and at first light I got up and went over to Mary’s father’s house.  Her father wasn’t happy to see me at any hour of the day, much less at that early hour.  But I was persistent, and when Mary heard my voice, she came to the door and stood between her father and me.  All I could manage to say was “Jesus.”  Mary smiled and touched her stomach and responded, “He will be called Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever; his kingdom will never end.”  We embraced in reconciliation, and the next day we resumed our plans and dreams for our future together.

But then we encountered another obstacle, this one coming from our Roman occupiers.  Our taxes are always getting higher, and this time the Roman Emperor had decreed that there would be a taxation all over his empire, and each person must return to his ancestral home for a census to be taken for this taxation.  For us, this meant a trip from Nazareth to Bethlehem, the city of David.  This was not the best time for such a journey, but we had no choice.  It was a very difficult journey for Mary, who by this time was nearing the time to deliver the baby.  We made many stops on the journey, causing us to arrive in Bethlehem quite late, long after all of the inns had become full.  Finally a kindly innkeeper said that he had a small stable behind the inn, and that would be a better than nothing.  So Mary and I made our way to that stable.  I made a bed of straw for Mary, and we laughed at the fact that we would be in such lofty accommodations!  Mary asked, “Wouldn’t it be funny if the baby decided to be born that night?”  Not really!  But sure enough, I had barely gotten to sleep when Mary awakened me!  It was time!

I don’t know if I had ever felt more hopeless or forsaken by God!  I went out into the night air to voice my concerns and complaints to God.  At that moment, the words of that angel seemed so removed from our experiences.  How could God’s special child be born in a barn?  But such protestations did no good.  That baby was going to be born in the middle of the night in that old stable.  Soon I was holding a beautiful, healthy baby boy.  The animals were not happy that I took a feed trough away from them to make a bed for the baby, but that is what I did.  I wrapped him up tight in layers of cloths to keep him warm and then I went back into the night air to resume my protestations while Mary watched over Jesus as if there was nothing out of the ordinary as far as she was concerned.

Soon there was a slight disturbance on the street.  There was a small group of men who were making their way straight toward the stable.  Usually such men are up to no good at this hour, but they didn’t appear to be drunk and out of control.  They walked over to me and said that they were looking for a newborn baby who was tightly wrapped in layers of cloth and sleeping in a manger.  How could they know about all this?  They then explained that they were shepherds and that their peaceful night in the fields with their sheep had been disturbed by music that came from the heavens, telling them about the birth of Christ the Savior, and that angelic music had told them where to look for the baby and how to identify him.  So I took them into the stable where they knelt down before that manger.  One of them said, “It is just as we were told!”  And then they gave Mary some warm woolen blankets, and I didn’t feel nearly so forsaken or forgotten by God.  Perhaps there was God’s method in all this madness, and even this humble birth must have been God’s plan for us.

Soon Mary was strong enough for us to move into a house of one of my cousins, and we stayed there a number of days after we registered for the census.  Whenever our people have time to talk, we always get around to talking about the Roman occupiers of our land and when God will drive them out.  One evening as we were discussing this, one of my kinsmen said that he had heard talk about King Herod’s jealousy over a newborn baby who was destined to be king, and Herod was just crazy enough to do something drastic.  He had already killed one of his own children; what would he do to a newborn king?  I felt a deep fear, telling me that we must leave Bethlehem for a place of safety far away, perhaps as far away as Egypt.  But how would I be able to afford the resources for such a journey?

Again I went back out into the night air to pray to God for help and guidance, again feeling so alone.  “God, you let your Son Jesus be born in a barn, and now the king wants to kill him.”  As I prayed, I looked up and noticed a very bright star that was directly overhead.  It is funny that I hadn’t noticed it before now.  Then in the light of that bright star that made the night sky look like a second moon had appeared, I noticed some men coming toward me.  At first I thought that they were soldiers, but then I noticed that they were strangely dressed, like I had once met from Persia.  They explained that, as priests of their religion, they studied the stars, and the bright star overhead had led them across the desert for the past two years.  The birth of this new star had to mean something, and judging by the place it appeared, it meant to them that a new king of the Jews had been born.  Their first stop had been in Jerusalem at King Herod’s palace, but having not found a baby there, they heeded the words of the prophet Micah who had prophesied that the new king would be born in Bethlehem.  As they made their way from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, they again found that star and had followed it here to the house we were staying in.  Then they went into the house to see Mary and Jesus, and they humbly bowed before Him in worship.  Then they presented gifts of incense, myrrh, and gold!  Gold!  I now had the ability to buy the resources we would need for our trip!  They told me that Herod had asked them to return to him but that one of them had had a dream, warning them to go back to Persia by another route, and after they left, I had a dream of that same angel I had met before, warning me to take Mary and Joseph and go down to Egypt so that we would be safe.  The next day I purchased provisions for the trip and we left, just before an awful event where Herod killed every male child in Bethlehem.  We stayed in Egypt for several years until Herod died, and then we returned to Nazareth.

So when I tell you that I believe that Jesus is the Messiah we have been waiting for, you see why I believe this.  Already, as a young boy, he is amazing in so many ways, with insight and wisdom far beyond His earthly years.  Then at other times, He is just a typical boy.  I worry about Jesus and what He might have to do to restore our people to right relationship with God.  I am most troubled by the prophecies of Isaiah.  Just what did the prophet mean when he said that “He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.”  What did Isaiah mean when he said that “he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed”?  I fear what my son might have to endure in order to restore our covenant with God.

But you mark my words!  Watch Jesus as He becomes a man, for my testimony to you is that this is God’s Son.  Listen to Him!  Follow Him.  Amen!

Listen to the 2009 Christmas Eve service below.

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Something happened one evening to a descendant of King David and his espoused wife which went almost unnoticed.  None of the powerful people of the world paid it any attention.  The members of the house of Judah were too oppressed to notice it, and they were too busy participating in a Roman census to pay it any attention.  Except for a few shepherds who overheard some angels singing and went to visit a stable to check on what they were told, this birth would have been completely ignored.  Because of the Roman totalitarian government, the exact date of this birth has long been forgotten.  But just as soon as it became legal to do so in the Fourth Century, the Church took an end of the year pagan celebration and re-christened it for a new purpose.  A special mass was celebrated on that day each year – the Christ Mass – and the birth of Jesus was remembered on that day.  That tradition has now been observed for seventeen centuries because the events of that evening so long ago are no longer considered unnoticed and forgettable.  It has been remembered by million and millions of people over many centuries as the most important birthday in all of human history because no life has ever impacted human history as has Jesus of Nazareth.

What was it about that night and that birth that is so special?  What did it mean?  Among many things that it means, first it meant that God had not given up on us.  Have you even been tempted to just give up on yourself?  Many of us who are nearing the final chapters of our lives look back and feel we could have done more and done better than we have with our lives.  We are tempted to give up on ourselves for not being more than we are and for not doing more for God.  Some of us are still trying to tame our tempers and our temptations, and it is so easy to get discouraged.  But God has never given up His hope for us that we can be more than we are today.  Jesus’ birth is proof that God still sees possibilities in all of us.

The old covenant community was always willing to admit their shortcomings.  You can read the scathing judgments of the prophets on the faithlessness of God’s people – how they combined faith in God with faith in false gods or left God entirely for foreign religions.  Moses came down the mountain with the 10 Commandments on stone tablets and saw the unfaithfulness of the people, and he was so angry that he threw down and broke the original tablets.  Since then, we’ve all thrown down those tablets and stomped on them by the way we have lived!  I know there are folks who want those 10 Commandments displayed in public buildings, but I agree with Paul.  Those commandments only remind me of how far short I have fallen from the glory of God.  They show me one thing: I really need a Savior!

And so God sent me one!  In spite of our shortcomings, God has not given up on the old covenant people or us who are members of the new covenant community.  Jesus is proof that God will never give up on you.  You can have a new start tonight.  Jesus came to His people at one of the lowest moments in all of their history.  He comes to us at our lowest moments, too.

Secondly, the birth of Christ has been remembered because it means that the long search is over.  From the earliest of times, humans wondered what God was like.  Did earthquakes, volcanos, lightning storms, and other natural disasters mean that God is always angry at us, and if so, what would it take to placate an angry god?  The great Greek philosophers got us part of the way to a greater understanding of God, as did Moses and the prophets.  God was doing His part to try to reveal Himself to those who were open to Him, but all of these human efforts fell far short of capturing God’s true nature.  I am sure that God always knew that the only way we would begin to understand His nature would be for Him to come down to our level, to empty Himself of His omniscient omnipotent nature to become one of us.  So God came to live among us, beginning life as a fragile infant and ending it as a vulnerable adult.  In the end, the God that Jesus revealed was so radically different from the one which people had believed in that they decided to get rid of Jesus!  Who could believe in a God who turns the other cheek, One who forgives sinners, and One who would welcome a vile, prodigal son who had trashed the family name?  And who could have imagined a Parent God who would willingly die for the sins of His children?  This is still difficult for people today to believe!  But for those with a hunger to know God, the long search was over at last when God came in flesh and was laid in a manger.  We would now learn from Jesus what God was like!

“In the beginning the Word already existed; the Word was with God, and the Word was God. From the very beginning the Word was with God. Through him God made all things; not one thing in all creation was made without him. The Word was the source of life, and this life brought light to humanity. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has never put it out” (Good News Bible).  Let us welcome the light of the world into our lives tonight!  Amen.

Photos provided by Corrie Kennette.

The two greatest Christmases of my life were in 1981 and 1984 because Penny was “great with child” during both of those Christmases.  That was such a special, wonderful time in our lives. There is nothing quite like seeing your wife learning to maneuver through tight places now that she occupied more three dimensional space than normal!  Penny wiped out my parents’ Christmas tree once because she didn’t realize that she couldn’t walk behind it. It was during Christmas week that I first felt the kick of my unborn infants, and that was pure magic!  A few months later, Penny and I went to a Neil Diamond concert, and little unborn Hillary danced and leaped all evening.  Let’s face it, guys. We’ll never know anything like that feeling.  The closest we will ever come to this feeling is after we’ve eaten too many fried onion rings at the Beacon.

The fact that we lived down in Saluda, SC during the first pregnancy made the experience all the more memorable.  The older people in that agricultural community had a very difficult time even acknowledging pregnancy.  One dear lady began telling me about the joy of her experiences in preparing for childbirth – things like preparing the nursery and making sure the family doctor knew that he would be needed – and then she turned red and said, “I guess I shouldn’t be talking with a man about this.”  My philosopher friend Gary Gene became very concerned about me when he learned that I planned to witness the birth of our child.  He told me that he had heard about a man who saw his child born who had to live in a mental institution after that!  We decided that since I was already crazy, I should be all right.  But down in Saluda, I knew we couldn’t talk about anything as personal as feeling the kicks of the baby, even though it was one of our most wonderful experiences.

So isn’t it interesting that something so personal and unmentionable as a baby’s movements in the womb would be included in our Bible and in the Christmas story?  When the angel Gabriel had visited Mary, not only did he tell her about the coming birth of Jesus but he had also mentioned that her older cousin Elizabeth was expecting a baby.  Mary must have thought, “First the angel tells me something seeming impossible about me – that I am going to have a baby – and now he tells me something else that seems impossible!  Old cousin Elizabeth is expecting!”  Soon after the angel left, Mary made plans to go visit Elizabeth.  Well, wouldn’t you?  If something as unbelievable as an angel visitation happened to you and the only way you could get a second opinion as to whether this visitation had been real or imagined was to check out a detail of the angel’s story, wouldn’t you pack your bags and go see if old cousin Elizabeth was really expecting a baby?  And if it turned out to be true, wouldn’t you be overcome with emotions and sing out, “My soul glorifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior”?  In telling the story of Romeo and Juliet, Andy Griffith used to say, “When Romeo saw Juliet, he broke out in a soliloquy.”  When Mary saw Elizabeth, she broke out in the Magnificat, and she did so because of what Elizabeth said to her: “Mary, as soon as the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy.”  It was true!  Elizabeth was expecting a baby. Well, Mary, there is the confirmation you were seeking!

It is fascinating that something so natural and normal as a baby’s movements in the womb, something my older church members in Saluda would have been embarrassed to talk about, would been given such significance that the story had to be included in Luke’s telling of the Gospel.  All four gospel writers felt the need to begin their stories with the preaching of John the Baptizer, but only Luke thought that the story of the leaping of unborn baby John deserved to be included.  John, who grew up to be the forerunner of God’s Kingdom, excitedly preparing people for the appearance of the Savior, was very excited by the visit of Jesus’ mother that day, Luke says.  If you read between the lines, it is possible to see how this encounter helped shape John’s life from the moment of his birth.  He would have grown up hearing the story of how he was destined by God to be the forerunner of the Christ, how he was the surprise child of aged parents, how his father was told by an angel about the purpose of his life, and how he had leaped in his mother’s womb when she heard Mary’s greeting.  No wonder John turned out to be, in Jesus’ own words, “among those born of women there is no one greater than John.”

What causes such movements of the unborn is interesting.  Some mothers-to-be tell me that their babies are motionless until they try to lie down for a nap!  Then baby starts moving.  Babies definitely react to loud noises, and they are born already able to recognize the sound of their mother’s voice.  But to Elizabeth, this leaping was far from coincidental.  It was just another sign among many others that assured her that God was busy doing great and wonderful things for His people in those days.  Elizabeth was not only unexpectedly expecting but she was enjoying a time of peace and quiet because her husband Zechariah had temporarily lost his voice.  Because he had doubted the word of angel Gabriel concerning the birth of his son, Zechariah had been stripped of his ability to speak.  But somehow he had communicated enough of the message of the angel to Elizabeth so that she knew that her baby was going to be like Elijah, restoring the people of Israel to faith in God, preparing people for the coming of the Messiah.  So this leaping was a sure sign to Elizabeth that she was in the presence of the unborn Messiah. “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the child you will bear!  But why am I so favored, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” Elizabeth asked.

It is so very helpful sometimes when a meaning is found for an apparently ordinary circumstance.  It may seem like a coincidence to some folks, but then someone sees some other Godly possibility.  Eleven months after my sister’s second son was born, she gave birth to a “preemie,” an infant daughter who almost didn’t survive.  While my sister, her husband, and my parents were struggling with their fears and questions, spending endless days at the hospital, someone said something to them that gave divine meaning to all that they were going though.  The person said, “That little girl is just so special that God couldn’t wait any longer to send her to you.”  This statement reminded us all that this premature birth had not caught God by surprise!  God was there with them. The baby in Elizabeth’s womb leaped, and Elizabeth said it was due to the joy the baby felt in being in the presence of the mother of the Savior.

When you can connect an event in your life with a Bible story or a spiritual truth, it does add meaning to that event.  We all know people who carry that too far; everything in their lives is God’s doing.  Everything they say is something God told them and everything they do is because God told them to.  Those people are spooky!  But most of us are the very opposite of these people.  We are never aware of the hand of God in our lives.  We aren’t aware that Jesus is healing us when the doctor gives us a shot or a prescription or when a surgeon repairs our bodies.  We don’t see God’s hand in our lives, giving us opportunities to serve our fellow man or to grow in grace.  Maybe we need a little dose of spirituality from our “spooky” friends.  God is far more involved in ordinary daily events than we are aware of.  Sometimes He is even involved in causing a baby to jump in mother’s womb!

In her conversation with Mary, Elizabeth declares Mary to be blessed for believing God’s word to her, for believing that the things God told her would come true.  We, too, are blessed from hearing God’s promises to us – promises of grace, forgiveness, and life eternal – and believing them!  Mary responds with a statement of how humbled she is to even be noticed by God.  God had overlooked the high and mighty and come to her instead.  Correctly she states that all future generations will call her blessed, and she remains today a sterling example of humility and dedication to Almighty God.  Mary correctly sees the work of Jesus as the fulfillment of God’s promises to Abraham and his descendants and as an expression of God’s mercy to all people.  And according the text, Mary remained with Elizabeth for three months, leaving for home very shortly before John was born.

We really don’t know any more about cousins Mary and Elizabeth or whether their boys even met each other while they were children.  It is fairly obvious that they didn’t have much contact in their early years because this is what John said after he had baptized Jesus: “I saw the Spirit come down from heaven as a dove and remain on him. I would not have known him, except that the one who sent me to baptize with water told me, ‘The man on whom you see the Spirit come down and remain is he who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.’  I have seen and I testify that this is the Son of God.”

This Christmas, if you are blessed to be around a little child, picture Jesus as a child that age, curious, inquisitive, irritating.  Jesus was incarnate, in human flesh and blood, one of us in every way.  And remember that God reveals Himself to us in very ordinary ways, even in the leaping of a baby in the womb!  Amen.