Today I want to look with you at a Christmas story seldom told. At Christmas time we always focus on the Babe in the manger, Mary and Joseph, the shepherds, the wise men. But what happened to Jesus after he was born in Bethlehem? Raymond Bakke wrote many years ago… Jesus was a Palestinian refugee. As a matter of fact, Jesus was an Asian-born baby who became an African refugee. The Christmas story is about an Asian-born baby who becomes an international migrant. Half of the babies born in the world are born in Asia, and Jesus was one of them. Half of the 18 million migrants in the world are Africans, and Jesus touched the African migrant experience. Twenty percent of the babies in developing nations died the first year from water-borne diseases; whole villages of babies died before Jesus had an opportunity to die for them on the cross. Jesus was born in a borrowed barn and buried in a borrowed grave and was homeless most of his life. The authentic Gospel has enormous power for the whole...
We tend to notice the big things that happen in our world and miss the small things. The news media focuses, for the most part, on world-shaping events: the election of a president, conflict in the Middle East, a natural disaster that kills hundreds of people in Southeast Asia. It is almost as if someone or something wants us to pay attention to the big stuff and ignore the small stuff. Even in the church, there is a tendency to focus on the large and sensational while passing over the seemingly tiny and insignificant. When pastors meet together at conventions of various sorts their conversations often whirl around the three Bs: buildings, bucks, and bodies. It is hard, even for those who are supposed to be spiritual leaders, to talk about what is close, small, intimate, and personal. This perspective, unfortunately, gets passed from pulpit to pew. Thus, the average Christian is fed on the idea (through Christian media no less than the secular) that what really matters in life is...