Christmas is a time of surprises. A lady was preparing her Christmas cookies. There came a knock at the door. She went to find a man, his clothes poor, obviously looking for some Christmas odd jobs. He asked her if there was anything he could do. She said, “Can you paint?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’m a rather good painter.”
“Well,” she said, “there are two gallons of green paint there and a brush, and there’s a porch out back that needs to be painted. Please do a good job. I’ll pay you what the job is worth.”
He said, “Fine. I’ll be done quickly.”
She went back to her cookie making and didn’t think much more about it until there was a knock at the door. She went, and the obviousness of his painting was evident: he had it on his clothes. She said, “Did you finish the job.”
He said, “Yes.”
She said, “Did you do a good job?”
He said, “Yes. But lady, there’s one thing I’d like to point out to you. That’s not a Porsche back there. That’s a Mercedes.”
Pastor Bruce Thielemann once said,
Christmas is a time of surprises — things that take your breath away. I think that’s a good thing, because life at its best is not really measured by the breaths you take, but by the breaths you miss. It’s those times of amazement and astonishment when suddenly your attention is carried away and your breath as well. It’s times like Christmas, fantastic times, when there’s a song in the sky and a baby in a feedbox and everything is gloriously topsy-turvy, when the things that cannot be are.
What could be more astonishing than the Messiah in a manger?But do we realize how flabbergasting it really is? Perhaps we need to hear the story again through younger ears.
One of my favorite books of all time is “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” by Barbara Robinson. It is the story of the Herdmans, whom she describes on page 1 as:
…absolutely the worst kids in the history of the world. They lied and stole and smoked cigars (even the girls) and talked dirty and hit little kids and cussed their teachers and took the name of the Lord in vain and set fire to Fred Shoemaker’s old broken-down toolhouse.
Well, through a series of circumstances, the Herdman kids end up playing all the main parts in the local church Christmas pageant. Besides the fact that the Herdmans were the closest thing to criminals that anyone in town knew about, there was one other problem: the Herdmans did not even know the Christmas story. So, they asked for the mother in charge of the pageant to tell it to them from the very beginning.
“What’s that?” they would yell whenever they didn’t understand the language, and when Mother read about there being no room at the inn, Imogene’s jaw dropped and she sat up in her seat.
“My God!” she said. “Not even for Jesus?”
I saw Alice purse her lips together so I knew that was something else Mrs. Wendleken would hear about—swearing in the church.
“Well, now, after all,” Mother explained, “nobody knew the baby was going to turn out to be Jesus.”
“You said Mary knew,” Ralph said. “Why didn’t she tell them?”
“I would have told them!” Imogene put in. “Boy, would I have told them! What was the matter with Joseph that he didn’t tell them? Her pregnant and everything,” she grumbled.
“What was that they laid the baby in?” Leroy said. “That manger…is that like a bed? Why would they have a bed in the barn?”
“That’s just the point,” Mother said. “They didn’thave a bed in the barn, so Mary and Joseph had to use whatever there was. What would you do if you had a new baby and no bed to put the baby in?”
“We put Gladys in a bureau drawer,” Imogene volunteered.
“Well, there you are,” Mother said, blinking a little. “You didn’t have a bed for Gladys so you had to use something else.”
“Oh, we had a bed,” Ralph said, “only Ollie was still in it and he wouldn’t get out. He didn’t like Gladys.” He elbowed Ollie. “Remember how you didn’t like Gladys?”
I thought that was pretty smart of Ollie, not to like Gladys right off the bat.
“Anyway,” Mother said, “Mary and Joseph used the manger. A manger is a large wooden feeding trough for animals.”
“What were the wadded-up clothes?” Claude wanted to know.
“The what?” Mother said.
“You read about it—‘she wrapped him in wadded-up clothes.’”
“Swaddlingclothes.” Mother sighed. “Long ago, people used to wrap their babies very tightly in big pieces of material, so they couldn’t move around. It made the babies feel cozy and comfortable.”
I thought it probably just made the babies mad. Till then, I didn’t know what swaddling clothes were either, and they sounded terrible, so I wasn’t too surprised when Imogene got all excited about that.
“You mean they tied him up and put him in a feedbox?” she said. “Where was the Child Welfare?”
The Child Welfare was always checking up on the Herdmans. I’ll bet if the Child Welfare had ever found Gladys all tied up in a bureau drawer they would have done something about it.
Well, maybe we need to be a bit more like the Herdmans when we read the Christmas story. If we were, it might just take our breath away all over again, or maybe, for the first time.
So, that’s the first question this story raises for me this Christmas 2018: do we realize how astonishing it is that the Messiah was in a manger? This text also raises a second question for me: Would we have followed the angel’s instruction to find the Messiah in the place least expected?
Imagine yourself as one of the shepherds for a moment. There you are in a field outside of Bethlehem keeping watch over your flocks by night.
I stood in those shepherd fields in the summer of 1984. Do you know the one thought that struck me? I thought: what a nowhere place for the Messiah to be born! And how astonishing that God would send his angels to announce the birth to the lowest of the low people of the land: shepherds!
In this, once again, we see God going all the way down in order to lift us all the way up. C. S. Lewis described it this way in his book, Miracles…
In the Christian story God descends to re-ascend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity; down further still, if embryologists are right, to recapitulate in the womb ancient and pre-human phases of life; down to the very roots and sea-bed of the Nature He has created. But He goes down to come up again and bring the whole ruined world up with Him. One has the picture of a strong man stooping lower and lower to get himself underneath some great complicated burden. He must stoop in order to lift, he must almost disappear under the load before he incredibly straightens his back and marches off with the whole mass swaying on his shoulders. Or one may think of a diver, first reducing himself to nakedness, then glancing in mid-air, then gone with a splash, vanished, rushing down through green and warm water into black and cold water, down through increasing pressure into the death-like region of ooze and slime and old decay; then up again, back to colour and light, his lungs almost bursting, till suddenly he breaks surface again, holding in his hand the dripping, precious thing that he went down to recover. He and it are both coloured now that they have come up into the light: down below, where it lay colourless in the dark, he lost his colour too.
You, dear listener, are that dripping, precious thing that God came to this earth to recover.
Now of course, the shepherds in the field would not have known any of this. All they knew was that an angel appeared to them and said: “Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. 11 For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Messiah the Lord. 12 And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.”
If you had been a Jewish shepherd in those days, in Palestine, 2000 years ago, you would have understood that the Messiah, the anointed one, was the Savior you were waiting for, to rescue you and your people from the oppression of Rome. You would have understood that the city of David, Bethlehem, was the right place for this Messiah to be born. Though you would have been astonished at the visitation of an angel, everything about the message of the angel would have seemed right, except for one thing… the Messiah in a manger.
Though the shepherds must have been astonished by this part of the announcement, they nonetheless followed the angel’s direction and found the babe in the manger, just as the angel told them they would.
I love what Frederick Buechner once said about this:
Those who believe in God can never in a way be sure of him again. Once they have seen him in a stable, they can never be sure where he will appear or to what lengths he will go or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation he will descend in his wild pursuit of man. If holiness and the awful power and majesty of God were present in this least auspicious of all events, this birth of a peasant’s child, then there is no place or time so lowly and earthbound but that holiness can be present there too. And this means that we are never safe, that there is no place where we can hide from God, no place where we are safe from his power to break in two and recreate the human heart because it is just where he seems most helpless that he is most strong, and just where we least expect him that he comes most fully.
Someone has said, the thing about growing older is that the things you really want for Christmas can no longer fit under the tree. I believe that is true. But here is an even greater truth: Christmas is all about finding, in the place you least expect it, everything you could ever hope for.
And so, finally, this story raises a third question for me: Do we have any room for Jesus?
Luke tells us that Mary laid her baby in a manger because there was no room for them in the inn. It is so easy, isn’t it, to point the finger at the innkeeper and ask: “How could he do such a thing?” But I have a hunch, that if we were in his place, we might just make the same mistake.
James Dittes once said,
For it is not easy for Christ to come to us, nor for us to serve him, when our lives are neat and stable. We try so hard to be strong men and undivided and to bind the Lord, His church, and his ministry, in swaddling cloths, and to lay them in a stable place. But our full and ordered house shuts them out—just as the inn at Bethlehem. Perhaps it is just to a divided nation, a ruptured community, a torn family, a split self, a chaotic sense of vocation, an impossible church, that Christ and his call comes.
The old hymn-writer put that call of Christ in this way…
Have you any room for Jesus,
He who bore your load of sin?
As He knocks and asks admission,
Sinner, will you let Him in?
Room for Jesus, King of Glory!
Hasten now: His Word obey.
Swing the heart’s door widely open;
Bid Him enter while you may.
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