Please be seated. Let us pray.
Heavenly Father, we thank you for the ability to speak and sing and tell and hear this wondrous story of your birth. Let it be an encouragement to us, building us up in hope and faith of you as we remember your past and look forward to our future together with you. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.
Now, every winter holiday season, I cannot help but shudder and cringe whenever I hear Andy Williams sing, ‘It’s the most wonderful time of the year.’ Because although I do appreciate the sentiment, it’s completely misplaced. The first Christmas, which you’ve been hearing about, was an event filled with wonder, and it was an awe inspiring event. So it stands to reason that our celebrations and remembrance of the Savior’s birth should also be a wonderful occasion.
But the wonder that Andy sings about, and what our commercial culture promotes as the seasonal wonder, have nothing to do with the true wonder of Christmas. Christmas is not wonderful because of jingle belling, or friends visiting, or parties and marshmallows, or ghost stories and memories of the past, or even mistletoe. I don’t know how that’s a verb, but somehow they use it that way. Yet even if those elements might help us to make the winter season feel special, they do not make Christmas wonderful. They’re unrelated and entirely unnecessary.
Christmas is wonderful because the most unique and extraordinary event took place 2,000 years ago: the Incarnation of God the Son, the birth of Jesus Christ. When the Creator entered into his creation, into time and space, taking on human flesh and dwelling among his children, people, that fact above all else is why Christmas is so wonderful.
That fact is why the world is constantly trying to obscure the truth, to trivialize and distract us from the actual enormity and wonder of the Incarnation. That fact is what we risk losing and forgetting beneath all of the glitz and glamour that evangelizes a false gospel of commercialism to us, seeking to feed our selfish greed and foster dissatisfaction with all of our many blessings.
Yet that fact is precisely what we recover, protect, and preserve whenever we delve into the Scriptures and maintain the highest view of who God is: the omnipotent and sovereign King over all, and a proper view of who we actually are—sinners in need of salvation. Sinners in need of God’s mercy and grace. Sinners that need Jesus.
And the wonder of Christmas happens when we encounter Jesus Christ and we discover what he has done for us by grace and in love. Following the original act of creation itself, the Incarnation of God the Son is the most wondrous event in human history, and it will remain so until his return and glorious appearing on the day of the Lord.
So to help us preserve a proper perspective of God in ourselves, and to avoid considering the extraordinary as simply ordinary, we remember that in the Incarnation, the infinite entered the finite, the Majesty on high lowered himself, the strong chose to become weak, the full emptied himself, the rightful forswore his rights, and the richest became the poorest.
Holding that perspective, we can envision the greatest extreme willingly choosing to reduce itself to the least extreme. Keeping our frame of reference in that perspective, we begin to be able to better understand the wonder felt and experienced by everyone involved in the Christmas story, but especially the shepherds.
Because on the night of Christmas, somewhere outside the little town of Bethlehem, there were shepherds out in the field keeping watch over their flock by night. These folks were just simply doing their job, just like they did every other night. It was routine; it was business as usual, and nothing strange or unusual was expected. But then their whole night and their whole lives were changed in an instant.
The ordinary was replaced by the extraordinary as an angel of the Lord appeared to them and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with great fear. A cloud of brilliant light appeared right in their midst—a holy cloud that inspired terror and reverence—a wonderful sight that had not been seen in Israel since the days of Solomon’s temple.
This was something they had never experienced before, nor was it something they ever expected to see. The angel said to them, ‘Fear not; don’t be scared. For behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be a sign for you; you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.’
They pronounced something absolutely wondrous: the birth of the Savior, the Lord. But just as wondrous as what they said was who said what to whom. Angels proclaimed a divine message to shepherds. Angels are ministering spirits, the Lord’s heavenly servants—beings that work in worship in God’s presence. Divine messengers sent from the King of the universe, they announced the birth of Christ to shepherds out in Israel’s fields rather than to the spiritual and political shepherds of Israel—the Pharisees, priests, and so forth—because those shepherds were the ones who had collectively led God’s people astray from his appointed and righteous paths.
While shepherds were not actually the lowest of low on the first-century social ladder, they were still not socially equivalent with the angels. The disparity in their relative social status adds another glare of wonder to this encounter, because messengers, ambassadors, or representatives from a king usually only met with other representatives of kings or to the king to whom they were sent, not the common people.
So the Lord sending his angels to the shepherds was an example of God elevating the humble and humbling the proud. And then, suddenly, there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on Earth peace among those with whom he is pleased.’
As wondrous as the news about Jesus was, as wondrous as who was telling whom about him is what Luke next describes.
I want you to imagine for a moment the clearest night sky that you can remember. Imagine all the stars twinkling and the moon shining bright. Now imagine that all of the ambient electric light is removed, as well as the industrial atmospheric pollution. What you should now be envisioning is close to the wonder and refulgent glory of the heavens that declare the glory of God and proclaim his handiwork.
They started their night off seeing, and even today, it’s impossible for someone to look at the night sky and not feel a sense of awe and wonder. It’s not impossible to not feel incredibly small and unimportant compared to the one that created the universe. Now, to your imagination, I want you to add the shining cloud of God’s glory with a whole host of angels singing God’s praises to your mental vision. How much more wonderful is the image in your mind now?
As wonderful as that is, how much more wonderful must the reality have been? But even as wonderful as that glorious brilliance must have been, surely it was not the greatest wonder of all. That wonder was in their response, because when the angels went away from them into heaven, the shepherds—they believed the angel’s word and went with haste and found Mary and Joseph and the baby lying in a manger.
And when they saw it, they made known the saying that had been told them concerning this child. These strangers, these shepherds—a host of strangers to Mary and Joseph—they came and inserted themselves into what was already an overwhelmingly stressful night. They came and they found the sign that the angel had told them to look for. They came and they brought tidings of good joy. They came and brought word of the angel’s prophecy about who the baby is. They came, and all who heard it wondered at what the shepherds told them. They came, and Mary treasured up all of these things in her heart, pondering them because of her own experiences with Gabriel and Elizabeth and Zechariah and even baby John.
Mary received, and Mary believed the shepherd’s word and treasured it. The shepherds sought and found the newborn Savior, and they wondered at the greatest, most important miracle which was right before their eyes: The Lord, the omnipotent, sovereign creator of the universe was lying right there before them. God in flesh, a child as humble, lowly, and poor as a person could be.
The Lord God in flesh was there, a happy and healthy baby boy wrapped up in swaddling clothes for warmth, just like any other newborn child would be. The Lord God in flesh was resting in an animal’s feeding trough in a stable rather than in a bed in a home; something which they might have even been able to provide for their own firstborn sons.
So when we think about this story using the perspective of those extremes that we began with, what could be more wonderful and inspiring than this? The Incarnation—God made flesh.
Finally, the shepherds returned to their field in their ordinary lives, but they did so glorifying and praising God for all they had seen and heard as it had been told. Because of their wondrous encounter with the Divine, I can’t imagine that they returned to their lives unchanged, because no one can. And that’s the true miracle of Christmas: the miracle of the Incarnation and the miraculous transformation which every encounter with the Living God, with Jesus Christ, provokes within us—either bringing our hearts to life or hardening.
Every life that Jesus touched then, and every life that Jesus touches today, changes because though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped but emptied himself by taking on the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.
And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow in heaven and on Earth and under the Earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.
When we encounter Jesus, when we are first confronted by the amazing wonder of the Incarnation—that the infinite God, who is Spirit, took on flesh, entering the finite—that gives way to an even more glorious wonder: that he did it, that he was born in order to live and die for us as our perfect substitute.
He did this so that our sins would be forgiven, washed away in the sacrifice of his blood. He did this so that we would be justified before the Father, clothed in his righteousness. He did this so that we would be united to him as his brothers and sisters by divine and sovereign adoption. He did this because God loves us and gave his Son Jesus to us and for us.
So every life and heart that encounters Jesus is either enlightened in joy and peace through faith and hope by accepting him as their Savior and Lord, or it’s hardened by their rejection of the truth and their willful disobedience of sin. Their response to him determines their benefit; the elect of faith and the rest reject him.
It is truly the wonder of grace that God saves any of us at all. So once you see the wonder of the Lord because of the Incarnation, once you know how wonderful the birth, life, death, resurrection, ascension, and enthronement of Christ is for you, then you will be transformed and you will give God the glory.
This is my sincere de Christmas hope and wish that you would do so with the joy and peace of Christ in your heart. Once you see and know this, then you will know the real reason why Christmas—why this is the most wonderful time of the year.
Amen and Merry Christmas.