Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
January 3, 2010

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Most of us know that there are two Christmas stories in the New Testament. There’s the one in Matthew. We just heard part of it. It’s the story of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem and the visitation of the magi guided by a star. Then there’s the one in Luke. That’s the one we really love, the one with Jesus laid in a manger and visited by shepherds to whom angels had appeared and spoken of this birth and its significance. There’s no story of Jesus’ birth in Mark, John, or anywhere else in the New Testament, just these two from Matthew and Luke.

But this morning I want to suggest to you that there actually is a third Christmas story in the New Testament. It is the passage from the Gospel of John that we just heard. It’s not like the stories in Matthew and Luke in that it doesn’t tell of the circumstances of the birth of the child Jesus, so to get at how that passage is nonetheless a third Christmas story we need to step back and look again at those stories in Matthew and Luke and to look specifically at what those stories are trying to tell us.

The Christmas stories in Matthew and Luke are stories about an ordinary event, the birth of a human child. It’s an ordinary event, but both Matthew and Luke, in their different ways, fill it with details that are far from ordinary. Both tell of a virgin conception of this child by the Holy Spirit. Both fill the story with miraculous events that point to divine intervention—an unnatural star that guides the wise men, angels appearing to shepherds, and so on. Why? Some say because that’s what happened, but that strikes me as at best a superficial explanation. Ancient storytellers like Matthew and Luke usually were making some point by the details in their stories beyond that’s what happened. What is the point that Matthew and Luke are trying to make?

It seems clear to me that the point they’re trying to make is that this child, this Jesus, has a special, indeed a unique relationship to God. He is conceived not by the usual biological processes but by the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God. God steps in to make his birth and its significance known to others. The point Matthew and Luke are trying to make is that this is God’s Son. Indeed, they are saying that this is Emmanuel, God with us, God present with humanity in human form. That’s the faith confession that lies behind Matthew’s and Luke’s Christmas stories. That’s the point, or at least one major point, that they tell their stories to make. The Christmas story is for them the story of nothing less than God coming to earth in human form. That’s what makes them Christmas stories and not stories of a mere human birth.

And that’s also what makes the Prologue to the Gospel of John that we just heard a Christmas story. John does it differently than Matthew and Luke. He doesn’t speak of the birth of a child. He doesn’t speak of a virgin mother or miraculous stars or angelic appearances. Instead he uses a word out Greek philosophy. He speaks of the Logos, the Word of God. He says that the word was God, and he says that the Word became flesh and lived among us. He doesn’t say how, he just says it happened. He says the Word of God, who is God, became human in Jesus.

In significant ways that’s the same confession that Matthew and Luke make in their Christmas stories. It is the confession that lies behind their more factual sounding stories and behind John’s more theological or philosophical sounding one. It is the confession of the Christian that in Jesus God was—and is—present with us in this earthly life of ours. John is more spiritual than the others, but in a way he is more direct too. Matthew and Luke point in story to the presence of God in Jesus. John states it flat out. The Word was God, and the Word became flesh and lived among us. Christmas is about God coming to us as one of us in the person of Jesus. That’s what John’s verses are about too. They are a third Christmas story.

And they are what our Christian faith is all about. No other religion confesses the immediate presence of God in the world the way Christianity does. For Christians, God is not remote, far off in some heaven somewhere. God is not aloof. God is not removed from the conditions of human life. Rather, God knows our life, not just from afar but because God lived it in Jesus. In Jesus God showed us God’s presence in all aspects of our lives, from birth to miserable, unjust death. In Jesus God is close. In Jesus God is accessible. In Jesus, the Word become flesh, we see as much of God as our finite human minds are capable of comprehending. We see how God is with us, that is, precisely with us.

That’s the point of all three Christmas stories in the New Testament, the two that we always think of as Christmas stories and the one in John that we don’t usually think of as a Christmas story. John’s un-Christmas Christmas story sheds light on the two actual Christmas stories and brings out their meaning. So when we hear those stories, let’s think about their meaning, and let us give God our thanks and praise for what God has done for us in the birth of Christ. Amen.