Where Does God Fit In?

We're going to begin with the reading of Scripture, starting with Luke 2,

Luke 2:1–7

verses 1-7, and then John 1, verse 8.

John 1:8

In those days, Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken

of the entire Roman world.

This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria,

and everyone went to their own town to register.

So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea,

to Bethlehem, the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David.

He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him,

and was expecting a child.

While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born,

and she gave birth to her firstborn son.

She wrapped him in clothes and placed him in a manger, because there was no

guest room available for them.

John 1.18. No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son,

who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.

Many years ago, at Christmastime, a school teacher in England supervised the

construction of a manger scene in the corner of her classroom.

It delighted her pupils to set up the model barn and cover its floors with real

straw and then arrange the clay figures of Mary and Joseph and the shepherds

and the wise men and the animals,

all facing a little crib where they laid a tiny doll representing the baby Jesus.

Somehow, even the most sophisticated among us never seem to outgrow this visual

reminder of ancient Bethlehem.

Come Christmas time, and we are all children at heart.

Well, it seems that one little boy simply could not tear himself away from the

corner of the classroom where the nativity scene was displayed.

He kept returning to it, and each time he would stand there for several minutes,

completely engrossed in the scene and wearing a very puzzled expression on his

face as if he were trying to figure out the great questions of the universe.

After a while, the teacher noticed him and asked, is something bothering you?

Do you have a question to ask?

What would you like to know? And with his eyes still glued to the major seed,

the boy said slowly, what I'd like to know, teacher, is where does God fit in?

Could there be possibly a more mature, more reverent,

more profound question to ask at Christmastime than the question asked by this

little boy of a schoolteacher, where does God fit in?

We could completely understand the boy's question if he was looking at the hectic

pace of Christmas with its maddening rush to purchase last-minute gifts,

the decorations in every store in town, even in September now, the wild parties,

the drunkenness and abuse, the gluttony.

In fact, we have often asked the same question in the midst of all of this scenery

that we have surrounding this time of year, where does God fit in?

Where on earth is God in all of this?

We could also understand this question if he was thinking of the activities

at the church with its many dinners, its programs,

its showy dress-up affairs, its decoration, its frantic busyness,

and we too would ask, where does God fit in with all of our busyness?

But this boy's question was more fundamental, more basic than any of this.

I'm sure the boy was thinking, with all this, all that we've sung in carols

about the gloriously bright night and the angels heralding him and worshiping

him, and with all we know about the majesty of God,

where in this scene, this scene of this young father and mother and baby,

where does God fit into something so plain,

so ordinary, so everyday life?

We're not unlike this little boy. We can look at this manger scene all we want,

but the thought keeps coming back.

That doesn't seem like anything we would expect from the God of creation,

the God of universe, who spoke everything into existence, the God who caused the worldwide flood,

the God who spared the lives of Noah and his family, the God that made the covenant

with Abram and said that his seed would be as numerous as the stars of the heavens,

the God that called Moses out of a burning bush,

the God that parted the sea for the Israelites and then drowned the Pharaoh's

armies when they followed him into the seedbed,

the God that caused the sun to stand still for 24 hours so the Israelites would win the battle,

the God that caused the walls of the city of Jericho to collapse, the God who said,

I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God.

You will worship me and me only, the God who sounded out and pronounced in history, I am who I am.

This is a God of magnitude, and yet we've seen this little thing,

this little scene of a mother and a father and a child, and the gospel writer

declared, no one has ever seen God, but God, the one and only who is at the

Father's side, has made him known.

God is a spirit. We cannot visualize him as we visualize people.

We can only have ideas about God, but our ideas are altogether different from

anything at all associated with that very first Christmas.

You see, when we think about God, we think about magnitude and greatness and phenomenon.

We think of God in terms of remoteness.

No matter how big we find the universe to be, we still think of God as existing

somewhere out there, beyond the farthest galaxy,

the only and abundant proprietor of outer space.

At the very mention of the name of God, we instinctively look upwards or point upwards.

Reaching with our minds beyond the farthest limits of vision and thought, no one has ever seen God.

And when the scientists begin to unravel the mysteries of the world,

that sounds like Big Bang Theory, right?

But when the scientists begin to unravel the mysteries and just see how large

this universe is and expanding at a rate of what we can fathom and what we can

understand and what we can see with telescopes,

God's still bigger.

And yet we view God as somebody who's out there.

We also think of God as in terms of otherness, not only far from our world in

space, but also very far from us in his very nature.

God differs in kind from everything human. We are temporal, the prisoners of time and space.

God is eternal without beginning or end and present everywhere.

We are finite, limited in body, mind, and will.

God is infinite, subject to no limitations. We are imperfect.

God is perfect in his holiness, his truth, and his love.

As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are his ways higher than our ways,

and his thoughts higher than our thoughts.

No one has ever seen God.

And then we think of God in terms of greatness and power, more powerful than

the atom, he created the atom.

And the world which God created, he governs and controls, and no one has ever seen God.

That's how we think about God in terms of remoteness and otherness and greatness and power.

Our words fail when we try to articulate our deepest feelings and knowledge

about the awesome, transcendent majesty of Almighty God.

But yet we are expected to try and comprehend it all, or worse yet, to try and explain it.

I remember a coworker once asking me, how can you be sure that Jesus is God? He's just a man.

He's not a deity. He was just a Hebrew man. And we began to look at the prophecies

about the Messiah and who this God would be, this person that would be.

And it begins to unravel the mysteries, the mysteries of God.

We have pastors and theologians to teach to us the hidden mysteries of God,

to enlighten us with the wonderful idiosyncrasies of the meeting of Scripture,

to feed us with the spiritual meat of the word.

As if we were some mystical thing, if it were some mystical thing that only

theologians can give us. and all the while we sit in our seats trying to soak

something of God into us by osmosis.

If I sit here long enough, maybe I'll become like God.

I remember growing up, I was studying, I was in high school,

and I was in my room downstairs in Woodstock,

Illinois then, and I was reading, which is not a good thing to do when you're

laying in bed, but I was reading my textbook in bed,

and my mom came down and found me fast asleep with the textbook over my face,

and she says, what are you doing?

You're supposed to be studying. And I said, I'm taking it in by osmosis.

But words, all of them, are only human invention.

They can only express how little bit we really do know about God.

And if a theologian tells you all about God, don't believe him,

because even theologians don't know all about God.

If they think they have the answer, their God is in a box and my God's not.

We look at Christmas, therefore, and with correct instinct, we ask with the

little boy, where does God fit in?

The incredible loneliness and humility of that simple manger scene under that

quiet Judean night sky seems absolutely impossible to compare with our high

and lofty ideas of a royal, majestic divinity.

If we were God, we would have had our son born in a palace somewhere and pronounced

with trumpets throughout the

street and order everybody to come and bow down and worship before him.

But thank God we're not God.

We look at the scene and maybe that's all we should do at Christmas is just simply look.

There are seasons in the church calendar when theological discussion seems almost

a sacrilege, when preaching seems to be anti-climactic, like trying to dissect

and analyze a beautiful rose,

a rose by any other name would smell just the sweet.

We can try to analyze that rose. We can try to describe it.

We can try to dissect it and analyze it, but we're never going to make one.

Because a rose by any other name would still smell as sweet.

How could it be that the king of the universe should have such a humble beginning?

A small town in Bethlehem, away from the throne city of Jerusalem,

actually probably only about 12 miles from the throne city of Jerusalem,

was the little town of Bethlehem.

In the shadows of the mighty, the man mighty, came the outreach of God.

At the time, approximately 2,000 years ago, the place, an obscure little province

of the Roman Empire, situated at the eastern corner of the Mediterranean Sea,

this was the most insignificant of all places,

not only in geography, but economically as well.

Even the best of farmers worked hard just to barely make a living from the land

that was rocky and badly irrigated.

And what little bit they did produce was heavily taxed by imperial Rome.

For five centuries, the inhabitants of this little country known as Jews had

lived as a conquered race, the

unwilling subject of whatever dictator held the balance of world power.

Yesterday, it was Nebuchadnezzar. Today, it was Caesar.

Up in the province of Galilee, a man named Joseph worked in his carpenter shop.

The man was to be the earthly father, the guardian of the Son of God,

not a king, but a carpenter with cuts and scrapes and blisters and calloused

hands and dirt under his fingernails.

Under somewhat unusual circumstances, his wife Mary was expecting a child.

Mary, not some proud, magnificently outspoken woman of the times,

but a simple Jewish teenage girl with little or no education who gave herself

as a handmaiden of God and said, Let it be so, as the Lord has said.

God didn't announce his coming to dwell with man by a mighty trumpet fanfare.

He did not ride in as a conqueror with a flashing sword. He sent his son through

the normal gestation cycle of this simple servant-hearted girl.

Then there came the time when Caesar ordered a national registration of the

Jews, and everybody knew that national registration means tax.

He wanted to count everybody there, and he had to have everybody else give money to pay for him.

To complicate the matters, each man was to register in the place of his birth,

which for Joseph and Mary meant traveling south from Nazareth down into Bethlehem,

a Judean village not far from Jerusalem.

Couldn't have come at a worse time, because any day now, Mary was expecting

her firstborn child, and she was in no condition to travel, much less undertake

a journey of several days and nights.

But Rome had decreed. Rome didn't care about the laws of natures.

Rome made their own laws. They said, you will do what we say.

And so we see this pathetic spectacle, a peasant Jew starting out on foot in

the early morning, and behind him is his pregnant wife riding on a donkey,

not in a chariot, on a smelly, poor donkey.

It would have taken at least five days even on the shortest route that went

through Samaria for them to arrive in Bethlehem, a trip of only about 80 miles.

If they went the long way around through Israel and avoided Samaria,

it would have taken about 10 days to get there.

At last, after several days and nights, they came to Bethlehem grateful to God

that the baby had not chosen to arrive in mid-journey at the side of the road.

They entered the town at nightfall. The gospel tells us that there was simply no room at the inn.

Apparently, many others coming to register at their birthplace had reached Bethlehem

before Joseph and Mary, and we can imagine Joseph knocking on the door after

door after door, only to be turned away with the same refusal, sorry, no room.

Now, an explanation of inns at that time were simply not a motel six or a holiday

inn or anything like that.

They were people's homes, and they made room for them in their homes for travelers,

they called those inns, and there would simply be room.

Sometimes they would lay several families in one room sharing together.

But we hear this message that, sorry, there simply is no more room.

We can't squeeze anybody else in at all.

No compassion for this expectant mother.

It must have been sheer panic that finally drove the couple to a stable, a cave.

According to some traditions, a place where animals were bedded down for the

night, there on the straw-covered floor, Joseph made a place for his wife to rest.

Not in a royal palace, not in the finest hotel that money could buy,

not a place that had a green mint on your pillow.

But there in those crude and lonely surroundings,

Mary, any mother compared to any other mother, a mother gave birth to her son,

but this one was God's son, and she cradled him in a manger.

Later that night, some shepherds from the Judean hills came to the stable with

a strange story of angels in the sky.

But apart from these few humble visitors, the event took place in complete obscurity.

Do you wonder then that a school child looking at the visual presentation of

the gospel story should ask the question, where does God fit in?

The Almighty God should make his presence known in a special way.

The remoteness of God, there's nothing remote about this Bethlehem stable.

You can place it, you can date it, you can find its counterpart anywhere,

wherever men live and work.

God's otherness, nothing unique about the birth of a baby. It happens thousands of times every day.

In fact, it's completely commonplace. Greatness, surely not in a tiny, squalling infant.

Those of us that have had children, had babies, know that when they're squalling

and when they're less than clean, it's not a great thing.

What's more helpless and dependent than a newborn human baby?

Under such conditions, it's a miracle that this one even survived at all.

In fact, the mortality rate at that time was probably around 70 or 80 percent.

So the fact that this child lived was a godly thing.

Just a few minutes ago, we talked about how impossible it is to describe God's

power and majesty with mere human words.

Now we go to the opposite end of the vocabulary and find it just as difficult

to find the appropriate words to fully describe the absolute lowliness,

the simplicity, the ordinariness of this birth of a baby in a barn,

these people would have been homeless by our standards.

And to that question, whether asked naively by a school child or profanely by

a theologian, the answer comes back unreservably, this is God.

Not some notion of a supreme attributes, not some earth-splitting explosion

on the hills of Olympia, but this simple, seemingly stupid, stable,

and ancient Bethlehem announces to all of history this is God.

His very almightiness consists in the nearness, the ordinariness,

the lowliness of the Bethlehem manger.

No one has ever seen God but the one and only Son who is in the bosom of the father.

So now see what has happened. We start out with a straightforward question asked

by a school child, and because we are not very childlike, we try to answer him

in the language of grownups.

God came to earth as a baby in a barn just so that children might understand

him, just so all of us might understand.

And if we cannot make the meaning of Christmas intelligible to our children

and to the man in the street, then we have missed the whole point of all.

You see, I think the little boy deserves an answer. Where does God fit in? What should we say?

This is God.

The writer of John wrote this in John chapter 1 verses, oh boy,

John 1 · chapter mention

that ain't working for my glasses.

John chapter 1, verses 1 through 5 and 9 through 12.

John 1:1–5

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

He was with God in the beginning.

Through him all things were made. Without him nothing was made that has been made.

In him was life, and that light was the light of all mankind.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

Verses 9 through 12.

The true light that gives light to everyone who is coming into the world.

He was in the world, and though the world was made through him,

the world did not recognize him.

He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.

Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name,

he gave the right to become children of God.

And then the final verse, the word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.

This one, This one who is our God, this child who was born in Bethlehem,

is the word become flesh. He is God in itself.

So thank you, young man, for helping us to become children again.

In many ways, you are wiser than we are.

Because while we try to explain things, you just simply sit back and marvel

and wonder what's happening.

But we do believe that this baby Jesus nestled in the manger was God, that he is God,

that this was God's way of coming into the world and living with us for a while

so that we might know him and understand him and love him and trust him,

and that by his death and resurrection, we might be redeemed and come to Christ.

But you know, that's a lot of explanation.

I kind of think that maybe it should be summed up in this this is God this is

who he is this is what God is and if we could make things simple enough for

all of us it might be in these words would you sing it with me,

Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.

Little ones to him belong, they are weak, but he is strong.

Yes, Jesus loves me. Yes, Jesus loves me.

Yes, Jesus loves me. The Bible tells me so.

Jesus loves me, he who died.

Heaven's gates to open wide.

He will wash away my sin.

Let this little child come in. Yes, Jesus loves me.

Yes, Jesus loves me.

Yes, Jesus loves me, the Bible tells me so.

Jesus loves me, he will stay close beside me all the way.

Lit and died for me, I will henceforth live for thee. Yes, Jesus loves me.

Yes, Jesus loves me.

Yes, Jesus loves me.

The Bible tells me so.

We think of that as a little child song, but probably nothing has been more profoundly spoken.

Yes, Jesus loves me. Why? Just simply because the Bible tells me so.

So where does God fit in all of our hoopla of Christmas, of all the decorations,

of all the lights, of all the simple manger scene?

Where does God fit in? This is God, the God in the person of Jesus who has become

our Redeemer and our Savior.