A Peasant King: The Humble Birth That Changed Everything

If you have your Bibles, we'll turn to Luke. We're going to take a break from

our study of Acts and concentrate on the Christmas story.

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and we'll be reading chapter 2, verses 1 through 20.

Stand together if you're able, in honor of God's Word, and do pay attention.

I know you hear it a lot, and you'll hear it again probably on Christmas,

but this is the Word of the Lord.

In those days, a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered.

This was the first registration when Quinarius was governor of Caesar,

Assyria, and all went to be registered each to his own town.

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

to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house

and lineage of David, to be registered with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child.

And while they were there, of the time came for her to give birth.

And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes

and laid him in a manger because there was no place for them in the inn.

And in the same region, there were shepherds out in the field,

keeping watch over their flock by night.

And an angel of the Lord appeared to them and the glory of the Lord shone around

them. And they were filled with great fear.

And the angel said to them, fear not for behold, I bring you good news of great

joy that will be for all the 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 clothes and lying in a manger.

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of heavenly hosts praising

God and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased.

And when the angels went away from them into heaven, the shepherds said to one

another, Let's go to Bethlehem to see this thing that has happened,

which the Lord has made known to us.

And they went with haste, and found Mary and Joseph and the baby lying in a manger.

When they saw it, they made known the saying that had been told to them concerning this child.

And all who heard it wondered at what the shepherds told them.

But Mary treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart.

And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God but for all they had

heard and seen as it had been told to them.

This is the word of the lord you can be

seated let's pray

together lord be with us now as we study

your word even an old story with with which

we're probably already familiar give us your grace and light through the holy

spirit that we might see it afresh and new and be even as the shepherds filled

with rejoicing and praising and glorifying god in whose name we pray amen so

you'll notice the title of the sermon is A Peasant King,

Jesus being born in the city of David at Bethlehem.

And his birth, as we know from many, many different Christian stories,

Christian legends, stories, et cetera, is a central part of our celebration as Christians.

I'm tempted whenever I do a Christian, a Christian, Christmas sermon,

I feel like I'm a new seminary student because I want to say everything that

could possibly be said about Christmas, but I can't.

So I will try to focus on the poverty of Jesus Christ and his birth into a peasant home.

I'll be rattling a few traditions, not just for the sake of rattling them,

because I think when you look at the text this way, I think it helps us to see

that Christ's birth is a covenantal birth.

It's a birth for us. And we are in this story in that sense.

The great early church father Irenaeus was always reminding his readers that

when Christ came to be born and to live, he wasn't doing it on his own behalf.

He wasn't doing it because he was interested in what it might be like to be human.

The gods of the ancient world did that. Gods of the ancient world would often

come down to earth, get involved with love affairs and warfare and stir up problems,

blow the wind and the waves, et cetera.

You read your Greek stories and so forth, but the gods would never dare to come

and remain a human, actually fully 100% become a human being.

Irenaeus spoke about this by saying that this was God redoing for us all the stages of life.

Sometimes people call this the recapitulation theory.

Now, it doesn't follow through because he never got married,

he never had a wife, he never had children. But Irenaeus' point was a profound one.

What he did in his birth, in his life, and in his death, he did for us.

And in so doing, he was doing for us what we could never do for ourselves.

He was being for us what we needed, but what we could never be for ourselves.

It was a covenantal birth here.

And in that sense, and I'll end with a quote from Martin Luther,

the birth of Jesus Christ is also our birth. It's our story in that sense.

And it's an amazing story of a humble God.

I remember I had classes in seminary by a great teacher named Dr. Douglas Kelly.

And Dr. Kelly said something. He kept saying it over again throughout the early

church fathers because it was a refrain.

Athanasius spoke about it. Irenaeus spoke about it. A lot of the fathers did.

And he kept saying, God is a humble God.

God is a humble God. It may seem obvious that he did humble things like he came

to earth, but God is a humble God.

And this is very, very unique among religions in the world. Our religion is

like no other religion in the whole world. No other gods are humble like this.

None of them would even want to be. You see that? To be a God is to be proud

and powerful and strong and rule.

All the other gods of the earth, if they had come to be born in that city,

they would have been born in a palace.

They would have been born in a large, at least a large house,

a large estate with servants, etc.

But Jesus Christ was born and laid in a manger. That's emphasized twice for us.

He was laid in a food trough.

The early Christian church was so, the message was so profoundly upside down

that the first known picture of Jesus that we have, at least extant,

and maybe earlier ones, we don't have them, is a Roman graffiti on the wall.

And it has a man on the cross, but he has the head of a donkey.

It's the head of a donkey. In fact, I think the inscription there says,

Alexomenos worships his God.

This donkey, this foolish situation that the Christians worship, this humiliated God.

The incarnation is a doctrine that points us to Christ's humility and to God's

humble spirit and character.

John says, the word became flesh and dwelt among us and we have seen his glory.

Imagine the glory of God in a baby.

Glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

We don't often register this sense of awe at Christmas.

If you were like me as a kid, I loved Christmas.

I still love Christmas, but I used to sleep under the Christmas tree on Christmas

Eve if I could because I wanted to get up as early as possible and start opening presents.

And I have to admit that I never really grew up with a sense of awe,

a sense of wonder, unless it was the present I got. I really loved it.

But we need to think of the humility of God.

We eat, we drink, we sing, we enjoy, but sometimes we miss that God is so humble

that he came to be one of us.

The birth of Jesus should cause us to reflect in a similar way that Mary reflected.

That's why there's so many great poems and songs about Christmas and in that

poetry and in those songs are mysteries and ironies and paradoxes that can't be explored.

They're inexplicable, they're immeasurable.

And the birth of Jesus was an amazing, an amazing event where we see God is a humble God.

His birth amplifies his own words in the Sermon on the Mount,

blessed are the poor, blessed are the poor, because he was born a poor king.

And I'm gonna, I'll have this quote and I'll end it. And I want us to see his

poverty and the poverty of his birth into a peasant's home.

I think it was a home, not a stable. There you go, I'll just say it.

And I'll try to prove it to you. And I think it covenantally makes more sense

that he entered into the home of a peasant of a poor person rather than the stable story.

You can leave your crash and your nativity scenes the same.

I don't want you to go home and be an iconoclast and wipe them all out. Get rid of it.

But, and what I'm going to say will challenge the traditional Christian account,

but not in any deep orthodox way.

It will just, I hope, I think it will just put the magnification on something

that's important. and reminds us of what Athanasius the Great said.

He says, you know how it is when some king enters a large city and dwells in one of its houses.

Because of his dwelling in that single house, the whole city is honored and

enemies and robbers even cease to molest it.

Even so it is with our king. He has come into our country and dwelt in one body amidst the many.

And in consequence, the designs of the enemy against mankind have been foiled

and the corruption of death, which formerly held us in its power has simply ceased to be.

For the human race would have perished utterly had not the Lord and Savior of

all, the Son of God, come among us, dwell among us to put an end to death.

It's from his famous work, The Incarnation.

The coming of Jesus Christ into the home of this peasant, his coming into flesh

itself, but particularly in this particular story, the home of a peasant,

transformed the poverty-stricken estate of humanity into something dignified and worthy.

Something important. Jesus Christ's birth in the city of Bethlehem transformed

the estate of all of us who were born in sin and in poverty.

I want to look at the story really quickly through Middle Eastern eyes.

That literally comes from a book I read years ago by Kenneth Bailey.

Dr. Bailey wrote a book called Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes,

Cultural Studies in the Gospel. He has a whole bunch of other books along the area.

Dr. Bailey grew up in the Middle East, Lebanon, Cyprus, and Egypt.

He taught there for almost 30 years.

And having lived in there as a son of missionaries in the area,

he watched and saw the way that the peasants of Galilee and the peasants of Israel lived.

And he reads now the gospel from those eyes through the perspective of peasants

from Galilee, peasants from the area, through Middle Eastern eyes, he says.

And so he says the traditional Christmas story doesn't do justice to the historical

setting into which Jesus was born.

Let me go through it really quickly. This is the traditional story.

Again, I'm not doing it to upset you.

And you can leave your nativity scenes the same. I don't care.

We have one. So there you go.

But he says this. This is a traditional story. At last, and by the way,

my kids have even been in the cute little plays where they dress up like the shepherds and not...

I'm not trying to down that. I'm just saying, here's how it traditionally goes.

Mary and Joseph arrive in Bethlehem.

It's crowded because other people are all there and they needed to pay their

taxes. Mary was very tired and needed a place to stay.

At each inn, you see on the place, knock, knock, there's no room in the inn.

Okay, they go from hotel to hotel looking for a place. There's no room for them.

Eventually, one kind innkeeper says, got no rooms, but there's a stable back

there where you guys can go. there's some hay, you know, so forth, just stay back there.

So they go and that's why the stable scene is in most of our nativity scenes,

because they're out there with the horses.

I mean, where else do you have a manger, right? Has to be in a barn.

And so if you take a careful look though at this, it doesn't make any sense

that Jesus went to a barn or a stable.

Not only through Middle Eastern eyes, but we witnessed this ourselves in Africa

with very, very strong sense of hospitality and entertaining of visitors,

particularly pregnant women.

So various traditions of the Bible don't always match with our Christmas traditions.

And we could go over whether there's really three wise men and so forth.

I'll leave that one alone. That'll be next Christmas, maybe.

But when we look at the text, you see a couple of things that don't fit with the stable scene.

And again, I'm not just trying to get him out of a stable. I'm trying to get

him into our homes, into the home of a poor person,

into the home of a peasant and the home to which he was born that he might dignify

that place and that through that place might dignify all of humanity who want

to follow him in a covenantal sense.

Plus, it's just, I think, more faithful to the text. Number one,

the first flaw of this is that the idea is Joseph is the son of Levi.

He's in a city connected to his family. He's even son of or descendant from David.

Bailey mentions that Joseph was from the family of a king and Bethlehem was

called the city of David.

So there's no way, historically or culturally, that someone's going to knock

on the door of a home or an inn or any other place and say, I am Joseph,

son of Levi, son of blah, blah, blah, all the way back. and they would say,

sorry, no room, go, okay?

There is a sense of honor in Bethlehem as in all of those cultures.

It's very different from our culture.

If a visitor shows up to your house at midnight and knocks on the door and says, hey, we're here.

And you're like, I'll get you a room at Comfort Inn, right? You can go down

there and stay or nobody does that.

You'll notice in the story of the friend at midnight when the guy shows up,

knocks on his neighbor's door, he won't stop knocking.

Well, why? Because behind the knocking, the guy inside says,

this guy's never going to give up. Why? Behind that is a super strong sense of hospitality.

If someone shows up at your house, you are going to take them in,

you are going to feed them, and you are going to help them because your honor is at stake.

This tradition goes all the way back to Genesis chapter 18, when Abraham entertained

Genesis 18 · chapter mention

guests and showed them hospitality, and then lo and behold, they were angels.

From that strong tradition in all Near Eastern cultures.

If a visitor comes to your house seeking help or hospitality,

if you decide to provide it for them, you are obligated, even at the cost of your life.

There was a story I read years ago called Lone Survivor. I don't recommend it for kids, by the way.

By Marcus Lutteral, I think was his name. A Navy SEAL that was,

his entire team was killed in Afghanistan.

And he was able to make it to this village area and ask for help.

The guy in the village started to help him.

And because he helped them, they actually would not let the Taliban get to him.

Why? Because their whole village, the honor of their whole village and the honor

of hospitality was at stake.

They even were willing to battle local Taliban leaders in order to protect their

sense of honor given this.

You can imagine then that a family member is looking for a place to stay.

That's just a visitor you don't even know.

But a family member comes and knocks at your door.

They had relatives nearby. Mary, after all, had just visited Elizabeth who was

in the hills countries of Judea.

If there really weren't a place for them to stay, then they could have gone there.

Again, a visitor alone, a family visitor, a pregnant woman, absolutely unimaginable

for any Middle Eastern villager to reject hospitality to these needy people.

Well, then where is, what does it mean? It says there was no room for them in the inn.

First of all, the word inn is not the same word as say, like you go to the story

of the Good Samaritan in Luke, where it says the guy was bound,

he bound his wounds, took him to the inn and let him rest and paid for it.

It's a completely different word than what's used in the Christmas story.

The word inn would mean like a lodge or a hotel.

And by the way, don't get your hopes up because in those days,

a lodge would probably be like a large sort of place with cots all over the

place where multiple people would be staying.

It wasn't even Motel 6, okay?

Randy and I stayed in Motel 6. It's not bad, but it wasn't even that level, not even close.

So that was the end at which the Good Samaritan took the person.

But the word here is katalima, which means guest room.

This is a house, And this is a house. In other words, there was no room.

Evidently, the guest room, we don't know exactly what it was.

And even having a guest room in a small Palestinian village hut would be a big deal.

Maybe a place on the top of your house where, like the prophet Elijah stayed,

where he stayed up and the widow kept him up on that place.

That would be like the guest room. It was occupied.

So the word itself is just not the same word as hotel inn or hostel.

It's guest room. And they Almost all your English translations will have the

word in there But it doesn't mean hotel It means a guest room So now we're back

in a home I wanted to get you in this house somehow Then you're like,

well yeah, but what about the manger?

Come on, mangers where animals are kept.

Well, if you grew up like I did, yeah, my mom wouldn't let any animals in the

house. Not a dog, not a cat. We did have a barn a long way away.

By the way, even if a mouse got in our house, the whole family went on a war

path, throwing things, smashing, killing.

There were no animals allowed in my home because my mom said animals are not

clean. They make things dirty, blah, blah, blah.

And many of us feel that way. And those of you who do have horses or pigs or

chickens or goats, you keep them where they go, right?

Which is where? in the barn or in the field.

But if you're a poor villager in Palestine or even in Africa,

we experienced this a lot.

We'd go over to our friend's house and out in front of their house,

they'd have a stick jammed down into the ground with a long rope tied to the leg of their turkey.

And then towards the road, they would have a similar rope tied to the back leg

of a goat and that goat would be staked down and moved.

Goats were always stretching to try to get a path of grass. What did they do?

Every single night, as it was getting dark, they brought all the animals in

to the back room where they also had a place to feed the animals.

In other words, you need to imagine a village, which it's really hard for us

to imagine because unless you've actually seen one of these places,

it makes your mind go tilt.

We went into a family's home once with seven kids and they had one room.

They just hung sheets down from the ceiling to separate the bedrooms and they

laid little mats on the floor and two or three kids to each mat and And they were in one room.

That also makes sense where Jesus said, if you light a candle,

it will light up the whole house. Well, yeah, if you have one room...

Right? Where the guy inside says, don't disturb me because you'll wake up the

family. Yeah, because they're all there together.

It's a small village hut. Imagine a dirt floor and nothing else.

And in most of these little dirt huts, these little village homes,

there would be a small area, sometimes larger, depending on how rich you were,

where you would keep your animals.

Every night when you took your turkey in or your chicken or your goat or whatever

it was to keep them from getting stolen, you would put them in the back area

where the food trough was.

Are we together? Have I gotten you in the house yet?

They weren't in a stable. They weren't in a barn. We would put them there because

we're Westerners and we don't think of animals in our home.

Not possible. Like I said, we'd lose our heads if we sneaked an animal somehow into the house.

Not possible. But here it was the norm.

So if your guest room is full, your aunts and uncles or other people,

and again, in those days, if someone shows up to your house,

the house is filled with visitors. You do not say no. You cannot say no.

We went out to our friend's house once in africa and there was a handful of

people sitting on the porch I said who's that my aunt and uncle from kenya.

Did you know they were coming?

No idea. How long are they staying? You're not allowed to ask.

It's like, what? It was so strange because I would tell my friends,

I would say, you know, in America, even my mom and dad call before they come.

My own parents are like, oh, that's so rude.

It's like, no, we would think it's rude if they just showed up without calling.

But there, if someone shows up at your door, you feed them. You give them water.

You put them sometimes in your own room and go out.

That's how strong the sense of hospitality was. And here we have simple village

homes in Palestine, maybe two rooms, maybe an upper level guest room that was full.

And there they were. They went into the home of a poor peasant person and they kept their animals.

By the way, once you see this, you can't unsee it. You see it all throughout

the Bible stories where remember when Saul went into the one lady's house,

the witch at Endor, and she realizes he needs food and she says, kill the calf.

And there it is. Where? In the house.

It's just there, right? That's why that weird story in Judges where Jephthah takes an oath.

He says, the first thing that comes through the door, I'm going to slaughter

and dedicate to God. You're like, well, he was expecting animals to come in that night.

And instead, his daughter walks in.

Once you see this village setting, you can't unsee it. It's all throughout the

Bible, and you see it everywhere.

And so this is not a scene in a stable. Now, why do I say all that?

Just to disrupt your nativity scene?

No, because I think it makes sense of Jesus' statement in the Beatitudes, blessed are the poor.

Blessed are the poor. This is poverty, by the way, that's unimaginable for most

of us. There's no running water. There's no electricity. Everybody's together.

Animals are in the house. Animals are eating there, and they're poor.

Luke, in fact, is when you read Luke's account of the story of Jesus,

by the way, when you read anything in Luke's gospel, he gives a lot of attention

and detail to poverty and those on the social margins and the outcast.

Luke's gospel is the only gospel you're going to find the parable of the Good Samaritan.

The only gospel, you're going to find the widow and the judge.

A lot of different stories are unique to Luke. Why?

Even when Luke states the Beatitudes,

Matthew and Mark say, blessed are those who are poor in spirit.

Are we together out there? Are we? But Luke says, blessed are the poor.

It's a bit shocking the way Luke uses language because he wants us to think

about genuine poverty, real poverty.

Not I'm poverty in spirit. We have very little attachment or connection to genuine

poverty, actual real poverty.

This is the poverty into which our savior was born for us to dignify it,

to reverse it, to provide it some sense of purpose and meaning that up to this point, it never had.

Nobody wanted to be poor. Nobody does want to be poor.

Jesus willingly became poor for us that we might be rich in him. You say, are you poor?

Yes, I'm poor in spirit. I'm humble.

Be careful how you answer that one. But when you look at Luke and he talks about

how God raises the humble but resists the proud.

God loves the poor. God loves the outcast.

I'm not trying to get close to liberation theology here where God really does

love every person just because they're poor.

But in Luke's gospel, we need to reckon with what it means to be poor because we're not.

Yes, I am. I'm blue collar, maybe lower middle class, maybe I'm middle class.

No, we're poor. We are rich.

When you actually look at the ancient days, even today, by today's standards,

we are massively, luxuriously rich.

In Uganda, about 2013, the stats are a little old.

Most Ugandans were living below $1.90 a day.

And more than 22 million of them were living on $3 a day.

You say, are you poor? Yeah, not really. Average Congolese in DRC Congo makes about $800 a year.

Okay, I don't say that. I don't wanna, I never wanna be that missionary comes

back and say, you should be sad you're so rich.

No, I don't say it for that reason. I say it to say, we need to get a grip on

what Jesus entered into. And it wasn't middle-class living.

It wasn't American living. It wasn't a comfort in. This was genuine poverty.

He became poor for us. and he loves

the poor because poverty in this sense represents our sin and our need.

Luke is concerned to express the humble nature of those who come to Christ.

He only receives the poor.

He only receives the poor who have humility of spirit and believe the gospel.

God is clothed in the riches of sovereignty while we are destitute and poor

in his sight. God's holiness and purity are infinitely massive.

And contrary to this, our state is one of utter poverty. We have nothing to offer him.

And yet he enters into our poverty.

This poverty is a recognition of your own helplessness, of your own inability,

of the nothingness of who we are. We took a vow and I quibbled over that vow for years.

Like, do you abhor and humble yourself for a while? I was like, I don't hate myself.

I don't abhor myself It doesn't mean that we're asking the kids to hate themselves personally,

Or anyone else who joins the church It's do I hate myself in my sin and in the

poverty and weakness of my own sin and do I have anything to offer god? No Nothing.

We find here that Luke is emphasizing over and over because he was laid in a manger.

He was wrapped in strips of cloth and laid in the food trough of an animal in

the back of a peasant's home.

Luke's account differs from the traditional story, which I think deepens the dramatic flair.

When you read Luke's gospel, there's a drama that's focused on poverty and social marginalization.

I know those are social justice terms and I'm not going there,

but Luke emphasizes that in a jolting way.

Like, wait a minute, I want to only be poor in spirit. I don't really want to be poor.

But Luke just says, blessed are the poor.

Because I think he wants us to know that the story of Jesus' birth is also our

story. We are born into an estate of sin and misery and poverty.

And it's a call for us. The Christmas story calls us to live a transformative

life out of this poverty unto the glory of God.

God is humble and poverty and humility leads him to Bethlehem to be born among

poor people in a peasant's home.

Not in a palace, not in a rich place, but among the animals in the back room of a peasant's home.

And that poverty leads him from Bethlehem all the way to Jerusalem and to the

cross of Jesus Christ for us. Because why?

Because God is a humble God. God is a humble God. And humility requires a kind

of honesty about our own estate.

Christmas story calls us to wonder and awe and glory and praise because we don't deserve it.

We are poor, we are the outcasts, we are the peasants with nothing to offer.

Nothing to offer. It's a call to us. Let each of us look not only to his own

interest, but also to the interest of others.

Having this mind among you, which was also in Christ Jesus,

who though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing

to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking on the form of a servant,

being born in the likeness of man and being found to serve, even to give his

life as a death on the cross.

Jesus doesn't literally tell us to give up our homes and live in poverty.

He doesn't ask us to give up our cars or cell phones or whatever accounts,

but what are you willing to give up?

Because Christ gave up the riches of heaven to be born in this peasant's home

that he might dignify and provide for us a meaningful story.

The Christmas story offers us the hope of transformation for all who are humble.

Anyone who will come to this blessed Savior born in the city of Bethlehem will

find grace and rest and peace and hope.

Rest for the weary to whom Jesus has promised rest.

Luke's shocking story causes us to fall down with the poor people in the story, with the shepherds.

And that's another whole sermon that I could do.

The shepherds were the outcasts of those days.

Nobody liked shepherds. They were usually shepherds because they had nothing

else to do, right? They didn't go to school.

All the little boys who were shepherds in Uganda hated their jobs,

standing around with a stick all day, beating cows and goats.

And they were laughed at by the children on their way to school because they

weren't going to school. They

were shepherds. It's like saying you're a fisherman, like the apostles.

You're a shepherd. You're poor. You're a liar. You're like a sailor.

They sit out in the fields and make up stories.

And so when they came to tell this story, people were probably interested.

But after all, they were just shepherds.

But the shepherds were joined by the magi. The shepherds were joined by the

wise men from the east who came to worship this king.

But he's not like any other king. because he's in the home of a peasant.

He reversed everything, in other words.

This reversal in Luke's gospel is characteristic of the whole gospel.

He takes those who are motherless and provides them children.

He takes the prostitutes and gives them family.

He transforms and renews and turns upside down everything in our lives.

And in the Christmas story, we see here our own story, a great reversal of all

things because Jesus was born in Bethlehem.

St. Augustine says this, he says, man's maker was made man that the bread might

be hungry, the fountain thirst, the light sleep, the way be wearied from the journey.

The truth might be accused as a false witness. The judge of the living and the

dead be judged by a mortal man.

Justice be sentenced by the unjust, the teacher be beaten with whips,

the vine be crowned with thorns, the foundation be suspended on wood,

the strength made weak, the healer wounded, and the light for the life might die.

Wake up, he says, human being, for it was for you that God was made man.

Rise up and realize it was all for you.

Eternal death would have awaited you had he not been born in this time.

Never would you be freed from your sinful flesh had he not taken to himself

the likeness of your sinful flesh.

Everlasting misery would be your misery had he not been performed this act of mercy.

You would not have come to life again had he not died your death.

The story of Christmas is that the gospel story, that Jesus,

the good news is he came to do and to be for us what we could never do or be for ourselves.

And so he came to this poor peasant's home, was born there in abject poverty

in the back of a small village hut with the animals lying in a manger.

And I'll close with this Martin Luther quote that I love so much.

It says, we see here how Christ, as it were, takes our birth from us and absorbs it in his birth,

and grants us his, that in it we might become pure and holy, as if it were our own,

so that every Christian may rejoice and glory in Christ's death,

as much as if it had been he himself born of Mary in Bethlehem.

Whoever does not believe this or doubts is no Christian.

Let's pray. Lord, as we think about how Christ left the glories and riches of

heaven to be born among the peasants, people like us who have nothing to offer,

deliberately stripping himself

of all the comforts of this life and eventually even death on the cross.

Lord, we do sing glory to God in the highest of this great transaction.

This was the first step, the incarnation, the first step in that great gospel

transaction where Christ would do for us what we could never do for ourselves

and where Christ became for us what we could never be for ourselves.

Lord, we praise and thank you for this Christmas gift of Jesus Christ in all

of his poverty so that we might receive all of his riches.

This we pray in Jesus' name, amen.