Many people today, believe in God but don’t acknowledge Him as God. Many have a sense of God’s goodness, but they don’t live in that goodness and then they wonder why things life isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. When it comes to Jesus, all too many people – by how they live their lives, end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It’s amazing here we are in another Christmas week with the whole year gone and we’re about to do that whole Christmas thing. A few years ago I was sharing a Christmas message in July with the church in Sydney. And we were singing some Christmas carols and we were having Christmas in July and after the service some people said to me, "You know, it felt really weird singing Christmas carols in the middle of the year." It’s a bit funny isn’t it? We’re somehow conditioned to do the Christmas thing at Christmas time in December. In the same way that people who live in the Northern Hemisphere can’t conceive Australian’s like me having Christmas in the middle of summer. Sitting on a beach somewhere maybe eating prawns or having a BBQ while the snow coming down in the Northern Hemisphere. Actually, it’s quite natural for us to have seasons and festivals. The whole festivals and traditions that surround the things that we do throughout the year, actually to turn out to be very, very important to society. Back in early civilisation sociologists tell us, that the whole issue of regular festivals created some stability, created a heartbeat and a cycle and a sense of celebration periodically which was quite important to the development of a society. Well, what about Christmas? Let’s have a look at, just quickly, at the history of Christmas because it’s a strange history. The early church celebrated the death of Christ that’s Easter and the death of the martyrs of the church but not the birth of people and certainly not the birth of Jesus. The first mention of a Christ’s mass on the Roman calendar was 336 AD. Almost well, three centuries after Christ was alive. And the reason that they had this thing called a Christ’s mass because there was a huge controversy raging in the church at the time over the nature of the person of Jesus. Was he truly God, that is God become man in the flesh or was he somehow a created being? And so the Christ’s mass was an argument against that heresy. It is was an urgency to proclaim the reality of the incarnation of God becoming man. And it spread right across the church by about the end of the fourth century. So why did they pick December 25th? Was that Jesus’ birthday? Well, actually we don’t have any evidence to suggest that it was but there was ample evidence to suggest that it wasn’t because the story of Jesus birth says that there were shepherds out tending their flocks by night. Now of course December is the middle of winter and it would be very unlikely for the shepherds to have been out in the middle winter tending their flocks because generally in winter they bought the flocks into a central area within villages and they weren’t grazing out the pastures by night because it was just too cold. So the chances are that Jesus wasn’t born on 25th December. Actually, the reason we have Christmas on 25th December is because it was a Roman winter solstice festival, a pagan festival. And Christianity was the official religion of the Roman Empire so they decided to transform this pagan festival which was about the sun, into a Christian festival about the Son. So instead of suppressing this pagan festival what happened was it was transformed into a Christian festival. And there were many parallel European festivals in the middle of December. It was the end of the harvest season, people prepared special foods, they decorated their homes with greenery, there was gift giving. So by about the 1100’s this pagan festival and this social festival and the Christian thing converged and St Nicholas had become a symbol of gift-giving. It wasn’t though until the Middle Ages that it was first called Christmas. And it’s popularity grew until the Reformation, until that time when Martin Luther stood up against some of the excesses that were happening in the Catholic church. And Christmas was then considered to be pagan. The non-religious elements were seen to be wrong so in the 1600’s Christmas was actually outlawed in both England and America. It wasn’t until the 1800’s that two more customs become popular, the Christmas tree and the sending of Christmas cards and of course by the 1900’s commerce and retail had taken over and Christmas became quite commercialised. So this celebration that we hold as sacred is really a conglomeration of pagan and cultural festivals, historically reinterpreted. And the Christian dimension is only there to the extent that it was required to argue against a heresy in the early church. Well, so what? I mean 2000 years on, ok we celebrate this thing and it means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, primarily it’s about shopping it would seem. What does that whole incarnation thing mean to us today? Is it just a festival or does it have a meaning? I suspect that in answering that question of what’s the relevance of the birth of Jesus today we have a problem or two. Let’s just think about it for a minute, here’s this baby and this baby Jesus was born in Bethlehem in a stable and laid in a manger. And the purpose ultimately of Jesus coming to the earth as a man was for Him to die on the cross, for Him to die and rise again so that our sins could be forgiven. That’s the theological answer. But you know, Jesus actually spent 30 something years on this earth. He was a baby, he grew up, he became a man, he had a public ministry and then he went to the cross. I mean if the only reason for Jesus to come onto this earth was to die to pay for your sins and mine if that’s the only theological reason, why didn’t they just kill the baby? Why didn’t they just sacrifice the baby, why wasn’t that God’s plan? It certainly would have been more spectacular. But no, no Jesus had a life. He grew up. We see a story about his birth, we see that circumcised when he was eight days old, we see him in the temple in Jerusalem when he was 12 years old. We know that he grew up as an apprentice carpenter working in Joseph’s carpenter shop and it wasn’t until he was in his early 30’s that he began his public ministry and then he had a three and half ministry before he was tried, crucified buried and rose again. So there must be a little bit more to this whole thing of Jesus coming from God to be a man to live on this earth. John the apostle puts it this way: The word became flesh. Jesus, God’s expression of his love became a human being. That’s the one thing that Christians celebrate at Christmas time. The question is what does it mean? How does it impact? How is it relevant to you and to me? To me, there are three key elements to this. I’d like to start, if you have a bible grab it, we’re going to have a look at Hebrews. That’s a book in the New Testament towards the end, Chapter 1:1-4. have a listen to what it says: Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets. But in these last days he’s spoken to us by His Son whom he appointed heir of all things through whom he also created the worlds. Jesus is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being and he sustains all things by his powerful word. When he made purification for his sins, he sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high, having becoming as much superior to angels as the name as he has inherited is more excellent than theirs. Isn’t it interesting? This book to the Hebrews to the Jews, it’s a letter about Jesus to the Jews begins by saying long, long ago...

Released on 19 Dec 2021