“The Heart of Christmas” Mount Olive Lutheran Church Season of Advent Sermon December 24, 2024 – Luke 2:1–20

Mount Olive Lutheran Church / Pr. Ted A. Giese / Tuesday December 24th 2024: Season of Advent, Christmas Eve / Luke 2:1–20 “The Heart of Christmas”

In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration when Quirinius was governor of Syria. 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, the time came for her to give birth. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped Him in swaddling cloths 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 cloths and lying in a manger.” And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, (ESV)

“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.” (KJV)       

When the angels went away from them into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go over to Bethlehem and 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. And when they saw it, they made known the saying that had been told 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 for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them. (ESV)

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in Your sight O Lord. Amen.

Grace peace and mercy to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Good Christian Friends “we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to His purpose.”[1] Saint Paul teaches us this in his letter to the Romans and it’s often a hard lesson to learn in life, but don’t be discouraged, this lesson has been taught from the beginning and we find it even in the familiar words of the Christmas story when the World’s Redeemer first revealed His sacred face.

They wanted more, it was put to them that they could have more, and they desired it; she reached out with her hand and seeing that the tree was good for food and a delight to the eyes, “and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.”[2] They were not content with what they had been given, the whole World was not enough; they wanted that one thing that was not theirs to have: the heart wants what the heart wants. Warnings were not enough to dissuade them. This was Eve and her husband Adam, the first man and first woman, the first of mankind, made by God and given the whole World and one law, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”[3] Coveting what was not theirs to have, greed for it, desire for it, and their failure to ward off and resist these temptations lead to their fall and the finger prints of this fall into sin touch every child born of the union of man and woman. We see this greed and desire even in our beloved Christmas story:  

“In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration when Quirinius was governor of Syria. And all went to be registered, each to his own town.”

The Roman Emperor wanted money from those he’d never even met, Caesar Augustus knew they were out there he just didn’t know who they were and the registration paved the way for their taxation, so he could have some of what they had for himself and for the Roman Empire: the heart wants what the heart wants.

Back in the Garden, at the beginning of time as we know it, when Adam and Eve were called out for their sin, God showed them grace and promised that the head of the deceiver who had tempted Eve to take the forbidden fruit would be crushed and that in the process the One to crush that head would have His heal bitten by the serpent. In God’s promise Eve knew that from her the One destined to crush the serpents head would come and when she had her first son she exclaimed, “I have gotten a man with the help of the LORD.”[4] But their son Able was not the One, and neither was their murderous son Cain, nor their son Seth but every mother who held the promise of God in her heart hoped she would have the promised Saviour. From then on, in many and various ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets,[5] passing this promise down from generation to generation. 

Eventually the promise of God came to King David when Nathan the prophet proclaimed to him, “when your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come from your body, and I will establish His kingdom. He shall build a house for My name, and I will establish the throne of His kingdom forever.”[6] For around a thousand years this promise was trusted, and people looked to the descendants of David for the child to come.[7] As those descendants grew in number over all those years eventually two were born, a man named Joseph, and a woman named Mary. And while they shared King David as an ancestor after a thousand years they were not closely related. So Saint Luke tells us how in the fullness of time both the greed and imperial concerns of Caesar Augustus and the shared ancestry of the Virgin Mary and Joseph in the end worked together for good.     

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, the time came for her to give birth. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped Him in swaddling cloths and laid Him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.

The name of that city of David, the little town of Bethlehem means “house of bread,” and from those dark and dreamless streets The Bread of Life would come. That’s a name Jesus would later have, in the Gospel of Saint John the grown man Jesus said of Himself,  “I Am The Bread of Life; whoever comes to Me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in Me shall never thirst.”[8] This Bread of Life, this promised Saviour came to Joseph and the Virgin Mary in an unexpected way and so as we heard in our Gospel Reading tonight Joseph required encouragement, “an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins.” All this took place, [Saint Matthew tells us,] to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet [Isaiah almost 700 years earlier]:

         “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,

               and they shall call His name Immanuel”[9]

                (which means, God with us).

Dear ones we confess in the Creed that Jesus was conceived of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary but why? That our Saviour came to us in this way meant that He was not conceived with, or born with, the fingerprints of that original fall upon Him and He was free to live a life without sin, without even the inherited sin of Adam and Eve or of any that came before Him. Jesus was free to follow with perfection not one law like Adam and Eve had given to them but all ten of the Ten Commandments and every other law handed down from God the Father with innocent hands, with pure lips and with a faithful heart. Indeed the heart wants what the heart wants and the heart of this baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and laid in a manger proved to be a heart that wanted nothing but to be lovingly obedient and endlessly faithful to His heavenly Father and so we see our Lord Jesus as the fulfilment of the blessed man of Psalm One:

        Blessed is the Man

               who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,

        nor stands in the way of sinners,

               nor sits in the seat of scoffers;

        but His delight is in the law of the LORD,

               and on His law He meditates day and night.              

        He is like a tree

               planted by streams of water

        that yields its fruit in its season,

               and its leaf does not wither.

        In all that He does, He prospers.

        The wicked are not so,

               but are like chaff that the wind drives away.”[10]

The beauty of this is that this promised Saviour who is the very Son of God, not born of the will of man, but of the will of God, took on our feeble flesh, and came not only to the good, not only to the respectable, not only to the well received, or those who counted themselves wise but rather to both the naughty and the nice. He is for all people and so Saint Luke tells us how:    

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 cloths and lying in a manger.” And 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, good will toward men.” (KJV)    

Dear ones “we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to His purpose.” Jesus didn’t come with flesh and blood to face off against Sin and Death and the Devil and the World only for the dirty and beleaguered shepherds in the hills around Bethlehem, no this the very Bread of Life came also for the Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus and Quirinius the Governor of Syria and for the Virgin Mary and Joseph and for Adam and Eve and King David and the Prophet Isaiah and Saint Paul and Saint Matthew and Saint Luke and Saint John and for you and me and all the rest, for all mankind. Jesus is the embodiment of the peace and good will of God toward you. In the Birth of Jesus we see the nature of God’s heart toward us, a heart of love: love not only for us but for all that He has made in heaven and earth. So, no matter who you are or where you’ve been or what you’ve done, no matter what finger prints of sin are on your soul, no matter how you have fallen in this life Jesus was born that day in the city of David for you. Saint Luke records the response of the shepherds that night:     

When the angels went away from them into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go over to Bethlehem and 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. And when they saw it, they made known the saying that had been told 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 for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.

The heart wants what the heart wants and after all of these events Mary wanted to treasure up all these things, to ponder them in her heart. What is it that your heart wants? What is it that your heart is seeking? Do you desire what is not yours to have? Is your heart filled with the desire for what belongs to another? You and I, like everyone, are called to a change of heart, a heart where the Lord in our baptism wipes and washes away the fingerprints of the original sin of our first father and mother Adam and Eve; a heart of repentance that looks at the troubles of the World pressing so heavily upon us and the weight of the cruelty and darkness imposed upon us truly trusting “that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to His purpose.”

Whatever the hardship, whatever the trouble, whatever the challenge as a Christian we can face them together in Christ Jesus for He is the fulfilment of the promise of God from the beginning of time to that manger in Bethlehem right down to each of us today; and His life, death and resurrection is the guarantee that God in The End will make good on every promise He has made us, “And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”[11] Amen.    

Let us pray: Lord have mercy on us, Christ have mercy on us, Lord have mercy on us, “take our minds and think through them, take our lips and speak through them, take our hearts and set them on fire; for the sake of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, Amen.

[1] Romans 8:28
[2] Genesis 3:6
[3] Genesis 2:16–17
[4] Genesis 4:1
[5] Hebrews 1:1
[6] 2 Samuel 7:12–13
[7] Micah 5:2-5
[8] John 6:35
[9] Matthew 1:20–23
[10] Psalm 1:1–4
[11] Philippians 4:7

Photo Credit: Main photo detail enhancment of Ely, Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, nave ceiling East Cambridgeshire by Tilman2007 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0