Dec 11
18
Christmas is God’s Story
Caesar Augustus paces before the assembled bachelors of Rome, then explodes: “You are murdering our future!” In Caesar’s view they aren’t “fathering their descendants,” so he enacts laws to give advantages to those who settle down and raise families. Years later, to find out if his “fertility laws” are working, Caesar begins a project he’ll list as number 8 in his life’s achievements.
He issues a decree that a census be taken of the entire Roman world.
Roman soldiers ride into the far-off town of Galilee where a young woman is “showing.” One of the soldiers announces the decree: “all must return to their town of family origin to be counted.”
Mary has to catch her breath. You see, that last detail had still puzzled her. The angel said the child she was carrying had been conceived by the Holy Spirit, and he was to be given the name Jesus. She understood that the baby growing in her womb was the promised Messiah. But the Biblical prophecy told of the Messiah being born in far-off Bethlehem. Now Caesar plays his unsuspecting part and, through his heralds, orders Mary to go immediately to “the town of David.”
She smiles. “We’re going to Bethlehem!”
After the census is complete, picture the emperor in Rome pacing through his palace room, scrolls of census data piled all around. One of those is labeled “Judea,” a backward little province in the land of the Jews. On it is written something very close to this: “Joseph, son of Jacob …carpenter; Mary, daughter of Joakim … his wife; Jesus … first-born son.” It’s one of a thousand places where secular and sacred history intersect.
How shocked Caesar would be to find that we now say “Merry Christmas;” instead of “Lo Saturnalia” or that we no longer measure calendar years from the founding of glorious Rome, but from the birth of that peasant Jewish boy counted in his census, and that we divide human history, the “before” and “after” on the dividing line of Jesus’ birth.
It all makes perfect sense when you realize that history is nothing more than His-story. Not make-believe stories, but real historical events that God planned and directed to bring about his salvation in Christ. Christmas is a time when God drew near.
There are many other historical events that God wove together “in the fullness of time” to bring about that historical event of Christ’s birth that we celebrate at Christmas. Please join us in celebrating and remembering these events at Peace Lutheran Church. Christmas Eve candlelight service will be held at 6:30 PM on Saturday, Dec. 24th, while Christmas Day service will be held on Sunday, the 25th at 9:45 AM. See you there!
