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Grace, mercy, and peace be unto you from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, the text for this evening comes from that gospel reading, especially the words, “no place for him.” You may be seated.
Merry Christmas, and welcome home to where Jesus has always been given to you, and you will be given Jesus again tonight, fully. For he comes bearing gifts. But not the kind of gifts that wear out or that need to be upgraded with the next model or that don’t fit. But the gifts that he gives are eternal gifts, never to be taken from you, given to you forever. The gifts of hope and healing, the gifts of faith and forgiveness, the gifts of joy and peace. They are exactly what you need.
And yet most people don’t recognize what God has done with him being born in flesh and blood just like you so that he can bring you into his kingdom eternally. Most people do not grasp what God is doing presently in your life and in others because it’s very hidden, isn’t it? Only to be received by faith. Most people do not grasp what God will continue to do until the day he brings all of this to an end and creates a brand new heaven and earth. And they sit with their arms folded across their chest, scoffing in their mind.
Your Lord Jesus comes in a manger and he always comes in a humble way, a lowly way, and an unassuming way. And when he came into Bethlehem in his mother’s womb before he was born, Joseph and Mary were looking for a place for him, but nobody offered. He was of no import. They were outsiders coming into the town. They didn’t plan far enough ahead. They didn’t make it in time to get a room. There was no place for him, and that is what Bethlehem was like.
Someone who came in with importance and power or prestige, they would have laid the red carpet out for him. People would have clamored to have let them in to their house or abode. But not this one, not this God, not your God. He comes and no one receives him. But why? Why do not people receive him? Is it because life is just too full for God? How unfairly God is treated in Jesus. He seeks to save those people who despise him. He seeks to win their hearts by his suffering, death, and resurrection. He seeks to make them his children. There’s no place for him, though.
And is that because there are more important things with which to be busy, to be occupied, to be consumed? Behold, how God is utterly disregarding of what the world is for you. How God utterly disregards what the world has for you or desires for you. For everything that this world can offer you is always temporal, always tainted with sin, always impure, always sin-filled. Oh world, how foolish are you.
Behold, the world shows how little it knows of what God is for you, how it does not see how God cares for you, how he has your needs in his heart, how he dies for mistakes you wish you could erase in your memory, how he heals brokenness that you seem not to be able to heal on your own. Oh man, how foolish are you.
There’s no place for him. So alone Joseph and Mary go to a place where animals habitate, where the smell of manure and urine fills their nostrils. There are no family gathered around her to help her with this delivery. She bears the Son of God by herself with only Joseph to hold her hand. There are no relatives with which they can find support. And where did she find this swaddling cloth? There was nothing in the manger, nothing in the barn or this area where the animals are at. She probably took it from her own clothing or from Joseph’s.
Did they wrap the Son of God up in? And it is he who covers your nakedness with his very flesh and blood. How ironic. It is his flesh and blood that covers your nakedness and makes you righteous and holy as it did in your baptism. And though there was no place for him, angels shouted with joy and great happiness because they could see the fulfillment before their very eyes that God finally fulfilled all of those Old Testament prophecies that we heard from his word.
He has come to crush the head of the serpent, Satan, and defeat that which you can’t defeat and I can’t defeat, which clings to us all, death. The angels were joy-filled because they got to see that this God descended and became one with humanity in flesh and blood, that he could save sinners, not righteous people, not holy people, sinners and only sinners.
The angels reveal this only to the lowly and despised. They don’t reveal it to the privileged or the proud because they have no room for him. This Jesus always works in a contradictory fashion. He looks in favor upon what the world turns away from. He looks with favor upon humble, childlike faith. He does not look upon man’s accomplishments, man’s wisdom, man’s power, for it is all given to them by him and can all be removed from them by him.
Your Jesus works in a contradictory fashion, for he teaches that from which the world runs away. And the world runs away from a message of God sacrificing his son to save the world. The world despises that message, cannot comprehend it because it’s not something to comprehend by our mind, but to be believed in that humble, childlike faith.
Jesus always works in a contradictory fashion, for he takes up that which the world discards and leaves behind, and that is his cross. He takes up the tree of death and dies on that tree of death to make it a tree of life for you, that you may not die. That you may live and have life in his name. But there’s no place for him.
Now believing that this miracle occurred in history, that’s important. But believing that this miracle occurred in history does not save your soul. The demons in hell and all those humans who have died and have not believed all have that understanding, died with that understanding, and live with that reality for eternity. But not you. You believe it. It is what’s been given to you. This miracle of Jesus becoming who he is: God in the flesh for you.
This is the miracle that saves you. And though there’s no place for him in this world, there is here in you. The angel said, “For unto you this day in the city of David a Savior has been born, who is Christ the Lord.” And the “you” he is referring to are the unfaithful you who don’t always stand up and speak up for the Lord of life. It’s unto you that he was born. The “unto you” that he was born is for the guilt-ridden people struggling with the sins of our past, dealing with the present, wondering about the future.
That’s the “you” he came to be born for. Not for the proud. The “you” he came to be born for is the sinful one. Sinners, like me and like you. Unto you, this day in the city of David, has a child named Jesus, the Messiah, the Christ, been born for you.
David makes it clear to us what we are in the 51st Psalm. He says about himself and about you and me, “Behold, I was begotten from sinful seed, and in sin did my mother conceive me.” Just as I was born of a sinful woman and a sinful man, so you were. And just as I gave birth to sinful children, so did you give birth to sinful children. Amen.
It all goes back to Adam and Eve, but not this one named Jesus. In his birth was it sinless so that he could cover the sinful birth of which you and I came into this world. Was he sinless throughout his life so that you and I can have our sins covered, cleansed, and paid for?
Therefore, the nativity of your Lord is not a great baby shower. It’s not about you giving gifts to other people. It’s not about you giving gifts to helpless people or people in need. It’s not about you giving gifts to your family members. It’s about one gift and only one gift: his gift to you, himself. The very bread from heaven upon which we will feed and feast. The one who brought life from the tree of death that we may have a tree of life now.
And the rewards and the consequences of sin no longer are ours. They were paid for in him. We are nothing more than beggars who come with hands open waiting to be fed by the one who feeds us himself.
Brothers and sisters, come. Be fed and rejoice in the Savior born for you. In the holy name of Jesus, amen.
