Have you ever noticed, have you ever really contemplated our infinite capacity to complicate things? It’s like we have a built-in aversion to the simple. We take the simplest situation and we make it a complicated affair. We build molehills into mountains. Before we examine a question, we wrap it in confusion. Really though, when you get the heart of it, the great experiences of life, even the great insights, have a way of turning out to be very simple.

At the heart of it, Christmas is a very simple thing. Look at the Christmas story. How beautiful in its simplicity. It tells of the marvelous, universal experience which everyone can recognize. A young couple expecting their first baby. The father is anxious and wants the best for his wife. You can feel his nervousness as he knocks anxiously on the door of the inn seeking a room in which they might stay. Can’t you imagine how caringly he must have prepared the place for Mary in that cattle stall, when there was no room for them in the inn? This was young Mary’s first baby. With what joy did she contemplate the infant son that was to come, and with what tenderness did she wrap him in swaddling clothes and lay him in that manger of straw? And when the child was born, there was Joseph’s sigh of relief, and the sparkling tears of joy on Mary’s cheeks. The pain and anxiety of childbirth are lost in the ecstasy of parenthood. A simple story, with universal appeal.

But we’ve managed to complicate it a great deal. Our speculations have issued opaque theological concepts and much intellectual wrangling. Perhaps we don’t want to understand it after all. One of our loveliest hymns puts the whole matter in perspective. Gentle Mary laid her child lowly in a manger. There he lay the undefiled, to the world a stranger. Such a babe in such a place, can he be the savior? And the answer…ask the saved of all the races who have found his favor. Such a babe in such a place. It couldn’t be simpler could it?

I want us to use our imagination now, to open ourselves up completely to what is here. Close your eyes and, in your imagination, see Mary with the little baby Jesus resting on her shoulder. Do you see it? The baby is so small. So vulnerable, see it? Look at Mary, the mother, the child, such a picture of our basic humanity. See them in your mind.  Now, Mary turns to you and says, “Here please hold the baby Jesus for a moment.”  And she hands the baby to you, and you hold him in your arms.  Keep that moment in your imagination, holding a little baby who is the son of God.  Doesn’t that undo you?  What an experience.  Open your eyes now. 

What do we see here?  Divinity breaks into our earthbound lives, and what does this mean?  It means that instead of keeping his distance, God came very close.  That’s at the heart of the Christmas message.  Matthew records the meaning of Jesus’ coming in this fashion – ‘his name shall be called Emanuel, which means God with us.’  Did you hear the story of that woman who was asked to serve as the chairperson of a Christmas celebration that was to be held in the center of the town?  She came to her pastor in distress because of the Christmas music which she had to choose for the program.  Most of the carols, she said, are so distressingly theological.  Well, they are.  They can’t be otherwise.  So Charles Wesley, the prolific hymn writer who set Methodism to music, rose to his greatest height of expression when he set down those hymns of Advent and Nativity.  Listen to him in one of those high moments of inspiration:

Christ by highest heaven adored, Christ the everlasting Lord.
Long desired behold him come, finding here his humble home.
Veiled in flesh the God head see, hail the incarnate deity.
Pleased as men with men to dwell, Jesus our Emanuel.   

God has come to dwell with persons in the form of a person, and this is what the world had waited so long for – a human quality in God which would bring him near.  Flesh of our flesh, body of our body.  It seems such a simple thing, so common and so earthy.  A little baby born in a cold cave stable, but then people realized, and we seek to grasp the truth more fully, the coming of Christ is the work of God, to satisfy the eternity He has set in our hearts.  The yearning, the deep yearning that is present in us all.  God has implanted it there, though sometimes unrecognized and unnamed.  We want to know God.  We want to share in this life, and we want Him to share in ours.  So He does.  Instead of keeping his distance, God has come very close to us.  He came in the way we would know him best, in love, as a little baby.  Robert Browning demonstrated at least a hint of this love when he met and married Elizabeth Barrett.  She was known as the invalid of Wimple Street.  One morning after their marriage, she slipped up behind him and placed a manuscript in his pocket, and she said to him, please read it, and if you don’t like it, tear it up.  Robert Browning read the love poem she had written to him and we know them today as the Sonnets from the Portuguese.  One of the deeply moving lines reads, ‘The face of all the world is changed, I think, since first I heard the footsteps of your soul.’  Christmas is the time when we hear the footsteps of God.  Instead of keeping His distance, God has come very close. 

But there’s a second big aspect of the incarnation.  When God could have demonstrated mighty power, He came in weakness.  How difficult this is for us to appropriate.  We are impressed by power, not by weakness.  Everything about us is geared to gaining power.  We are hardly out of our diapers before we put on our suits of armor.  We do everything we can to develop resources to protect ourselves, to get in positions of strength.  This is ultimately destructive, besides being unchristian. 

Best-selling author, Gail Sheehy, wrote about pacesetters.  In fact, that was the title of her book.  Through extensive research, she sought to discover just who are the pacemakers, the pacesetters.  Persons who have a profound sense of well-being, of who they are, who are not superficially happy, but who are deeply joyous—persons who make a difference in the world.  One characteristic of such persons, she said, is their ability to share with others’ ups and downs, their fears, as well as their faith, their triumph, as well as their tragedy, their sorrow, as well as their joy.  Now that isn’t easy, especially when everything in our culture is geared to our being in control, to exercising strength, to hiding our weakness.  It is particularly difficult for men, for whom the dominant image of success is the John Wayne/Arnold Schwarzenegger macho male.  Here is a signal for us.  When He could have demonstrated power, God came in weakness.  Such a babe in such a place. 

Paul captured the meaning of this when he said that this power comes to its full strength when it really expresses itself in weakness, and Jesus demonstrated that over and over again throughout his life.  It’s interesting that as a man, Jesus was not afraid to share his struggles.  He was vulnerable, and He was not afraid to let that vulnerability be seen.  How else would His disciples have known about His personal faith struggle in the garden of Gethsemane, when he sweated drops of blood, if He had not told them about it?  After all, they were asleep when it happened.  Jesus shared His struggles and His anguish, His vulnerability throughout his life. 

Let me tell you something I’ve learned as a preacher, and it’s been a painful lesson.  It’s easy to hide, it really is.  It's easy to be comfortable and to cultivate an image of the professional clergyman, with competence and confidence, and most parishioners like that, because that’s what they’d like to be.  But here is my discovery, people will admire and respect you for being accomplished, for being confident and competent and correct, for being strong and having the answers.  They will admire you for all that.  But they will identify with you when you dare to be vulnerable, to share your weakness and failures, when you’re willing to let down your hair and aren’t ashamed to admit mistakes and deficiencies.  It’s nice to be admired.  But it’s better to be loved.  And we love those who we identify with, and who can identify with us.  And that which cements us together most endearingly is not the sharing of our strength, but the sharing of our weakness.  What a revelation of God.  It helps us little to know that there’s a God somewhere out there who loves us.  All of our efforts to talk about him and convince ourselves that he is alive is meaningless, unless we know that he is with us, involved in our life.  That’s what Christmas says.  He is the one who has come near to us.  The one who has taken upon himself our nature, the one who has identified himself with our sufferings, the one who has become a friend and addresses us as brothers and sisters, the one who has finally identified himself with our sorrow, our weakness, our sin, even in our death.  We can serve a God like that, can’t we?  We can trust Him.  We can depend upon Him to be with us through the fires and floods of life.  Such a babe in such a place. 

Instead of keeping His distance, he came very close.  When He could have demonstrated his power, he came in weakness.  A Christ like that can do something for us if we let him.  The lordship of Christ is not in the beautiful and miraculous events that surround his birth.  This child grows into a man of sorrows.  The song of the angels soon die out on the Judean hillside, and we hear the sounds as he is crucified.  The cradle is replaced by a cross.  The stable which was his birth place became the sepulture in which his crucified body was laid.  The soft cry of the infant dies and in its place come the severe commands and the tough summons of the savior.  The adoration of men turned into the bitter hatred of rumors.  The Christ child in the New Testament does not remain the child of sentiment; he grows into the savior on a cross.  We complicate that too, we get it all messed up in theological speculations.  We want to know how it’s done, and how one man could take upon himself the sin of us all, and how through him our sins are expiated and God accepts us in spite of our sins.  We all feel different, and have different theories of the atonement, and none of the theories are complete really.  But the saved  know that the work of Christ is the work of salvation and it doesn’t matter too much how it’s done.  What matters is that it IS done.  I know, and if you’ve been saved, you know, other efforts at salvation are tried and found wanting.  They do not meet our deepest needs; they do not reconcile our estrangement and separation from God and our neighbor.  They do not assuage our guilt that we feel so deep and from which we cannot free ourselves.  They don’t cleanse the dirtiness that smudges and mires our souls.  They don’t set right the dislocation and the disunity of our inner being.  The salvation of Jesus does.  Those who have sought and found him accepted his forgiveness and surrendered themselves to him, they know.  They know that the good news of great joy is the news of salvation, of new birth, and new life.  Such a babe in such a place.  Can he be the savior?  Ask a person who knows. 

A married couple’s eldest daughter came down from college for the Thanksgiving holiday. It was a happy family reunion. On the Friday after Thanksgiving, her college friend came down to join them. Now fathers are always anxious to meet the friends of their daughters, especially if those friends are male.  The daughter had talked by phone about this young man, had told them something about his story, but to hear it from him was different.  There was an intensity and an excitement about his sharing that made a strange combination.  He wasn’t bubbling over, in fact, he was rather quiet.  But when he spoke, there was a certainty about his sharing, and an obvious joy.  Yet it was intense and had a sound of seriousness that was unique for a 21 year old.  His was a straightforward story of a wasted life.  Dominated and devastated by drugs, estrangement from a wonderful family, a great cleavage between him and loving parents, a college dropout after one semester, wandering over the face of the earth, odd jobs to support his habit.  Then a dramatic conversion—Christ got through to him directly.  Christ confronted and claimed him, the young man responded.  His witness is simple.  And he didn’t hesitate sharing it.  “Christ saved me,” he said.  “I’m a new person.  No more drugs.  I’m rebuilding my life, especially my relationship with my parents.”  Ask a person who knows.  Can he be the savior?  This young man says, “yes.”  And you, at least many of you, know the same. 

The answer is not some biblical, theological speculation. It’s a confident, personal affirmation.  This is the Savior.  This is my Savior.  How do I know?  “I was blind, but now I see,” was the answer the fellow in the New Testament gave when he was asked a similar question.  And with some of that same confidence and joy and relief, we can say—I was once guilt stricken, but now I know forgiveness.  I was once self-centered, but now I care for others.  I was once plagued by loneliness, but now I have communion.  I once knew hatred, now I love.  I was bound in a hopeless habit, the tenacious chains of alcohol or drugs, but now I’m free.  I was once buried in the mire of self-pity and self-condemnation, but now I’m released.  I was once impotent and without power, now I can do all things through Him who gives me strength. 

If you’ve missed that in life, you have missed life.  If you miss that this Christmas, you’ll miss everything.  So there it is.  Such a babe in such a place.  Instead of keeping His distance, God has come very close.  When He could have demonstrated mighty power, God came in weakness.  Can He be the savior?  If you don’t know, why not find out this Christmas.  Today, accept Him.  Invite Him to be born in your life.  Such a babe in such a place.