What did you get for Christmas?

We shouldn't ask it, but we do, don't we? It is part and parcel of our experience of the season. While Christmas gift-giving may have originated in Christian communities seeking to celebrate the divine gift to us, it is now our culture that demands we spend and purchase and drive the economy into the black through our holiday purchases.

We are obligated to give gifts. We are cajoled into giving. We must ?nd the "right" gift for each person on our list. Can you do it? Did you do it? Is this the year you got it right?

Tomorrow says, "No." Tomorrow half of those who received gifts will go back to the stores to return them and exchange them or get refunds so that they can buy what they really wanted. Yesterday we bought the perfect gifts. Tomorrow they will all be wrong.

But we are in good company. God got it wrong, too, that first Christmas. That's essentially what we read at first glance in Luke's report. We are so familiar with the words that we often skim past the meaning. If we put Jesus' birth back into its historical context, God gave the wrong gift to the wrong people wrapped in the wrong package!

Here's how. First, note how Luke ties the events of Jesus' life directly to circumstances in the greater Roman world. He reports that Jesus' birth occurred during the reign of Caesar Augustus and the governorship of Quirinius (Luke 2:1-2), and later tells that the beginnings of Jesus' ministry took place in the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar's rule (Luke 3:1). The connection with Caesar Augustus is particularly striking, since Augustus was the great ruler who brought about the Pax Romana, the peace of Rome. For the past fourteen years the doors of the temple of the god Janus in Rome had been closed. During the decades prior to that they had stood open, as they always did when there were battles afoot, and the Legions were in the fields to the north and the east. But Caesar Augustus had brilliantly subdued the world and peace was his great gift to the expansive empire that embraced all.

So no new peace was needed. In fact, no one was looking for a new ruler. Caesar was "god" and the world rejoiced in his benevolence.

And yet… and yet there had to be the nagging fear at the edge of the collective social conscience that even Caesar's marvelous peace could never last. Sin has made us for war, and we have lived out that symptom in bloody colors at every turn.

Now the angels sing that God is bringing "peace" to earth through this gift of Jesus on Christmas morning. It doesn't make sense in the middle of the Pax Romana. It shouldn't make sense. But it does. For in a very few years the great Roman Empire would begin to fray and disintegrate, and only the kingdom of Jesus would survive its collapse. It seemed, on every hand, like the wrong gift. Only time would tell a different story.

God's gift was not only the wrong gift, according to the times, but it was also given to the wrong people. Luke makes evident, particularly through the song of the angels to the shepherds that even in those times of relative calm, the greater gift of divine peace was needed by humankind and could be brought only through Jesus.

Who were these shepherds? We think of boys in their dads' bathrobes play-acting in Christmas pageants. And through nostalgic eyes we see little boy David on the hillsides of ancient Judah. By the days of Jesus' birth, shepherds had become the outsiders of society. They were considered ritually impure, socially inept, thieves and robbers, and perpetual liars. They were not allowed in synagogues or the great temple in Jerusalem. Bouncers at the doors turned back any who might get a conscience and think he should pray. Rabbis railed against them, forbidding people ever to do business with them, let alone enter their despised trade. Because shepherds paid no attention to property lines when herding their flocks, they spoiled backyards and swiped things that were not locked down. No shepherd was allowed to testify in court, for it was widely known that they were all liars and couldn't tell a truth if it whacked them in the face.

So if God is going to do something nice for the human race, the least he could do is bring a gift to people who deserved it. Yet here the familiar nativity story takes us where we truly do not want to be. When we ?nd out about the shepherds, we stay away from them, like the lost and the last and the least in all our societies. How could God do such a thing? First God gives a gift we don't need, and then God sends it to the wrong address, as if these losers know what to do with it! How odd of God!

But the wrongness doesn't end there. The wrong gift to the wrong people is wrapped up in the wrong package. As George MacDonald put it in one of his fine and perceptive poems:

They all were looking for a king
To slay their foes and lift them high;
Thou cam'st a little Baby thing
That made a mother cry.
— "They All Were Looking for a King" George MacDonald, 1883 (public domain)

If we get a gift from God, certainly it ought to be something we can use. We need power. We need wealth. We need healing. We need recognition. We need things.

All we get is a baby! A helpless baby! It doesn't make sense!

That's where we need to take another look at what is going on here. Although the gospels of the New Testament are among the most widely recognized and read literary documents in the world, it remains difficult to explain their exact genre. They have no parallel in any other religious or literary tradition.

Certainly the gospels are not mere biographies. They do not offer enough data about the life of Jesus to construct a full story of his existence or to offer a well-developed social portrait of his presence among his contemporaries.

Nor is it true that the gospels are a complete and systematic summary of Jesus' teachings. What has been preserved as the record of Jesus' sayings and speeches is too haphazardly gathered to form a codified compendium that would neatly explain his wisdom or theology.

The most fitting designation for the gospels seems to be "proclamation." These documents are records of early Christian preaching about Jesus, describing the significance of his coming, the meaning of his person, the content of his teachings, the impact of his actions, the character of his death, and the miracle of his resurrection. This is exactly what Luke tells us at the start of his gospel.

Jesus is the center of history, according to the Bible. The very term "gospel" means "good news." In a world that is plagued with bad news, Jesus' coming and presence reminds us that God wants to love us, care about us, and help us understand the ethics and morality of the kingdom of God that protects and affirms us. That's why the preaching of the church is always about Jesus. And it begins with the gospels.

Luke starts his gospel with a quick personal note to Theophilus, who is a friend and recent convert to Christianity.

Theophilus may have been a highly placed government leader, since Luke calls him "most excellent." More interesting, though, is the man's name. "Theophilus" means "friend of God." Whether this was the name given to him by his parents or a nickname he claimed when he became a Christian, it is a marvelous title for all who read about Jesus and call him Savior and Lord.

As Luke notes, becoming a Christian is always a kind of homecoming. The gift of God announced to the shepherds is designed to bring them home. "For to you is born today, in the city of David…" We are all displaced people, whether in little or great ways. The gospel story reminds us that God came into our world in the person of Jesus to find us and to bring us home to love and grace and eternity itself.

When we actually begin to breathe the air of the gospels, they smell of home. Christopher Fry put it this way in one of his plays, The Lady's not for Burning: Margaret and Nicholas are talking about a woman who seems to be acting strangely. Margaret says, "She must be lost." Nicholas responds, wistfully, "Who isn't? The best thing we can do is to make whatever we're lost in look as much like home as we can."

That's what we do with our lives, isn't it? We have so many goals and dreams and hopes in life, yet so few of them pan out. We get old before we've done half of what we wanted. Somehow we never become what we thought we might. We make a few mistakes along the way. We disappoint some people, and they disappoint us. Even our best times have an edge of bitterness attached to them — when they end we walk away nursing our nostalgia. We're always a little bit away from home — from the home we remember or the home we desire; from the dream we miss or the dream we're still looking for. That's what Nicholas is saying to Margaret in Christopher Fry's play. We're all a bit lost in life. We're all a bit away from home. The best we can do is make what we have look as much as possible like what we think "home" should be, until we can finally see our true home, and like Luke, bring our friends along with us.

No matter where we go, no matter what we do, there must live in each of us a touch of that homesickness, or we die a horrible death. Our trips "home" are only a pale imitation of the place we belong and merely a wayside rest stop on a restless journey to the real home of God's love and God's eternity. More than we know that is where we all truly want to go. Only in finding Jesus and the coming of God's kingdom will our desires find fulfillment and our longings be satisfied. Only then will our homesickness end.

That is why this "wrong" gift of God keeps giving each year. Perhaps it is not the gift that is "wrong," but we, the ones who beg and borrow and steal, really don't know what we need. I'm sure that was the case for Mary and Joseph as they wrestled with these things, "pondering them," as Luke puts it.

Think of it! Whenever a new president is elected, tabloids and journals bump sales by pro?ling the arrival of the next "First Family." Women's clothing choices, children's behavior, couple's tenderness or standoffishness, are duly chronicled. Some First Families create idyllic portraits of the closest thing Americans will have to royalty (the Kennedys and "Camelot"). Others bring homespun commonness into the White House (the Carters). A few depict dynasties in the making (the Bushes, first and second), while others seem to leap off the silver screen and bring Hollywood to life (the Reagans). A few seem to be political teams (the Clintons, the Obamas), although one always defers publicly to the other as a matter of domestic efficiency and diplomatic focus.

Perhaps it is because our lives are eternally caught up in the drama of naming, claiming, and defaming cultural icons that some families stand above us as types and symbols of greater meaning and significance. It happens in the church too. We are more than a little curious about the First Family of Christianity. We pick up prescient clues from the Old Testament prophecies that we recite about Jesus and theology as romantic drama, looking for more details about wedding dresses and royal ceremonies. When the marriage is consummated, we are the first on hand with Luke to view the special days of celebration in the life of the First Family of which everyone is talking.

When children play "dress up" they are enacting common social rituals. Lovers dress up for special dates. Spouses dress up to go out for an evening. Actors dress up to get on stage. Soldiers dress up for the parade march. Business leaders dress up for the big meeting. Children dress up for the first day of school. Gangs dress up in the right colors for identity. Football fans dress up in team pigments. Choirs dress up for performance. To dress up is to enter a community of kindred spirits or to take up a role of identity.

On this first day of a new Christmas season, in which we bow to the God who keeps promises and enters our world, we enjoy the music of caroling, keeping alive the attention of our world to the big news — the good news — the dawning of a new age in which Camelot begins all over again, and this time will not have within her secret places the specter of her own destruction. For the bridegroom who adorns his bride has already found and dealt with the skeletons in every closet.

On this ?rst day of a New Age, the weeping and wailing of another frightful swing around the sun is like the distant voices on the last amusement park ride, and the song of the dawn is hope and joy and expectation. You can see it glowing on the faces of those in the First Family!

Our culture seems gossip hungry and celebrity frenzied. Popular actors are identified as "stars," and people's lives are scrutinized by tabloids simply because they have wealth or public notoriety.

Sometimes in the church, especially in the Protestant tradition, the lives and times of the First Family of faith are underplayed. Religion becomes overly spiritual and the incredible reality of God entering the realities of daily lives to create humble human superstars through whom history is changed forever can be lost. Today is a great day to play up the significance of our First Family of faith, and how we have been re-energized by knowing they are there. Let the radiance of heaven diffuse a new "Camelot" glow through the admiration God and we can give to this First Family, in which the drama of divine romance with us takes on human form.

There is an interesting, albeit limited, parallel to draw between Caesar Augustus, the mighty Roman emperor who brooded over the world at the time of Jesus' birth, and Christ himself. All who saw what Caesar looked like never expected him to gain exalted position in society. Here is how those who knew him described him: He is quite short; he has such sensitive skin that he dares not be out in the sun too long — and never without his head covered; he walks with a limp; his right hand fails him from time to time, so he rarely uses it; bladder stones cause him daily pain; he doesn't sleep well; he catches cold easily; and horseback riding tires him, so he is often carried to the battle?eld on a litter.

Can you imagine a man bearing that description becoming the great Caesar Augustus? Yet he did. Part of his secret lies in an event that occurred when he was a young boy. One day he visited the well-known astrologer and fortune-teller Theogenes. When Theogenes read the boy's horoscope, he was so impressed with its prophecy that he fell on his face and worshiped him.

You and I may not believe in astrology, but Cesar Augustus did. All throughout the struggles of his life, he lived as if this prophecy were true, and eventually it became true.

How much more significant is this prophecy for Christ and for us? Jesus certainly knew the meaning that God's long history of salvation placed squarely on his shoulders. But those of us who become the ongoing incarnation of Christ in this world share his identity as well and need ever and again to become what we are meant to be: the servant of God for the redemptive transformation of God's world.

The wrong gift? For the wrong people? In the wrong packaging?

Perhaps not! Amen.