Have you seen those birthday cards which show the events that took place in a particular year—the year of your birth? The card names the major events of that particular year. I saw one recently for 1939. It recorded the following events. Two classic movies were produced that year. One was “The Wizard of Oz”; the other was “Gone with the Wind.” Also in that year there was the merger of the Methodist Episcopal Church South, the Methodist Protestant Church, and the Methodist Episcopal Church to form the Methodist Church. Third, Superman Comics first appeared in daily newspapers across the nation. The fourth thing it listed was that Brian Bauknight, another superman, was born at West Penn Hospital in Pittsburgh. Well, maybe I made up that last part! 

Luke plays this sort of game in the third Gospel. Luke is often seen and appreciated as a physician; but he also fancied himself a historian. He asked the question, in what year was Jesus born? He was born during the reign of Emperor Augustus when Quirinius was governor of Syria during a time when a general enrollment was announced for all the citizens of the Roman Empire. 

Most of us have listened to those words in the Christmas story for years, perhaps even for decades. We’ve not thought much about them. I want you to think about them this morning. 

Why was this detail important? Why was it important to Luke? I think it’s more than his simply being a history buff. I don’t think Luke was simply showing his grasp of historical facts. Luke was more than one of those fussy history teachers who wanted you to learn history by memorizing names and dates. And certainly he was more than name dropping. 

When a baby is born today, we announce it with statistics. We say the baby weighed so many pounds and so many ounces, and was x number of inches long. I read a story about a couple who sent out a birth announcement which said simply, “Isaiah 9:6. (signed) Patricia and Paul.” (Isaiah 9:6 reads, “For unto us a child is born; unto us a son is given.”) A friend opened the birth announcement, looked at it for a moment and then said to her husband, “It looks like Patricia and Paul had a baby boy. He must have weighed in at 9 pounds 6 ounces. But why on earth did they name him ‘Isaiah’?” 

When was Jesus born? We don’t really know, exactly. Some of the historical data doesn’t quite compute. But Luke wanted us to know the specifics as he had them in his gathered information. It was when Augustus was the ruling emperor and when Quirinius was governor of Syria. 

Why? What is Luke the preacher trying to say to us? There is an intentional theology in some of these carefully chosen words. 

A PART OF YOUR HISTORY AND MINE 

First of all, Luke is saying that Jesus is a part of your history and mine. This is not a “once upon a time in a land far, far away” story. This is not a fairy tale, or folklore. This is real. 

Many religions of Luke’s day were mythologies. Greek and Roman gods and goddesses lived in some ethereal realm somewhere beyond the earth. They worked out their love and their hate and their war in remoteness from real life. Luke says, “Not this time. This is different.” 

Some religious of that day were called “Gnostic.” A Gnostic religion was one where a few people were presumably given the secret knowledge of the divine. Only a few knew the inner secrets of the universe. Luke is saying “no” to this expression of religion as well. 

Luke is writing for a predominantly educated Roman audience. He wants to say to them, “Jesus is different. Jesus is not like the others you may have heard about.” The readers would see the difference. 

The quality of the Christmas good news is that God is real. God is here. God is now. That’s why Paul writes in one of his letters, “When the time had fully come, God sent forth his son.” That’s why John says, in much more philosophical language, “The word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.” Luke says God exercised some precision timing. 

It is a bold and exclusive claim. His words are easy to overlook. Luke is saying something dramatic: “God has done something quite different here.” 

JESUS CAME WHEN LIFE WAS NOT VERY PRETTY 

But there’s more to the text than just this. Luke tells us that Jesus came into this life at a time when life was not very pretty. Luke would say to us that Christmas is more than new-fallen snow or twinkling lights. Christmas is more than happy people everywhere singing, “’Tis the season to be jolly, fa la la la la la la la la.” Jesus came into a world that is not easy. The world in the first century was not easy. It was a very troubled time. I think it is important for us to hear that right now, near the end of 2005. 

Consider all the natural disasters that took place in 2005; the tsunami, with which the year began. Hurricane Katrina, one of 26 named storms during the calendar year—a new record. The earthquake in Pakistan, where heartache and death still stalk the land—where is God in all this? I had someone in my office a few weeks ago. I said to him, “I have not seen you in church for a while.” His response was, “I haven’t been there for a while. I have a hard time believing in God in the face of all the devastation we’ve seen in the past year.” 

Sometimes in church we sing the well-known hymn, “Holy, Holy, Holy.” One of the lines in that hymn says, “All thy works shall praise thy name in earth and sky and sea.” That didn’t exactly happen in 2005, did it? Where is God in all this? 

It’s like a child who wrote a letter to God and said, “Dear God, you’d better do something quick.” Luke says God has done something at exactly the right time. Jesus came to live in the midst of all of this with us. 

Think about the war in Iraq, a tragic and draining war. It is draining this country economically, politically, and socially. It’s tearing the country apart. There are many deaths from combat, from suicide, from insurgencies, and there are many innocent civilians who die as well. Luke says Jesus comes to stand among us as the Prince of Peace. He comes into our world in this time as a companion as we try to find a solution. 

Or I think about the personal losses that some of you have had this past year. The year did not turn out exactly as you had hoped. A marriage came apart unexpectedly. A death will bring a notable absence at the Christmas table this year. A dream that held so much promise at the beginning of the year has faded and died. Hopes and possibilities rode high in January, but they’re pretty much gone in December. Or the loss of employment, without a real job prospect; an illness that perhaps struck violently or catastrophically; staggering financial reversals that seem to crush us beneath the load. 

I really heard for the first time some lines in the Christmas carol, “It Came upon the Midnight Clear.” Listen carefully to these words.

O you beneath life’s crushing load,

Whose forms are bending low,

Who toil along the winding way,

With painful steps and slow. 

Luke says that Jesus came into this also. When the time had fully come, when the right time had come, God sent forth His son. 

Helmut Thielicke was a great German preacher in the mid-20^th century. Someone asked him why he celebrated Christmas. This was his reply.

God is not merely the mute and voiceless ground of the universe, but God comes to us down in the depths, down into the world of pain, into the world of homelessness and refugees, a world where there are lepers, lost sons, poor ladies, in which people die and are killed. That’s the world we live in. And God is here. 

Jesus plunged his life into our fragile, painful, often unfaithful world. That’s what Luke is saying. That’s what Paul is saying. Jesus is the one who stands by us, even in the darkest abyss. It was precision timing on God’s part. It was exactly what was needed. 

A woman sent out a Christmas card like many of us receive this time of year. Her husband had died in the past year and she knew her friends would want to know how she was doing. She was honest in her letter. She was honest about the pain, the loneliness and the emptiness. She did not try to hide any of it. Toward the end of her letter she wrote this:

Christmas is the promise that God can be trusted to meet all of our needs. 

Finally in the letter she said this:

Some say this first Christmas without my husband will be very painful. Probably it will. But without Christmas, my life and the pain would be impossible. 

That’s Luke’s intention in this narrative. And that’s why Paul says what he does. Because Jesus came into the midst of our history, life is possible. 

BEYOND THE LIMITS OF LIFE 

But there’s even more in these words, too, and in Luke’s intention. Luke says that Jesus takes us beyond the limits of life. Jesus gives us the courage to live larger than life. 

In 1952 American theologian Paul Tillich published a book of some of his lectures entitled The Courage to Be. Jesus gives us the courage to be. He gives us more than life can offer. He gives us more comfort than life can offer. 

We had our annual Journey to Bethlehem this past week for the pre-school children here at the church. Between 250 and 300 children came through, all day Tuesday and Wednesday. The staff portrayed the various characters of the Christmas story. In the Journey to Bethlehem I am always at the end of the line. I sit in the sacristy and greet the kids as they come through. I have a Nativity set in front of me. As each group comes, I explain to them who the various people are and we talk about the story one last time. Then I say something like this to the children: “Do you know why God sent Jesus into the world? Jesus came to be your very best friend and mine, now and forever.” 

That’s Luke’s story. Jesus is now and Jesus is forever. 

John Buchanan tells of the death of one of his favorite seminary professors during this past year. In the last weeks of the man’s life, he wrote these words.

Jesus frees us to do more with our lives than protect them. We are free to offer them. We are called to love the world, to want clear air and water for everyone, to give ourselves to the service of peace instead of… wars, to commit to the cause of justice… That’s a big order. But you are free to pursue it by the (life and Resurrection) of Christ who has put an end to the dominion of death. We are free for the battle because the victory has already been won.[i] 

I think of the closing lines of Charles Wesley’s great Christmas carol… “born that we no more may die, born to raise us from the earth, born to give us second birth…” (UM Hymnal #240, verse 3) 

So the opening of Luke’s Christmas story is no small thing! In some not so incidental words lies a powerful proclamation. Jesus is a part of our history. Jesus is a part of my life and yours—no matter what the situations may be. Jesus gives us the courage to be. The one born in the days of Emperor Augustus when Quirinius was governor of Syria is at the very center of what life is all about.