A Simple Christmas Read Free Page B

Jesus, a bloodless, somber, and somewhat silent affair, as depicted in the various church Christmas cantatas or typified by the classic hymn “Silent Night.” Silent night my foot! I’ll bet that Mary and Joseph were both screaming and the baby was crying and the animals were all wound up as well. It may have been an “immaculate conception,” but the notion that the birth was immaculate is definitely a stretch. It was the same bloody, yucky mess that marks any birth, except at this one there were no clean towels, sterilized clips to cut the umbilical cord, or incubator to place the child in to keep him warm. In fact, one thing we do know was that upon his birth, Jesus was “wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger.” How precious! Oh, really? Swaddling clothes are nothing more than rags that were tightly wrapped around a newborn to keep him warm, dry, and secure.
    The “manger” was nowhere near as romantic as it sounds. It was simply a rough wood water or feed trough for the animals. Not long before the son of God was placed in it, livestock had eaten grain out of it. God spent His first few moments as a human in a food dish.
    From our perspective this sounds like a plan gone bust. But it wasn’t a plan gone bust. It was the plan from the beginning. God had no intention of opening the sky and landing like a little Superman from a faraway planet. He didn’t plot an arrival that was all about huge ceremonies and fine linens, festive music, scrubby-clean surroundings, and the latest advancements in medical technology. From the beginning, God wanted to show up in the lowliest of conditions so that in the future, no one would assume that their own situation was simply too humble as to merit His attention. However low people might feel, God wanted to demonstrate that He’d “been there, done that.” His first bed was an animal’s food dish, His first outfit was some dirty old rags, and His first roommates were cows and sheep. Top that, whiners of the world!
    I once heard a Christmas sermon by a minister who seemed to get the real picture. The sermon was called “Making Love on a Dirty Street.” Sure grabs your attention, huh? The title might be a bit risqué for some tastes, but it pretty well makes it clear that the greatest act of God’s love happened in the least likely of places, and it reminds us that if God can show up for his own arrival on earth in a place like that, then He can show up wherever we are, no matter how dirty, dangerous, or humble it may be.
    It’s an expression not of humility but of arrogance to say, “God wouldn’t understand how low I feel or how horrible my situation is.” If anything, most of us can’t ever imagine just how low and horrible His situation started out to be. Next time you start to think you have it really bad, take some comfort in knowing that God understands exactly how you feel.
    That’s the real Christmas story. It wasn’t pretty and pristine but dark and dirty. It was a humiliating experience for the young lady who had to become a woman the night she gave birth to God’s own son. She probably wondered why the Creator of the universe didn’t provide a better staging area for his arrival, but the nice stages, melodious music, and fancy costumes would have to wait a few centuries until churches came along and added them to the picture. But who can blame the church for coming up with an inaccurate version of the story? The real version seemed so unlikely and so hard to explain and defend that it’s easier to tell the modern version. Oh, sure, some shepherds eventually showed up, but wouldn’t you think that the birth of the son of God would warrant a visit from the mayor or at least a letter from the chamber of commerce? Instead, Jesus was welcomed into the world by some young boys herding sheep in the middle of the night who dropped by the cave full of cows to