The birth story isn’t about Mary and Joseph; it is about how Jesus comes into the world. AND how Jesus keeps coming into the world.

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The purpose of the Christmas story
Christmas 1C | Luke 2:41-52

The birth backstory

Every year we anticipate the coming of Jesus, lighting candles, a new one each week; four in all. We green our churches and our homes, give presents, eat dinner with friends and family, we gather on Christmas Eve night in the evening light and we sing songs of praise for the birth of the Christ child, Jesus.

Jesus was never lost. He was home. Share on X

And we hear this story of the birth as told in the gospel we call Luke. A story of a couple, coming to Bethlehem, the family home-city to be counted. And it is there that Jesus is born.

This unlikely place, these unlikely circumstances: no room, no family, the dirt of a stable, a manger for the child’s bed: and we celebrate the power of GOD, the love of GOD to come into the world with such humility, such weakness. The Christ, Jesus, the baby in a manger.

In Year C, we are treated to the most extended story of the origins of Jesus, a portion of it is given to us in Advent. A story which extends the cast of characters beyond Mary and Joseph, to Zechariah and Elizabeth, the angel Gabriel, and a whole host of angels and shepherds.

This whole sequence is genius, truly inspired storytelling. It establishes quickly what the whole gospel is going to be about. The whole thing is about birthing Jesus. It isn’t just Mary who does this, but the disciples, the people hearing the story in the 1st Century, the centuries of hearers and readers since. Us. Giving birth. To Luke, being a Christian is about being pregnant with Jesus; bearing Jesus.

The birth story isn’t about Mary and Joseph; it is about how Jesus comes into the world. AND how Jesus keeps coming into the world.

The power in the birth

Last Sunday, we explored this sequence in Luke 1, with Zechariah and Mary and Elizabeth. We dove into the ways in which Mary’s part in the story was exceptional. And more controversial than we ordinarily recognize.

Then Christmas Eve, we connected that exceptional character with the frightening truth of her decision: that she was giving up her family, her status, her everything to follow through with the GOD relationship. This puts a pregnant Mary on the streets to give birth to Jesus: trading in royal privilege and purity for poverty and pollution; in the dirt, among the animals. Ritually impure conditions for the birth of the future king.

Luke doubles down on this image, bringing the shepherds into town: people whose livelihoods prevent them from really ever being ritually clean and who are quite literally dirty and smelly. These are the attendants to the newborn king.

But then the holy family do what is expected of them. They have Jesus circumcised and they go to Jerusalem to present him at the Temple.

For the casual reader, what happens in the first two chapters of Luke seems extraneous or overkill. For the scholar, many of these elements are necessary to establish Jesus’s appropriate bona fides as coming from a good Jewish family. We might hear that line at the beginning of this gospel passage in that light:

Now every year his parents went to Jerusalem for the festival of the Passover.

But for the followers of Jesus, we have a rich story that isn’t a play-by-play of Jesus’s life and times, a biography of sorts, but a story of who Jesus really is and what his coming into the world is really about. Why the baby Jesus, and then the 12 year-old Jesus, tell us the plan GOD has in Jesus.

GOD in the pre-teen Jesus

Most of us have wondered what Jesus was like as a kid. Did he know who he was? Was he aware of his powers? Why don’t we have an account of his childhood?

Those questions have followed the church for 2000 years and keep getting asked. Perhaps because the most obvious response doesn’t do it for us. Because like Jesus’ parents, we don’t get it.

GOD’s purpose in Jesus isn’t revealed in stories of Jesus’s childhood. We don’t care about that. Our curiosity is still there. We want to know the truth, the factual, the actual. We want to know what happened with an objective journalist’s eye and a historian’s wisdom.

But that isn’t the gospel. That’s being nosy.

Only two writers include birth stories in our canon: the writers of Matthew and Luke. The writer of Luke is the only one in the canonical gospels who includes anything between birth and adult ministry, when he gathers disciples and is called rabbi. The mission is their focus, not a full accounting of all of the details.

This story, of Jesus at 12 is weird and may seem out-of-place. Or at the very least, a strange accompaniment. The family goes to Jerusalem for the Passover in a caravan with family and friends. Somehow they don’t realize that Jesus is lost, so when they notice he’s missing, they freak out and look all over. Then they do what all parents do, and what all parents tell their children to do when they get lost: stay where you are, where you were last seen. For them, that’s the Temple.

I love Jesus’s response to being found: duh, where else would I be? Most of us could relate to this moment and the fear associated with being separated, with going missing. As children, all of us encountered this fear. For me it was a JC Penney when I was hiding in a clothing rack (which is so much fun, I mean, how could I not?) and my Mom lost sight of me and I lost sight of her.

And many of us who are blessed to be parents know that same curse. My kids love those same racks.

But this isn’t about filling in timeline or showing us who Jesus was as a kid, it is about GOD’s mission and our job in bearing Christ, sharing the light, the radiance, the brilliance with the world, by giving birth to Christ in everything we do.

And this is the troubling, frightening truth revealed in this moment: to his parents, Jesus was a son, lost, needing to be found. He could be anywhere.

But Jesus was not only their son. He is the Son of GOD. He was never lost. He was home.

We lose only those things we possess. Jesus isn’t property. In this way, he isn’t their child. He is GOD’s. And he came to reconcile not only them, but the whole world.

Bearing Christ

We’ll see later in the story how Jesus is rejected in his hometown, like his family is rejected in Bethlehem that holy night, like those first followers of Jesus were rejected by their families, how many of us are rejected for our beliefs. How Christmas gatherings with family can be fraught with dangerous conversation because we bear Christ’s love and hope in those places of rejection in our world. Or we speak uncomfortable truths about the Rome we live in.

Jesus will tell us that we will be rejected for loving him, for following him, because people won’t understand, they won’t get it. That following Jesus will tear apart families and relationships.

The Christmas story, the whole sequence as the writer of Luke tells it, is full of hope in a situation of despair. It is love coming into a place of hate.

And those first followers knew their part of the missio dei, of GOD’s mission, was to bring that light, that radiance, that brilliance of Christ into the darkest places. They saw themselves in Mary, not Joseph, for we aren’t to be married to the bringer of light, we are to bring the light. And they were living in a time of religious persecution and political persecution. So they brought that light to one another, to their neighborhoods, to the neighboring communities.

For us, that missio dei (mission of GOD) is to bring light to the dark places, to go to those places where hate is the rule and bring love, to where resignation reigns and bring hope, to communities of despair and bring joy. Like Fowler Park next month for the point in time count or the Salvation Army for its Food Pantry.

For we, every person in this room, is called to bear the light of Jesus. Not just to be a nice person. Not just to live a good life. Not just to be in church each week and pray for those in need. But to be pregnant with Christ, to birth the one who comes to transform the world. The one who brings justice and peace to a world that is broken and obsessed with war. The one who brings generosity to a world of selfishness. Hope to a world resigned to perpetuating violence and division and hatred.

It was Epiphanius, an early church father who wrote,

“The righteous person will shine a hundred times more brightly than the sun, and once saved, even the smallest among you will shine a hundred times more brightly than the moon.”

We come with love and praise for a GOD who is not confined to a single house, but resides inside all of us.

Stop looking for Jesus, he’s already here. Grown and ready for us to let him go.