© 2024 Evan D. Garner
Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video can be seen here.
It’s Christmas, which means that some of you are here because you came home for the holidays, and others are here because you wouldn’t go home if your life depended on it. Some of us, when we go home, actually enjoy spending time with our family but live in fear of running into a high-school acquaintance at the grocery store. Others, as soon as we get to our parents’ house, make plans to go out and meet our friends in order to spend as little time under their roof as possible.
Years ago, not long after college, I was back in lower Alabama and had the chance to swing by my old high school to say hello to some of the office staff that had helped me survive those difficult years. I wanted to reconnect with some people I loved and say thank you for all the times they let me hide out in the office. When I walked through the door and saw their familiar faces, I greeted them warmly and reintroduced myself, just in case they didn’t recognize me. Before I could say a word of gratitude, however, the office secretary belted out, “Evan Garner? I almost didn’t know who you were. You’ve gained so much weight!” I haven’t been back.
Going home can be a blessing or a curse. Usually, it’s a little of both. Some people relish the opportunity to reunite with family and friends, rekindling old relationships and telling stories about the way things were. Others have learned over the years that going back brings up more painful memories than nostalgic ones. And a few of us grew up in homes that we have never once wanted to return to. But, like it or not, Christmas has a way of making all of us look back. As we think about the Christmases of our childhood, we either romanticize the past or fantasize over what the past could have been. Every time we go back home, whether it’s in the flesh or in our mind, we’re either looking for something we once had but have since lost, or we’re searching for something we never had but have always longed for.
I bet the thought of returning to Bethlehem gave Joseph more anxiety than excitement. As his ancestral home, Bethlehem wasn’t the place where Joseph grew up or went to high school, but it was the town from which his family came. People knew him there. Growing up, his family surely would have made the six-mile trip south from Jerusalem a time or two after finishing one of their thrice-annual pilgrimages to the holy city. He may not have kept up with his distant cousins, but only a brief reintroduction would have been necessary to renew all those relationships, for better or for worse.
This time, Joseph made the trip with Mary, his pregnant fiancée. Back then, people rarely strayed very far from familial connections when proposing marriage, so there’s a good chance that the people in Bethlehem would have known Mary or her parents, but I doubt this was how they wanted to share their good news with their distant relatives. Sometimes an unexpected pregnancy is all it takes to feel like we’ll never live up to other people’s expectations.
What was it like for Joseph to have grown up knowing that he had been born into a royal family only to come back to the city of David as a carpenter whose bride-to-be had become pregnant under inexplicable circumstances? There’s no evidence in the gospel that Joseph’s friends or family gave much thought to his Davidic lineage, but I suspect that this homecoming made Joseph wonder whether his life was measuring up. That he and Mary arrived in Bethlehem with no place to stay—no family member willing to take them in and not enough money or influence to convince the innkeeper to make space for them—lets us know that this trip wasn’t easy for the holy family.
But there’s nothing like the birth of a child to cut short all that wistful longing and self-criticism. While bedding down with the livestock, Mary went into labor, and, whether or not Joseph was ready, the child of the woman he loved was coming into the world. The infant Son of God was born not back in Nazareth, where Mary’s mother, aunts, and cousins could help her, nor in the home of one of Joseph’s relatives, where surely a sympathetic kinswoman would assist with the delivery. The King of kings was born in a stable, celebrated, we are told, not by family and friends but by some nearby, nameless shepherds—as if God wanted us to be sure that the only thing that mattered in that moment was what the future held.
When the shepherds came to see the Christchild, they did so not as a link to generations past but as a sign that, with this birth, God was doing something new. On that holy night, we hear of no one who came to the manger that was able to say that the baby looked like his grandfather or had his great-aunt’s eyes. These strangers had no way of looking back. They could only see what lay ahead—what the angels had said to them—that this child would be the Savior, the Messiah, the Lord.
At Christmas, God shows up in a way that only embraces the past by making all things new. Except for the city in which he is born, there is nothing about our savior’s birth that suggests that he is following in the footsteps of David. Joseph may have felt the burden of the past as he came into his ancestral home, but the birth of Jesus shows us that what lies ahead is not a repeat of what has come before. Christmas reminds us that the past may have brought us to this point, but it cannot define our future.
Christmas may feel like a time when the world is urging you to look back, but God wants you to see what lies ahead—something new and hopeful and wonderful. “Unto us a child is born; unto us a son is given.” The reason the prophet Isaiah speaks of an infant leader is because, at that time in Israel’s history, God’s people were desperate for a new start. People were sick and tired of the same old patterns of hardship and struggle repeating themselves in every generation. They needed a break with the past. They needed to start over.
Our new start comes at Christmas. In the birth of Jesus, God rewrites our story by writing ourselves onto Godself. Our past is only our past, but our future is found in God. This gift to the world is like no other. The world’s greatest hope arrives as a newborn—a perfectly clean slate, a sign that, though the work of redemption is not yet finished, the old patterns have been broken so that, within us, God can do something new.
This is the miracle of Christmas—that what we long for is not locked away in the past but given to us in this present moment. This season of hope has never been about recapturing something that was lost or yearning for something that can never be. With the birth of Jesus, it has always been about receiving something new. On this night, God comes into your life, right where you are, celebrating exactly who you are in this moment. Let the birth of this child interrupt any wistful longing or self-criticism that might distract you from that sacred truth. At Christmas, you are the child whom God is making new.
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