In those days Caesar Augustus declared that everyone throughout the empire should be enrolled in the tax lists. 2 This first enrollment occurred when Quirinius governed Syria. 3 Everyone went to their own cities to be enrolled. 4 Since Joseph belonged to David’s house and family line, he went up from the city of Nazareth in Galilee to David’s city, called Bethlehem, in Judea. 5 He went to be enrolled together with Mary, who was promised to him in marriage and who was pregnant. 6 While they were there, the time came for Mary to have her baby. 7 She gave birth to her firstborn child, a son, wrapped him snugly, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the guestroom.
8 Nearby shepherds were living in the fields, guarding their sheep at night. 9 The Lord’s angel stood before them, the Lord’s glory shone around them, and they were terrified.
10 The angel said, “Don’t be afraid! Look! I bring good news to you—wonderful, joyous news for all people. 11 Your savior is born today in David’s city. He is Christ the Lord. 12 This is a sign for you: you will find a newborn baby wrapped snugly and lying in a manger.” 13 Suddenly a great assembly of the heavenly forces was with the angel praising God. They said, 14 “Glory to God in heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors.”
15 When the angels returned to heaven, the shepherds said to each other, “Let’s go right now to Bethlehem and see what’s happened. Let’s confirm what the Lord has revealed to us.” 16 They went quickly and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby lying in the manger. 17 When they saw this, they reported what they had been told about this child. 18 Everyone who heard it was amazed at what the shepherds told them. 19 Mary committed these things to memory and considered them carefully. 20 The shepherds returned home, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen. Everything happened just as they had been told. (Common English Bible)
Christmas 2020
The news the past couple of days has probably given you fits if you have been waiting on any new government action ten months deep into a pandemic, and that is as close to contemporary politics as I will get tonight. But as far back as 1513, the Americas have been subject to such arbitrary decrees by those who would lay claim to rule it. Twenty-one years after Christopher Columbus sailed to the Caribbean islands, a decree went out in Spain from King Ferdinand II of Aragon, the same monarch who had dispatched Columbus twenty-one years previous.
The decree declared the Spanish crown’s divine right, granted to it by the Pope on behalf of God Almighty, to subjugate—with military force when necessary—all peoples it encountered in the Americas. It was a world-altering way of taking religion and applying it to the powers of the state as an almost post-facto justification for all sorts of injury and harm that would extend well into the future. A decree went out from across the oceans, just as they would for hundreds of years from Spain, from Portugal, eventually from England, which these states rather famously rebelled against.
Tonight and tomorrow, we are called to celebrate the birth of a Messiah who transcended all kingships, all thrones, all crowns, as the one true King of Kings. We are beckoned forth to Bethlehem like the shepherds, like the Magi, out of our faith in God, not our faith in kings or other men of power. These participants in the original nativity scene gave glory and honor to God’s Son, and in so doing denied that glory and honor to rival claimants to kingship—Herod and Augustus. Christmas, then, is heartwarming for us not only for all the usual traditions we have built up around it, but also because it is rooted in the fundamental truth that God cared for us first, and God cares for us most.
Perhaps I might not have settled on so sweeping a message for my first-ever Christmas Eve with you here at Valley, but I think the nature of 2020 has been such that I think Christmas can serve for us a profound reminder of God’s power and sovereignty, even in the face of truly terrible loss. And 2020 has caused each of us to lose something—even if only a sense of normalcy. Which, in that regard at least, gives us something in common with the Holy Couple.
For, as Luke writes, a decree went out then as well, by Caesar Augustus, for the entire population of the Roman Empire to be counted in a census. This was not a benevolent, good-government gesture by Augustus, mind you, like the once-a-decade census we hold today. The primary interest of the Roman Empire in a census would be to determine just how many people were attached to the blocks of land that would get allocated to the empire’s tax collectors—which is why Mary and Joseph must journey to Bethlehem, even though Luke places their present home in Nazareth. Because Bethlehem is Joseph’s ancestral home, that is the land he is tied to for tax purposes, and it is there where he and his household must be counted for the census.
This represented a not-insignificant hardship for the Holy Couple. Travel in those days was dangerous enough to begin with, as evinced by the premise of the parable of the Good Samaritan, but Mary was also nine months pregnant, and Nazareth and Bethlehem are on completely opposite sides of Israel to boot, with Nazareth in the Galilean north and Bethlehem in the Judean south.
But they make the journey anyways, because a decree went out and they must comply with it. But at the heart of the Christmas story is that while Caesar sent his own decree out, God was busy sending out a decree as well in the form of this baby boy born to us. A decree written not with ink and paper, but with soul and heart. A decree that did not treat the rest of humanity as numbers on a page, but as souls with value and fundamental worth. Caesar sent out a decree that we must be counted for his own (primarily financial) purposes, but God sent out a decree that we count simply because we are loved.
And whatever else 2020 may have taken from you, or changed about you, know this: it cannot, and must not, take from you that basic and foundational truth: that God so loved the world—including you!—that God sent God’s only Son, that we might not perish forever but one day have eternal life.
That is God’s decree for us. It always has been. It always will be. Because the story of Christmas is eternal, not momentary. It began at the manger in Bethlehem, but it did not end there. Christmas is a forever story, one that is told and retold, fashioned and refashioned, year after year, because we, the church, the Body of Christ, are the ones to tell it and retell it, fashion it and refashion it.
Christmas is told because we choose to tell it. And Christmas lives because God has chosen to live as one of us. We respond to that by choosing to live as well, and to live for God. Most years, every year before now really, we have done that in all manner of festiveness, of gatherings and in-person worships and dinners and parties. But we live differently today so that we can continue living for God tomorrow. Not for Caesar and his money-first census, but God, and God’s soul-first census.
That is, I think, at the core of the Christmas story—Jesus arrived so that we might begin to live differently, and so that we can continue living for God tomorrow. It is easy to chafe at the decrees to wear masks, keep physical distancing, and the like. But our decree from God is to value one another’s lives, and to do right by them just as we would our own, because we each count under God’s census, and when God takes that census, we want for none of us to be gone. And so we are celebrating Christmas Eve tonight together by abiding by these decrees, because we want our nativity scene, Valley Christian Church’s Christmas, to include each and every one of us in 2021.
And so, like the shepherds, we watch and wait to hear the good word to gather in person, to hear the decree that born unto us, in the City of David, is a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.
God is sending that decree out tonight. May we hear it. May we heed it. May we live it.
May it be so, and Merry Christmas. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
December 24, 2020