Christmas Eve, 10:00 service
The air was cool and dry as the sun dipped descended behind the horizon. It was anything but a silent night, as the city was filled to beyond capacity with people. Most homes and hotels had more bodies than beds, and under almost every roof was someone complaining about how hot it was.
Some were grateful to just have a place to sleep, but far too few. Still though, there was one couple… She was pregnant and terrified. You could tell it was her first child. Her man wasn’t much better. He was trying to be brave, but you could see it on his face. He knew the baby was coming, and they didn’t have a place to stay, and… well, what kind of husband lets his wife have their first-born child on the side of the road?
Well, he managed to secure a stable for them to stay in. Not the most hygienic place to stay, but at least they could have some small measure of privacy and cover if it happened to rain.
The smells were unmistakable: the warm and itchy hay, the musty earth, the animal… fragrances. But, all of that faded away in the tense moments leading up to the birth of that baby.
And then, the moment came and the moment passed and the world was changed forever.
The birth of a child – any child – is a sacred moment. It is a moment when the fears and the anxieties abruptly stop and in their place is this baby. Tiny, and helpless and beautiful. And the words won’t come.
But no birth could compare to this birth, and because there was never a child like this one. His mother, Mary, wrapped him up and held him and rocked him and smiled down on him as mothers have always done. – and yet she was doing something that had never been done before. She was holding and rocking God. She held the fullness of God in her arms. She did what even Moses had been forbidden; she looked upon the face of God.
That night in noisy, overcrowded Bethlehem, the stable became the new temple, and the manger a new ark of the covenant.
The old temple was so vastly different. It was build of the finest woods, gold plated with the fabrics and colors… the colors! And there was a curtain several inches thick to keep people a safe distance from the holy presence of God. One person, once a year got to go behind that curtain, and if everything went to plan, they wouldn’t even die back there.
But this stable was a strange temple indeed. There weren’t courtyards upon courtyards. There was no curtain to keep God away from men. There was no gold plating, no fine fabrics. And that is how we know that the world had changed.
When Solomon dedicated that first temple, he did so with a grand prayer in which he prayed: “Will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you; how much less this house that I have built!” If the great and palatial temp could not hold God, then how could this stable?
God was telling us something, if only we had ears to listen. He was showing us something, if we could only open our eyes.
Solomon’s prayer, and really the prayer of every wise man was being answered. Yes, God would indeed dwell on earth. Not in a palace. Not with the elite and privileged and the exclusive. He had chosen the lowly things.
Being born as a baby was a choice that God made. He could have made his debut in any way. He could have shown up in the wilderness, wild-eyed and fur clad. He could have descended from heaven with a golden crown and an iron scepter. He could have not shown up at all. But He chose to be a baby, born in a stable.
That baby, asleep a public feeding trough, was at once both the world’s Creator and it’s Savior. A strange temple indeed, was that stable, but no less strange and humble than our hearts. For if the highest heavens cannot contain God, how much less this broken and fickle heart of mine? And yet God has chosen your heart and mine as his residence. You and I.
It is a humbling thing, and yet the highest honor that one could ever imagine, that Christ now lives in us. Not a memory of him, nor a sentiment, but Christ Himself. Immanuel was not a once-only title, but it is the principle way in which Jesus would have us think of Him, even now. He is God with us.
