How far would you walk to pay your taxes? How about to Lincoln, Illinois? It’s a straight shot up highway 51 to Decatur, and then take highway 121 right into Lincoln. By the time you make it to the courthouse in Lincoln, you will have walked roughly 70 miles.
Walking 70 miles just to pay your taxes sounds rather strange, doesn’t it? Yet that’s how far Joseph had to walk from his hometown of Nazareth to go to his family’s ancient hometown, Bethlehem. And the reason he had to make the journey with Mary, his fiancée, was so that his name could be recorded and he would have to pay taxes to Caesar Augustus. That’s what was happening on that first Christmas. That’s how God used a heathen Roman emperor to get Jesus’ family to Bethlehem, so that he could be born there to fulfill the prophesy of the prophet Micah.
How far would you travel to celebrate Christmas? Many people will have will have flown or driven hundreds or even thousands of miles before this Christmas season is over to spend holiday time with loved ones. I wonder how far I—or you—would travel if we had to walk all the way? Today members of our family are coming to Pana from distances ranging from 50 to eighty miles. Would any of them come – could any of them come – if they had to walk all of the way? Especially in this cold, snowy weather. Even if they could do it, it would be terribly inconvenient.
Joseph certainly had plenty of reasons to grumble about the inconveniences of being forced to walk roughly 70 miles from Nazareth to Bethlehem. Listen to Luke 2:4–5 from that viewpoint once more: “Joseph also went up from Galilee, from the town of Nazareth, to Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David, to be registered with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child.” Today doctors tell women not to travel during their final weeks before giving birth, so do you think Joseph grumbled about a long walk with a woman in her ninth month of pregnancy?
Have you or I grumbled sometime in these days about various things we have to do to get ready for Christmas? I don’t know about you, but I have. There’s too much to do and too little time to do it. Gifts must be bought and wrapped, food must be prepared, we sometimes feel like we’re meeting ourselves coming and going. By the time Christmas is over, we’re exhausted – we’re ready for a rest. We can’t wait for Christmas to get here – but the nearer it comes, the more we can’t wait for it to be over. And we don’t hesitate to talk about how busy and stressed out we are. Complaining and grumbling before Christmas are what make Charles Dickens’s character Scrooge seem so real to us. I suspect many of us are tempted to be like Scrooge in some part of our lives this Christmas. We all have a little “humbug” in us sometimes.
Christmas is always inconvenient. Take Mary, for example – she certainly had every reason to grumble about the trip she was forced to make. We read in Luke chapter 2 verse 7, “She gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.” Preachers before and after Martin Luther have talked about “wretched Bethlehem”—those were Luther’s exact words—and how there was no place really nice enough for the Son of God to be born. But what about His mother? From a human point of view, she was inconvenienced even more than Joseph. Those of us who either have given birth or been in a delivery room to watch a birth know the pain, the emotion, the mess that giving birth can involve. And Mary had to deliver her first son, Luke says, in a place where animals lived, laying her newborn baby not in a cradle, but in a cattle feedbox. After her delivery she probably had no place to rest other than on a bed of straw. She gave birth in a barn in Bethlehem rather than in the relative comfort of her own home back in Nazareth.
Christmas is most inconvenient, though, for Jesus. The apostle Paul writes to the Corinthians believers: “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich.” Jesus left the splendor of heaven and came to our planet with its scratchy hay and smelly barns. But even more, he came to live as one of us. Jesus came because we are imperfect sinners, each and every one of us.
And yet, God felt that sharing His love was worth all the inconvenience of Christmas. The Apostle John writes in his first letter about how much God loves us and why Jesus put up with the inconvenience of becoming human: “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”
I think you and I would agree that whatever inconvenience we go through this Christmas and every Christmas is small compared to what Joseph, Mary, and especially Jesus had in their lives at the first Christmas. But Bethlehem is just the beginning of inconvenience for Jesus. Years later Jesus described himself as someone who had “nowhere to lay his head” – no home and no bed to call his own. When he died, he was buried in a borrowed grave. That death on the cross was the most inconvenient thing of all. But John reminds us that Jesus was the sacrifice for sin, and as we will say in the Communion liturgy, it was his death that gives us life. His death is the way in which our sins are forgiven. His death, coupled with his rising from the dead to show that God accepted all his Son had done, was what began in that stable in Bethlehem.
All of this might not change the fact that you and I might have gone through some inconveniences this Christmas. But John can help us see how even the problems in our lives can be opportunities for sharing the love that Jesus was born to bring. The apostle adds, “Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.”
Would you walk seventy miles, all the way from Pana to Lincoln, Illinois so you could pay your taxes? Joseph and Mary did. Here is a more important question: are you willing to be inconvenienced in some other way, to share the forgiving and life-giving love of God, through Jesus? When we answer yes to that question, then the love that came down at Christmas begins to be part of our lives, too. Amen
Note: this sermon was freely adapted from a Concordia Pulpit Resources sermon written by Rev. Henry A. Simon.
Return to Pastor page
