It's December and we're beginning the homestretch to Christmas and the end of 2017...soon the 500th anniversary year of the Reformation will be a memory.  We will also be finishing our long run of Luther quotes by sharing some of his thoughts on the Nativity of our Lord.  Then we shall see what might be of interest to you and me as grist for this word mill in 2018. But for now I hope there is some illumination to be had for these next 4 weeks...

It would seem that if the 4 gospels are the source of the story of the life of Jesus they all might begin alike, that is, with his birth.  But you should know that only Luke tells it in the way we have become accustomed to celebrating it...a choir of angels singing to shepherds and a baby lying in a manger located in a stable in tiny Bethlehem.  John speaks of the "Word" made flesh and we first meet Jesus in Mark as he arrives as an adult at the Jordan to be baptized.   Matthew's initial words are neither poetry nor story, rather they are the recounting of a pretty dry as dust genealogy intended to prove Jesus' lineage. 

Hence, a line from Luther.. ."Our Lord Jesus Christ was born of a line of ancestors whom the Evangelist Matthew arranges with artistry into three groups of fourteen patriarchs, fourteen kings, and fourteen princes.  Among the latter were a number of disreputable characters, as we learn from the book of Kings, and there were no savory women.  God holds before us this mirror of sinners that we may know that he is sent to sinners, and from sinners is willing to be born."

Never in our culture and seldom in Christendom will the telling of the beloved Christmas story be begun with the reality of sin...too much of a downer, I guess.  No warm fuzzies or colorful glitz for the former, and no commencement of joy and immediate peace for most of the latter.  Typical of Luther to expound on the ancestry not for proof of Jesus' authenticity, rather as evidence of our dire need and his will to become truly human for us.  We proclaim Jesus as Savior...we are saved from ourselves by One who becomes us for our sake.  Imbedded in the beginning of the account of incarnation is both our a priori brokenness and the subsequent unfolding purpose of the ending...the wood of the manger becomes the wood of the cross.

Except that is not the end of this divine drama...there is resurrection!  So the smorgasbord  of Christmas is not just about birth...the nativity is sandwiched between the recognition of the bad news of our need for forgiveness and the ultimate good news of God's need to love us and hold us and never desert us!  And thank God that the menu for this feast that begins, for Luther, with sin... ends with never ending grace.

Wait for it...