Two thousand years ago the Creator of the universe, the eternal God, entered human society as a baby.  The Creator of the universe put on humanity.  The Lord of heaven came to live on earth.  On a night like every other night in Israel, with no fanfare, no celebration by anybody, a child was born.  It was a night like any other night but it wasn’t a child like any other child.  This child was the Lord Jesus Christ, God and man fused together in indivisible oneness.  This birth was so monumental that it became the high point of history, the peak, the apex.  All history before this birth is B.C., Before Christ.  All history since is A.D., Anno Domini, Latin for “the year of our Lord.”

The birth of God in human form then is the most important moment in all of history.  Let me read to you the first seven verses of chapter 2, which in plain, simple, and clear language describe this great event.

“Now it came about in those days that a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that a census be taken of all the inhabited earth.  This was the first census taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria.  And all were proceeding to register for the census, everyone to his own city, and Joseph also went up from Galilee from or out of the city of Nazareth to Judea, the city of David, which is called Bethlehem because he was of the house and family of David in order to register, along with Mary who was engaged to him and was with child.  And it came about that while they were there the days were completed for her to give birth.  And she gave birth to her firstborn son and she wrapped Him in cloths and laid Him in a manger because there was no room for them in the inn.”

Very familiar words.  Behind these simple, straightforward, unembellished words of narrative offered with delicacy and reserve, unmistakable meaning and significance there is the profoundest event in the history of the world.  But as I said, the story of Jesus is generally familiar to anybody who knows anything about Christianity and many people who know very little about Christianity.  Sadly the worldwide celebration of the birth of Christ, which is called Christmas, has become so cluttered and so confused with paganism and personal indulgences as to obscure the simple, clear reality of the birth of God in human form.  In fact, it’s pretty refreshing to be able to preach a Christmas message in June because you, at this particular point, are not cluttered with the other kind of Christmas clutter.  The world celebrates the birth of Jesus in December for all the wrong reasons, for the expression of self-indulgence, materialism, partying, social events of all kinds.  But largely misses the point, as we know.  The real significance of the birth of God in human form is overlooked, treated trivially, overshadowed by everything else that’s going on.

And I suppose it’s a fair question to say: How can you take such a simple story as we’ve just read in seven verses and come up with such a complicated celebration?  How do you get from the account of Luke and the account of Matthew, how do you get from those accounts to what we have today?

Well, I’ll give you a little bit of history. You might find it interesting.  About the middle of the fourth century right at the time of the establishing of the great world empire of Rome under Constantine, the bishop of Jerusalem wrote to the bishop of Rome and he asked him to determine the actual date of Christ’s birth.  Well, no one knows the actual date of Christ’s birth. The fact of the matter is we don’t even know for sure the actual year of His birth.  But the bishop of Rome sent word back to the Bishop of Jerusalem that it occurred on December 25.  By the end of the fourth century that had been accepted by the church, was really put into church fiat, or church law, it became the regularly accepted day to celebrate the birth of Christ.

Now most scholars would tell you today, if not all of them, that the bishop didn’t know the day of Christ’s birth because we don’t know the date of Christ’s birth.  December 25 is purely arbitrary.  But he didn’t do it for purely arbitrary reasons.  He was a…a fairly shrewd guy and he had a reason for putting the celebration of the birth of Christ on December 25.  And here was his reason.  For centuries before Christ was born, the month of December had been an occasion long established and still being celebrated at that time as a pagan festival of significance.  In fact, most boisterous pagan revelries were celebrated in December.  It marked the winter and great celebration was held in anticipation of the coming spring.  Everything around was dark and dreary and trees were without leaves and things didn’t grow.  And in the midst of winter they put on these great celebrations for the hope of the return of the sun, the return of the strength of the sun to bring back the spring and make things grow and warm up the cold.  Feasting was part of it.  Parties were part of it.  Adorning your house with evergreens, anticipating those deciduous trees and plants that would soon bloom, they even adorned their houses with mistletoe.  They exchanged gifts. There was a general merry making held at that time of the year held by the pagans.  This was all a part of their traditional pagan celebration.

Now the bishop’s idea was, now this is such an orgy, this is sort of like carnival in our modern world, this is the worst of a pagan decadence celebrated, the bishop’s idea was, let’s take the birth of Christ and put it on the same day around the same time to coincide with all the ancient festivals and all the wild winter revelries, in that way we will bring a sanctifying influence into this celebration and draw the attention of the people away from those things that they’re engaged in to more spiritual pursuits and start making them think about the fact that God came into the world in a human form.

That was a nice thought.  Let’s sanctify these celebrations by imposing on the same day the celebration of the birth of Christ.  Well, needless to say the heathen festivities never missed a beat.  They kept on going at the same pace they were always going at and the church, which frowned on them and wanted to change them finally accepted them and let them be assimilated into the celebration of Christmas so that today Christmas is a conglomeration of all that is distinctively Christian and biblical and all that is distinctively pagan.

To the Romans, for example, this winter December festival, this feasting and orgy, was called Saturnalia, named after Saturn, who was the god of agriculture.  And it was he who presided over the planting of crops. And during the time of celebration of Saturnalia, gift giving was the most popular custom. That’s where we get that from.  The most common gifts of the Saturnalia were small idols, small deities, small gods, replicas of the Roman gods made out of clay, sometimes marble and sometimes silver.  Candles were used extensively in their idolatrous celebration and evergreen branches were given to friends to hang on their houses and sometimes trinkets were placed hanging on those evergreen branches, forerunners to what we know today as Christmas decorations and trees.

In the really barbaric north lands among the Norsemen, a similar winter festival was held and it was called Yule, or Yuletide as we refer to it.  It was in honor of the gods Odin and Thor. It involved feasting and music, drinking to drunkenness from horns.

In Persia fires were kindled to the god Mithra.  And if you know anything about legend you know Mithra was believed to be the god of light.  And so at this time of year when the daylight was briefer than another time and winter was on them, they would pray and celebrate the god of light in anticipation of the sun and the spring and summer.

In England it was the Druids who gathered sacred mistletoe and they made live sacrifices to their many gods.  Mistletoe, by the way, was venerated by the English, it was venerated by the Druids, it was venerated by a lot of pagans in pre-Christian times.  The Druids, for example, gathered mistletoe during their December celebration.  They had some priests, they would get a few white-clad priests and they would march to a sacred oak tree with a large entourage where the mistletoe would grow.  And then they would have the chief priest climb the tree, he would go with a golden sickle, he would cut the plant which would fall from the tree and be caught in a cloth so as not to be defiled by touching the ground.  Then two white oxen were sacrificed and the mistletoe given to the people to be hung in their homes.

Now the mistletoe was supposed to be an emblem of peace and an emblem of good fortune and whenever, the tradition of the Druids was, whenever an enemy passed under the mistletoe you had to embrace the enemy and it was supposedly a little ploy to try to help people reconcile; hence kissing under the mistletoe which is some deviated form of that original embrace.

Adding to that you have the drama of the crib, or the creche, the manger scene which was popularized by St. Francis in the thirteenth century.  Three hundred years after that Martin Luther, of all people, brought a tree into his house at this season of Christmas and decorated it with candles.  He said he put the candles on it to simulate the starry sky glittering over the stable where Christ was born. But long before pagans had used bows of evergreens decorated with trinkets to celebrate their own pagan holidays.

In Holland there was a favorite saint by the name of St. Nicholas.  This white-bearded bishop of Asia Minor was believed to have appeared around December 6 riding a white horse, leaving gifts for good children and leaving switches for the parents of bad children.  And he would leave one or the other on the porch.  The Dutch called St. Nicholas Sinterclaus, from which we get the derivative Santa Claus.

Caroling started in the fourteenth century along with jesters and musicians and mummers and there’s still a mummers parade, I think it’s in Philadelphia.  People wearing all kinds of masks and crazy garb, eight-hour feasts; that all comes from fourteenth century partying.

Now stockings, where did they come from?  Well, it was believed in Holland that St. Nicholas, when he was dropping his switches and his good stuff on the porch on some occasions threw coins down a chimney.  And they just happened to land in some stockings hanging there to dry.  Out of that came the whole idea that Santa Claus comes down the chimney and fills your stocking.

Christmas cards were first printed in London in 1846 at the request of Sir Henry Cole, who was owner of an art shop. And the Christmas cards first printed all showed Mary drinking scenes. About that same time, about middle nineteenth century, the celebration of Christmas was accepted by the church in the United States and became a regular part of church life.

Well the old bishop might have had a good motive for what he did, but it didn’t help. Putting the birth of Jesus Christ on the same day as all the rest of this only served to clutter the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ with a whole lot of unrelated pagan elements. That’s why I say it’s kind of refreshing to do this in June, to study the birth of Christ, because at least we’re not in the middle of all of that stuff. We can just go through the faithful and true account of Luke and the simple unembellished, uncluttered story of the birth of Jesus.

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