Christmas In the Middle of a Mess

Have you ever been in the middle of a mess?

I don’t mean a polite middle class mess where you roll your eyes and complain with the other moms about decorations that aren’t up or a Pinterest masterpiece turned into burnt offering.  I mean the sort of mess that buries you in shame.  

In the middle of a mess like that we feel entirely unloveable.  We are convinced that if someone knew the truth we would be a pariah.  We hide.  We lie.  We try frantically to clean up our chaos hoping against hope that somehow no one will notice.  We tell ourselves all kinds of stories that start with "bad luck" and end with "never again" and some of them are even true. 

Declaring His Generations

The record of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham:

      

So all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen generations; from David to the deportation to Babylon, fourteen generations; and from the deportation to Babylon to the Messiah, fourteen generations.

(Matthew 1:1 and 17)

Matthew opens his gospel by declaring the generations of Jesus Christ. Fourteen recorded ancestors starting from the covenant with Abraham to bless the world through his seed.  Fourteen generations later the promise to David that he would have a son to sit on his throne for all eternity.  Fourteen generations since the shame of Israel when the presence of God left his temple.

And now Matthew declares that God has brought the fulfillment in his generation of all those generations of waiting.  The seed that will bless all mankind has come into the world.  The king who will reign forever has come to take His throne.  The presence of God has returned to Israel.  

Let us join Matthew in a shout of song.  Joy to the world!  The Lord is come!  In our day, in our generation as in theirs, the world is blessed, the King reigns, and God is come!  

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All We Like Sheep

    Surely our griefs He Himself bore,

            And our sorrows He carried;

            Yet we ourselves esteemed Him stricken,

            Smitten of God, and afflicted.

      But He was pierced through for our transgressions,

            He was crushed for our iniquities;

            The chastening for our well-being fell upon Him,

            And by His scourging we are healed.

      All of us like sheep have gone astray,

            Each of us has turned to his own way;

            But the LORD has caused the iniquity of us all

            To fall on Him.

      He was oppressed and He was afflicted,

            Yet He did not open His mouth;

            Like a lamb that is led to slaughter,

            And like a sheep that is silent before its shearers,

            So He did not open His mouth.

     By oppression and judgment He was taken away;

            And as for His generation, who considered

            That He was cut off out of the land of the living

            For the transgression of my people, to whom the stroke was due?

(Isaiah 53:4-8)

I love this part of Handel’s Messiah!  One year as a kid I checked the record of the whole thing out of the library and listened to it.  I was old enough to enjoy being different maybe not old enough to really appreciate the lyrics.  But I remember the chorus swelling “all we like sheep-have gone astray.”

And I remember being that sheep.  Not some cute and fluffy lamb from a Christmas pageant but a panicked matted sheep caught in the brambles wondering where the shepherd went.  

The last part of the song drops the frenzied primary melody into a sad slow fade.  “He has laid on Him the inquiry of us all."

In Christmas and every other season we have this precious gift: our Shepherd became a sheep.  He left the glory of heaven to be a broken and bloody lamb.  

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