Luke 2:1-7 A Special Delivery

Of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsek preaches from his series, King Over All, from the Gospel of Luke. Let's listen in.

As Ben said, I'm Don Filsek, I'm the lead pastor here, and thanks for coming out to worship God on this wonderful Christmas week. Merry Christmas to all of you. Probably won't see you again before then, and so Merry Christmas.

The Familiar Christmas Story and the Need to Revisit Scripture

We gather here each week out of the year to celebrate Jesus Christ, our King, and particularly this Sunday to remember and reflect on his birth. We've been marching through the Gospel of Luke, and we are up to the point.

Luke chapter two, probably the most familiar Christmas passage that there is. But the name Recast is an acronym for our core values. It's on the sign above the donut holes back there, but you might be paying more attention to the donut holes than you are to the sign, so let me recap those.

We wanna be a church that values replication, community, authenticity, simplicity, and truth, and part of this process for us involves looking at the Word of Truth, capital T Truth, every week, taking a real good look into who God is, who he says we are, and also emphasizing what he desires of us, and that's really fundamental for our faith is digging into his Word and recognizing who he is, and then also how he desires for us to live, to go out and put it into practice.

So when it comes to passages like the one that we're looking at today, I have to confess that my gut level is to assume you've all heard it before. As a matter of fact, I would suggest that you all think you could probably teach it right now, and some of you are right, you probably could.

You know about the birth of Jesus, you've read this passage, or had it read to you many times, you've seen the Christmas pageants, you've maybe participated in those at times, we watched the kids last week, and so many of us are very familiar with the Christmas story, and I'm not arrogant enough to assume that I'm gonna bring a lot of radical and fresh insight to this text this morning, and yet we are looking at God's disclosure of himself, and when we look at this text, we are looking at what is true, and this truth is given to us so that we might know him.

So it's valuable, it's good for us to go back over,.

I even recognize that just about any time.

That I'm preaching up here, we're going over a text that some of you are familiar with, that some of you have read, that I kinda hope all of us have read it at least once. So why keep going over the Bible?

Why keep talking about the Bible year after year? Why keep going back to these accounts? It's because in it we discover who God is, and he meets with us for the purpose of changing us, transforming us, and it might hit you different today than it hit you last year, than it hit you the year before, and so we keep coming back and refreshing this wonder and awe of incarnation.

So as we consider the arrival of God in flesh, it would be wise for us to think in terms of the big picture of his arrival among us. He came to us, don't lose sight of this, God coming to us in his birth, and this coming to visit has been replicated in many of our lives as we heard the call of Jesus, and through our faith in him, he came to us to take up residence with us.

And let's be clear that when Jesus comes to us to take up residence with us, he isn't just looking for a guest room. He doesn't just want a place to hold over in your life. He wants the deed to the house.

Do you know what I'm saying? He wants all of you. He doesn't want just kind of like a place to hang out on Sunday mornings with you and then split after that. No, he wants all of us to follow Jesus. It isn't just a minor flippant decision, but it is a life that submits to the rightful king over all who came to us in incarnation.

So this morning, we're gonna see that the king arrives in the account of Luke. We ought to, if we're at all students of the Old Testament, and just like those Jews in that time, we expect a king by the time that we come to this point in Luke.

We expect Emmanuel, God with us, a word that is used in the Old Testament, a name for him that comes from Isaiah. Daniel, in his writing, saw one like a son of man coming with the clouds into the very throne room of God.

And this morning, the much-anticipated arrival of the king is revealed to us in Luke chapter two. We've been in Luke for the past couple of months, and now we come to the birth of Jesus after a long journey through Luke chapter one.

And so let's open our Bibles now, finally, to Luke chapter two. Or you can open your scripture journals or your devices or your Bibles to Luke two, and we'll read the first seven verses, recast a very familiar passage, but what God desires us to take in this morning.

And we'll spend a lot of focused attention on what this text says here in a little bit after we worship, but let's give it our attention now as I read it. Luke chapter two, verses one through seven. There's no way, by the way, that I can read this as good as the kids do at the Christmas pageant, but we'll give it a shot.

In those days, a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration when Quirinius was governor of Syria, and all went to be registered, each to his own town.

And 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.

And while they were there,.

The time came for her to give birth.

And 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. Let's pray. Father, we can get into these cadences and routines of life and Christmas being kind of a thing, a season, rolls around every year.

And I confess to being surprised by it regularly.

I don't know why.

It comes every December, but all of a sudden it's this week. And Father, I pray that you would strike us fresh with awe and wonder, with joy, with gladness, and with truth that leads to appropriate worship.

Nothing in this text is written that we might just have ideas or information or be able to win in a game of trivia. It's all meant to move from the theory and the history to our hearts, to awe, to wonder, to worship.

Father, I pray that would be the end result of our gathering this morning, that we would actually worship, even as we sing these songs, but as we hear from your word and as we go out from here, in awe and wonder of what you have done for us in sending forth your son, the mystery of incarnation, the mystery of God and man together in your son, Jesus Christ.

You have loved us way, way, way, way beyond anything that we deserved. You have loved us in sending your son to pay the price for our sins, to live a sinless life, to be the lamb of God, to die for us, and to be raised victorious to now be at your right hand.

Father, I pray that that reality.

Would settle on us in a fresh way. We have the same patterns, the same routines, the same ideas, the same thoughts, the Christmas trees, the presents, all the things. But I pray that those things would fade into the background and that we would worship you through this text this morning.

In Jesus' name, amen. Yeah, go ahead and be seated. And then if you can reopen your Bibles to Luke chapter two, your device, your scripture journal, whatever you're using there. Maybe more so than ever, it's important when we're talking about a very familiar passage to have the Bible open so that you can see that what I'm saying is coming from the text.

And we have these stories in our mind about Christmas and about how the story goes, and we can tend to go like, I know this stuff, and then not really deal with the text itself. So sometimes we skip stuff when we read, if we're honest.

Maybe our mind goes over the words quickly. Maybe we even browse to the end with little understanding. Any of you ever find yourself at the end of a paragraph and go, I just wasn't paying attention, I'm gonna go back and read that over again?

Or you even have the intentional brushing over things like your end user licensing agreements are probably, they might be important but rarely read, right? And then we sign off at the bottom, click, yeah, of course I read that.

And I think some passages in scripture are kind of like that, to be honest. You're familiar with it, you've known it. Verses one through five of Luke chapter two are often read, and I would suggest to you, if you've been a Christian for a while, it's probably read by you without much thought.

When's the last time you asked the question, who was Caesar Augustus? Or for that matter, who in the world is Quirinius? What was this whole registration and census about? Oh, we kind of know they were counting people.

Did it ever sink into you that the whole world was in upheaval during this census, that this was a major, massive undertaking in the Roman Empire at this time? Why did they all go to their own homes?

Do you know that?

And then there's deeper questions that we probably ought to be asking about this passage, and that's questions like, so what? So what, can we just get to the baby in the manger? Is Quirinius just in the text so that kids get a good lesson in enunciation during Christmas pageants?

You know, just why is he there? This morning, I wanna walk through the text and pay careful attention to what is here, and I will spend very little attention to what is not written in the text. So we will not be spending a lot of time, for example, on the stable.

We will not be painting a frenzied picture of a couple traveling solo to Bethlehem. We will not spend time on the drama of Joseph and Mary knocking on every single door in Bethlehem, being turned away by everyone, including the final innkeeper.

We will not be naming all the animals that were there in the place of his birth. We've added so much of the story in our minds, and although it's fun to imagine, it's just not the point. I've heard entire sermons, and I'm sure you have too, on things like, no room in the inn.

Will you make room for Jesus this Christmas? But there's no frantic search for a place to have a baby in this text at all. It does not occur in the gospel accounts. But let's try our best to wipe the slate clean and listen to the arrival of our king as told by the historian, Luke.

He's telling us history. He's telling us what happened. He researched these things. You can go back to the first four verses of his gospel, and you could glance there if you want, for the methodology that he undertook, going and visiting eyewitnesses to these events to get the details down for us so that what we read here is a well-thought-out historical account.

He's brief and less than detailed in this particular account of the birth. He doesn't get into a lot of details, and much of what we've adopted as tradition from the Christmas story is just not what's taught in the Bible, and I'm not here to burst everybody's Christmas bubbles, but I think it's very, very important, very vital that on these points where tradition battles against what the text says, we need to practice.

We need to practice and practice taking God's word over what we've thought of in our minds, what we've imagined in our minds time and time again, so wiping that slate clean is really, really important.

Caesar Augustus, Quirinius, and the Historical Setting of Luke 2

We begin with an imperial decree. You see that right away in verse one. Luke refers to these events as historical. They are rooted in real days on a calendar as opposed to being a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away or once upon a time.

He doesn't begin that way. Luke says the following happened in days on a real calendar. There's a date and time, and the account begins with maybe what we tend to think of. Where would you begin the Christmas accounting?

The story begins with Mary. Where do you start? The account begins with powerful people throwing their weight around and forcing the common people of the known world to turn their lives upside down for the purpose of taxation.

That's where the accounting of the birth of our Savior begins with taxes.

What?

James Edward, in his commentary on this passage, said what I think is really kind of vital.

For us to understand.

When we think about it, we get sentimental about this, and there's a geopolitical thing going on in the birth of Jesus. That doesn't make for good Christmas carols, but here's what James Edward says on this.

With predictable regularity in modern Christmas pageants, the birth of Jesus is often sentimentalized. Winter cold and a poor and pregnant couple turned away from an inn, adoring oxen ass presiding over the manger.

These romantic embellishments are absent from Luke's sober narrative, which reflects the real politic of Imperial Rome and Caesar's regulations requiring a pregnant woman to make an arduous journey in order to be enrolled and taxed in the town of her husband's birth.

That's the context into which our Savior was born. It all starts with this really, really, really big deal of a man named Caesar Augustus. Real guy, real history, tons of stuff written about Caesar Augustus.

When he was younger, he was known by the name Gaius Octavius. I assume that all of his childhood friends just called him Guy for short. But his great uncle Julius Caesar, his uncle, great uncle rather, Julius Caesar took great interest in this young man from his youth.

And it wasn't until his uncle was murdered as the ruler of Rome, the city of Rome, that he found out that his uncle had left him, designated him as heir of the entire throne.

Through more history.

Than you probably want to hear this morning, Gaius Octavius rose to become the sole authority in Rome, and over the course of his life, he unified all kinds of territories and he established what we know now today as the Roman Empire.

He is known by historians as the very first emperor over that Roman Empire. This is, again, tons of stuff written about Caesar Augustus. So a census during his reign would make sense. He's just unified a bunch of peoples, he's unified a bunch of territories, he wanted to know how massive and how expansive his rule truly was, and so counting people serves all kinds of purposes in ancient history, all the way from just raw pride to taxation, right?

Like how many people do I have under me and how much money can I get? Questions that people ask still today. He wanted everyone to be registered and accounted for. Luke says in the world, obviously it's the known world.

Luke's point is not to say that the goal of Caesar Augustus was to count every human on the planet, but this was a massive census that would have set the event of Christ's birth so close to an event that the world could relate to that it would be like us saying, you know, right around September 11th, and everybody knows, like right away.

The world knows where they were on September 11th, and it was like, you remember the first census under Caesar Augustus? Oh yeah, oh, it was around that time. So everybody could relate, everybody alive at that time could relate to that event.

It was a massive thing going on in the world. So in verse two, Luke attempts to further clarify the history by speaking of Quirinius, who was the governor of Syria, and I say that Luke attempts to clarify because verse two is actually, and honestly, one of the hardest historical facts to reconcile with all of Luke's accounts with what we know in modern history.

So it's actually a tricky sticking point for any scholar, and I know that not everybody gets into this depth, but you may encounter it as a potential problem in the text, and so I wanna just explain to you that there's a solution to this.

I think a lot of people don't ever mention, by the way, Quirinius in Christmas sermons because it's confusing, and hey, look over there, it's Christmas, right? Like just the deflection and distraction, let's not talk about him, but the best way that I found to reconcile this because there's a timing issue about him being late, Herod being early, and there being a gap of year, a couple years in between there, that it can't be that Jesus was born during the reign of Herod and being born during the reign of Quirinius.

Is that making sense to you guys? Like there's just a gap in there, like there's not overlap between those two guys, and so, and that's, again, that testifies to the detail that we have in historical reckonings of these things.

We've got record after record after record of these guys, multiple sources that we can compare and contrast, and so the best way that I found to reconcile this is to interpret the word first in verse two as the word prior.

If you have the word prior, then everything comes together. The Greek, by the way, the Greek language allows that word protos to be either prior or first, and so it's used both ways, and so I would say, man, translators ought to be moving towards prior in this.

In other words, verse two could read, this was the registration prior to when Quirinius was the governor of Syria. That one interpretive adjustment lines up the scripture and the historical reality that Quirinius was governor from 6 to 12 AD, and that gets rid of that problem.

Now, all of this is history,.

And you're going like, oh,.

The City of David, Joseph’s Lineage, and the Humble Birth in Bethlehem

I didn't come here to get a history lesson, and yet Luke the historian wants us to have these discussions. He wants me to talk about this. He wants us to be curious about these events. He calls us to study and test his statements.

Luke roots these events in real history on purpose. That's why he has so many names at the start of this. We may have a hard time making sense of the chronology of things from our vantage point 2 ,000 years later, but we are confident of the major players having served in the roles that Luke says that they served in.

All kinds of historical accounts, all kinds of ability to trust in these accounts being true because there really is tons of evidence.

That there was a man named Quirinius.

That ruled in this area during this time. He was governor over Syria for at least one term that we know of. Caesar Augustus, as well attested as the first Roman emperor. Herod mentioned earlier in Luke chapter one was certainly a Jewish king in Palestine during this era.

The scripture is amazingly accurate when it identifies who was in charge when back in the day. But I think there's more at play in the mention of these guys than just merely tying the events to history.

Merely telling us, okay, these are historical events, these were real dudes, move along. Because while these rulers are in the text, a new ruler is arriving. That's why it's set into this backdrop of human power, human authority, human way of getting things done.

God is sending one. God is sending his king. We are seeing the advent of the king over all kings.

Set into the backdrop of powerful people.

Throwing their weight around. Caesar might be exercising authority over most of the known world. Quirinius might be the governor over Syria. Herod might be the puppet king of Rome and Judea at the time.

But the king over all kings is breaking into history, amen? He's coming. The census would have been super taxing, by the way, on a people living hand to mouth. Like, this is a big deal. When I say powerful people throwing their weight around, this is burdensome to people.

Consider how would you respond if the government mandated a trip on your dime to the place you were born so that they could count you in order to extract more taxes from you. That's probably not gonna fly in America, right?

Many of us would say, no, thanks. No, I'm not doing that. But for some of us, we wouldn't have to travel far and it might be a little bit easier. For some of us, it would require significant money to get back to where you came from, not to mention the loss of work time, et cetera.

This is an inconvenience at the least and dangerous for many who were living hand to mouth during the time. This is not an easy trip. But with this statement in verse three that all went to his own town, we should immediately recognize how wrong Hallmark gets it every time they print a card with Mary sitting on a donkey with Joseph leading it down a lonely desert road.

The whole world was on the move. Everybody traveling back to where they were born, the cities of their lineage, the people going both directions. Like, I mean, you're meeting people coming and going. You're walking with people.

Joseph's entire family was on the move. He surely wasn't the only one in Galilee with roots down in Judah who are traveling. This trip of a couple of days would have involved a caravan and not a Dodge Grand Caravan, but something probably more roomy with fewer breakdowns.

Yeah, there you go. In verse four, we get a quick geographical history of Joseph. He lives in Nazareth in Galilee up in the north in kind of like hillbilly country. But his family is from the south where the movers and shakers live, down in Bethlehem of Judea.

He's from the house and lineage of, he's got royal blood. He's from the house and lineage of King David. And this statement at the end of verse four seems like a passing comment, but to anyone who has read the Old Testament, it is loaded with messianic hope.

If you've read the Old Testament and you know that one is coming from the line of David and then we hear Joseph is of, by the way, Joseph is of the line of David, hmm, something important is going on here.

We live in a culture that loves the story of someone who is special and doesn't know it. Harry Potter is raised by muggles until, and he finds out he's a powerful wizard. Bilbo is a simple hobbit until Gandalf shows up.

Where did we find Luke Skywalker at the start of episode four? Just a lowly moisture farmer, right? Joseph is that lowly carpenter guy who has the credentials to offer his adopted heir the very throne of David.

That's this guy. And to just give you a historical nugget that ought to tie down a loose end that some of you have questioned and have wondered and never gotten to the bottom of, how in the world does it matter that Joseph is of the line of King David when he is not in any way, shape, or form involved in the birth of Jesus?

Anybody ever ask that question in your mind?

How in the world is that, how does that tie together?

It's a beautiful word. It's a glorious word, a word that's been used a couple of times here. Anybody know it?

Adoption. Adoption.

To tie that loose end is right in the text, and it's kind of amazing the way that God draws this out. His first mention of a person in this text is an adopted boy into a royal line. Caesar Augustus, adopted boy into a royal line.

The most powerful man on the planet at the time.

Adopted.

Not the birth son of royalty, but adopted by royalty. That's a beautiful picture here. He's mentioned in verse one, adopted by Julius Caesar, given the right to the throne in Julius Caesar's will. Didn't even know he was in line for the throne until his great uncle dies and says, I left you everything.

I left you everything.

The legality of royal adoption has been well attested throughout the history of monarchies. Joseph's adoption of Jesus grants to Jesus the rights of the firstborn, which includes heir to the throne of King David.

And in verses five through six, we zero in more closely down into Joseph's relationship with Mary. And here, we find some scandal and some difficulty. The simplicity of what is shared in these verses introduces an issue that does not resolve.

It's not resolved in the text. We don't know how this looked. Here's what we get in this text. Number one, Mary is Joseph's fiance. Number two, she's preggers. Awkward, okay. Of course, we know that peering into the other gospel accounts, we know a few other details.

The baby isn't his. She claims God is to blame. Number five, he wants to put a stop to the engagement. Number six, an angel meets with him and says, don't you dare. That's it. What do you imagine that car ride looked like?

Whew. Their arrival to Bethlehem is with little fanfare. They arrive in the very place that the prophet Micah has predicted would be the place of the Messiah's birth, Bethlehem of Ephrathah. It's likely that they stayed with a family who had no room in their guest room for them.

And before you rebel or accuse me of ruining the Christmas story, let me carefully burst, let me be careful as I burst your bubble by letting you know that there's a perfectly good word for public inn in the Greek language.

This is not, it's not used anywhere in this text. There is no evidence of a public, there is no evidence of a public inn here. As a matter of fact, a public inn is used in the story of the Good Samaritan, where the Samaritan puts the guy up in an inn and pays the innkeeper, and that word is used, and there's all kinds of uses of that word even in the Bible, but it's not here.

Another construction of verse six implies that they arrived and hung out until the baby arrived. There is nothing of a desperate search in the night, in the last minute, for a place to have a baby. But we made that up.

We invented that for our tradition,.

For sentimentality,.

And we like to tell the story every year. But the grammar leads every single Greek scholar.

That I've been able to read,.

And it's pretty unanimous, to the same conclusion. Everybody who speaks Greek, studies Greek, knows ancient Greek, understands. Mary and Joseph were staying in Bethlehem when the contractions began. They are there when she begins to give birth.

The word translated traditionally as inn isn't either the comfort inn or the holiday inn,.

Neither one.

It's a word most frequently translated guest room, and it does occur in other places in the New Testament. For example, the upper room, what we translate as upper room where they hold the last supper, is this word.

It's a guest room. It's a common room in most houses.

How many of you ever heard.

Of ancient Middle Eastern hospitality? You needed to have a room for guests to occupy. When somebody was traveling through town, it was shameful for you to not have a place for them to stay. And so every house was built with a guest room, this word that's used here.

By the way, we learn more about archeology than we do from literature about this. Archeology uncovers houses with these guest rooms. Almost every house that we uncover in ancient Palestine has a guest room in it.

So nothing about the desperate search in the night for a place to have a baby. And this word here. A house was divided into three sections. A lower area open to the rest of the house with a low railing where the valuable work animals were kept out of the elements and away from robbers and thieves.

You didn't want to leave your precious and priceless work animals outside. You brought them inside. And so they were open to the rest of the house. A living area for the family raised up a little bit and then a guest room divided by a wall and a door from the rest of the living area was the way that most houses look.

The house in which Jesus was born was very likely owned by someone in Joseph's family. Think about it, where's he going? Back to his roots, back to his family. And they were packed to the gills so that even the area where the animals usually slept was occupied by people.

They have likely taken the risk of putting the animals outside on this night because the city is busting at the seams with people. The image that we have in our mind of this birth is probably nothing like what actually happened.

Unfortunately, the image of this birth is not an image of isolation. Not alone, not Joseph desperate to try to figure out how to deliver a baby. Poverty and desperation is not part of it. At least not in the text written, not in what's revealed for us.

It is one of humility, indeed. It is one of crowded quarters and a very, very, very human entry into this world. They were in Bethlehem and the time came, which is a really easy statement to say, but not so easy for those in the room who have experienced labor and delivery.

How many of you have been present at a labor and delivery, whether you were the one giving birth or whether you were there to observe it? Whew, okay. I don't really even need to say much.

For those of you that raised your hand. You've been there, you've seen it.

It's a beautiful, amazing, earthy, scary, painful, emotional, physical, and spiritual event, isn't it?

It's amazing.

It's awe-inspiring. And this was not different. Nothing in the text is designed to direct us to isolation. Nothing in the text indicates that a cow was the first to greet the baby Jesus. Nothing indicates Joseph serving as the midwife.

Oh my goodness, there is no way. And there, fortunately, isn't even a mention of any little drummer boy, so maybe we could just scrap that song.

Anybody with me on that?

Could anybody else do without that pa rum pum pum pum thing? Only four of us? The rest of you, is that your theme song or something?

For real? Our drummer is like, come on, bro, really?

Sorry, dude. Come on. Delivery was and has been frequently throughout history the realm of women for centuries, maybe even we could say millennia. And if we feel compelled to speculate beyond what the text says, we should at least fill it, fill in any gaps in our understanding with a culturally informed imagination.

Do you know what I'm saying? Anything that we fill in there ought not to have Joseph catching the baby. Someone was there to provide swaddling cloth for the baby to keep him warm. Again, that's not a diminutive thing.

There were cloths to wrap him with.

That's a good thing.

That's not like, oh, they didn't have anything but swaddling cloths. Down through the centuries. I reflect on what's a common occurrence down through the millennia. One of the first things that the nurses did.

With Adam and Luke and Leah.

Was to wrap them so tight in blankets that I was concerned that this was okay. Some of you dads know what I'm talking about.

You're like, can he breathe? Can she breathe?

Wrapping babies to keep them comfortable and warm is a regular common human habit forever. And due to the lack of room, a feeding trough was used as a bassinet.

Now, where did Mary give birth?

The text is not clear. Which room? Who is present when she gives birth? The text is not clear. We can make some assumptions about some family. Was the Messiah kicked out by everyone before he was even born?

Rejected by everybody whose door they knocked on? The text does not say that. It doesn't. So why am I going down this road? Am I trying to go all Dwight Schrute on Christmas.

And say, false, false, false, and just fix it for you?

Is that why I'm going down this road? Because I want to say what scripture does say. I want us to have a biblical informed idea when we think about what occurred and transpired at the birth of our Messiah.

I don't want to just apply a bunch of stuff that the text doesn't say, because these are just the routine, traditional Christmas messages. But let me suggest a couple of applications to our lives from this text.

Let's think this through. The first is, I would just encourage us all to be students of the Bible. Let's study it so that we know what it actually says. We come to the text with so many assumptions that we sometimes miss what the text is actually saying.

Recast Church, I encourage you, be students of God's word. Let it inform you, not your bias, not your opinions, not your thoughts, not Hallmark, not Hollywood, no movies, no thoughts, not The Chosen, not even good authors like John Piper or other people who write about these things or scholars or commentaries, but let the Bible fuel what you think about these things.

Let it be your guide, not some Christmas special that you watched one time. So that requires us to study it. And by the way, the purpose of studying scripture should not be to improve your knowledge at trivia.

It shouldn't be so that you can disagree with everyone and prove them wrong. And all of a sudden, I've got now 150, 200 people who are now warriors for the cause to actually fix Christmas.