Christmas Eve

Luke 2:1-20

December 24, 2018

“What Child Is This?”

(The basic idea of this sermon is from Rev. Ralph Tausz in his Advent & Christmas series “What Child Is This?”)

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

You’ve been to enough Christmas Eve services, seen plenty of nativity scenes, that you know the birth scene pretty well in your mind. There’s the manger where the baby lays—swaddled in white cloths. Our mangers are usually made of wood like this one, although it may very well have been a stone manger. And to the right is Joseph kneeling, keeping watch over his newborn. And to the left is Mary, sitting or kneeling, admiring her firstborn son. Then a little further back to the right is the Wise Men, one of them holding a present of myrrh. That scene you know pretty well.

But let me remind you of another scene, another picture, which you might not know as well because we don’t set it up in our houses and in our yards. At this scene there’s the baby again, lying on a slab of stone just as his manger might have been. Only now he’s 33 years older. And He’s dead. But again He’s swaddled in white cloths, linen cloths. And there’s Joseph. Not Joseph the carpenter father, but Joseph of Arimathea, who asked Pilate for the body of Jesus and brought it to his own grave and laid Him there on that slab of stone and wrapped Him in those linen cloths.

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