Luke 12:32 “Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has been pleased to give you the kingdom.”

Even Jesus calls us a “little” flock here. That suggests that we suffer from a certain poverty. Just as Jesus had his little group of disciples and followers who seemed like an insignificant number of people compared to the vast world population, so we Christians may feel like a little flock. Our churches don’t consist of vast numbers of people. More and more our minority status in our nation and our world becomes clear.

Nor are sheep the most powerful or assertive animals. They aren’t the roaring lions or the crafty foxes of the animal kingdom. They are generally vulnerable, dependent, and defenseless. As Jesus’ little flock of sheep, we perceive the same weaknesses in ourselves. We are vulnerable. Perhaps the year just past has exposed more of our personal vulnerabilities than we care to think about. The pandemic has ruled our lives since March. It has killed over a quarter million people in the United States alone and destroyed a wide swath of our economy. Police violence and racism, dangerous and destructive riots in reaction, the political divisiveness of an election year have all added to our sense of helplessness.

As Jesus’ little flock, his command that we not be afraid suggests that there is an issue of trust with which we must struggle. In the context, Jesus was speaking these words because he knew that it was all too easy for his disciples to worry about their daily provision. They knew that God considered them incomparably more dear than birds or flowers or other created things. Despite this knowledge, they still found it difficult to conclude that he would take care of them. They still worried about fulfilling their basic needs.

Our sin-sickened senses share the same fears. We withhold our trust. We base our conclusions on what our eyes see rather than what God promises our hearts. At times we may believe that our fears our defensible, even sensible. Such lack of trust still calls for repentance.

Then Jesus leads us to look in the right direction. “Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has been pleased to give you the kingdom.” Just look at what we have! Even before we look at the gift, look at the Giver! We have a Father who is pleased to give us things. It makes him happy to see us open his gifts. Perhaps you have had a similar experience this Christmas. You watched as your child or friend opened a gift you know they wanted. Their surprise and joy, their gasp or squeal, gave you a deep feeling of satisfaction.

The difference is that our Father is pleased to give us his gifts even when we look inside the box and we don’t get it right away, even when our reaction is a disinterested, “oh.” That doesn’t stop him, but he keeps on giving generously, and he keeps on being happy to do so.

Then there is the obvious difference in value. One Christmas there was a brand new car sitting in our neighbor’s yard with a great big bow on top. Such a gift is still a worthless trinket compared to the gifts our Father gives. He is God, and his gifts literally cost him everything. God gives us himself and the Lord of Lords and King of Kings becomes our Servant. God gives us his Son, and he sacrifices the most precious life to save us from sin, and he doesn’t resent the cost, but he is only happy to give it.

Then there is the gift he has given us here. Jesus says that he has been pleased to give you and me the kingdom! Now don’t we look silly worrying about something to eat, something to wear, or how we are going to pay for things. We are worrying about plastic beads when all this time we have been holding gold and diamonds in our hands. The Lord of all the universe has snatched us from death, cleansed us from sin, adopted us and made us his children, and given us his kingdom as our very own.

Our Father has taken care of the big things, the hard things. He will not run out of the resources necessary to care for us in the smaller things. The Apostle Paul once said, “He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all, how will he not also, along with him graciously give us all things.” This year we can be sure we have nothing to fear in light of such gifts.

Luke 2:36-38 “There was also a prophetess, Anna, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher. She was very old; she had lived with her husband seven years after her marriage, and then she was a widow until she was eighty-four.”

People often assume that Simeon, the man who found the baby Jesus in the temple just before Anna, was an elderly man, but Luke doesn’t tell us this directly. About Anna there is no doubt. She was either eighty-four, or she had lived eighty-four years after her husband died. That would make her about one hundred and five years old. Either way, her age was outstanding for that time. Few people lived much beyond forty years.

The Bible considers long life a blessing, but old age brings its own set of burdens. There is the wear and tear that comes with a high mileage body. In his seventies, my grandfather once went to the doctor because of joint pain. The doctor said, “Marvin, you’ve worked hard all your life. You are simply worn out at the seams.” Aches and pains that limit what we can do are a growing reality for us with each passing year.

We don’t know how Anna felt about her age. We do know that more serious hardships were a feature of her youth. She was widowed after only seven years of marriage. If Jewish girls got married sometime in their mid-teens, then she was only in her early twenties when she buried her first and only husband. Did she see herself a widow so soon? Was this what she expected her family life to be?

Age and hardships may tempt us to lose sight of the real benefit of Christian faith and life. Some Christians wallow around in their earthly mud so much that they cannot rise above it to appreciate the spiritual blessings our Savior has given. They lean away from God toward agnosticism. A kind of spiritual hardening sets in that struggles to acknowledge that the Lord is good. Life seems meaningless if we do not properly value the heavenly life to come.

Anna was not ignorant of the hardships she had to suffer, and faith in Jesus does not make our earthly problems suddenly disappear. But Jesus does make our lives meaningful in spite of them. Like Anna, we can live our lives in God’s service. “She never left the temple but worshiped night and day, fasting and praying.”

Anna didn’t spend her long years of widowhood sulking. She spent them in worship. Every day found her at the temple until as late in the evening as they would let her stay. Here she fasted, not in the work-righteous way of the Pharisees. She fasted sincerely and voluntarily so that that time could be given to serving God. Here she prayed. Here her prophetic gifts were available to other women who undoubtedly sought her wise counsel about God’s will. Her life found meaning as she waited for the day she would meet her Savior face to face.

There is another place in God’s service that Jesus makes our life meaningful. That is in our life of witness. “Coming up to them at that very moment, she gave thanks to God and spoke about the child to all who were looking forward to the redemption of Israel.” Anna knew that this was not another cute baby brought to the temple for the customary sacrifices. She spoke about this child to “all who were looking forward to the redemption of Israel.” Redemption is one of those loaded words we hardly think about. It speaks about a price paid to set us free. Anna recognized Jesus as our Redeemer–the one who would pay the price, the Lamb of Sacrifice who would be the price to set us free from sin’s guilt and power. Straight from her heart Anna gave her little witness to all who would listen. This baby is redemption sent from God. He pays the price we can’t to take our sins away.

What would make your life meaningful? Inventing a cure for cancer? Making a billion dollars? Feeding people in some far away third world country? What about sharing the love of Jesus with your own children? What about helping a friend to know Jesus as his Savior? What about being part of an effort to send missionaries to people who haven’t heard the gospel before?

When we serve God by spreading the good news of redemption to others, we are making an eternal difference in their lives. And our own words about Christ and the cross, about sins forgiven and death defeated, about grace and peace and joy and life through Jesus come back to feed our own faith as well. Your life is meaningful, child of God. Jesus makes it that way.

Luke 2:12-14 “This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in strips of cloth and lying in a manger. Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests.”

The only thing extraordinary about the angel’s sign is the ordinariness and humility of it all. There isn’t anything special about strips of cloth and feeding troughs.

Except that it’s not where you expect to find your God! It’s not where you expect the salvation of the world to begin. It’s not the sort of place you expect to find the foundation for your only hope of eternal life in heaven. Who would have believed such a thing if it didn’t come from the mouth of an angel sent by God? If a quiet stranger had stopped and said this to the Shepherds, would they have believed him?

But for those who, like the shepherds, have come to believe that it is so, they understand just a little bit better the astounding love that God must have for them. He stoops so low. He is born in a stable. Here is Godhood and Divinity in a form that we can approach. Here we get a brief glimpse of heaven, when we are looking at our God, lying in the manger.

The wonder of such love certainly begs his creatures to give him glory. “Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests.’”

God’s glory clearly shines in Jesus’ humble birth. We often say that you can’t find heaven on earth, and rightly so. This world and its things can never be heaven. But on this day the Lord took a little bit of heaven’s glory, and he brought it down to earth for just a little while so that we might know him as he truly is. He did it so that someday he might take us back to heaven to bask in his glory forever.

This is possible only because Jesus is our peace. He came to end the war between earth and heaven, between us and God. He has paid for our sin and atoned for our guilt. He has led us to faith and comforted us with his love. He accomplished it all at the cross, and confirmed it at his empty tomb. But already in the stable, in the manger, we see him coming as our peace.

So, God’s favor rests on you, and me, and a world of sinners. We look into his smiling face, and his good news grants a little taste, a little glimpse of heaven, even as we live on earth.

Luke 2:8-11 “And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, ‘Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord”

Let’s not misunderstand the angels. They are more than cute and cuddly figures, the chubby little cherubs of Renaissance art and so many Christmas decorations. The angels are holy, powerful, even frightening. When this angel appeared, the glory of the Lord shone around the shepherds. Night became like day. Like everyone else who ever saw an angel in Scripture, the shepherds were terrified.

Does that surprise you, that it scares them out of their wits? It shouldn’t. When we are first confronted by perfect holiness, and perfect love, it condemns us. You may have seen a pious, yet sinful, Christian walk into a room where people were using off-color language. The people often become uncomfortable and quiet and change the conversation. That effect is heightened a thousand times when any sinful mortal finds himself in the presence of a holy being who reflects God’s glory. The glorious perfection makes our imperfection painfully clear. See the angel, and deceive yourselves no more!

So it is that this most enviable sight, this vision of glory, only drives home how far we are from heaven by nature. The streets on which we travel are paved with asphalt, not with gold. The future here, in this world, holds only death, not eternal life. From here, with the shepherds of Bethlehem, you can almost see heaven in the presence of the angel, and the sight before us terrifies.

But the angel had come with only good in mind for these men, and we get a little glimpse of heaven in his preaching. “But the angel said to them, ‘Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord.”

“Don’t be afraid!” In the Greek, his words say even more. “You can stop being afraid–forever!” “You don’t ever have to be afraid again!” Why such confidence? The answer lay in the angel’s message. “I bring you good news of great joy…” What follows was not a message merely to calm them down. This was a message of joy. It would inspire them to celebrate and worship and tell others, just as it moves us to do each Christmas. We may bemoan the secularization of Christmas. So much materialism has crept into the holiday. But let no one tell you that it is wrong to celebrate–to sing and to decorate and to feast and to pull out all the stops. When God gives us reason to feel joy, it is only right that we respond in every way we know how.

And reason for joy he has given us. “Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord.” The angels did not go into a lengthy discourse about who this Savior is, but the Shepherds didn’t need one. They knew what the Christ, the Lord was coming to do. For men who moments earlier had been scared nearly to death by this heavenly holiness, there would be no joy in hearing that here was a Savior from Caesar or Herod. They would not find a Savior from war, poverty, or sickness, to be good news. God had given them a Savior from sin: someone who could bring them forgiveness, rescue them from death, and make their vision of heaven happy once again.

Dear Friends, God has given us a Savior.  For troubled consciences, for hearts heavy with sin, there is no better and more joyful news to be had. He has not sent us great example, to show us the way, but a Savior, who himself picks us up and carries us out of our awful mess. He has not sent us a helper, to help us be a little better, but a Savior, who has made all of our work his own. He has not sent us a task master, to whip us into shape, but a Savior, who frees us from our slavery to sin and makes us members of God’s own family.              

Can you see it? Do you see the gates of heaven flinging open wide and the Father stretching out his arms in welcome? Can you almost see heaven in the angel’s preaching?

Jeremiah 33:16 “In those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety. This is the name by which it will be called: The Lord our Righteousness.”

Judah’s real problem was never so much the hostile neighbors who kept invading–the Egyptians, the Philistines, the Assyrians, the Babylonians. They made life miserable, but the problem ran deeper.

Their problem wasn’t even so much in their own wicked kings. People like to blame bad politicians when things go wrong. But nobody put a gun to the citizen’s heads and made them imitate their leaders. They still had God’s prophets to teach them what was right. They knew better.

Israel’s real problem lay in their own rebellious souls. They had been resisting God’s ways from the days of Moses. They were quick to forget his goodness. They were quick to turn to the disgusting practices of the gods of their neighbors. In the end they had no one to blame for their misery, their spiritual bankruptcy, or the judgments God visited on them but themselves.

We’re not so different. We would like to believe that the blame for our misery rests on someone else’s shoulders. We wouldn’t be so grumpy if others treated us better. We would behave ourselves if it weren’t for the terrible influence of our peers, or the failure of our parents to nurture us in a more loving and godly way.

But in the end, it’s our life. Our reactions are our reactions. Our sins are our sins, and we will personally own the consequences, too.

That is why this picture of days to come is such great news. Jeremiah couches God’s promise in pictures the people of his day would understand, but he is describing a salvation that’s spiritual. “Judah will be saved.” Jesus’ coming has saved us, not from foreign powers, but from guilt and distress over our sin. Here’s the picture wrapped in Jeremiah’s Hebrew: We no longer must live like a city under siege, squeezed and choked until we are spiritually starving to death.  Our consciences no longer bombard us with guilt; Satan can’t torture us with fear. We are free from all that, free to live and breathe, free to trust God and love him, with no enemy and no threats anywhere to be seen. This is what it is like to live under this King.

“Jerusalem will live in safety.” Here is the second picture: Our coming King faithfully protects us. Death has been arrested, found guilty, and securely locked away in prison. Only a faint resemblance of it still goes free–not to murder us, but to escort us to the door of a new home. There we are safe and secure with the rest of God’s family around us. Whether we are still on our journey home, or whether we have reached our final destination, we are safe under our new King’s rule.

This is all true because the King has dressed us up to look like himself. “This is the name by which it will be called: The Lord our Righteousness.” In an earlier chapter of Jeremiah, “The Lord our Righteousness” is a name given to Jesus (23:6). Here the “it” to which the name refers is the people of God represented by Judah and Jerusalem.

Either way, the name tells the story: Our Lord Jesus has given us his righteousness–the righteousness of his life, and the righteousness of his death. We wear it as our own in place of the rags of our sin. He has come not only to be near us. He traded identities with us, and dressed in his righteousness we have nothing to fear. Our sin is removed, replaced. Our salvation is sure. We are safe in the royal robes of our King.

Jeremiah 33:15 “In those days and at that time I will make a righteous Branch sprout from David’s line; he will do what is just and right in the land.”

There are many miracles surrounding the birth of our Savior. We will marvel again at the faith of Mary and Joseph, the virgin birth, the appearance of angels, miraculous stars. Jeremiah mentions one here that gets little attention most Christmas seasons. We are familiar with the picture of Jesus as the Branch growing from David’s line. We are less familiar with the striking wonder of God this proclaims.

Jeremiah was prophesying at the time of the last Jewish King from David’s line to rule over an independent Jerusalem. That king was Zedekiah. He was ruling in Jerusalem when Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon laid siege to the city, broke through its walls, and captured him while he was trying to flee to the East. Nebuchadnezzar made Zedekiah watch while each of his sons was killed in front of him, then his friends and advisors. Then Nebuchadnezzar put out Zedekiah’s eyes. The last thing King Zedekiah ever saw was the death of his children and his friends.

This is why the Bible refers to David’s line as a stump. For many it must have appeared as though the family of David, and the promises of a great Savior King from it, had been cut off. The family of David, his royal dynasty, was dead. Nebuchadnezzar made it nothing but a lifeless stump. If this were the history of any other nation or dynasty, the story ends here. And if the story ends here, then we lose…everything.

But underneath the surface there was life left in that royal line. Survivors from David’s family carried on the name and the promises. Among the many miracles at Christmas is the miraculous life God gives to the royal family of David. He kept a seed of life alive in that family through exile in a foreign land and hundreds of years in obscurity. Jesus is the new royal Branch who sprouted and grew to become our Savior.

Jeremiah 33:14 “‘The days are coming,’ declares the Lord, ‘when I will fulfill the gracious promises I made to the house of Israel and to the house of Judah.’”

To many people, the very idea of religion seems dry and unexciting. Since God isn’t someone we visibly encounter every day, he can seem distant. More and more people are turning to a do-it-yourself spirituality and avoiding the organized religions, denominations, and churches. That kind of spirituality focuses less on the person of God. It is more concerned with developing a sense of right and wrong and becoming a kinder, more loving person.

Perhaps you have found a similar reaction within yourself. Sometimes the Christian faith doesn’t seem inpiring or uplifting. It feels more like a set of theoretical propositions. The preaching, the teaching, even the music, all seem dry and unexciting.

Is it possible we have forgotten? Our God is the God who steps through the door between heaven and earth to become part of our world, part of our lives, part of our times. He does it time and time again. Our Christian faith is about more than detailed standards for human behavior. God is not a divine quality control inspector. He is the God who rolls up his sleeves and gets his hands dirty in the story of our lives.

“The days are coming when I will fulfill the gracious promises I made…” he says. Christmas, and just about every other Christian holiday, doesn’t celebrate an idea. It celebrates an event, a promise kept, a day when God came and did wonderful, gracious things for us. Maybe it happened a long time ago, but we can still live in the excitement that God was here. He was here for us, and he was here doing amazing things to give us his grace.

Nor is he finished keeping such promises to his people. He hasn’t left us, but he still steps through that door between heaven and earth. He comes to us. We know this if we tune our ears to hear his voice in his Word. We experience this when we grasp his promise to be with us in his supper. He promises the days are coming when he will step through that door between heaven and earth one last time, not in obscurity as he did at his birth; not under cover of word, water, or wine; but in glory to lead us through that same door from earth to heaven.

He can seem agonizingly slow in keeping these promises. Jeremiah lived about 600 B.C. At his time these promises “to the house of Israel and to the house of Judah” were already hundreds of years old. The house of Israel barely even existed. Most of its people were taken away to exile a century earlier and never returned. It would be 600 more years before the things Jeremiah promised came to fulfillment.

We don’t do so well when we have to wait long times for things, do we. When our parents told us we couldn’t have anything to eat until supper, when we had to wait our place in line for some event, even 10 or 15 minute delays seemed unbearable to us as children. When someone we love is in surgery and the surgery goes long, we worry and expect the worst. Waiting drains our hope and tests our faith. That isn’t because things tend to take a negative turn when they take a long time. Slow is often better, but we are short on patience.

Abraham and Sarah struggled to wait the decades God took to give them a child. King Saul couldn’t wait a few days for Samuel to come and offer a sacrifice. The children of Israel grumbled when the Lord made them wait for food or water in the wilderness. We get tired of waiting for God to answer our prayers. God’s people had been waiting for the promised Savior to appear since the beginning of time. By Jeremiah’s day many of them had lost interest or found some other religion to follow.

But God has kept this gracious promise. The Savior he promised has come.  Christmas reassures us that God will keep every good promise he has made to us in his own good time.

Isaiah 9:6 “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called…Prince of Peace.”

We have every reason to respect and love Jesus as our Counselor, Mighty Hero, and Everlasting Father.  In the end, we also bow to him as King. Jesus is royalty. He was the King of Israel as rightful heir and descendant of King David. But more importantly, he is the King of kings. He reigns as King of the universe, the Son and rightful heir of God the Father in heaven.

But this King does not come to bow our heads in terror, or enslave us in servile fear. His name is the Prince of Peace. His peace is not the kind the world so desperately seeks: peace from wars, relief from crime and violence. He didn’t come to make it possible to build a kind of counterfeit heaven on earth. Many times Jesus himself has been the cause of conflict, not just between nations, but even between individual members or our earthly families. He predicted it would be this way.

None of this contradicts the fact that he is the Prince of Peace, however. He came to bring peace in the BIG war, the one between you and me and our God. When we turned against God with our sin, he had no choice but to turn against us with his judgment. When people are at war with God, there is no peace.

But Jesus has turned God’s judgment away. He has made our sin invisible to God by his death in our place. He has given us real peace with him by leading us back to faith. Our consciences can rest. We don’t need to live our lives constantly looking over our shoulders to see if today God is coming to get us. We may not always be safe in an earthly sense, but we have peace.

Our lives may not be free from struggles with other people, free from struggles with temptation, free from struggles to make it through another day, but God’s peace stretches over us in the middle of these struggles. When we have peace with him, our life is whole. God grants us a sense of security, a sense of contentment even when outwardly our lives are a total disaster. This is the peace that comes with faith.

We possess true peace flowing beneath the rushing adrenalin, the sweating anxiety, the streaming tears, and the overwhelming grief of our messed up existence here. It’s the gift Jesus brings us because he is our Prince of Peace.

Isaiah 9:6 “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called… Everlasting Father….”

We’re not used to hearing the name “Father” applied to Jesus. Scripture teaches us to know him as the “Son of the Father.” In other places the Bible refers to Jesus as our brother. “Father” sounds foreign to our ears when we are speaking of the second person of the Trinity. Isaiah isn’t confusing the Father and the Son in this description. They remain distinct, and their relationship unchanged. Rather, he is illustrating important features of the way Jesus relates to you and me.

A few moments consideration will reveal what a fitting name Father is for him in relation to us. A father gives life to his children. Children trace their origin back to their parents. Jesus has given us spiritual life. He made it possible for us by giving his life for our sins. Then he made it happen to us by sending us his word and his Holy Spirit. We would have no spiritual existence if he were not our spiritual Father.

He also sustains our spiritual life just like a Father provides for the needs of his family. It is Jesus himself who continues to meet us in his word. He continues to breathe life into us there as he confronts our sin and promises us his grace. He feeds the family with his own body and blood at the Lord’s Supper. The forgiveness it pronounces provides just the nourishment our faith needs. He hasn’t left us here as orphans. He takes care of our spiritual needs.

In our day fatherhood has gotten a bad name. Many fathers abandon their responsibilities. They fail to nurture and provide for their families. Human fathers may forget (or just don’t care) that there is more to fatherhood than begetting children.

But Jesus will never be a “dead beat dad.” He is the Everlasting Father, and his loving nurture and care for us will never end.