00:00:00:41 – 00:00:24:42
Clint Loveall
Hey, friends. Welcome back. Thanks for joining us. After a week or so off, we’re grateful to have you back. And as we move toward Christmas in this season that the church calls advent the the month or so before Christmas Day, we thought that it might be interesting. We hope interesting to take a look at Christmas from a biblical perspective.

00:00:24:46 – 00:00:53:58
Clint Loveall
Not Bible study per se, but we will be looking at parts of the Bible and kind of overlaying on them, a broader discussion about this time of year, which people love. You know, your average person is really excited about Christmas. There’s a reason radio stations switch over and decorations go out early, and Christmas displays in stores have been up for well over a month now.

00:00:53:58 – 00:01:21:16
Clint Loveall
And and so, in the midst of this sort of cultural move toward Christmas, we thought it might be interested. Interesting to try and focus down on what the Bible actually tells us about Christmas. And I think, Michael, right off the bat, two things it is difficult to look at. One part of a thing in the scope of a larger thing.

00:01:21:21 – 00:01:59:40
Clint Loveall
So there is a sense in which I think what the Bible tells us about Christmas gets lost in the kind of bigger narrative which is the related second point. A lot of even in the church, Christmas is so big. Christmas is such an enormous idea that even in the church there is a very blurry line between religious or Christian Christmas and the broader stories.

00:01:59:40 – 00:02:29:00
Clint Loveall
And so you have people who don’t go to church listening to very blatant Christian music. You have people who don’t consider themselves particularly Christian, decorating their houses and putting up trees. And in the midst of all of that, there’s a lot of looseness in what are the facts? Where do they come from? What does the Bible say? What does it not say about Christmas?

00:02:29:00 – 00:02:35:13
Clint Loveall
I think that’s messier than than most people maybe appreciate.

00:02:35:18 – 00:03:02:52
Michael Gewecke
This is a tough continuum to try out for you, I think, in lots of different ways, because on one hand, there is a broader cultural conversation about what is closer to the biblical Christmas versus what is the secular narrative. So you’ve got the idea of the the Nativity all the way on the other side of that, you might have your Santa Claus, or you might have your, Christmas tree with big presents.

00:03:02:52 – 00:03:36:34
Michael Gewecke
You might even have this idea of Happy Holidays. So that’s a conversation that we might be very comfortable with that there’s a there’s a kind of range there, but I think you were saying, I want to make sure that we see this. There’s also a range within the church because anyone who’s been Christian for some amount of time, you’ve heard at Christmas, really the only time I think that I could argue would be equal might be Easter, that you’ve heard the most number of sermons about the most limited number of scriptural texts.

00:03:36:34 – 00:04:14:31
Michael Gewecke
Now you’re gonna be looking for context surrounding it. Maybe you’ve heard some background sermons, maybe, you know, but preachers try to make this season interesting. But you might be shocked to know how much, even in the church has really been fluffed up, how much content has been assimilated and brought together, how many things have a gloss on them that you might think that you know, that you absolutely know that you might not know that has been, accident of history or it’s been a thing that has just sort of worked its way into the tradition as time has gone along.

00:04:14:36 – 00:04:38:38
Michael Gewecke
The whole point of this diatribe is to say it’s really tough to get to the micro of what the Christmas story is in the scriptures because of all the baggage we bring to it. That’s really the point I want to make, is that it’s tough to come as a blank slate, especially if you have all of this history wrapped up in hearing the sermons, studying the texts, listening to the Christmas songs.

00:04:38:45 – 00:05:12:46
Michael Gewecke
Well, whatever your experience of this season has been, it’s likely that you come to these stories with things that you believe that you know confidently, that upon closer examination you don’t, and that that’s really not a problem. I don’t think it’s a significant problem. I think what it is, is it’s a barrier to you having some of the AHA’s and some of the exciting re-engagement with these stories that you can have, if you can find ways of setting those presumptions aside for just a moment.

00:05:12:57 – 00:05:15:01
Michael Gewecke
That’s where I think this study gets interesting.

00:05:15:01 – 00:05:42:21
Clint Loveall
Yeah, I think the difficulty is you have to you have two things, a smaller version and a larger version that call themselves Christmas. And it’s easy to believe that they fit comfortably together. And in many ways they do. But in some surprising ways, there are differences. And I want to be clear, not all of those things that have attached themselves to the Christmas story are from outside the church.

00:05:42:34 – 00:05:55:04
Clint Loveall
Many of them we inherited, in worship songs, hymns that, you know, the three Kings, which the Bible doesn’t say. Three and just some of those.

00:05:55:04 – 00:05:56:21
Michael Gewecke
Silent night.

00:05:56:25 – 00:06:26:11
Clint Loveall
We’ve done to ourselves the In the Bleak Midwinter. Right. We there are not in fact, is it fair, Michael, that the church, the church may have expanded the story as much as the culture? I mean, some of that we’ve done to ourselves 100%. Yeah. It surprises people, I think, to know I want to I’m saying this word intentionally, so bear with me.

00:06:26:24 – 00:06:57:34
Clint Loveall
It surprises people, I think, to know how disinterested in some ways the Bible is in Christmas. There are and I’m being very generous here. Four chapters in the scriptures that have much to say about Christmas. Now, you can argue there’s some Old Testament things that help, and I’ll give you that. But but if we want to talk about where do we get the biblical Christmas story?

00:06:57:39 – 00:07:26:33
Clint Loveall
There’s two chapters in Matthew and there’s two chapters in Luke, and part of those chapters are long list of names that nobody pays attention to. And so there is less. The Bible is less interested in Christmas than we might think. We we pay it tremendous attention. We have special services. We have a month of of preparation. We have decorations, even in sanctuaries and in many cases.

00:07:26:38 – 00:07:55:48
Clint Loveall
And yet it’s a thing that the Bible and and really for a couple of centuries, probably 3 to 3 centuries easily, the church wasn’t particularly interested in the idea of Jesus birth story was not initially something that people were curious about. The people were interested in, that people were passionate about. They they had much bigger issues to try and sort through.

00:07:55:53 – 00:08:19:24
Clint Loveall
And, and it it came to prominence later, but I think it may be not something that people are aware of. I think casual Bible readers may assume that that whole, full, very detailed Christmas story is somewhere in these pages, and I think that’s just not the case.

00:08:19:24 – 00:08:51:16
Michael Gewecke
Well, there’s this human desire that we have to take the way that the Bible talks about the Christmas story and make it into one synchronous, clear story. And I’m not suggesting that it’s not, accurate account of what happened. Well, I’m suggesting is that if you read Matthew and Luke, who are the major, the, gospels that contribute to the story that you and I think of when we put a nativity scene in our homes, if that’s a practice you have or in your sanctuary, the story depicted there is coming from those two books.

00:08:51:21 – 00:09:15:21
Michael Gewecke
And what’s what you might be surprised to know is that when you look at Matthew and Luke as Gospels, there are many parts of their Gospels where the stories that they tell of Jesus are radically similar, where it is just off by maybe a word choice or two. The Christmas Story. Interestingly, Clint is a story of great diversity between the two tellings.

00:09:15:34 – 00:09:54:00
Michael Gewecke
One is going to tell us about the wise men. Now there’s going to tell us about the shepherds, and they’re really not interested in the details that the other has. Now, of course, the basics. Jesus is born to Mary, right? So Joseph is going to feature much more prominently. In the, the Matthew story. So it’s just it’s a fascinating way of recognizing that when the authors of the Bible themselves are telling the story, they’re telling it with a very clear eye towards and a very clear lens of what this story is going to accomplish in the larger story of Jesus’s life.

00:09:54:00 – 00:10:32:06
Michael Gewecke
And that is a point I want to make note of for the early church. For hundreds of years, the story of Christmas functioned as a basic reminder for every Christian that Jesus was born of humble status, that Jesus was born in the most humble and human frame. That was the core message of Christmas, and that fundamentally, what God reveals through Jesus Christ becomes all the more astonishing because his humble birth ends in a humble death, even in a shameful death.

00:10:32:11 – 00:11:00:46
Michael Gewecke
And yet God, through resurrection, reshapes and rewrites the entire story. In that way, the smallness of Christmas was custom delivered. It was custom written so that we would see throughout the whole cosmic scope of Jesus’s story, the grandeur of what God has done, which of course, you look back then, just like you do any good book, you get to the end and then suddenly all of the things that came before have new meaning.

00:11:00:59 – 00:11:26:51
Michael Gewecke
Christmas, then we see differently. Time goes on and we begin to see, oh, whoa, this is grand. God’s arrival into earth in human form, taking on flesh. This is a really big deal theologically. But Clint, we don’t get there for hundreds of years. And and realistically, I would argue to you, even the chief proponents of Christmas today, they’re not, generally speaking, towards that specific point.

00:11:26:58 – 00:11:34:27
Michael Gewecke
They’re generally honed in on some things that are far more interesting in our time than what they are in the theological time.

00:11:34:31 – 00:12:11:16
Clint Loveall
Which which I think Michael, is probably why half of the Gospels that we have don’t include a Christmas narrative. Right? A birth story, because their focus and their, passion is to get to the quote unquote meat of the story. All four gospels have a resurrection story. All four gospels have an Easter story. Only two of them bother to tell us where this person, Jesus, this Messiah, Jesus, was born.

00:12:11:16 – 00:12:38:40
Clint Loveall
And some of the circumstances. And this is where I think it can get uncomfortable for people. They tell those stories differently. They include different material. Now, why is that true? It could be that they had access to stories that the other one didn’t. It could have been that for whatever reason, they were more drawn to particular stories that kind of fit the thrust of what they were trying to say about Jesus.

00:12:38:45 – 00:13:10:32
Clint Loveall
In Matthew’s case, for instance, and we’re going to dive into some of these differences in greater depth. But Matthew’s very interested in the Jewish aspects of Jesus because he’s writing to Jewish people. Luke, more interested in the the sort of, universal Jesus for all people is going to minimize those things. Luke’s very passionate about the poor, so he’s not going to tell us about wealthy, wise men from other places carrying gold and such.

00:13:10:37 – 00:13:42:28
Clint Loveall
He’s gonna tell us about shepherds and their. There is a natural temptation to mash these stories together, but I think it is worth remembering Matthew and Luke aren’t working together. It’s not as if they’re having a conversation and they’re saying, hey, you tell that story. I’ll tell this story. They each told what was important to them, that they trusted in what they had heard or learned and and what were reflected for them, what they wanted to say about Jesus.

00:13:42:28 – 00:14:08:01
Clint Loveall
And so while in the in the final word, I think it is probably okay to kind of synchronize these stories, it is also worth spending some time with each of them to try and listen to. What did Matthew want us to know about Jesus birth? What did Luke want us to know about Jesus birth? And how? How are they different?

00:14:08:06 – 00:14:35:16
Clint Loveall
How do they complement each other and and maybe even in a way or two? How did they challenge each other? Because as if we’re able to do that, I think we get a better sense of what the New Testament, what it is our scriptures are trying to convey to us. And when we lump everything together, especially when we add the cultural elements, I think we water that down and we make it harder to do by making it messy.

00:14:35:27 – 00:15:04:10
Michael Gewecke
This is a weird place to get to, Clint, but I’d be interested in your thoughts on this. I think, in a way, one of the lessons that we’re going to engage here, studying Christmas because of this desire to synchronize stories and yet the differences that are here to be celebrated. I think one of the interesting lessons here in a broader effort of trying to study the Bible well, is to don’t be afraid to study the Gospels.

00:15:04:10 – 00:15:36:10
Michael Gewecke
Don’t be afraid of the Gospels. Don’t be afraid of the fact that we have four tellings of Jesus’s life. We might be tempted to want to minimize the fact that we have four authors, that the Bible is very clear about, that the early church understood that the that key theologians have engaged that seriously? Yes. There are differing accounts of what Jesus did, the things he said, the order in which he did them.

00:15:36:10 – 00:16:08:47
Michael Gewecke
Here. There are differing accounts of how Jesus came into the world and that might sound disjointed, that might be jarring to you. But the truth is, the church has always been comfortable that not one human is capable of writing the story of Jesus, that it requires multiple voices. And in fact, the church has insisted that the Spirit of God continues to reveal through these texts the ways in which God has come to renew and transform the world.

00:16:08:47 – 00:16:41:09
Michael Gewecke
In other words, it can’t be locked down. In one book, we we’ve had some of the smartest people in the history of the world occupying, seats of theology and biblical criticism over the course of thousands of years, and none of them would have been capable of synchronizing these stories into one perfect telling because of the fact that when we make the claim that God took on flesh, we have to bring with it the humility to say, and so therefore, no human is capable of a perfect accounting of what that means.

00:16:41:09 – 00:17:09:16
Michael Gewecke
It’s significance. And I think it’s worth noting here, as we as we turn our attention to the study to come, the Christmas story may be limited in content. That doesn’t mean it’s limited in its significance, and it does mean that the biblical writers thought that there was much more that you needed to know about Jesus in order to be a follower of Jesus, and that is the purpose for which the Gospels were written.

00:17:09:16 – 00:17:40:48
Michael Gewecke
So remember, while we might think of Christmas as a season that we celebrate and we all have rituals and practices and ways that we do that, celebrating the people who are giving you the Christmas story are fundamentally not thinking about your celebrated tradition. What they’re thinking about is what does this person need to know in order for them to be a faithful disciple of Jesus Christ, and what we might discover if we engage with these texts wholeheartedly?

00:17:40:48 – 00:17:47:13
Michael Gewecke
Clint, as we’ve already said before, is you need less information than what you might think that you need to have.

00:17:47:18 – 00:18:25:57
Clint Loveall
Right? And I think maybe that’s a a good final word. Just briefly, Michael, one of the things that I think we have to sort of confront right on the the beginning, right at the front end of this is there is so much about the biblical Christmas story that we simply don’t know. And when you when you boil it all down again, I think that people are unaware maybe or at least surprised.

00:18:26:02 – 00:18:46:59
Clint Loveall
The scripture just off the, you know, just off the top of our heads here, the Scripture says nothing about the date of this. Now, there would be those who argue that there’s some references that indicate it was this or that, that the truth is, we got to December 5th, long after Jesus birth, December 25th, long after Jesus birth.

00:18:47:04 – 00:19:16:43
Clint Loveall
And we have really no idea. We can’t. There’s no great case that can be made for that date as the actual date. The year is likely not zero. They they didn’t keep the calendar the way we do. We went back and renumbered. It now appears that we got that numbering off. So what we call zero is likely not the year of Jesus birth.

00:19:16:48 – 00:19:53:38
Clint Loveall
There’s no innkeeper, there’s no animals. We’re never told Mary rides a donkey or all the thing. There’s no barn. Every manger, every nativity set has this wonderful, you know, wooden roofed A-frame that all the everybody’s underneath. We we sort of creatively manufactured those things. Those are not scriptural details. Now, again, they’re embedded in our experience of the story, and I don’t think they hurt anything, but we got them from outside of the text.

00:19:53:38 – 00:20:23:58
Clint Loveall
And I think when if you were to ask the average Christian person, tell me everything you know about the biblical Christmas story, you know, as a as pastors, our disappointment is often that we think people don’t know as much of the Scripture as we wish they did. I think just the opposite might be true. If you ask the average person, tell me everything you know about the biblical Christmas story.

00:20:24:03 – 00:20:36:28
Clint Loveall
I bet they would add more than what’s actually in here, and there aren’t many instances where I can think of that. That would be true, but I, I think it likely would be true in regard to the Christmas story.

00:20:36:33 – 00:20:52:46
Michael Gewecke
Want to give you a 32nd pitch here. I think in a way, you might ask yourself, why in the world do I want to join these guys for a seven day series where we’re going to explore some of the stuff I thought was in the Christmas story? And quite frankly, I like having the Christmas story, and I prefer the Keeping the Christmas story.

00:20:52:51 – 00:21:25:21
Michael Gewecke
And I think here’s the reason, because as adults studying scripture or person, wherever you are in your faith journey, I just want to encourage you, the Bible is limitless. You will never find the limit of its depth. And so don’t come to the text afraid of what you might find. But if you come humbly and open and say, I’d like to learn something new this time around, I guarantee you the Christmas story has built into it amazing tributaries that you’ve yet to explore.

00:21:25:21 – 00:21:44:04
Michael Gewecke
And so I think that’s my pitch. My invitation to you is, yes, there is some discomfort when you hear, well, hold on, there is a donkey. Clinton I’m going to oh wait, maybe there’s not a if that’s your response, say, hey, maybe this story has way more to it than what we’ve discovered yet. Let’s go on a journey and see what we find out.

00:21:44:11 – 00:22:04:51
Clint Loveall
Yeah, and if you want to imagine a kindly old innkeeper that shows them to a clean spot in the barn, by all means, do that. But it’s not in there. And if we’re going to commit in this instance to try and study scripture, then we may have to whittle some of that other stuff to the side, at least temporarily.

00:22:05:03 – 00:22:34:18
Clint Loveall
It certainly isn’t. What we are not saying is that you should throw all that out and not included in in your ideas of Christmas. You are welcome to put them all in there. I just think when we turn our eyes to the Bible and to studying what it actually tells us, we have to try and, at least keep those things somehow straight, if not also maybe separate.

00:22:34:22 – 00:22:59:09
Michael Gewecke
What we say here today may sound philosophical. I think if you join us tomorrow, you’re going to discover, as we start getting into the text, that’s going to get really practical. Glad that you’re with us here today. If you stuck through the end here while good for you. Give this video a like that’s a great way to help others find it in their own study and, certainly subscribe because we’re going to spend a few, days here looking through these stories together, and I hope they’ll be something encouraging and challenging for you.

00:22:59:16 – 00:22:59:54
Clint Loveall
Thanks, everybody.