Chaotic Christmas

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We are ending the year with so much gloom hanging over our country and much of the world. 2025 had been a chaotic year.

Never ending wars, mass killers randomly shooting at people, incorrigibly corrupt and power-hungry politicians stealing our money and even Mother Nature afflicting us with earthquakes, floods and epidemics.

We have this idyllic and peaceful picture of the first Christmas in our Nativity sets. But the first Christmas was anything but peaceful. The first Christmas was incredibly troubled.

Just ask Mary and Joseph. The Virgin Mary was pregnant and that’s difficult to explain or understand. Her husband-to-be was concerned and didn’t know what to do. An angel told him it is okay because it was ordained by God. By faith, Joseph believed.

So, Joseph married Mary and as Mary neared her due date, the Roman government ordered them to go to their hometown for a census. A Catholic church’s website figures the one-way trip may have taken a week or ten days, and perhaps longer.

Remember that Mary was close to the end of her pregnancy. They had to travel about 100 kilometers more slowly than normal on foot and donkey.

When they arrived in Bethlehem, there were no rooms left at the inns. Mary gave birth in a stable with farm animals around them.

Then they had to flee to Egypt because the murderous King Herod, in a fit of jealousy after hearing the Messiah was born, ordered the slaughter of male infants in Bethlehem. The Holy Family had to live as refugees in Egypt for years until Herod died.

Angels were singing about peace on earth when they paid homage to the Christ child. But outside of Christ’s birth in that stable, everything before and after that first Christmas was anything but peaceful.

Yet, in the words of New York Times writer Ross Douthat, that was a “profound and magical-seeming event, the obscure birth of an infant in the provinces of a powerful and cruel empire that radically redirects 2,000 years (and counting) of human history, that introduces a story and a value system into the world that’s so powerful that even nonbelievers can’t shake its influence, that once a year makes almost everyone stop and listen for angelic choirs…”

Douthat continues: “And yet it’s also an event that, according to Christianity’s believers, happened only once, and when it happened, by God’s apparent design, only a very few were chosen to see the fullness of the miracle — Mary and Joseph, a scattering of shepherds, a few perspicacious Zoroastrian priest-astrologers…”

Couldn’t God have made it a bit easier for people to believe that indeed, the Messiah was born?

That’s not how God works. In Matthew 11:25-27, Jesus said: “I thank you, Father that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children.”

That means God reveals divine truths (the kingdom of God) to humble, childlike people, rather than to the self-proclaimed wise or learned religious leaders. The Bible teaches us that we can find God through simplicity, faith and humility.

But Douthat protests: “why not give the wise and understanding just a little more to work with? Couldn’t we get a few more witnesses for the choirs of angels? Maybe a skeptical pagan historian, at least? Couldn’t the Incarnation (to say nothing of the Resurrection) have happened in the age of digital camcorders?”

Nope. Paramount to our God is faith. God is constantly testing our faith.

Hebrews 11:1 defines faith as “the evidence of things we cannot see.” It’s deep trust, confidence and reliance on God and His promises, even when unseen or unproven by physical sight, involving both belief and action.

Christmas should be seen as a divine plan for redemption. It is a rescue mission launched by God to save man, which he created in his image, but has gone terribly astray.

Christmas is not about convincing arguments that it happened. It is about God showing up among his people when they need him most, then as now, 2000 years later.

But will people recognize him when he shows up? The handful of shepherds apparently did and knew in their hearts that the Christ child in that stable is the Messiah. Then they went back into their lives and nothing more was heard.

The question for us today is, would we have recognized him? Where do we find him? In our churches? Or will he be watching from the public gallery as our congressmen and senators insist on budget provisions to make more stealing from the national treasury easier for them?

Will he be stuck in impossible traffic jams caused by people hurrying to buy all the Christmas gifts in their list? But everyone’s forgetting it is his birthday. And they have no gift to give him.

Even on Christmas Day, we would be too busy catching up with family and friends… to catch up with Jesus.

Christmas happened precisely because the world was a mess, then as now, and this was God’s plan to save the world from itself.

Christmas should remind us that whatever our troubles are, because Jesus came into this world, and we believe in him, we can look forward to better times in the presence of our God.

Revelation 21:3-4: “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”

A Blessed Christmas, everyone!

Boo Chanco’s email address is [email protected]. Follow him on X @boochanco