We've realized that we've been talking about waiting for several weeks. Some of us are familiar with this idea and this concept of waiting in advent and others of us. It's a new thing for us, but we've talked about waiting and what the good news is that Christmas is almost finally here. Now, many of us have been waiting for different reasons.
Kids, you all been waiting for school to get out, right? Okay, yes, we're waiting. Parents, we've been waiting for school to get out, right? It's a different level of enthusiasm when that happens.
Do you notice that? Some of us, we can't wait because we're getting a chance to go and see our family, to see our friends. For some folks, that's a really happy and enthusiastic thing. For others of us, we realize that we're waiting to go see our family and our friends.
Waiting has these two opposite sides of the coin. But we're all waiting and we're all excited. There's landmarks that we reach and we know we're getting close to somewhere. When I was a kid and we got out for Christmas, that myth that Christmas was coming.
When I was a kid and we traveled, our grandparents, I was telling someone earlier, both of my grandparents lived six, seven hours away from our house when I was a kid. And we would have to travel a pretty decent distance to get there. But I began learning that we're going to my mom's house in Texas that we turned right off the highway in Jefferson, Texas. There's the Blackburn syrup factory.
And even like it's a six year old. A six year old can't tell you directions anywhere. But I remember the Blackburn syrup factory. I knew that it was coming up close.
And so we were waiting and we were getting closer and closer and closer. And we've been talking about waiting all month, but the good news is the wait's over. We're going to get to the end of the story today and I cannot wait to get there with it for you. So we're going to talk about Mary.
We're going to talk about Joseph. We're going to talk about the baby Jesus today and how that teaches us about waiting. Because waiting is only a temporary state. Waiting by definition, it has finality into it.
And so if you open up your Bibles with me, you can also look on the screen and we'll read that together. But we're going to open up in Luke chapter two. We're going to read verses one through seven today. We'll start off with a Luke one through five.
And this is what it says is that at the time the Roman Emperor Augustus decreed that a census should be taken throughout the Roman Empire. So the first census taken in Quenarius was governor of Syria and all returned to their ancestral towns to register for this census. Because Joseph was a descendant of King David. He had to go to Bethlehem in Judea, David's ancient home.
He traveled there from the village of Nazareth in Galilee. And he took with him Mary his fiance who is now obviously pregnant. So the first question we think about, and we talk about waiting is this. It's just what are we waiting for?
Joseph was waiting for some things. The first it talks about is this census. And there's a lot of weird details that's going on with the census. But Luke who wrote the Gospel of Luke, and he also wrote the Book of Acts.
Luke is very, very detailed. And every detail he includes is there for a reason. And if we really dig into that, we see there's two things that are going on with this whole census. Because this passage one through five, it's detail after detail after detail after detail.
Luke's telling us two things. The first is that this happens in a place and in a time. This happens as a historical action. The second thing Luke tells us, by the way, he's talking about the census going across the entire Roman Empire, is that Jesus' birth is of universal significance.
It's not just affecting Bethlehem. It's not just affecting this place called Israel. But it's affecting the whole entire world. But there's some emotions that Joseph is going through.
What are you waiting for? Joseph is waiting for this to be over with. OK, let's just think about the situation. So you and your fiance have angelic visions of a virgin birth.
Something's about to happen. You know something big is going on. And all of a sudden you find out that you have got to travel to this place to take care of a business. Like real estate stuff and tax stuff.
And all of the things that we put off and off and off and off. Now Joseph, if you were here in our previous series, we talked about the Book of Ruth and how in the Jewish faith in the first century, they have a weird system of ownership and responsibility. Someone might remember that. The quick version of it is that Joseph is probably the head of his house.
That he is not just the head of him and Mary and the soon to be born baby Jesus. But he's responsible for a lot of people. That's the reason that he is having to travel to Bethlehem to take part in the census. Because it's not just for him, but it's for all these other folks he's responsible for.
But then also that he is from Bethlehem. It's his ancestral home. But he's not living there. Tells us something else.
Because back then, especially in Israel, people just don't pick up and move. I know some of you all here in this room have moved from other parts of the country to Monroe in this last year. And that would be an extremely rare occurrence in the first century. Because you didn't leave your support systems.
You have dwelling places that are passed down from generation to generation to generation. It's an extremely odd thing to move. And usually when you move, it's because there's economic reasons. You're having to leave where you're from to go find resources elsewhere and provide for your family.
And you don't just like sell your house. Like you set up a long-term release. Someone else has about 50 years with that property for it. It can hopefully come back to you.
It's a system of checks and balances that we have in scripture. So Joseph is going back to take care of his taxes and his census and all these things. And there's also probably the hope that he's going to be able to maybe get his ancestral. They're their series of homes back for all these people he's taken care of.
So there's a window of time. And he brings Mary with him. And we don't know if Jesus decided to come a little bit early. We don't know if the census business took an abnormally long amount of time.
But for some reason, here's Joseph. And we're familiar with the story. There's no room in the inn. We can tell from the language that Joseph, there's no room in this house.
And some people a lot smarter than I have said. Maybe Joseph thought that he would have a place to stay in this home or in this house complex that was his family's by right. Now I've rented a lot of houses in my life. In college, I've rented the most dumpiest houses in the world.
And Rustin, it was pretty sketchy sometimes. But for all of you who've ever rented a house before, if you find out that you're landwards coming, what do you do? Like you start cleaning. You try to make everything proper so you don't get in trouble, right?
There's some sort of awkward business going on when Joseph and Mary show up and she's pregnant and what they find out is that they have to not only sleep, they don't have a space in the house to stay, but they have to stay like an open-aired stable that's part of the living room. So here's Joseph with his pregnant wife, who they know that all these special things are going on. And they're having to stay in the middle of this awkward situation. There's something going on with all the relationships.
And the census business is probably taking a lot longer. Joseph cannot wait to get this situation over with. The second thing we can learn about waiting though in this scripture, we find in verse six, but the best person to kind of name this is the modern theologian known as Tom Petty. He says the waiting is the hardest part.
Okay? Now think about Mary. Now we've talked about Joseph. Think about Mary.
She's young, she's pregnant with her first child. She probably had these ideas of how she was going to give birth to Jesus, how she was going to give birth to this special child. And instead she stuck in an extended road trip with her husband. And she's being at some family's house.
Some family she probably does not know. And is going to give birth to her first child, this prophesized child, this angelic visions have come across this child. And she's going to have to give birth to Jesus in a public cow pen. She's tired.
Verse six, it tells us this of what's going on. Now while they were there, the time came for her baby to be born. And she gave birth to her first child as son. Now the middle of everything is always hard.
The waiting is the hardest part. The middle is that hard part. The middle is that place where we start questioning everything, right? We start questioning our motives.
We start questioning our decisions. We start questioning is this the right thing to do to make a last minute change? The middle is where we might maybe roll off of our good plans and instead start shooting from the hip. But verse six, verse six, put that back up there.
It has one thing that's just amazing. It says, and while they were there, the time came. So Luke is fascinated with time. He talks about time a lot across chapter two.
The time came is like secret God code word for I'm about to do amazing things in your world. I'm about to do big things. And this is happening when I have desired for it to happen. This is happening at the best time for the whole world for this to happen.
In the middle of this situation, this incredibly frustrating for Joseph and then incredibly frustrating for Mary is the right time for Jesus to people. So we've learned that that much about waiting. And then verse seven, we read this where we've come to the end of our story. So they wrapped him snugly in strips of cloth and laid him in a manger because there was no lodging available for them.
The third thing we learned about waiting is that there is an end to waiting. My family has a story about waiting in Christmas that is really, really awesome. My granical burl was a Marine in World War II and fought in the Pacific. He was in Iwo Jima and he stayed with the occupation forces in Japan.
And they didn't know exactly when Uncle Burl was going to get home, but my family in South Mississippi, the road is long. From the Hattiesburg area, it's called Steelman Road now. But that's actually my great grandfather's driveway. One point in time his driveway was eight miles long.
And there's a story my grandmother tells of one Christmas season that they went to church on a Sunday night. And this was still during a lot of the times we have to conserve energy and conserve resources. And so they go to church, they give all the light to the house off. But then they're coming home from church that Sunday night.
And my great grandfather built his house on top of this gigantic hill. And you come around a bend, and it's a pretty curvy road. And for a split second, when you're around the bend, if you look straight ahead, you can see the house. And then you cut back through the road again and the view of the house is blocked for you for a few more moments.
My grandmother, she said she was around like 14, 15 years old. And they were wondering when Uncle Burl was going to get home. And how special it would be to have him home for the Christmas season. And they turned, they take that curve and then for a split second, they have a view of the house and the lights of the house are on.
And they knew that somebody was there. And they got excited because they were pretty sure that someone was my Uncle Burl. And they ended up making the curve and getting up to the house and finding out that he'd come home for Christmas. They've been waiting for that moment for years.
I said earlier that waiting is not a permanent state. Waiting is a temporary state. Then every single thing the world has been waiting for has now made manifest in this tiny little baby. That this awkward situation that's occurred, this frustrating situation of a census being taken, everybody having to make a bunch of travel, to do a bunch of business.
If we think about it, the person who ordered that census was attempting to exercise power over everyone in the known world and cause the situation. But then the only person in this world who will truly ever have power was born. And it was born in the least powerful way. And for those of us that Christmas is sometimes frustrating and awkward and confusing.
For some of us sometimes how life is frustrating and awkward and confusing, we can find a great relief because that's exactly how Jesus came into this world. He didn't come into this world the perfect way. He didn't come into this world and a well planned, well thought out way. He came into this world in the middle of our mess so that he can take us out of our mess.
So there's two things that we can learn about waiting. Two things we can take in our own lives is we reflect over the rest of the Christmas season as we reflect over across our whole life. And the first one is that what we do while we're waiting matters the most. If we look across the story of Mary and Joseph, later in chapter 2, there's a couple more people who've been waiting a long time for Jesus.
We'll cross the story of all of scripture. Whenever people wait, they act out in faithfulness. We know God has always been faithful to us. And so we're going to be faithful to Him while we're in the middle of that waiting.
And the second one is this, is that we need to realize when the waiting is over. When the waiting is over, that there's a new reality for us. There's something that God is calling us to. There's something that Jesus wants for us to do.
For some of us, that might mean another step towards faithfulness. But for others of us, that might mean taking that first step towards faithfulness. But that waiting period is not permanent. That now that Jesus is here, that everything He's promised us is available to us.
That everything we've ever desired in our entire life, everything we wanted from the pit of our stomach that we've been terrified to tell other people about, the things that have kept us up at night. The things we think about when we're driving by ourselves. The things we think about when we're happy. The things we think about when we're set.
That the wait and the answer for all that is over. And it's in the form of a little boy. A friend of mine once said that hope is a person and the truth has a heartbeat. And that's how we know the wait is over because Jesus is here.
Let's pray. Father, we ask for clarity, God. We ask for vision. We ask for us to see what a life done with waiting is like.
So we pray as we continue in worship, God, as we take communion, as we sing some familiar Christmas songs, as we go out and have fun on jumpers and eat snacks and enjoy each other. And we pray for us to see what the next step is. Whether that next step is the first step towards Jesus or whether that next step is just another step in further faithfulness. We celebrate the power of you being here and of our wait and of the whole world's wait being over it.
You know we pray. Amen.