I was struck this morning with the profound contrast with the scene which Luke pens in that pair of verses and the reality of Jesus' birth in a likely less than comfortable stable/cave. As my own family has grown, moved from an apartment to a series of homes, we've been blessed with a larger, nicer place, comfort and security each time. But bigger and more comfortable does not always mean better.

Earthly monarchs, whatever their end, nearly always were birthed in more stately homes, supported by feather bed or other soft foundations. But Jesus may have been dropped onto a muslin or linen cloth which the humble Mary and Joseph prepared before the moments of her physical travail beneath a cold moon. There was no midwife, no hot water, no medical staff or emergency surroundings. There was just the two young people and a few animals placidly gazing at the entrance of their King into the world to the groans and whimpers of the barely mature woman who was now passing from virginity to the plain circumstance of a child to nurse and coddle. Did the infant cry, to the perked ears of His creation?

The tiny boy could not have been more welcomed by the couple. They would construct the world in which this Christ Jesus would grow, but the fact would never change from this night on, Jesus was a King born into a crude hovel, dirty, moldy, cold.

I'm slightly embarrassed as I write this, that Jesus has always been pictured in some kind of stable, whether wood or rock, whether laid with straw or the eroded bits of dirt as a floor. In every book I've read, not one provided a scene of a palace. All literature and art followed the Biblical narrative of the babe in swaddling clothes. Did our King deserve no more than a mid teenager mother and a used pile of straw?

It has become quite difficult to separate our MP2 or iPod culture from the Biblical holiday we now celebrate, increasingly bewitched by glass ornaments and cellophane ensconced cheese balls, which techology and fashion wrapped around us. In this Christmas, will we choose the conscious remembrance of this God walking humbly about the countryside with simple robes of that first century culture, or the spiced up bejeweled rappers thumping their heavy rhythms and Drummer Boy? Our Father in Heaven, forgive us of our cultural haughtiness!