However, should a sermon be formulated in such a way to rhetorically insinuate that everyone else had done something profoundly wrong if God concealed this event from all but a few?
Why are certain hardline Evangelicals this insistent about finding sin in nearly everything?
Isn't the point of these accounts that, in announcing the birth of the Messiah to people as disparate as agricultural laborers and imperial advisors, the Gospel message is for everyone?
It might sound exceedingly pious, but you can't accuse a population of being too preoccupied with their own affairs in terms of complying the Roman census to be concerned about a young woman about to give birth to the most important baby in all history, as this pastor explicates in his homily, if the population is not told exactly who this blessed virgin happens to be?
They didn't exactly have Twitter or post Amber Alerts in those days.
by Frederick Meekins