Christmas Babies

In the December 2007 Ensign Magazine, LDS Church President Gordon Hinckley quoted E. T. Sullivan, who once wrote these interesting words: “When God wants a great work done in the world or a great wrong righted, he goes about it in a very unusual way. He doesn’t stir up his earthquakes or send forth his thunderbolts. Instead, he has a helpless baby born, perhaps in a simple home and of some obscure mother. And then God puts the idea into the mother’s heart, and she puts it into the baby’s mind. And then God waits. The greatest forces in the world are not the earthquakes and the thunderbolts. The greatest forces in the world are babies.”

I love this time of year. In the dead of winter we commemorate the births of two of the greatest babies in the history of mankind. Long ago and far, far away on Judea’s Plain, a virgin named Mary gave birth to a lad who would provide a way back to God for all of his Sprit Brothers and Sisters. She named him according to what she had been instructed by heavenly messengers – Yeshua – translated meaning “Jehovah Saves.” He is better known by its Greek rendering, Jesus.

 Thanks to need of the early Christian Church to replace ancient pagan revelries surrounding the Winter Solstice, a December day was chosen to celebrate the birth of the Savior of the World. Over the next 1800 some odd years, many such pragmatic choices made changes to truths and ordinances of the Christ’s Church.  Lack of bodies of water sufficient to submerge a human adult in the Saharan Africa indicated a change to sprinkling as opposed to immersion for baptism. A common view of the Godhead was required to push the new church forward politically – so a group of men at a Council in Nicaea compromised to say that Father, Son and Holy Ghost were really one being, capable of appearing separate in some mysterious way. The created a creed that became the confession of many, and a litmus test for those who take it upon themselves to determine who is worthy to call themselves a Christian.  At nearly the same time, the Church fathers decided that Baptism for the Dead as taught by the Original Apostles was “A useless tradition of Paul, and of no efficacy.”

Such drift continued in the centuries following the death of the Apostles. And as new opinions were developed on doctrinal matters, new entities claiming to be the Church of Jesus Christ appeared. Each of these was missing critical components, not least of which was actual authority to perform ordinances in the name of God, also known as the priesthood. In 1805, the wheels began turning to correct these deficiencies. On a winters morning, near to the Christian Holiday, thousands of years and miles away from that manger in Bethlehem, another boy was born that would change the world and prepare this tired old planet and its inhabitants to once again and truly “Receive her King.” 

His name, like his father’s, was Joseph – which translated from Hebrew means “he shall add.” And add he did, or rather, reveal that which had been hidden for centuries. His contributions have lit the way Home for millions who have heard his words. 

December is a blessed month. One in which we celebrate the birth of Our Messiah, and remember the birth of His Prophet. I thank God for both!