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"Christmas Eve 2006"
St. Mark’s Episcopal Church
Sunday, December 24. 2006
Christmas Eve
Isaiah 9:2-7
Titus 2:11-14
Luke 2:1-20
When you get to be 43 years old, which I am, the Christmas story
is like an old friend. You’ve encountered it so many times,
in so many ways, and heard or seen countless manger scenes,
crèches, cartoons, paintings, live nativities, crayon
drawings, carols and cards that you begin to take it for granted.
That friend can get a little tired and predictable. “In
those days...” and “In that region” - the
introductory phrases Luke uses - set the story apart from us
in both time and place. It is an event with comfortable distance
that took place a long time ago, when people wore robes and
sandals and traveled by donkey.
But like old friends and all Scripture, surprises and newness
are continually bubbling up, if you are open to it. First, take
a moment to create a picture in your mind of the Christmas manger
scene. What do you see? What do you hear? Are you close up or
far away? Is it real or impressionistic? Put that image aside
for a moment, and I’d like to share mine with you. This
year, what I am noticing how little we really know about the
Christmas story from the Bible. This is what Luke tells us:
“And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him
in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was
no place for them in the inn.” There it is in one simple
sentence. Why such a minimalist portrait? Are the details not
important? In the vacuum of information, over the centuries
our collective imaginations have filled in many details. But
Shakespeare wrote that brevity is the soul of wit, so we can
be confident that often less is more when it comes to stories,
including Christmas. Sifting through these few pieces of information
can yield many treasurers. One piece of this brevity is that
“she laid him in a manger.” A manger – that
is not a softly illuminated, straw-lined, open barn with sweet
cooing of doves in the rafters. If you have studied French,
you know that the word “manger” is a verb that means
“to eat.” The mother puts the baby in a feeding
trough – unsanitary by our standards but probably licked
clean during the evening feeding of the sheep, donkeys or whatever
animals were kept nearby. There is no barn or straw mentioned.
It is likely that the trough is in the open, exposed to the
night sky, surrounded by well worn earth, scratched bare of
grass by the animals who feed there. In the middle of an open
place, perhaps the only light that gives definition to the scene
is from the cloudless starry night sky and a small campfire.
Luke writes that the shepherds went with haste and found Mary
and Joseph and the child lying in the manger, which is where
Mary had just placed him. It didn’t take long for the
shepherds to find them – in fact no time at all seems
to have elapsed. When the angels had left them, the shepherds
looked toward Bethlehem. A flicker of light from a distant campfire
was perhaps no more than 200 yards away. There was no searching
from manger to manger, barn to barn. It wasn’t hard to
find what they were looking for, but would they have bothered
to investigate without having been visited by the angels? The
light that tells us where the child is is always closer than
we expect.
Another piece of the Christmas story that we know well is
that “there was no room for them in the inn.” We
can imagine the heartless innkeeper, standing in the doorway
of a small rooming house, basked in the warmth and light of
a fireplace in the background, denying the man and woman a place
of shelter, even as he sees the woman make a fist as she fights
the intensifying labor pains. As bad as this may sound, I think
the actual situation was even worse. Luke tells us that Joseph
went back to his family of origin in Bethlehem. This was a town
populated with his cousins and assorted other relatives. It
is these people – Joseph’s family - who do not show
mercy, not just to him but to his betrothed who is going into
labor in the middle of the night. Luke is silent on the emotion
of Mary and Joseph – but I think we can only begin to
imagine the feelings of anger, abandonment and despair at their
situation. Desperate for shelter, perhaps it was on their way
to one of the many caves in the hillside near Bethlehem when
Mary simply had no choice but to stop in the middle of a field,
a feeding trough the only object to mark the place.
With these images of the story in mind, I received a piece
of junk mail several weeks ago. The cover of the thirty page
pamphlet has a yellow background, headshots of Osama Bin Laden
and North Korean President Kim jong-il and menacing red block
letters that announce: “Investing in a World on the Brink.”
Following a table of contents, a page of introduction includes
these headings: “Then the World Changed” and “Get
a Grip on the New Reality.” This isn’t an investment
ploy, I thought...this actually is the Gospel! Indeed, the world
is on the brink – when we see a woman giving birth next
to a feeding trough in the middle of the night. The world is
on the brink as the death toll of American soldiers in Iraq
nears 3,000, as Bethlehem is orphaned by road blocks and a separation
barrier that cut it off from neighboring Jerusalem, as Islamic
fighters and government soldiers clash in Somalia, as temperatures
in Europe are at their warmest in 150 years of record-keeping,
as 200 acres of Brazil’s rain forest are destroyed during
the time of this sermon, as rival groups of Christian monks
clash in Greece in a 1,000 year old monastery using crowbars
and sledgehammers because one of the two groups opposes improving
ties between the Orthodox and the Vatican, and as soaring demand
for cashmere in the United States has resulted in overgrazing
in China, destroying vast grasslands, sending dirt into the
atmosphere that pollutes the skies and reaches portions of the
west coast of the United States carried by the winds of the
Pacific jet stream.
The world is on the brink, and it is into such a situation
that God invests – in fact, bets the house, puts everything
on number 13. Spin the wheel. Tick, tick, tick. Then the world
changed. In the shortest of moments, the mysterious vastness
of the universe, the galaxies, the majesty and awe of the heavens,
the glory of the firmament, the kingdom, the power and the glory
are at once collapsed into a tiny, helpless newborn, laid in
a manger – a feeding trough. Those tightly wound bands
of cloth hold it all in place. The psalmist cries out, “Lift
up your heads, O gates, lift them high, O everlasting doors;
and the king of glory shall come in.” (Psalm 24).
It is a terrifying thought. God almighty, the creator, the
eternal, the One on whom we live, move and have our being, realized
entirely in the person of a newborn baby on the rugged plains
of Israel. It is an insane bet, an investment with odds of any
return of 1 in infinity. But the angel said to the shepherds,
“Do not be afraid!” And why not, please tell us?
Because, “I am bringing you good news for all the people
– to you is born a Savior, the Messiah, the Lord. To you
is born. And they went with haste to see the baby because it
was theirs. And the baby is ours. And the baby belongs to all
of the people. As the piece of junk mails says, “get a
grip on the new reality.”
The reality of a baby is one we all know from personal experience,
in the deep recesses of our memories, and for some of us, as
parents who have witnessed and nurtured the life of babies.
Who we are, our personalities, temperaments and physicality
to a large degree reflect our lives when we were babies. A baby
must be fed and cleaned or it will die. It must also be held
and touched or it will die. A baby learns how to talk by being
around and in constant conversation. A baby’s first words
are invariably “no” and “mine” but over
time are mingled with “yes” and “ours”
with conscious care and nurture. A baby learns to love by being
loved and to share by the example of sharing. A baby is not
a piece of clay – but will reflect the type of care it
receives from its parents, its family and its community. “To
you is born a Savior” declares the angel. This baby is
ours and will thrive or die depending on us. God, in other words,
turned the tables on us, leaving us as creators and God as the
one who will reflect who we choose to be and how we choose to
raise the baby in a broken and risky world. What a foolish bet
by the world’s standards, but not God’s. This is
the Christmas story.
Luke writes that “the shepherds returned” –
which holds an ambiguous meaning. Did they return to their fields
or to the baby at a later time? Perhaps both – because
we follow their example, returning time and time again to the
manger, the feeding trough, the campfire, under the vastness
of the night sky, to see, to touch and to love the God who risks
everything in a foolish bet, on a broken world. God has invested
in a world on the brink – on the brink of desperation
and hopelessness and has brought us to the brink of joy. This
is the Christmas story, the old friend, once again made new.
Amen.
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