December 24, 2011

Texts: Psalm 96, Titus 2:11-14, Luke 2:1-14 [15-20]

It’s Christmas Eve. Do you feel it? The electricity in the air? Do you hear it? The stars singing to one another, “Do you hear what I hear”? Do you see it? The wonder in a child’s eyes as he looks up for a glimpse of Santa? Each year, I am overcome by the feelings of the season. The wonder of it all floods over me, and I can’t help but be caught up in it. I have read Luke 2:1-14 side by side ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas,” for as many years as I can remember. This is part of what is beautiful about this season: as Christians, we have the luxury of understanding that external and internal preparation go together. The gifts on Christmas morning are a manifestation of the gift of God coming into our lives and dwelling among us. But sometimes, I think this makes reading ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas alongside Luke 2:1-14 a little more complicated. “The stockings were hung by the chimney with care;” everything is in its proper place, awaiting the joy of Christmas morning. This is very different than “she laid her baby in a feeding trough because there was no place for them in the inn.” Okay, I know the text says ‘manger,’ but now, when we picture a manger, we picture something that looks an awful lot like a crib and hay that is somehow soft. A manger has more in common with a feeding trough than it does a baby crib. The hay probably wasn’t soft (it was dried for the animals to eat it), and the manger was probably used… meaning full of animal drool. And, being from Iowa, I can confirm that the smells of barns and livestock are hardly fit for anyone, let alone a baby, let alone the Messiah.

When I slow down enough to pay attention to the details in this text, I wonder: did God, the One who hung the stars in the heavens, who divided the land and the sea, who calls plants and animals and people into being, miss one tiny detail? “Whoops. I made all these plans to send my Son into the world and, wouldn’t you know it, I forgot to figure out a place for them to stay?” One teensy weensy divine oversight? The One through whom all things were made, eternally begotten of the Father, slept his first night on this earth in a manger. Was it some sort of cosmic accident, or was God born in the manger precisely because that was where God chooses to dwell? Christ comes into the world, with heralds from angels and the song of the stars, and all of creation testifying to his glory, and all the earth could provide was a cattle stall. It jars us into reality. This is the reality into which God comes. It isn’t some other reality, some better version of humanity, some better version of the world: it is into our reality.

Immanuel literally means: God-with-us. It wasn’t God-with-the-people-who-deserve-it, God-with-the-holy, or God-with-another-creation-long-ago-and-far-away. It’s God-with-us. Not God-with-us when we get our lives together, God-with-us when the stockings are hung by the chimney with care, it’s God with us. In the middle of our joy, in the middle of our pain, God is with us. In the middle of our child’s tantrum, in the middle of our teenager slamming the door, in the middle of mourning those who have gone on before us, God is with us.

This is no normal God. God could have decided that Jesus would be born with a royal welcome, with dignitaries and kings and princes and rulers and principalities, but he didn’t. This God invites the shepherds to the party. The shepherds tending their fields were nomads, the socialization they enjoyed was that of other shepherds. And yet they are the first to whom Gabriel speaks upon the birth of our savior. Could he find nobody else, nobody more worthy, in Bethlehem? God could have brought anyone to the birth of Christ, but he invited these, who most would have shooed away from their doorstops. These shepherds were the first to be invited to the birth of Christ, the Messiah.

God comes to real people… to real sinners; he comes because we’re sinners. He doesn’t come to the people that have their lives together, the people who are ready for it, it’s to the people whom everyone else relegates as outcast, unworthy to share polite company with the well-to-do in society. God comes into the mess that the world is to the messy people that live in the world. The angels say: “Do not be afraid, for this is good news.” God comes to you - as you are, and to the world - as it is. Jesus was born that he might dwell among us, that he might know us more intimately than we have ever been known. It peers into the core of who we are, all of our attempts to make God into something God is not, and gives us a helpless baby and says “This is your God.”

Part of what we lose when we conflate the Nativity with ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas is the reality of God-with-us. This is as real as it gets. Mary wasn’t shielded from the pain of labor; having traveled nearly 100 miles on a donkey in the 9^th month of pregnancy, she wasn’t given the benefit of timing for the birth of Jesus, her son. What she was given, what we all were given, was a gift of life, as real as the baby she held in her arms. This baby, soft-skinned, crying, laughing, sleeping, is the Savior of the world. It makes me catch my breath, that the God of all there is, who hung the stars in their place, who separated the land and the sea, would choose to come and dwell among us. Born in a barn, sleeping his first night in a feeding trough, this is as real as it gets. This God is as real as it gets. Even the cleverest poem about Christmas Eve, about Santa and the wonders of reindeer, the poem about everything in its place, cannot match the splendor of the angel song, of the stars singing our Savior his first lullaby, of the tenderness of Mary rocking her firstborn child - God incarnate - in her arms.

“To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” It is the most wondrous news, the greatest story ever told, and here’s the kicker: it’s true. The story has been told year after year in thousands of languages in thousands of cultures, all of whom draw near to the manger to catch a glimpse of God-with-us, as children gathering around a new baby.

Come: come to the manger; come with the angels, with the company on earth and the hosts in heaven, come with the shepherds, with the greatest and most and the last and least: come to the celebration of the birth of the One who is named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace, but what is more, whose name is Immanuel, that is, God-with-us.