Sermon - Christmas Eve (12/24/2019)
Is. 9:2-7; Ps. 96; Tit. 2:11-14; Lk. 2:1-14
“Do not be afraid. Look, I am bringing you good news of great joy for all people. A Savior is born for you today, who is the Messiah, the Lord.”
According to Luke, the angel’s announcement of good news was made to a group of shepherds living in the fields with their sheep, away from their homes and families, working the night shift, generally disrespected and unnoticed. But they are not the only ones in this story who are far from home: Mary and Joseph forced to leave their home in Nazareth because of the census and to travel to Bethlehem. The census of Israel is itself the act of the foreign Empire for the purpose of exercising control and domination of a subject people, the better to tax them and draft them into their armies, so that even though Israel was in “Israel,” the census impressed on them that their homeland was no longer their home. And the baby Jesus, lying in a manger, in the stable for the animals, because there is no room in the home where humans stay.
Some of you, tonight, are not at home. In the physical sense, you may be traveling to be with family and friends for this holiday season. But in a deeper sense, you may feel off-center, not fully at peace, unable to rest and take your shoes off and just be. Like Israel, some tyrant – external or internal – may have dominion over you. Maybe like Joseph and Mary you feel relegated to the barn with the oxen and the lambs, not part of the real action with the people who, unlike you, supposedly belong inside. Maybe like the shepherds you are living in the fields, working around the clock, with no time to think about angels and Messiahs. Perhaps illness has estranged you from your own body, where just getting out of bed in the morning is a reminder that we’re not in Kansas any more. Perhaps there is conflict within your family, or even within yourself, and you always feel like your guard is up, and you can never just relax at home and just be. Perhaps there is someone missing from your home this year, and home just isn’t home anymore without them.
To you the angel says: I bring you good news of great joy for all people. Today a Savior has been born for you, the Messiah, the Lord. Today God has come home to this world to make a way so that you can come home too. So that you can come home to peace, so that you can come home to deliverance from whatever threatens or binds you, so that you can come home to belonging.
It may seem odd to hear that God taking flesh and being born as a human baby in Bethlehem is God coming home. Isn’t God’s home in heaven – isn’t that the place where God belongs? One might think that for God to leave heaven and come to earth is like God going on a trip, and not a particularly enjoyable one at that. For a divine person used to being at home in heaven, spending 33 years on this earth, sleeping in mangers, working for a living – and winding up getting crucified, at that – hardly sounds like a pleasure cruise. Let alone a homecoming.
But our faith teaches us that just as Jesus is truly and completely God, as much God as God can be, Jesus is also truly and completely human, as human as any human being can be. I don’t pretend to understand how that works, but I know this: If there is someone who is 100% God and 100% human, then being divine and being human are not in competition with each other. So being divine doesn’t make you less human, but could even make you more human. That being human doesn’t make you less divine, but more divine.
Being the Son of God does not make Jesus less of a human being than you or I. In fact, Jesus is more fully human than we are, more at home in this world, more deeply rooted in a particular time and place, more comfortable in his own skin, more connected to God and neighbor, more able to give love and to receive it.
Jesus comes into this world to make a home here for God – and to allow us to become more fully at home in this world and in our own lives. He does not come to give us a ticket out of this world to a better one somewhere else, but to make us so fully at home here in this world and in this life that nothing, not even death, can uproot us from our belonging to God and God’s magnificent creation.
So how does this work, this coming to join God in Jesus in coming home to our true selves and the true life that God has made for each one of us? On the first Christmas, the angels told the shepherds what to look for: You will find him wrapped in bands of cloth, lying in a manger.
Wrapped in bands of cloth. You will find Jesus submitting to human customs – starting with the one by which parents of newborns in those days wrapped their babies in strips of cloth as tightly as they could. I think it’s a striking image: God comes into the world and takes flesh, and the first thing that we humans do is to wrap him up as tight as we can. To protect God, as if God needed our protection. Or as if we could protect ourselves from God-the-human-baby flailing his arms about. Yet Jesus does not resist. This is where we are to find God-with-us: with us, wrapped up in our own ways of doing things, in our customs and traditions. God can work with pretty much anything. There is no need to learn any special practices or specialized jargon. We do not have to become like God to find God in Jesus; in Jesus, God adapts to us, God becomes like us, whoever we are, so that we can be found by God exactly as who we are.
And lying in a manger. In the place where animals eat. Jesus was often found in places for eating. At the other end of the gospel story, the disciples encounter the risen Christ on the road to Emmaus – but they only recognized him when they sat at table to break bread together. And here at the beginning of the story, the angels tell the shepherds: If you want to recognize him, look for him lying in the feeding trough.
Jesus never told us to remember him by celebrating his birthday every year, although it is a fine thing that we are here doing that tonight. But he did tell us to remember him by sharing a table together, taking bread and wine and blessing them and giving them to one another. And as we do these things here tonight, he has promised to be present here in Mount Vernon in this year of our Lord two thousand and nineteen, just as really and truly as he was present in Bethlehem centuries ago. He has promised to enter this broken world once again, to become flesh and blood once again for us, so that we might become a bit more human as he is fully human, so that we might be at home with ourselves and at home with one another and at home with God.
And as we go forth from this place tonight, to our homes or wherever we will celebrate Christmas this year, may the God who made a home with all humankind in Bethlehem make a home with you as well. May God make us as a community of faith a place of belonging and rest for beleagured pilgrims on the way. And may God open our eyes to the forgotten and overlooked hardworking shepherds in the fields all around us, so that we can share with them the good news of great joy given to all people: Christ is born; it is time to come home.
(The first third of this sermon was inspired by, and in part drawn from, a blog post by Rev. Matt Tebbe.)