This is Christmas
Commentary
Object:
"And so this is Christmas...." Bob Geldof's musical Band Aid gift to Africa ("Do They
Know It's Christmas" and other such songs) replays the ongoing crises of our times every
year in this season. Perhaps this will be the year when faith gives way to sight, and all
Christmas Eve services will be pre-empted by our Lord's return.
But if not, the texts for preaching this year are the great classics. Isaiah charges our imagination with hope. Paul, in his memo scratched off to Titus, ties our hope to the tangible. And Luke, as he recounts the first Christmas, makes the tangible wondrously strange and compelling.
One child, learning to recite the Lord's Prayer about this time of year, petitioned God to "forgive us our Christmases as we forgive those who Christmas against us." If we respond appropriately to the lessons for today, nothing need be forgiven.
Isaiah 9:2-7
Sometimes a baby can change everything, as Bret Harte humorously noted in his great short story "The Luck of Roaring Camp." Cherokee Sal, the local woman of ill-repute, died as she gave birth to a male child in a rough and tumble California gold mining camp. No one could be sure who the father was, so the entire company waited in strange silence to hear the baby's first wail. Then everything began to change. First, suitable sleeping quarters had to be found for the infant, and a fancy crib was imported all the way from San Francisco. Then the tiny tyke had to be fed, so milk had to be brought in, and a cow was procured, turning these fighters and brawlers into pastoral farmers. Of course, those who fed the child needed to wash their hands first, but that only gave evidence of how filthy their bodies and clothes were, so bathing and showering and clothes-washing facilities suddenly sprouted up. More than that, because newborns need quiet time to sleep, the entire noisy shantytown shut down for several hours every afternoon, and drunken yelling and gun firing was outlawed at night. In a few amazing months, Roaring Camp became civilized and decent. All because of a baby boy whose parentage was uncertain.
We know the story well from its New Testament gospel-telling, but Isaiah gives the visionary rendition here in chapter 9. Assyria looms on the horizon, scarfing up nations left and right in a bid to become the first major superpower of the ancient near east. To the north of Jerusalem (where Isaiah is living and appears to be working as a court recorder or scribe or special priest attached to the royal family), Israel and Syria are playing a no-win game of trying to create faltering coalitions to stop the approaching steamroller. Spitting into the wind would be more successful. Still, they argue with King Ahaz of Judah and try to bully him into joining their lost cause.
Meanwhile, like the leader of the loyal opposition, Isaiah airs his party's proposals in the weekly prophetic address. Yahweh will not countenance a shaky and doomed alliance with the boys up north. Nor, on the other hand, should Ahaz look south to Egypt for a favor; it will only come back to bite him. Instead, in the rich tradition of covenant promises, Ahaz and Judah should wait for Yahweh's peculiar brand of salvation. It will come on time. It will be sufficient. And it will bring glory both to Yahweh and the people.
How will it happen? Isaiah sees the national victory celebration originating with the birth of a child within the royal family. Even as the darkness of Assyrian evil encroaches on Galilee (so 9:1-2; think of Elie Wiesel's Night, or Tolkien's bleak kingdom of Mordor in the Lord of the Rings trilogy), a deliverer will be born in David's divinely inspired line (see 2 Samuel 7) who will lead the armies of Judah to victory against overwhelming odds, just as Moses did when the Israelites first fell under the dark terror of the Midianites (Isaiah 9:4; see Numbers 31).
The people of Judah did, indeed, avoid succumbing to the seemingly unstoppable Assyrian onslaught. It happened when Ahaz' own son, Hezekiah, came to the throne in 715 BC. Although his father's leadership was at best a cowardly dance of compromise and collusion, Hezekiah had the fortitude to keep Judah neutral in the pressure cooker of international intrigue. He had to trust Yahweh for deliverance which was miraculously brought in 701 BC when the Assyrian masses disappeared overnight (Greek historian, Herodotus, confirms this surprising departure as a result of some strange plague).
While this is likely the anticipated event forecast by Isaiah, there are long-range implications that leap over into the New Testament and find their culmination only in Jesus. For one thing, after the Assyrians, there would always come another threat (Babylon, then Persia, then Greece, then Rome ...). No typical human king, regardless of his strength or prowess, would be able to keep defeating wave after wave of global conquerors, simply because he would die after two or three decades of leadership.
Second, Isaiah's prophecies increasingly looked beyond the immediate challenges to find a picture of the messianic kingdom, the age of full deliverance, and the time of transcendent renewal. Israel's mission would never be complete until all the nations of the earth came under the sway of its covenanted relationship with Yahweh (see Isaiah 2:1-5). This would require a new and decisive incursion by Yahweh into the affairs of the human race, putting an end to the chicanery of devil's dances, and restoring the fallen creation to a new age of imputed righteousness. Such an outcome could never depend on any mere temporal ruler. A larger-than-life deliverer was humanity's only hope.
For that reason, the church has chanted these words every Christmas. Although the end of the story has not yet been told, the beginnings of the tale of triumph did indeed emerge from the report that a new child had been born in our bawdy and boisterous shantytown world and that birth has changed everything.
Titus 2:11-14
Waiting is hard work. Paul knows it, as he writes these words to young Titus who is left to fend off the lying teachers of Crete.
Much of the time we wait impatiently. Children who have been told time and again to stop poking at the presents under the Christmas tree have now probably finished their waiting. They are no more impatient than the throngs trying to get through airport security as they travel home or away or to some idyllic sanctuary this holiday season. Nor are they alone among the masses of our world who bide their time with less than grace while others occupy their homelands, or sow their fields with landmines, or cheat them out of convoys of food and medical supplies. Sometimes the impatience of waiting is itself a saving grace. As one poet put it, "Patience is a virtue, possess it if you can; seldom in a woman, and never in a man!"
But many times we wait in anticipation: the countdown to graduation, the marking of months from pregnancy to birth, the security of a looming cost-of-living hike in wages, the grade-level promotion, the arrival of relatives for holiday gatherings, and the clock- work culmination of incarceration at end of sentence. Anticipation is a virtue married to patience. Without anticipation, patience can degenerate into cynicism and insanity. Even patience with unfounded anticipation becomes the grist for horror stories. The musical tale of "Delta Dawn" is a case in point. Swept off her feet by a charming and devious lover when just a teenaged nobody in Brownsville, Texas, Dawn is left at the altar by a con man who stole her heart and her mind. Gone a bit loony after that failure to launch, she wanders the streets wearing her wedding dress, holding a rotted bouquet, and mumbling strange wishes and hopes and dreams and promises, looking for a bridegroom who will never show.
Samuel Beckett believed the Christian church was that weirdo wacko. His play, Waiting for Godot, hints that those who believe Jesus is returning are like Vladimir and Estragon, holding nonsense conversations around an odd tree (think the cross of Calvary) throughout the changing and meaningless seasons of existence. When they almost give up hope and are about to take hold of their times and circumstances as real men ought to do, a messenger (think preacher) shows up and says that Godot is, in fact, still planning to come. When they ask this bearer of good news (think gospel) whether he has himself seen Godot or talked with him, the answer is no, the message actually was handed to him by others (think scripture). Beckett's waiters may anticipate something, but the audience, set outside of stage time, sees the folly in it all because the waiting is unfounded. Godot will never come. There will be no resolution to this ill- gotten exercise. Faith is futile.
What makes Paul's urge to anticipation anything other than Godot's shameful nonsense? Paul hangs his future courage on one single hook: Jesus came once. He lived. He talked. He healed. He taught. He died. He came back to life.
Jesus' first coming is the guarantee that makes the anticipation of faith a confident and rational activity. Since God invaded our world in the person and presence of Jesus, we can be sure that the promises made through Jesus will be fulfilled. Christmas is a day of remembering promises made and kept so that others which are still in process can be trusted. As the Old Testament people of God waited during prophetic times for the coming of the messiah, so we, the New Testament people of God, wait during the apostolic age for the coming of the messiah. We do not trust a mythical fantasy, created for mass delusion; we are confident that the one who came once will return again to make all things new.
A young man named Sean Coxe had come to an impasse in his life. His marriage was over, his job lost, his savings drained, and he no longer had a place to live. In bitterness, he took his last $300 to buy an airplane ticket to go see his dad, living in Florida. Sean had always been close with his father, and they had weathered a number of difficulties together in the past. Now, in this new crisis of life, Sean could think of nowhere else to go, and no one else to reach out to.
As they stood behind Sean's parents' condominium, facing the evening waters of the Gulf of Mexico, an astoundingly colorful and heart-wrenchingly beautiful sunset washed over them. In silence, they waited until all the crafting of hues and nuances had finished. Finally Sean's dad brought them back to earth with the usual rhetorical question, "Beautiful, wasn't it?"
The cynicism of Sean's tortured soul roared back in bitterness, "Sure, but if you would take all these wonderful sunsets for a lifetime, and put them next to one another, it probably wouldn't amount to more than twenty minutes."
"Maybe so, son," said his father. "But those twenty minutes would help us understand all the rest, wouldn't they?"
This is the point of Paul's encouragement to Titus. We are forced to wait for many things in life, including the promises of our religious faith. Will we grow angry or bitter or cynical with impatience? Will we become foolish in scandalous religious rites that hold no meaning? Or will we trust the record of God's historical activity and find the strength of our hopeful courage through anticipation of that which is still to come?
Luke 2:1-14 (15-20)
This story is so familiar to us that it can bring panic to the preacher who is supposed to preach on it once again. But there are a few things often overlooked in our multiplied recitals. While Luke focuses on the great gift of Jesus given at Bethlehem, he tosses in a number of fascinating surprises.
First, this is the wrong gift for God to give. Mary has a baby. So what? Babies are helpless and tiny and cannot even care for themselves, let alone change world affairs. As George MacDonald put it powerfully in one of his poems:
They all were looking for a King
To slay their foes and lift them high;
Thou cam'st a little Baby thing
That made a woman cry!
Why should a birth in the backwaters of a troubled Roman province have any impact on the world, especially with all of the truly remarkable power plays that had been engineered by the greatest ruler the world had known to date? For God to give a child to the people seemed less impressive than a catastrophic flood (as in the days of Noah), or the parting of surging waters (like the Red Sea or the Jordan River), or the great plagues thrown down on Egypt, or making the sun and moon stand still until the day of battle had been won. A baby? If anything was to come of this child it would first have to survive (not an easy feat in a society stacked against longevity), get training (a slim offering), gain international recognition (truly unlikely), and then make a meaningful difference even though it did not have access to any of the tools of politics or warfare. This seemed to be the wrong gift for God to give.
Second, it was given to the wrong people. While shepherds may have enjoyed a good reputation in ancient Israel, their careers had fallen on hard times. Jacob and his family might have prided themselves before the Pharaoh of Egypt as herdsmen, and David may have made a name for pastoral kings and shepherding Gods (think of Psalm 23), but in first-century Palestine, shepherds were unwelcome and unwanted. The Mishnah warned against six occupations that should never be entered by God-fearing Jews; top of the list was shepherding. The rabbis of the day urged people to have no dealings and no contact with those involved in five careers, one of which was shepherding. In fact, one might say that Willie Nelson's famous song, "Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys," is only a recent reincarnation of an ancient rabbinical warning, "Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Shepherds."
Why should shepherds be ignored and despised? There were four interrelated reasons. First, shepherds did not obey boundary markers in the tending of their sheep, so they trespassed on private property. Along with this, they had gotten a reputation for having sticky fingers, picking up things that did not belong to them. Second, because there was a kind of honor among thieves, no shepherd was allowed to give testimony in court since they were all a pack of liars anyway. Third, because of their constant work with feces and dead animals, shepherds tended to be in a perpetual state of ritual impurity. For that reason, shepherds were generally not allowed to enter synagogues or the temple and would not be expected or welcomed in any places of worship. Fourth, there were rumors around that while shepherds watched their flocks by night, there was often a little hanky- panky going on between the shepherds and their sheep. For these reasons, shepherds had come to be part of the marginalized outcasts of society, and no good religious person would work with them, eat with them, worship with them, or allow them into courts or synagogues.
This makes the idea of having the birth announced to shepherds quite astonishing. Among all the people to whom the message could be given, it is the shepherds who are told that a Savior was born to them. This is in keeping with Luke's constant reminder that Jesus came for the lost and the last and the least of society. When we dress up shepherds and make them fuzzy pets for our Currier & Ives Christmas pageants, we are undermining the essence of the gospel as it was originally given.
Third, the gift of God through Jesus was given at the wrong time. Luke tells us that this all happened during the days of Caesar Augustus. He also notes that the song of the angels was that declaring "peace on earth." But such a message was pointless. Caesar Augustus had created the great Pax Romana, the Roman world peace, that brought stability and harmony to all of the nations of the Mediterranean basin. There was no need for God to pretend to give peace in this grand age of Roman tranquility. Even the doors of the famous temple of Janus in Rome had been closed for decades. They stood open when the Roman legions were at battle, since the two-headed god was lord of the fields of conquest, being able to see both ahead and behind.
Why should God presume to give peace when it was no longer needed? That becomes the perennial question for Christian preaching. What is the peace that is at hand, and why is it insufficient? What is the transcending peace that only God can promise or bring, especially when it is to be achieved by the bloody death of this Christmas child grown older?
Fourth, the gift of Jesus is given in the wrong place. As the magi of Matthew's incarnation story knew (see Matthew 2), a king should be born in a palace. Jerusalem was the local royalty shop, so that is where people ought to look for someone to emerge as deliverer and ruler. A better place, of course, would be Rome. That was the center of world domination. There the mighty ones who moved the chess pieces of the global board were plotting and scheming.
Yet it is here in backwater Bethlehem that the Messiah is born. If we were to tell the story, it would be very different. Maybe, though, it is the brilliantly unusual nature of the event that makes it still fresh to us, even if we have heard it a time or three.
Application
The old Burt Bacharach song, "What The World Needs Now," could draw all of these passages together in a unified homily. A comprehensive set of moves might look like this: What do we really need (Isaiah); when will it come (Titus); where will we find it (Luke)?
Alternative Application
Luke 2:1-14 (15-20). The materials given for the gospel lesson are sufficient to make that story come out fresh. Give it a try!
Preaching The Psalm
Psalm 96
"Say to the nations, 'The Lord is King!' "
Our religious vocabulary is full of such claims as this. On this night, especially, we look forward to the birth of the "Prince of Peace." Indeed, there are likely a few who have taken the time to sing or to listen to Handel's Messiah where we laud the "King of kings, Lord of lords!" In a culture where we attempt to draw boundaries between church and state, such claims can be confusing at best.
If God is king ... or to use modern parlance, president, then what do we do with the fellow occupying office at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? After all, we hear in scripture that we cannot have two masters, for we will love one and hate the other (Matthew 6:24). What, one has to ask, are good Christians to do?
Some follow the impulse to "Christianize" the government. We are, after all, a "Christian nation." The fiction of this former statement notwithstanding, this is a route followed by a vocal minority. Another impulse might be to ignore the guy in the White House and try to simply follow God's law -- assuming we can find consensus on that.
Neither of these options seem satisfactory, even as we await the birth of the King of kings. Perhaps a modest suggestion is in order.
What if our language revealed to us a hierarchy of sorts? What if this Messiah, this Prince of Peace, this Emmanuel, is indeed our true leader? To this one we owe our final fealty. This, however, does not erase the need for a viable civil government that guarantees the rights of all and protects the most vulnerable among us. Even with Jesus Christ as Lord, we will still need roads, hospitals, schools, and a decent sanitation department.
The difficulty comes, however, when civil government asks or demands things of us that we know will not please God. Herein lies the call to conscience, the opportunity for prayer and debate, the need for open hearts and committed lives of prayer. And, as Martin Luther King Jr., Daniel Berrigan, Dorothy Day, and a host of others have done, it may come to a choice to prayerfully disobey the civil government in order to maintain obedience to God. But remember, it has ever been thus. Even Saint Paul was forced to write some of his letters from a jail cell.
So what say you? On this Christmas Eve, let the bells ring out! Let the celebration begin! For Christ our Lord is born! He is our sovereign Lord, who claims our final loyalty. As we gaze on the manger scene let us also gaze on the public square where together we meet the common need and advance the cause of the vulnerable among us.
But if not, the texts for preaching this year are the great classics. Isaiah charges our imagination with hope. Paul, in his memo scratched off to Titus, ties our hope to the tangible. And Luke, as he recounts the first Christmas, makes the tangible wondrously strange and compelling.
One child, learning to recite the Lord's Prayer about this time of year, petitioned God to "forgive us our Christmases as we forgive those who Christmas against us." If we respond appropriately to the lessons for today, nothing need be forgiven.
Isaiah 9:2-7
Sometimes a baby can change everything, as Bret Harte humorously noted in his great short story "The Luck of Roaring Camp." Cherokee Sal, the local woman of ill-repute, died as she gave birth to a male child in a rough and tumble California gold mining camp. No one could be sure who the father was, so the entire company waited in strange silence to hear the baby's first wail. Then everything began to change. First, suitable sleeping quarters had to be found for the infant, and a fancy crib was imported all the way from San Francisco. Then the tiny tyke had to be fed, so milk had to be brought in, and a cow was procured, turning these fighters and brawlers into pastoral farmers. Of course, those who fed the child needed to wash their hands first, but that only gave evidence of how filthy their bodies and clothes were, so bathing and showering and clothes-washing facilities suddenly sprouted up. More than that, because newborns need quiet time to sleep, the entire noisy shantytown shut down for several hours every afternoon, and drunken yelling and gun firing was outlawed at night. In a few amazing months, Roaring Camp became civilized and decent. All because of a baby boy whose parentage was uncertain.
We know the story well from its New Testament gospel-telling, but Isaiah gives the visionary rendition here in chapter 9. Assyria looms on the horizon, scarfing up nations left and right in a bid to become the first major superpower of the ancient near east. To the north of Jerusalem (where Isaiah is living and appears to be working as a court recorder or scribe or special priest attached to the royal family), Israel and Syria are playing a no-win game of trying to create faltering coalitions to stop the approaching steamroller. Spitting into the wind would be more successful. Still, they argue with King Ahaz of Judah and try to bully him into joining their lost cause.
Meanwhile, like the leader of the loyal opposition, Isaiah airs his party's proposals in the weekly prophetic address. Yahweh will not countenance a shaky and doomed alliance with the boys up north. Nor, on the other hand, should Ahaz look south to Egypt for a favor; it will only come back to bite him. Instead, in the rich tradition of covenant promises, Ahaz and Judah should wait for Yahweh's peculiar brand of salvation. It will come on time. It will be sufficient. And it will bring glory both to Yahweh and the people.
How will it happen? Isaiah sees the national victory celebration originating with the birth of a child within the royal family. Even as the darkness of Assyrian evil encroaches on Galilee (so 9:1-2; think of Elie Wiesel's Night, or Tolkien's bleak kingdom of Mordor in the Lord of the Rings trilogy), a deliverer will be born in David's divinely inspired line (see 2 Samuel 7) who will lead the armies of Judah to victory against overwhelming odds, just as Moses did when the Israelites first fell under the dark terror of the Midianites (Isaiah 9:4; see Numbers 31).
The people of Judah did, indeed, avoid succumbing to the seemingly unstoppable Assyrian onslaught. It happened when Ahaz' own son, Hezekiah, came to the throne in 715 BC. Although his father's leadership was at best a cowardly dance of compromise and collusion, Hezekiah had the fortitude to keep Judah neutral in the pressure cooker of international intrigue. He had to trust Yahweh for deliverance which was miraculously brought in 701 BC when the Assyrian masses disappeared overnight (Greek historian, Herodotus, confirms this surprising departure as a result of some strange plague).
While this is likely the anticipated event forecast by Isaiah, there are long-range implications that leap over into the New Testament and find their culmination only in Jesus. For one thing, after the Assyrians, there would always come another threat (Babylon, then Persia, then Greece, then Rome ...). No typical human king, regardless of his strength or prowess, would be able to keep defeating wave after wave of global conquerors, simply because he would die after two or three decades of leadership.
Second, Isaiah's prophecies increasingly looked beyond the immediate challenges to find a picture of the messianic kingdom, the age of full deliverance, and the time of transcendent renewal. Israel's mission would never be complete until all the nations of the earth came under the sway of its covenanted relationship with Yahweh (see Isaiah 2:1-5). This would require a new and decisive incursion by Yahweh into the affairs of the human race, putting an end to the chicanery of devil's dances, and restoring the fallen creation to a new age of imputed righteousness. Such an outcome could never depend on any mere temporal ruler. A larger-than-life deliverer was humanity's only hope.
For that reason, the church has chanted these words every Christmas. Although the end of the story has not yet been told, the beginnings of the tale of triumph did indeed emerge from the report that a new child had been born in our bawdy and boisterous shantytown world and that birth has changed everything.
Titus 2:11-14
Waiting is hard work. Paul knows it, as he writes these words to young Titus who is left to fend off the lying teachers of Crete.
Much of the time we wait impatiently. Children who have been told time and again to stop poking at the presents under the Christmas tree have now probably finished their waiting. They are no more impatient than the throngs trying to get through airport security as they travel home or away or to some idyllic sanctuary this holiday season. Nor are they alone among the masses of our world who bide their time with less than grace while others occupy their homelands, or sow their fields with landmines, or cheat them out of convoys of food and medical supplies. Sometimes the impatience of waiting is itself a saving grace. As one poet put it, "Patience is a virtue, possess it if you can; seldom in a woman, and never in a man!"
But many times we wait in anticipation: the countdown to graduation, the marking of months from pregnancy to birth, the security of a looming cost-of-living hike in wages, the grade-level promotion, the arrival of relatives for holiday gatherings, and the clock- work culmination of incarceration at end of sentence. Anticipation is a virtue married to patience. Without anticipation, patience can degenerate into cynicism and insanity. Even patience with unfounded anticipation becomes the grist for horror stories. The musical tale of "Delta Dawn" is a case in point. Swept off her feet by a charming and devious lover when just a teenaged nobody in Brownsville, Texas, Dawn is left at the altar by a con man who stole her heart and her mind. Gone a bit loony after that failure to launch, she wanders the streets wearing her wedding dress, holding a rotted bouquet, and mumbling strange wishes and hopes and dreams and promises, looking for a bridegroom who will never show.
Samuel Beckett believed the Christian church was that weirdo wacko. His play, Waiting for Godot, hints that those who believe Jesus is returning are like Vladimir and Estragon, holding nonsense conversations around an odd tree (think the cross of Calvary) throughout the changing and meaningless seasons of existence. When they almost give up hope and are about to take hold of their times and circumstances as real men ought to do, a messenger (think preacher) shows up and says that Godot is, in fact, still planning to come. When they ask this bearer of good news (think gospel) whether he has himself seen Godot or talked with him, the answer is no, the message actually was handed to him by others (think scripture). Beckett's waiters may anticipate something, but the audience, set outside of stage time, sees the folly in it all because the waiting is unfounded. Godot will never come. There will be no resolution to this ill- gotten exercise. Faith is futile.
What makes Paul's urge to anticipation anything other than Godot's shameful nonsense? Paul hangs his future courage on one single hook: Jesus came once. He lived. He talked. He healed. He taught. He died. He came back to life.
Jesus' first coming is the guarantee that makes the anticipation of faith a confident and rational activity. Since God invaded our world in the person and presence of Jesus, we can be sure that the promises made through Jesus will be fulfilled. Christmas is a day of remembering promises made and kept so that others which are still in process can be trusted. As the Old Testament people of God waited during prophetic times for the coming of the messiah, so we, the New Testament people of God, wait during the apostolic age for the coming of the messiah. We do not trust a mythical fantasy, created for mass delusion; we are confident that the one who came once will return again to make all things new.
A young man named Sean Coxe had come to an impasse in his life. His marriage was over, his job lost, his savings drained, and he no longer had a place to live. In bitterness, he took his last $300 to buy an airplane ticket to go see his dad, living in Florida. Sean had always been close with his father, and they had weathered a number of difficulties together in the past. Now, in this new crisis of life, Sean could think of nowhere else to go, and no one else to reach out to.
As they stood behind Sean's parents' condominium, facing the evening waters of the Gulf of Mexico, an astoundingly colorful and heart-wrenchingly beautiful sunset washed over them. In silence, they waited until all the crafting of hues and nuances had finished. Finally Sean's dad brought them back to earth with the usual rhetorical question, "Beautiful, wasn't it?"
The cynicism of Sean's tortured soul roared back in bitterness, "Sure, but if you would take all these wonderful sunsets for a lifetime, and put them next to one another, it probably wouldn't amount to more than twenty minutes."
"Maybe so, son," said his father. "But those twenty minutes would help us understand all the rest, wouldn't they?"
This is the point of Paul's encouragement to Titus. We are forced to wait for many things in life, including the promises of our religious faith. Will we grow angry or bitter or cynical with impatience? Will we become foolish in scandalous religious rites that hold no meaning? Or will we trust the record of God's historical activity and find the strength of our hopeful courage through anticipation of that which is still to come?
Luke 2:1-14 (15-20)
This story is so familiar to us that it can bring panic to the preacher who is supposed to preach on it once again. But there are a few things often overlooked in our multiplied recitals. While Luke focuses on the great gift of Jesus given at Bethlehem, he tosses in a number of fascinating surprises.
First, this is the wrong gift for God to give. Mary has a baby. So what? Babies are helpless and tiny and cannot even care for themselves, let alone change world affairs. As George MacDonald put it powerfully in one of his poems:
They all were looking for a King
To slay their foes and lift them high;
Thou cam'st a little Baby thing
That made a woman cry!
Why should a birth in the backwaters of a troubled Roman province have any impact on the world, especially with all of the truly remarkable power plays that had been engineered by the greatest ruler the world had known to date? For God to give a child to the people seemed less impressive than a catastrophic flood (as in the days of Noah), or the parting of surging waters (like the Red Sea or the Jordan River), or the great plagues thrown down on Egypt, or making the sun and moon stand still until the day of battle had been won. A baby? If anything was to come of this child it would first have to survive (not an easy feat in a society stacked against longevity), get training (a slim offering), gain international recognition (truly unlikely), and then make a meaningful difference even though it did not have access to any of the tools of politics or warfare. This seemed to be the wrong gift for God to give.
Second, it was given to the wrong people. While shepherds may have enjoyed a good reputation in ancient Israel, their careers had fallen on hard times. Jacob and his family might have prided themselves before the Pharaoh of Egypt as herdsmen, and David may have made a name for pastoral kings and shepherding Gods (think of Psalm 23), but in first-century Palestine, shepherds were unwelcome and unwanted. The Mishnah warned against six occupations that should never be entered by God-fearing Jews; top of the list was shepherding. The rabbis of the day urged people to have no dealings and no contact with those involved in five careers, one of which was shepherding. In fact, one might say that Willie Nelson's famous song, "Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys," is only a recent reincarnation of an ancient rabbinical warning, "Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Shepherds."
Why should shepherds be ignored and despised? There were four interrelated reasons. First, shepherds did not obey boundary markers in the tending of their sheep, so they trespassed on private property. Along with this, they had gotten a reputation for having sticky fingers, picking up things that did not belong to them. Second, because there was a kind of honor among thieves, no shepherd was allowed to give testimony in court since they were all a pack of liars anyway. Third, because of their constant work with feces and dead animals, shepherds tended to be in a perpetual state of ritual impurity. For that reason, shepherds were generally not allowed to enter synagogues or the temple and would not be expected or welcomed in any places of worship. Fourth, there were rumors around that while shepherds watched their flocks by night, there was often a little hanky- panky going on between the shepherds and their sheep. For these reasons, shepherds had come to be part of the marginalized outcasts of society, and no good religious person would work with them, eat with them, worship with them, or allow them into courts or synagogues.
This makes the idea of having the birth announced to shepherds quite astonishing. Among all the people to whom the message could be given, it is the shepherds who are told that a Savior was born to them. This is in keeping with Luke's constant reminder that Jesus came for the lost and the last and the least of society. When we dress up shepherds and make them fuzzy pets for our Currier & Ives Christmas pageants, we are undermining the essence of the gospel as it was originally given.
Third, the gift of God through Jesus was given at the wrong time. Luke tells us that this all happened during the days of Caesar Augustus. He also notes that the song of the angels was that declaring "peace on earth." But such a message was pointless. Caesar Augustus had created the great Pax Romana, the Roman world peace, that brought stability and harmony to all of the nations of the Mediterranean basin. There was no need for God to pretend to give peace in this grand age of Roman tranquility. Even the doors of the famous temple of Janus in Rome had been closed for decades. They stood open when the Roman legions were at battle, since the two-headed god was lord of the fields of conquest, being able to see both ahead and behind.
Why should God presume to give peace when it was no longer needed? That becomes the perennial question for Christian preaching. What is the peace that is at hand, and why is it insufficient? What is the transcending peace that only God can promise or bring, especially when it is to be achieved by the bloody death of this Christmas child grown older?
Fourth, the gift of Jesus is given in the wrong place. As the magi of Matthew's incarnation story knew (see Matthew 2), a king should be born in a palace. Jerusalem was the local royalty shop, so that is where people ought to look for someone to emerge as deliverer and ruler. A better place, of course, would be Rome. That was the center of world domination. There the mighty ones who moved the chess pieces of the global board were plotting and scheming.
Yet it is here in backwater Bethlehem that the Messiah is born. If we were to tell the story, it would be very different. Maybe, though, it is the brilliantly unusual nature of the event that makes it still fresh to us, even if we have heard it a time or three.
Application
The old Burt Bacharach song, "What The World Needs Now," could draw all of these passages together in a unified homily. A comprehensive set of moves might look like this: What do we really need (Isaiah); when will it come (Titus); where will we find it (Luke)?
Alternative Application
Luke 2:1-14 (15-20). The materials given for the gospel lesson are sufficient to make that story come out fresh. Give it a try!
Preaching The Psalm
Psalm 96
"Say to the nations, 'The Lord is King!' "
Our religious vocabulary is full of such claims as this. On this night, especially, we look forward to the birth of the "Prince of Peace." Indeed, there are likely a few who have taken the time to sing or to listen to Handel's Messiah where we laud the "King of kings, Lord of lords!" In a culture where we attempt to draw boundaries between church and state, such claims can be confusing at best.
If God is king ... or to use modern parlance, president, then what do we do with the fellow occupying office at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? After all, we hear in scripture that we cannot have two masters, for we will love one and hate the other (Matthew 6:24). What, one has to ask, are good Christians to do?
Some follow the impulse to "Christianize" the government. We are, after all, a "Christian nation." The fiction of this former statement notwithstanding, this is a route followed by a vocal minority. Another impulse might be to ignore the guy in the White House and try to simply follow God's law -- assuming we can find consensus on that.
Neither of these options seem satisfactory, even as we await the birth of the King of kings. Perhaps a modest suggestion is in order.
What if our language revealed to us a hierarchy of sorts? What if this Messiah, this Prince of Peace, this Emmanuel, is indeed our true leader? To this one we owe our final fealty. This, however, does not erase the need for a viable civil government that guarantees the rights of all and protects the most vulnerable among us. Even with Jesus Christ as Lord, we will still need roads, hospitals, schools, and a decent sanitation department.
The difficulty comes, however, when civil government asks or demands things of us that we know will not please God. Herein lies the call to conscience, the opportunity for prayer and debate, the need for open hearts and committed lives of prayer. And, as Martin Luther King Jr., Daniel Berrigan, Dorothy Day, and a host of others have done, it may come to a choice to prayerfully disobey the civil government in order to maintain obedience to God. But remember, it has ever been thus. Even Saint Paul was forced to write some of his letters from a jail cell.
So what say you? On this Christmas Eve, let the bells ring out! Let the celebration begin! For Christ our Lord is born! He is our sovereign Lord, who claims our final loyalty. As we gaze on the manger scene let us also gaze on the public square where together we meet the common need and advance the cause of the vulnerable among us.
