Away with the Stable
Sermon
FROM ANTICIPATION TO TRANSFIGURATION
Sermons For Advent, Christmas, & Epiphany
If we could change some of our images of the Christmas story, it would mean more to us. If we could get the birth narrative straight, it would not be diminished but enriched.
Luke records the incident of Christ's birth in a very simple and a very beautiful way: "[Mary] gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn."
Regardless of the stories that we have been told and hear about the little Bethlehem hotel being full, in spite of all of the criticism that we have heaped upon the innkeeper because he sent pregnant Mary outside to a cold stable, and no matter how many stables are erected in homes and on church parking lots - there is the possibility that Jesus was not born in a stable. The Gospel of Luke does not mention Mary and Joseph arriving at Bethlehem at the last minute. Nor does Luke say that they scurried around to find a place to lodge because the baby was about to be born. Luke simply says "while they were there," as though they had arrived several days ahead of Jesus' birth.
Luke makes no mention of a stable. He merely comments on the fact that Mary "gave birth to her first-born son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger." Luke wrote not one word about a hotel or an innkeeper who cold-heartedly turned the family away. There is no way to know how many Christmas pageants have portrayed the bad innkeeper who turned Mary and Joseph away from the door. According to Luke's Gospel, that hard innkeeper and his tiny inn did not exist.
Luke tells the story another way.
In Luke's Gospel the word which is typically translated as "inn" is the Greek word kataluma. It is interesting to note that in the story of the Good Samaritan, Luke does not use the word kataluma to describe the inn to which the beaten man was taken. He uses another word to describe the place of lodging beside the Jericho Road. However, Luke tells about Jesus sending two of his disciples to find a kataluma for the serving of the Last Supper. Thus in Luke, the word kataluma literally means a "guest room." As Luke tells the story of the nativity, it is just possible that a proper translation would be something like this: "She gave birth to her first-born son and laid him in a manger because there was no place for them in the guest room."
Logic suggests that there is some basis for this translation. Bethlehem probably had no inn or hotel since it was only six miles from Jerusalem, a mere two-hour walk. Furthermore, Bethlehem was not located on a main highway. The Roman roads in that region bypassed the City of David and went directly to Jerusalem. In all probability, this small village had no need for an inn.
If Mary and Joseph had come here for a census, it is not unlikely that they had relatives living in Bethlehem with whom they could have stayed. It is possible that the carpenter from Nazareth and his young wife arrived a few days before the birth of their son and found the kataluma, the "guest room", already occupied by other relatives and guests. Since there was no room in the guest room, they might have lodged in the main room with the homeowner and his family. Thus, it may be that Jesus was not born in the inn or guest room, but right out in the middle of the main room of the house.
We cannot fully appreciate the message of Luke unless we first understand the configuration of a Palestinian house. In those days a peasant's house was a simple, one-room affair. A man, his wife, their family, and all of their belongings were concentrated in one main room. If the owner of the house had sufficient resources, he would build a small room, or kataluma. It was not uncommon for travelers to be offered a couple's guest room or inn as a place of lodging.
In the dead cold of winter, it was not uncommon for a Palestinian family to bring into their house all of the livestock. This provided shelter for the animals, and the heat of the beasts' bodies provided warmth for all who resided in the house. Usually the central room had an upper and a lower level. The family lived on the upper level while the cattle were kept on the lower level, possibly a foot or two lower than the rest of the house. On the step, next to where the cattle were lodged, there would have been a manger area. The location for the manger was a place scooped out to create a trough where the cattle could be fed. It was in that manger area, right in the middle of the house, that Palestinian women gave birth to their children so that the newborn might have the comfort of the manger's straw.
Listen carefully to what Luke is saying to his reader when the story is told in this way. He said that Mary gave birth to Jesus right in the middle of the house because there was no room in the kataluma, or "guest room." Luke wanted his readers to hear something very special. He wanted his words to convey the notion that Jesus, the Son of God, was born, not off in the guest room, but right in the midst of smelly hay, snorting animals, anxious on-lookers, and the tenderness and love of the family circle. Jesus, our Savior, was born just like all other children of that day. He was tenderly placed precisely where all other children of that day were cradled. When the Magi arrived from afar, they came, as Matthew said, "into the house [where] they saw the child with Mary, his mother." (Matthew 2:11)
If we experience the birth of Christ on Christmas Eve, it will not be in the guest rooms of our lives, but right in the middle of it all. We will experience his birth right in the midst of people who love each other. We will feel his birth not in the kataluma, but in the pain of the world where his influence still says, "be reconciled to God." (2 Corinthians 5:20) We will see his yearning to be born again in the Middle East where his voice still cries out for peace and good will on earth. We will find him, not in the side rooms of life, but with the poor, the imprisoned, and the hungry. If we listen closely, we can still hear his voice saying, "As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did this to me." (Matthew 25:40)
One of the traditions in my family is to gather at my wife's home on Christmas Day to break bread and open gifts. For almost twenty-three years I have joined my family in that ritual. Until my wife's grandfather died, one of the tender moments of every December twenty-fifth had been Granddaddy's prayer before the Christmas feast. All of the family would gather in one room, and Granddaddy, his voice quiet but confident, would pray the same prayer every year. "Help us," he would say, "not to forget the birth of the One whom we remember on this day." He would pray that simple prayer right in the midst of it all: the aroma of the almost-done turkey, the eager grandchildren, the large room littered with wrapping paper, and the growling stomachs and tender taste buds. Granddaddy had never heard of the kataluma, but he prayed as though Christ had not been pushed into the guest room of his life.
Frederick Buechner, a well-known writer and preacher, was invited to teach a course in preaching at a Protestant seminary. Uncertainty gripped him because he had never ventured into teaching homiletics. He began by teaching his students how to draft introductions, conclusions, and thesis statements. But toward the middle of the semester, he came to the silent conclusion that what he was teaching the students did not amount to very much. After apparent failure, he took a different approach. Instead of teaching the theory of preaching, he decided to teach his students about feelings. He said, "I tell them to pay special attention to those times when they find tears in their eyes."
That's where Christ is born. If we want Christ to be born in the cradles of our hearts, we might do well to look for him in those experiences which cause emotions to surface in our eyes and in our hearts. If we want a new awareness of Christ's birth, we might give attention to those times when our heart skips, a knot lumps in our throat, and feeling pulses through our veins. Here, right in the middle of it all, is where Christ is born.
Why not do away with the stable? Doing away with the stable might shatter some of our fantasies and fairy tales, but it would make a difference in how we view the Incarnation. If Jesus was born like all other peasant children, the event of his birth becomes something very positive and powerful. It means that Jesus is one of us. It means that God is present in the events and lives of ordinary people.
When we possess the understanding that God surfaces in the commonplace, then we are never the same again. When we understand that God goes to any lengths to meet us in the "stuff" of life, then we know that we can never hide from God. To see God as absent from the "stuff" of life is to deny the Incarnation.
On Christmas Eve, more than any other night of the year, we know that the God of the Christian faith is not on the boundary of life. He is Emmanuel - "God with us." If we open our ears tonight, we can hear the God who has no voice and yet who speaks in everything that is - and who, most of all, speaks in the depths of our own being. We are the words of God.
Luke 2:1-14
First Sunday of Christmastide
The Message of Christmas
Christ was not born in the clean, sterile rooms of a local hospital. He was not born in the southeastern part of the United States. He was not Caucasian. He was not American.
His humble family was not known outside the city of Nazareth. We know very little about Joseph except that he was a carpenter, a just and honorable man of the house and lineage of David. We know very little of his mother, Mary. We do know that she probably belonged to the anawiem, the poor ones of Palestine, and we know that she was a very unlikely person to be the mother of Christ.
Hebrew was Christ's language for the acquisition of knowledge. Aramaic was his mode of everyday speech. English was unknown to him. Never did he travel more than a few miles from his home town. He knew absolutely nothing about modern medicine, science, or economics.
He never went to a barbershop. He did not wear tailor-made clothing. He had no public holdings, save a tunic and some sandals. We know that his associates were simple people: fishermen, merchants, tax-collectors, and prostitutes.
More than anyone else, the religious establishment stood against him. He was accused of "stirring up" the people or, as we would say, of being a rabble-rouser. He was often misunderstood. He was not followed by many, and he had very few people who supported him when the chips were down. Very few people stayed with him as he moved toward Golgotha. We know he was given a criminal's death, and he was mockingly called "the King of the Jews."
It is the birthday of this kind of man that we are now celebrating. According to our standards of success, mine and yours, Jesus was a flop at thirty-three. He didn't have many friends; he had no holdings; he had nothing in the bank; he had no rank or standing. According to the way we judge success, Jesus never made it. By our standards, he would clearly be classified as a failure. Simeon said that the Messiah's mission would be fulfilled, but it would only be fulfilled with suffering, opposition, rebuke and scorn.
Only a small portion of what Jesus said was ever retained on the printed page. Jesus himself never wrote a book. He never wrote a poem. He never wrote a song. As far as we know, he never wrote anything that was printed and handed down from one generation to the next. Out of all that he said and did - out of all the travels, all the stories, all the parables - only a very few are contained in the few short words of four brief gospels.
In spite of all these limitations, people from every part of the world are honoring him by celebrating his birth. His influence is more far-reaching and profound than all the parliaments that ever sat or all the navies that ever plied the oceans of the world. More paintings, more books, and more music have been created in honor of this man than in honor of any person who ever lived. In his name, the hungry are still fed, the naked are still clothed, the sick are still treated, the lonely are still visited, and the bound continue to be set free.
If I listen very closely today, I can hear the voices of millions stretching from Nashville to Hong Kong, and from Hong Kong to London, as they sing the immortal hymns of Christmas. If I feel deeply enough today, I can feel in my own life what Handel must have felt when he penned the Messiah. And if I need more proof, I can listen to saints, martyrs, and average people as they relate how the inward presence of this one man has changed their lives.
Christmas, more than any other time of the year, makes us want to put into practice the principle by which Jesus lived and for which he died. It is a principle which is universal and proven true. Anyone can live by it. Anyone regardless of his or her skin pigmentation, speech, or national origin can live by this principle of love, if he or she so chooses. This principle of love, as lived out in the life of Jesus, can be as easily understood by a PhD from Vanderbilt as a poor and illiterate person from the slums of North Nashville. This principle of love, as articulated and lived out by Jesus, is so powerful that it can reunite a broken family, reunite a neighborhood, and bring distant parts of the world together into one.
Without this love, symbolized by Christmas, people lose their way and fight one another until death. When this love is absent, life gets twisted until people become cynical and bitter. Forget about this love, and self becomes God. Deny it, and cast your lot with demons. Deny it, and you cast your lot with those who believe that someday there will be a final triumph of the demonic. Practice it not, and your name is Scrooge.
The message of Christmas is very simple and yet very profound. The message of Christmas is that God has humbled himself. The message of Christmas is that glory has become simplicity, and simplicity has become glorious. The message of Christmas is that the Word has become flesh. God has become human. Heaven has come down to earth, and eternity has invaded time.
To celebrate a real Christmas is to see hope surfacing in a twisted humanity. It is to see salvation coming through the humble in spirit. It is to truly believe that the wonder of God's love can be and is embodied in flesh.
To believe in a real Christmas is to stake your life and mine on the belief that God has come, not in power, but in innocence, even in the innocence of a baby which means, of course, that God is always easy to turn down. It is hard to know without question about this kind of Christmas, but to know about this kind of Christmas is to know that Heaven is not very far away from earth and that eternity is always present in time.
Recently, I had lunch with a newspaper reporter. Although it is not always a pleasant or easy thing to do, I wanted to speak rather forthrightly to him about the way the religious community is treated in the news today. He wanted to talk to me about the meaning of the Christmas stories. We had planned to meet for lunch for forty-five minutes, but we ate and talked for nearly an hour and a half. As a good newspaper reporter does, he asked pointed questions; and I tried to give him some straight, honest answers.
We talked about the differences in the way the birth stories are pictured in the Bible. Matthew is interested in the genealogy of Jesus. He wants to get it fixed in our minds that Jesus is of the lineage of David, and so he records Jesus' genealogy at the beginning of the Gospel. Luke gives us some details about the birth story including angels, shepherds, cradles, songs, and the people's response to the birth of Christ. This Luke does in a very sensitive and telling way. Mark, on the other hand, doesn't care a thing in the world about the birth stories of Jesus. Mark is interested in the crucifixion, so he says nothing about Christ's birth. John's account of the birth of Christ waxes with eloquent poetry: "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God, and the Word was with God, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and full of truth." Saint Paul, however, never mentions the birth of Christ in any of his letters. He never says one word about the birth of Jesus.
We talked about the meanings of these different accounts - the descriptions, the implications, and the beauty in all of them. And as we talked, a newspaper reporter - who, of all people, is supposed to be objective, hard, and a bit cynical because he sees the back-end of life so much - looked across the table and said with a quiver in his lip, "Joe, now that we have talked about all of these birth stories, it seems to me that the human mind could not have invented a tale like this."
I believe that this is true - the human mind could not have invented a tale like this because these birth stories are about the Ultimate.
When I was a student at Vanderbilt Divinity School, I was very interested in a theologian by the name of Paul Tillich. I learned in my theology classes that one of the central teachings of Paul Tillich was that whatever our ultimate concern is, this is our "god." If our ultimate concern is money, then money is our "god." If our ultimate concern is our position, then our position is our "god." If our ultimate concern is security, then security is "god." If our ultimate concern is having a good name, then our good name becomes "god." According to Paul Tillich whatever our ultimate concern is, that is "god" for us. Well, I was just full of all this talk as a young seminarian.
One weekend, I went to my little country church down in West Tennessee. I enjoyed talking to a member of that church. His name was Corney Kent. Now, Corney is an awkward name, to say the least. But I used to tell Corney that if I ever had a son, I would name him "Corney"; and both my wife and his wife would say, "I dare you."
Corney was not an educated man but he was a wise man. On Saturday afternoon I would go to the cotton gin to talk to Corney. We would fall into conversation about this and that. I told Corney what Paul Tillich had taught me that week about ultimate concern: whatever our ultimate concern is that is our "god." I waxed eloquent with old Corney as he sat across the room in his cane-bottomed chair. Dressed in his bib overalls with his glasses pulled down on the end of his nose, he chewed on his old corncob pipe and listened very carefully and attentively to me.
After I had finished my little mini-theology lesson with Corney, I turned to him and I said, "Corney, what is your ultimate concern in life?"
He twisted his pipe around between his lips a little bit, moved his glasses back up on his nose, and peered across the room at me, and said, "That the Ultimate is concerned about me."
That is the meaning of Christmas - that the Ultimate is concerned about us. The Ultimate was so concerned about us that he took flesh upon himself and dwelt among us so that we might have a human picture of what God is like. And as the Ultimate is concerned about us, so should we be concerned about each other.
Luke records the incident of Christ's birth in a very simple and a very beautiful way: "[Mary] gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn."
Regardless of the stories that we have been told and hear about the little Bethlehem hotel being full, in spite of all of the criticism that we have heaped upon the innkeeper because he sent pregnant Mary outside to a cold stable, and no matter how many stables are erected in homes and on church parking lots - there is the possibility that Jesus was not born in a stable. The Gospel of Luke does not mention Mary and Joseph arriving at Bethlehem at the last minute. Nor does Luke say that they scurried around to find a place to lodge because the baby was about to be born. Luke simply says "while they were there," as though they had arrived several days ahead of Jesus' birth.
Luke makes no mention of a stable. He merely comments on the fact that Mary "gave birth to her first-born son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger." Luke wrote not one word about a hotel or an innkeeper who cold-heartedly turned the family away. There is no way to know how many Christmas pageants have portrayed the bad innkeeper who turned Mary and Joseph away from the door. According to Luke's Gospel, that hard innkeeper and his tiny inn did not exist.
Luke tells the story another way.
In Luke's Gospel the word which is typically translated as "inn" is the Greek word kataluma. It is interesting to note that in the story of the Good Samaritan, Luke does not use the word kataluma to describe the inn to which the beaten man was taken. He uses another word to describe the place of lodging beside the Jericho Road. However, Luke tells about Jesus sending two of his disciples to find a kataluma for the serving of the Last Supper. Thus in Luke, the word kataluma literally means a "guest room." As Luke tells the story of the nativity, it is just possible that a proper translation would be something like this: "She gave birth to her first-born son and laid him in a manger because there was no place for them in the guest room."
Logic suggests that there is some basis for this translation. Bethlehem probably had no inn or hotel since it was only six miles from Jerusalem, a mere two-hour walk. Furthermore, Bethlehem was not located on a main highway. The Roman roads in that region bypassed the City of David and went directly to Jerusalem. In all probability, this small village had no need for an inn.
If Mary and Joseph had come here for a census, it is not unlikely that they had relatives living in Bethlehem with whom they could have stayed. It is possible that the carpenter from Nazareth and his young wife arrived a few days before the birth of their son and found the kataluma, the "guest room", already occupied by other relatives and guests. Since there was no room in the guest room, they might have lodged in the main room with the homeowner and his family. Thus, it may be that Jesus was not born in the inn or guest room, but right out in the middle of the main room of the house.
We cannot fully appreciate the message of Luke unless we first understand the configuration of a Palestinian house. In those days a peasant's house was a simple, one-room affair. A man, his wife, their family, and all of their belongings were concentrated in one main room. If the owner of the house had sufficient resources, he would build a small room, or kataluma. It was not uncommon for travelers to be offered a couple's guest room or inn as a place of lodging.
In the dead cold of winter, it was not uncommon for a Palestinian family to bring into their house all of the livestock. This provided shelter for the animals, and the heat of the beasts' bodies provided warmth for all who resided in the house. Usually the central room had an upper and a lower level. The family lived on the upper level while the cattle were kept on the lower level, possibly a foot or two lower than the rest of the house. On the step, next to where the cattle were lodged, there would have been a manger area. The location for the manger was a place scooped out to create a trough where the cattle could be fed. It was in that manger area, right in the middle of the house, that Palestinian women gave birth to their children so that the newborn might have the comfort of the manger's straw.
Listen carefully to what Luke is saying to his reader when the story is told in this way. He said that Mary gave birth to Jesus right in the middle of the house because there was no room in the kataluma, or "guest room." Luke wanted his readers to hear something very special. He wanted his words to convey the notion that Jesus, the Son of God, was born, not off in the guest room, but right in the midst of smelly hay, snorting animals, anxious on-lookers, and the tenderness and love of the family circle. Jesus, our Savior, was born just like all other children of that day. He was tenderly placed precisely where all other children of that day were cradled. When the Magi arrived from afar, they came, as Matthew said, "into the house [where] they saw the child with Mary, his mother." (Matthew 2:11)
If we experience the birth of Christ on Christmas Eve, it will not be in the guest rooms of our lives, but right in the middle of it all. We will experience his birth right in the midst of people who love each other. We will feel his birth not in the kataluma, but in the pain of the world where his influence still says, "be reconciled to God." (2 Corinthians 5:20) We will see his yearning to be born again in the Middle East where his voice still cries out for peace and good will on earth. We will find him, not in the side rooms of life, but with the poor, the imprisoned, and the hungry. If we listen closely, we can still hear his voice saying, "As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did this to me." (Matthew 25:40)
One of the traditions in my family is to gather at my wife's home on Christmas Day to break bread and open gifts. For almost twenty-three years I have joined my family in that ritual. Until my wife's grandfather died, one of the tender moments of every December twenty-fifth had been Granddaddy's prayer before the Christmas feast. All of the family would gather in one room, and Granddaddy, his voice quiet but confident, would pray the same prayer every year. "Help us," he would say, "not to forget the birth of the One whom we remember on this day." He would pray that simple prayer right in the midst of it all: the aroma of the almost-done turkey, the eager grandchildren, the large room littered with wrapping paper, and the growling stomachs and tender taste buds. Granddaddy had never heard of the kataluma, but he prayed as though Christ had not been pushed into the guest room of his life.
Frederick Buechner, a well-known writer and preacher, was invited to teach a course in preaching at a Protestant seminary. Uncertainty gripped him because he had never ventured into teaching homiletics. He began by teaching his students how to draft introductions, conclusions, and thesis statements. But toward the middle of the semester, he came to the silent conclusion that what he was teaching the students did not amount to very much. After apparent failure, he took a different approach. Instead of teaching the theory of preaching, he decided to teach his students about feelings. He said, "I tell them to pay special attention to those times when they find tears in their eyes."
That's where Christ is born. If we want Christ to be born in the cradles of our hearts, we might do well to look for him in those experiences which cause emotions to surface in our eyes and in our hearts. If we want a new awareness of Christ's birth, we might give attention to those times when our heart skips, a knot lumps in our throat, and feeling pulses through our veins. Here, right in the middle of it all, is where Christ is born.
Why not do away with the stable? Doing away with the stable might shatter some of our fantasies and fairy tales, but it would make a difference in how we view the Incarnation. If Jesus was born like all other peasant children, the event of his birth becomes something very positive and powerful. It means that Jesus is one of us. It means that God is present in the events and lives of ordinary people.
When we possess the understanding that God surfaces in the commonplace, then we are never the same again. When we understand that God goes to any lengths to meet us in the "stuff" of life, then we know that we can never hide from God. To see God as absent from the "stuff" of life is to deny the Incarnation.
On Christmas Eve, more than any other night of the year, we know that the God of the Christian faith is not on the boundary of life. He is Emmanuel - "God with us." If we open our ears tonight, we can hear the God who has no voice and yet who speaks in everything that is - and who, most of all, speaks in the depths of our own being. We are the words of God.
Luke 2:1-14
First Sunday of Christmastide
The Message of Christmas
Christ was not born in the clean, sterile rooms of a local hospital. He was not born in the southeastern part of the United States. He was not Caucasian. He was not American.
His humble family was not known outside the city of Nazareth. We know very little about Joseph except that he was a carpenter, a just and honorable man of the house and lineage of David. We know very little of his mother, Mary. We do know that she probably belonged to the anawiem, the poor ones of Palestine, and we know that she was a very unlikely person to be the mother of Christ.
Hebrew was Christ's language for the acquisition of knowledge. Aramaic was his mode of everyday speech. English was unknown to him. Never did he travel more than a few miles from his home town. He knew absolutely nothing about modern medicine, science, or economics.
He never went to a barbershop. He did not wear tailor-made clothing. He had no public holdings, save a tunic and some sandals. We know that his associates were simple people: fishermen, merchants, tax-collectors, and prostitutes.
More than anyone else, the religious establishment stood against him. He was accused of "stirring up" the people or, as we would say, of being a rabble-rouser. He was often misunderstood. He was not followed by many, and he had very few people who supported him when the chips were down. Very few people stayed with him as he moved toward Golgotha. We know he was given a criminal's death, and he was mockingly called "the King of the Jews."
It is the birthday of this kind of man that we are now celebrating. According to our standards of success, mine and yours, Jesus was a flop at thirty-three. He didn't have many friends; he had no holdings; he had nothing in the bank; he had no rank or standing. According to the way we judge success, Jesus never made it. By our standards, he would clearly be classified as a failure. Simeon said that the Messiah's mission would be fulfilled, but it would only be fulfilled with suffering, opposition, rebuke and scorn.
Only a small portion of what Jesus said was ever retained on the printed page. Jesus himself never wrote a book. He never wrote a poem. He never wrote a song. As far as we know, he never wrote anything that was printed and handed down from one generation to the next. Out of all that he said and did - out of all the travels, all the stories, all the parables - only a very few are contained in the few short words of four brief gospels.
In spite of all these limitations, people from every part of the world are honoring him by celebrating his birth. His influence is more far-reaching and profound than all the parliaments that ever sat or all the navies that ever plied the oceans of the world. More paintings, more books, and more music have been created in honor of this man than in honor of any person who ever lived. In his name, the hungry are still fed, the naked are still clothed, the sick are still treated, the lonely are still visited, and the bound continue to be set free.
If I listen very closely today, I can hear the voices of millions stretching from Nashville to Hong Kong, and from Hong Kong to London, as they sing the immortal hymns of Christmas. If I feel deeply enough today, I can feel in my own life what Handel must have felt when he penned the Messiah. And if I need more proof, I can listen to saints, martyrs, and average people as they relate how the inward presence of this one man has changed their lives.
Christmas, more than any other time of the year, makes us want to put into practice the principle by which Jesus lived and for which he died. It is a principle which is universal and proven true. Anyone can live by it. Anyone regardless of his or her skin pigmentation, speech, or national origin can live by this principle of love, if he or she so chooses. This principle of love, as lived out in the life of Jesus, can be as easily understood by a PhD from Vanderbilt as a poor and illiterate person from the slums of North Nashville. This principle of love, as articulated and lived out by Jesus, is so powerful that it can reunite a broken family, reunite a neighborhood, and bring distant parts of the world together into one.
Without this love, symbolized by Christmas, people lose their way and fight one another until death. When this love is absent, life gets twisted until people become cynical and bitter. Forget about this love, and self becomes God. Deny it, and cast your lot with demons. Deny it, and you cast your lot with those who believe that someday there will be a final triumph of the demonic. Practice it not, and your name is Scrooge.
The message of Christmas is very simple and yet very profound. The message of Christmas is that God has humbled himself. The message of Christmas is that glory has become simplicity, and simplicity has become glorious. The message of Christmas is that the Word has become flesh. God has become human. Heaven has come down to earth, and eternity has invaded time.
To celebrate a real Christmas is to see hope surfacing in a twisted humanity. It is to see salvation coming through the humble in spirit. It is to truly believe that the wonder of God's love can be and is embodied in flesh.
To believe in a real Christmas is to stake your life and mine on the belief that God has come, not in power, but in innocence, even in the innocence of a baby which means, of course, that God is always easy to turn down. It is hard to know without question about this kind of Christmas, but to know about this kind of Christmas is to know that Heaven is not very far away from earth and that eternity is always present in time.
Recently, I had lunch with a newspaper reporter. Although it is not always a pleasant or easy thing to do, I wanted to speak rather forthrightly to him about the way the religious community is treated in the news today. He wanted to talk to me about the meaning of the Christmas stories. We had planned to meet for lunch for forty-five minutes, but we ate and talked for nearly an hour and a half. As a good newspaper reporter does, he asked pointed questions; and I tried to give him some straight, honest answers.
We talked about the differences in the way the birth stories are pictured in the Bible. Matthew is interested in the genealogy of Jesus. He wants to get it fixed in our minds that Jesus is of the lineage of David, and so he records Jesus' genealogy at the beginning of the Gospel. Luke gives us some details about the birth story including angels, shepherds, cradles, songs, and the people's response to the birth of Christ. This Luke does in a very sensitive and telling way. Mark, on the other hand, doesn't care a thing in the world about the birth stories of Jesus. Mark is interested in the crucifixion, so he says nothing about Christ's birth. John's account of the birth of Christ waxes with eloquent poetry: "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God, and the Word was with God, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and full of truth." Saint Paul, however, never mentions the birth of Christ in any of his letters. He never says one word about the birth of Jesus.
We talked about the meanings of these different accounts - the descriptions, the implications, and the beauty in all of them. And as we talked, a newspaper reporter - who, of all people, is supposed to be objective, hard, and a bit cynical because he sees the back-end of life so much - looked across the table and said with a quiver in his lip, "Joe, now that we have talked about all of these birth stories, it seems to me that the human mind could not have invented a tale like this."
I believe that this is true - the human mind could not have invented a tale like this because these birth stories are about the Ultimate.
When I was a student at Vanderbilt Divinity School, I was very interested in a theologian by the name of Paul Tillich. I learned in my theology classes that one of the central teachings of Paul Tillich was that whatever our ultimate concern is, this is our "god." If our ultimate concern is money, then money is our "god." If our ultimate concern is our position, then our position is our "god." If our ultimate concern is security, then security is "god." If our ultimate concern is having a good name, then our good name becomes "god." According to Paul Tillich whatever our ultimate concern is, that is "god" for us. Well, I was just full of all this talk as a young seminarian.
One weekend, I went to my little country church down in West Tennessee. I enjoyed talking to a member of that church. His name was Corney Kent. Now, Corney is an awkward name, to say the least. But I used to tell Corney that if I ever had a son, I would name him "Corney"; and both my wife and his wife would say, "I dare you."
Corney was not an educated man but he was a wise man. On Saturday afternoon I would go to the cotton gin to talk to Corney. We would fall into conversation about this and that. I told Corney what Paul Tillich had taught me that week about ultimate concern: whatever our ultimate concern is that is our "god." I waxed eloquent with old Corney as he sat across the room in his cane-bottomed chair. Dressed in his bib overalls with his glasses pulled down on the end of his nose, he chewed on his old corncob pipe and listened very carefully and attentively to me.
After I had finished my little mini-theology lesson with Corney, I turned to him and I said, "Corney, what is your ultimate concern in life?"
He twisted his pipe around between his lips a little bit, moved his glasses back up on his nose, and peered across the room at me, and said, "That the Ultimate is concerned about me."
That is the meaning of Christmas - that the Ultimate is concerned about us. The Ultimate was so concerned about us that he took flesh upon himself and dwelt among us so that we might have a human picture of what God is like. And as the Ultimate is concerned about us, so should we be concerned about each other.
