Little Lord Jesus
Sermon
Love's Pure Light
Christmas Candlelight Sermons and Service
Object:
"Take me to your leader" -- it's the famous cliché of bad science-fiction movies. Extraterrestrials visit earth and when they encounter their first humans, their spokes-alien demands, "Take me to your leader."
It's a perfectly reasonable request, don't you think? Celestial beings from some province far off in the heavens traverse thousands of light years of interstellar space, arrive at our humble planet, and encounter, oh, I don't know, let's say, you or me. What are they going to say? "How 'bout dem Nittany Lions?" I don't think so. "Take me to your leader" is a plausible opening line.
The story around which the Christian community gathers this festive season includes a visit from celestial beings, emissaries from a province far off in the heavens. They arrive and encounter some common folk not so different from you and me -- people living in the boonies, going about their everyday tasks.
Saint Luke has already told us not only that there were leaders to whom these heavenly messengers could have gone; he's even told us their names: Augustus Caesar of the entire Roman empire and Governor Quirinius of Syria. But the angelic messengers have no interest in emperors or governors. Their presence with the shepherds is not the result of a malfunction of their Global Positioning System. It is part of God's divine plan. To simple, humble shepherds is entrusted "good news of a great joy for all the people."
Look who occupies center stage in Luke's telling of the tale: those rustic shepherds and three homeless people (an unwed mother, the carpenter to whom she is engaged, and their seemingly illegitimate newborn son).
Look at the setting: not Rome, not Athens, not Jerusalem. Mary and Joseph make a journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem. In terms of the size and importance of the towns, it's like going from Nescopeck to Shamokin Dam.
It would be tempting to see these as mere details of the story, intriguing, but of peripheral importance. It would be tempting, and we would miss a central part of Luke's message. These are not simply incidental parts of his gospel, for as Luke tells the good news, there is a consistent emphasis on those who are the little, the least, the last, and the lost of this world -- those at the margins: women, children, the possessed and dispossessed, the destitute and downtrodden, oppressed people living in a country occupied by soldiers serving a foreign, imperialistic superpower. In short, all those whom the Bible calls "the poor." These are the special recipients of God's amazing grace and liberating love.
Those with power and privilege, who imagine themselves the center of the universe, are mostly stage dressing in Luke's gospel. The caesars and the governors are the ones T.S. Eliot describes as those "that will do ... To swell a progress, start a scene or two."1 For, in fact, that is precisely what Caesar does in the Christmas story: He starts a scene.
Caesar issues an imperial decree, and that quite literally gets things moving. He has a war machine to feed, after all. Military adventurism in far-off lands is an expensive proposition. Any fool knows that it requires additional taxes, and to tax properly, Caesar needs a census. "So all went to be enrolled," Luke tells us, "each to their own city."
The powerful, living in castles carefully constructed to buffer them from the ugly realities of the indigent, exercise their prerogatives and issue edicts; the poor are left to fend for themselves. And so a very pregnant young woman, younger than most first-year college students, and her fiancé do as the government commands: They evacuate, headed for the ancestral home, Bethlehem, leaving behind the tiny village of Nazareth.
Theologian, Carl Braaten, has this to say about Jesus' hometown: "We've been to Nazareth," he writes, "and looked around and have to say: Nazareth was a one-horse town if ever I've seen one. It's almost unbelievable that something of such world-historical meaning as the gospel of our salvation should have been conceived in this little jerkwater town."2
So Jesus, conceived in Nazareth and subsequently reared there, was born in Bethlehem, because Caesar knew little and cared less about the effects of his policies on the poor who lived under his administration. Given these humble beginnings, is it any wonder that this Jesus, born in a barn and cradled in a feed trough, would grow up to say such things as
* "The last shall be first and the first last";
* "Blessed are you poor, for the kingdom of God belongs to you"; or
* "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for the wealthy to enter the kingdom of heaven"?
Is it any wonder that he would grow up to tell
* the story of the good Samaritan;
* the parable of Lazarus and the rich man; or
* the parable of a destitute widow who gave God two tiny copper coins worth less than a penny that she put in more money than everyone else?
Jesus inverts, you see, our conventional wisdom and natural order, substituting God's odd logic and a divine order for the ways we habitually arrange our affairs. In God's grand plan, the last are first: humble shepherds are the first to hear the glad tidings of the Savior's birth, the first to enter into his divine presence.
If we ask, "Where does he get this stuff?" we need look no further than his mother Mary's song, the Magnificat:
(God) has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the imaginations of their hearts.
He has cast down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.
-- Luke 1:51-53
Like mother, like Son, there's no doubt that this is Mary's boy. He embodies the good news of which his mother sang.
The angel told the shepherds that the birth of Mary's boy was good news of a great joy for all the people. To my understanding, all the people includes both rich and poor, both privileged and marginalized. As Mary said to the archangel Gabriel, "How can this be?"
Dean Brackley, a Jesuit priest who lives and works in El Salvador, offers what I believe is a critical insight. Brackley writes:
After reflecting on these issues for some years, it only gradually dawned on me that I belong to a peculiar tribe. The middle-class cultures of the North are newcomers to world history and have only existed for about 200 years. We're not all bad people; we're just a tiny minority under the common illusion that we are the center of gravity of the universe. The poor can free us from this strange idea ...
The problem for us is that new freedoms and economic security have distanced the non-poor from the kind of daily life-and-death struggle that has been the daily fare of the poor of all times right up to today. Maybe 90% of all the people who ever lived have struggled every day to keep the household alive against the threat of death through hunger, disease, accidents, and violence. By distancing the non-poor from the daily threat of death, the benefits of modernity have induced in us a kind of chronic low-grade confusion about what is really important in life, namely life itself and love. The encounter with the poor stops us short; it recollects us. When we come out on the other side, we realize that the marginalized are actually at the center of things. It is we, in Washington and Paris, who are on the fringe.3
Brackley grasps what Luke proclaims: God comes among us poor and vulnerable to deliver us from the damning myth that life is about the accumulation of power and privilege and possessions. God comes quite intentionally to rural shepherds and peasant parents and entrusts to them the good news because God is sure that they'll get it, that they will hear the tidings of God's incarnation in Mary's babe as good news, for the one cradled in the manger is one of them, and eternally will be.
Jesus' story is not a rags to riches story, small town boy makes good. It is a rags to rags to rags story -- from the swaddling cloths of Bethlehem to the loincloth of Calvary to the shroud of the empty tomb: love incarnate, suffering love, and love victorious over death.
We who are non-poor can hear this as good news as well, for it breaks down our fear of the poor and calls us to solidarity with them as together we hear the good news of a great joy that has come to all the people, as we share the feast of love, and share the bounty of creation.
If an alien should land this Christmastide and ask to be taken to your leader, take him or her or it to the manger, and together marvel at the love that has the power to turn strangers into friends.
____________
1. T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917) -- http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html.
2. Carl E. Braaten, "Nazareth Was a Hick Town" in Stewards of the Mysteries (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1983).
3. Dean Brackley, S. J., "Meeting the Victims, Falling in Love," Salvanet (January/February 2000), p. 6; also HYPERLINK "http://www.crispaz.org/news/snet/2000/0100.pdf" http://www.crispaz.org/news/snet/2000/0100.pdf accessed July 2, 2007.
It's a perfectly reasonable request, don't you think? Celestial beings from some province far off in the heavens traverse thousands of light years of interstellar space, arrive at our humble planet, and encounter, oh, I don't know, let's say, you or me. What are they going to say? "How 'bout dem Nittany Lions?" I don't think so. "Take me to your leader" is a plausible opening line.
The story around which the Christian community gathers this festive season includes a visit from celestial beings, emissaries from a province far off in the heavens. They arrive and encounter some common folk not so different from you and me -- people living in the boonies, going about their everyday tasks.
Saint Luke has already told us not only that there were leaders to whom these heavenly messengers could have gone; he's even told us their names: Augustus Caesar of the entire Roman empire and Governor Quirinius of Syria. But the angelic messengers have no interest in emperors or governors. Their presence with the shepherds is not the result of a malfunction of their Global Positioning System. It is part of God's divine plan. To simple, humble shepherds is entrusted "good news of a great joy for all the people."
Look who occupies center stage in Luke's telling of the tale: those rustic shepherds and three homeless people (an unwed mother, the carpenter to whom she is engaged, and their seemingly illegitimate newborn son).
Look at the setting: not Rome, not Athens, not Jerusalem. Mary and Joseph make a journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem. In terms of the size and importance of the towns, it's like going from Nescopeck to Shamokin Dam.
It would be tempting to see these as mere details of the story, intriguing, but of peripheral importance. It would be tempting, and we would miss a central part of Luke's message. These are not simply incidental parts of his gospel, for as Luke tells the good news, there is a consistent emphasis on those who are the little, the least, the last, and the lost of this world -- those at the margins: women, children, the possessed and dispossessed, the destitute and downtrodden, oppressed people living in a country occupied by soldiers serving a foreign, imperialistic superpower. In short, all those whom the Bible calls "the poor." These are the special recipients of God's amazing grace and liberating love.
Those with power and privilege, who imagine themselves the center of the universe, are mostly stage dressing in Luke's gospel. The caesars and the governors are the ones T.S. Eliot describes as those "that will do ... To swell a progress, start a scene or two."1 For, in fact, that is precisely what Caesar does in the Christmas story: He starts a scene.
Caesar issues an imperial decree, and that quite literally gets things moving. He has a war machine to feed, after all. Military adventurism in far-off lands is an expensive proposition. Any fool knows that it requires additional taxes, and to tax properly, Caesar needs a census. "So all went to be enrolled," Luke tells us, "each to their own city."
The powerful, living in castles carefully constructed to buffer them from the ugly realities of the indigent, exercise their prerogatives and issue edicts; the poor are left to fend for themselves. And so a very pregnant young woman, younger than most first-year college students, and her fiancé do as the government commands: They evacuate, headed for the ancestral home, Bethlehem, leaving behind the tiny village of Nazareth.
Theologian, Carl Braaten, has this to say about Jesus' hometown: "We've been to Nazareth," he writes, "and looked around and have to say: Nazareth was a one-horse town if ever I've seen one. It's almost unbelievable that something of such world-historical meaning as the gospel of our salvation should have been conceived in this little jerkwater town."2
So Jesus, conceived in Nazareth and subsequently reared there, was born in Bethlehem, because Caesar knew little and cared less about the effects of his policies on the poor who lived under his administration. Given these humble beginnings, is it any wonder that this Jesus, born in a barn and cradled in a feed trough, would grow up to say such things as
* "The last shall be first and the first last";
* "Blessed are you poor, for the kingdom of God belongs to you"; or
* "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for the wealthy to enter the kingdom of heaven"?
Is it any wonder that he would grow up to tell
* the story of the good Samaritan;
* the parable of Lazarus and the rich man; or
* the parable of a destitute widow who gave God two tiny copper coins worth less than a penny that she put in more money than everyone else?
Jesus inverts, you see, our conventional wisdom and natural order, substituting God's odd logic and a divine order for the ways we habitually arrange our affairs. In God's grand plan, the last are first: humble shepherds are the first to hear the glad tidings of the Savior's birth, the first to enter into his divine presence.
If we ask, "Where does he get this stuff?" we need look no further than his mother Mary's song, the Magnificat:
(God) has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the imaginations of their hearts.
He has cast down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.
-- Luke 1:51-53
Like mother, like Son, there's no doubt that this is Mary's boy. He embodies the good news of which his mother sang.
The angel told the shepherds that the birth of Mary's boy was good news of a great joy for all the people. To my understanding, all the people includes both rich and poor, both privileged and marginalized. As Mary said to the archangel Gabriel, "How can this be?"
Dean Brackley, a Jesuit priest who lives and works in El Salvador, offers what I believe is a critical insight. Brackley writes:
After reflecting on these issues for some years, it only gradually dawned on me that I belong to a peculiar tribe. The middle-class cultures of the North are newcomers to world history and have only existed for about 200 years. We're not all bad people; we're just a tiny minority under the common illusion that we are the center of gravity of the universe. The poor can free us from this strange idea ...
The problem for us is that new freedoms and economic security have distanced the non-poor from the kind of daily life-and-death struggle that has been the daily fare of the poor of all times right up to today. Maybe 90% of all the people who ever lived have struggled every day to keep the household alive against the threat of death through hunger, disease, accidents, and violence. By distancing the non-poor from the daily threat of death, the benefits of modernity have induced in us a kind of chronic low-grade confusion about what is really important in life, namely life itself and love. The encounter with the poor stops us short; it recollects us. When we come out on the other side, we realize that the marginalized are actually at the center of things. It is we, in Washington and Paris, who are on the fringe.3
Brackley grasps what Luke proclaims: God comes among us poor and vulnerable to deliver us from the damning myth that life is about the accumulation of power and privilege and possessions. God comes quite intentionally to rural shepherds and peasant parents and entrusts to them the good news because God is sure that they'll get it, that they will hear the tidings of God's incarnation in Mary's babe as good news, for the one cradled in the manger is one of them, and eternally will be.
Jesus' story is not a rags to riches story, small town boy makes good. It is a rags to rags to rags story -- from the swaddling cloths of Bethlehem to the loincloth of Calvary to the shroud of the empty tomb: love incarnate, suffering love, and love victorious over death.
We who are non-poor can hear this as good news as well, for it breaks down our fear of the poor and calls us to solidarity with them as together we hear the good news of a great joy that has come to all the people, as we share the feast of love, and share the bounty of creation.
If an alien should land this Christmastide and ask to be taken to your leader, take him or her or it to the manger, and together marvel at the love that has the power to turn strangers into friends.
____________
1. T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917) -- http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html.
2. Carl E. Braaten, "Nazareth Was a Hick Town" in Stewards of the Mysteries (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1983).
3. Dean Brackley, S. J., "Meeting the Victims, Falling in Love," Salvanet (January/February 2000), p. 6; also HYPERLINK "http://www.crispaz.org/news/snet/2000/0100.pdf" http://www.crispaz.org/news/snet/2000/0100.pdf accessed July 2, 2007.
