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The Nativity of our Lord - Christmas Eve Luke 2:1-10 |
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"[Behold] I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. And this shall be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger." So the angel spoke to the shepherds. Shepherds were what we today might call "marginal people." Observant Jews despised them because their wandering life in unsettled regions made them careless of the niceties of religious law. If you asked them, they would have identified themselves as Jewish but would have admitted that they didn't practice their faith very strictly. They believed that religion was important, but the lives they chose--or were forced into or born into--made it uncomfortable, too challenging, or too difficult to practice many of their ritual beliefs. For instance, washing one's hands before eating wasn't always an option, nor was resting on the Sabbath. Shepherding was a 7 day-a-week job. And yet, according to Luke, It was shepherds who were the first, apart from Mary and Joseph, to hear the angels’ voices and to worship the newborn child. Luke puts them in the center of the drama of God's great act among us. The love of God draws the shepherds from the margins to the center of the divine mystery. In the countryside around the town of Bethlehem, these obscure and somewhat disreputable workers hear the good news that God has become flesh in our world. God is born as a child, a human being like us, a sign that humanity is not doomed to separation from God, but is intimately and wholly connected--our everyday lives interwoven with God's life. Humanity is not alone. God has come and has become human, taking on the same flesh (the same soiled flesh) as the shepherds--and you and me—and on hearing this news, the astonished shepherds ran to the stable at Bethlehem "glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen." For good reason, wouldn't you say? That God is born among humanity is a great and holy truth, an event worthy of celebration. That's what we're doing here tonight: celebrating with hymns and praise and great thanksgiving that God showed such incredible love 2000 years ago. But tonight we celebrate much more than some great occurrence in the past. Tonight we rejoice in a mystery that affects each one of us here today. The God who was born among us as Jesus of Nazareth still lives among us--this savior who came, as Paul wrote to Titus, to make us "a people of his own." Jesus came to call us to remember who we are and whose we are--to renew ourselves and change our lives (for even the best of us is often far from God) and to become again the children of God whom we are made to be. In Genesis, we read that we were made "in the image of God," but that we soon and easily abandoned that great possibility within us. Each of us reenacts that story from time to time. Through impatience and anger, greed and self-righteousness--and self-centeredness--we constantly find ourselves moving away from God and away from the true self God made us to be, the person we'd like be. We forget who and what we are and become instead all bound up by our confused needs and wants and ambitions. Yet, even today, "Unto us a child is born." This reminds us that we are God's people, God's own, made in God's image, to know and love God, to discover God in others, and to keep our hearts fixed in the service of God. The shepherds heard the voice of the angels calling them to come see a birth--a birth among them, a birth to redeem them, a birth which they celebrated with their gifts of praise and worship. In return, God gave them back their true selves, the selves who could drop everything to respond to God's call. God freed in them the selves who adored the Christ Child, and who then went forth to spread the news of God's great love to all people, worthy and unworthy, religious and irreligious, ready or not. From marginalized people, they became evangelists of God's love. So tonight we celebrate the birth of Jesus, but also the rebirth of the shepherds, and ourselves, and of all who come to the manger. We rejoice in the gift of our true selves as children of God--children who had wandered far but who have come again to receive the gift of God's salvation, the good news of God's love and God's presence. Through the power of God's Holy Spirit, the Christ Child, God's own life, lives in us as surely as he lived in Mary. That's a powerful claim about God's work in us, but it is the true Christmas story. You want to see Jesus in the flesh? Then look at the person next to you. There he is. There she is. The incarnation of God's love, the becoming flesh of God's faithfulness and justice on earth. We represent (re-present) Christ--become Christ--by loving and serving the world just as Christ would--and does through us. If we open our hearts to Christ's being born in them again each day, exactly as he was born 2000 years ago in Bethlehem; If we're ready to go to Bethlehem and offer our hearts just as the shepherds did so long ago; If we're ready to go forth into the world and proclaim the good news about this child who is born, then, you know what? It's Christmas every day! It's not simple and easy to be truly ourselves, to be again God's image, children of God, God's own people. It's a challenge to return to our created goodness, to be born again in God, and to open our hearts so that God may be born again in us. But "Do not be afraid. For I bring you good tidings of great joy." The Spirit of God who gives us birth and is born in us will feed us through prayer, through the companionship of all others who seek God, and sometimes even through the song of angels proclaiming throughout the ages the saving love of God in our world and in our hearts: "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will to all. For to you is born this day a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord." Merry Christmas! In the Name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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