“O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie.”
With those familiar words Phillips Brooks began his immortal Christmas carol and created a largely Victorian tableau with which all of us are familiar. It’s a peaceful setting, a comforting setting, and a hopeful setting all at once. Renaissance art and Hallmark would be bereft and largely insignificant without that one image at least at this time of year. To be fair to Phillips Brooks, however, that particular carol only mentions the Christ Child, Mary, and angels, but the Bible and other carols certainly fill in the rest with Joseph, the manger, animals, shepherds, and then the Magi whom we celebrate on Epiphany. It is for me a picture of warmth and tenderness with which you and I have been familiar our whole lives long. “O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie.”
Truth be known, however, the reality was quite different than this particular image. While we say that this was the birth of the Prince of Peace, violence was abroad then. In fact, the whole purpose for the census that brought Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem was for Roman control and Roman taxation in a country where fractious, rebellious Jews—terrorists we might call them now—had to be on the occupying government’s list. And if you were from Bethlehem as Joseph was, you were doubly suspicious because that’s where the great King David came from, an icon of patriotism and independence that was a threat not just to the Romans but also to King Herod, a Jew, but a puppet of Rome. Joseph, Mary, and Jesus barely escaped from Bethlehem with their lives before Herod had the children of that small village slaughtered. Babies killed, innocent lives snuffed out—it’s like a horror movie or our worst nightmare, or both. What kind of a world was it into which Christ was born? But what kind of a world is it now into which our babies are born?
A week ago we presented our own tableau of the little town of Bethlehem in our Christmas pageant. Only the hardest of heart had a dry eye as our very own sheep and angels and lions and lambs came together with the little child in their midst and a charmer to boot! You see, I knew this particular little Jesus whom I nicknamed “Jesette,” happy to have a little girl Jesus in this Thoroughly Modern Millie of a pageant, but also that’s because Bev’s and my little babies were girls and every self-respecting pageant ought to be an equal-opportunity employer. In any event, I had baptized this little sweetheart named Lindsey on All Saints’ Sunday and was tickled to see her in Mary’s arms, just as perky and curious and winsome as she had been in my arms for her baptism. However, she began to self-destruct a little bit under the weight of her office, having been such a good little girl in the wings, all those expectations and jostling and gawking had to take their toll, so that by the end we had a tearful baby Jesus which only made her more charming in my mind.
Actually I’ve never believed the words of another very familiar Christmas carol, Away in a Manger, when it says, “The cattle are lowing, the baby awakes, but little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes.” Why wouldn’t he cry? They do, you know. Why wouldn’t any child cry just as our little Jesus cried at the pageant? But more than a wet diaper or nap time, isn’t it possible that the baby Jesus and baby Lindsey and every baby know in their souls a certain fearfulness, know in their genetic makeup the world into which they have been born, and a world in which they must inevitably die.
Boo, hiss, Rector, shame on you! Don’t rain on our Christmas parade! But the truth is, that despite the inevitability of death we live in a world in which a child dies from malnutrition, from violence, from neglect, from disease, once every three seconds. Within the space of this service, 1,200 children will have perished prematurely. It breaks Jesus’ heart as surely as it must break my heart and your heart.
Nonetheless, Christians continue to call the birth of Christ a miracle to be celebrated, to be enshrined in verse and song, to be cherished just as much as the birth of every child is in its own way miraculous and to be cherished. And who can’t remember the wonder of birth whether it be our own children or the children of others? I doubt any mother here tonight can’t recall with exquisite detail the birth of her children. Well, maybe exquisite isn’t quite the right word (what do men know?) but how thrilled we are with ten fingers and ten toes and a cry that tells us the lungs are working. It’s a moment some have called divinely human and humanly divine. I can’t resist the comment of a nurse when our own Elizabeth Prevost was born, nurse Arbouthnot, (now that’s a name you need to be wary of!) when she said to an equally ecstatic but pained Bev, “You didn’t think it would be easy, did you?” All sympathy there. And so despite the best efforts of poetry or song or sentiment to do it justice, it remains a profound mystery, and I believe every mother is entitled to say “What’s so great about God in this Christmas story? It’s Mary who’s the real hero.” It’s such an amazing combination of heaven and earth, of the most profound and the most prosaic.
Evelyn Underhill shares something of that mystery in her meditation that begins
The heavens open and what is disclosed? A Baby. God, manifest in the flesh. The stable, the manger, the straw; poverty, cold, darkness—these form the setting of the Divine gift. In this child, God gives his supreme message to the soul—Spirit to spirit—but in a human way.
Outside in the fields the heavens open and the shepherds look up astonished to find the music and radiance of Reality all around them. But inside, our closest contact with that same Reality is being offered to us in the very simplest, homeliest way—emerging right into our ordinary life.
A baby—just that. We are not told that the Blessed Virgin Mary saw the Angels or heard the Gloria in the air. Her initiation had been quite different, like a quiet voice speaking in our deepest prayer—the Lord is with thee! Behold the handmaiden of the Lord.” Humble self-abandonment is quite enough to give us God.
Think of the tremendous contrast, transcendent and homely brought together as a clue to the incarnation—the hard life of the poor, the absolute surrender and helplessness of babyhood and the unmeasured outpouring of the Divine Life.
—Evelyn Underhill, Light of Christ
Something of a miracle that is the birth of Jesus has to do with the fact that it is in fact God’s self being born into the everyday life that you and I encounter, into the everyday world that is at once fearful and wonderful. It is in fact a suffering world God identifies with, and God says to us in the birth of Jesus that ultimately we are not to be afraid for if there is joy, God is with us. And if there is pain, God is with us.
I’m always moved by stories of children with cancer who lose their hair because of chemotherapy in that effort to save his or her life. I know one such story of an eleven-year-old boy who had cancer who when it came time for him to return to school he and his parents tried everything to conceal his baldness, experimenting with various hats and wigs and bandanas. They finally settled on a baseball cap, something as innocuous as possible, but he still was afraid that he would look “different.” Mustering up his courage, he went to school wearing the cap and discovered that all of his friends had shaved their heads. Someone observed that “You can’t hide the pain of the world. You can’t cover it up. You can only share it. Make someone else’s journey a little easier. Be willing to go to great lengths to help someone else carry their pain.” [Julius Hollyday]
And this is exactly what God did. God left whatever throne people had put him on in their imaginations and came to earth. God made the absurd choice to arrive as a baby, vulnerable and dependent, subject to all the pains and fears and frustrations that plague the rest of us.
I began with Phillips Brooks and will end with Phillips Brooks by quoting that verse we never sing, but hear the hope expressed, the pain shared,
Where children pure and happy pray to the blessed Child,
Where misery cries out to thee, son of the mother mild;
Where charity stands watching and faith holds wide the door,
The dark night wakes, and glory breaks, and Christmas comes once more.
What better gift could you and I ever, ever hope for! Amen.
