I’m thinking about babies tonight. I’m thinking about one baby in particular, but then also by extension, all babies. Everyone here has some experience with babies, not that any of us remember much about our own infancy, but rather our own babies or baby brothers or sisters or the ones that invariably sit right next to us on airplanes. I’ve always enjoyed my wife Bev’s recollection of her sister Barbie’s going to her grandmother’s house after church one Sunday. Her grandmother asked Barbie what she had learned in church. Barbie replied, “We learned all about the baby Jesus.” Bev’s grandmother then said, “Well then you can tell me who’s in this picture” (it was a print of Raphael’s Madonna and Child.) Barbie replied, “Oh, Barma, (that was Bev and Barbie’s grandmother’s nickname, lest you thought I was invoking an Illinois senator) that’s the baby Jesus.” Barma replied, “Very good, Barbie. And who’s with the baby Jesus?” Barbie thought for a minute and finally replied, “That must be the babysitter!”
At the Episcopal Church of St. James in Florence, Italy, a course was offered to American art students who were brilliant about art but woefully ignorant about the biblical subjects so prominent in the Renaissance art they were studying. The course’s title was “Who’s the Lady with the Baby?”
Of course it’s entirely believable that I might be thinking about babies at this time of year when the Christmas story is so much a part of our church’s celebration. I’ve always loved the fact that at Christ Church we have a live Jesus for its Christmas pageant. Sometimes it’s a Jesette or a Christa if you’re a high-church feminist, but live nonetheless. This year we were graced by Jesus James Walters, Josh and Emily’s newborn, and as is the case with every pageant there was great angst whether this Jesus would cry or fuss. Maybe he’d even throw up all over Mary and that would really be exciting! Jesus/James, however, was the very model of a famous line from Away in a Manger: “No crying he makes.” It was as if Jesus/James had taken to heart another line of a Christmas carol we heard earlier (Once in Royal David’s City), “Christian children all must be, mild, obedient, good as he.”
Now there are some of us who take exception to the requirement or the sentiment, whatever it is, that Jesus can’t cry, that Jesus didn’t cry. Why wouldn’t he cry? Think about it. In the first place, all babies cry at least once in a while. For Jesus, he had every reason to cry having been born in a cold, stinking, dirty, flea-infested, animal-snuffling stable. It doesn’t make Jesus any less the Son of God to take exception to this particular welcome into the world. We might remember that in the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus wasn’t exactly thrilled about the prospect of dying on a cross and essentially said so to God even though, as we all well know, he submitted himself to the violence the cross represented. And yet the discomfort of being born in that setting was perhaps the least of Jesus’ problems, to quote another Christmas carol: “No ear may hear his coming, but in this world of sin, where meek souls will receive him, still the dear Christ enters in.” Was this baby’s heart breaking with some kind of instinctual knowledge that the world into which he was born was in such need of his saving, “this world of sin?”
Thomas Cahill presents a concise summary of this story and its meaning when he writes,
2000 years ago a man was born into family of carpenters in occupied Palestine. He was a small-town Jew, born in a bad time for Jews. Their land was no longer their own, they had been made to bow before a succession of conquerors who had diluted their proud culture and, as many would have said, infected it. His name, as everyone knows, was Jesus of Nazareth—or, as the Jews of his own day called him, Yeshua. Also as everyone knows, he preached a message of mercy, love, and peace and was crucified for his trouble. This unlikely character has long been accounted the central figure of Western civilization. Even now…we count our days by his appearance on earth; and, where supposedly post-Christian society often ignores and even ridicules him, there are no serious suggestions for replacing him as the Icon of the West. [Thomas Cahill, Desire of the Everlasting Hills: the World Before and After Jesus, Doubleday, 1999, p. 8]
While I might take issue with Cahill that there are no serious suggestions for replacing him as the “Icon of the West” in our present culture that flirts with or even claims outright the notion that Jesus is now irrelevant, nonetheless we do have to ask the question why Jesus ever caught on in the first place. The whole point of our stories about Jesus’ birth is that were it not for God, Jesus would surely have been forgotten, would surely have been irrelevant. And so the
Gospel writers are not really interested in the facts of the birth, but in the significance, the meaning for them of that birth, just as the people who love us are not really interested primarily in the facts of our births but what it meant to them when we were born and how for them the world was never the same again, how their whole lives were changed with new significance. [Frederich Buechner]
Much has been made these past few decades about the high incidence of teenage pregnancy and children born to teenagers. The other day Britney Spears’ younger sister who is sixteen announced that she was pregnant and was planning to give birth and raise her child. Presumably she’s affluent enough for that purpose and lest we be too critical I suppose we might remember that Mary was quite probably even younger than sixteen when she gave birth to Jesus amidst the scandal that at least when she was first pregnant she and Joseph had not married. The comparison, however, ends there. In any event, we can all wonder what the significance is for anyone so young giving birth to a child, but especially among teenagers of the chronically poor. Those births are also typically criticized by those of us who are presumably more responsible, and yet I can well imagine a 14-, 15- or 16-year old with nothing to her name, no husband, no prospects for the future, no education, for whom the birth of a child is despite all that a chance to love and to be loved.
But I ask again why is it that the baby Jesus caught on in a way that has indisputably changed the history of the world and provided the generations since his birth with meaning and significance so captured by the mystery of the events recalled this night? For me it has to do, simply, with the enduring truth and experience of God’s love.
Tonight will be the 37th Anniversary of my first celebration of the Eucharist as a priest. I recall that for several reasons which have to do with the truth and the experience of God’s love for us as I recall midnight mass on Christmas Eve at the little mission church of St. John the Evangelist in Yalesville, Connecticut. I had been ordained to the priesthood four days before in the same chasuble and stole I’m wearing tonight that had been given to me by my aunt and godmother whom some of you will remember as the aunt who came to visit Bev and Ned and went to all the Christmas and then all the Holy Week and Easter services every year before she died. But when I was sending out invitations to my ordination 37 years ago, my father asked me to remember Father Gribbon who had played a significant albeit brief role in my life when I was four, so let me tell you that story.
One summer day while my family and I were vacationing on the New Jersey shore I had a terrible accident, fracturing my skull and it landed me in the hospital in Point Pleasant, New Jersey. My parents called the Episcopal priest who had been taking Sunday services at the little mission church in Bay Head and asked him to come to the hospital and pray for me. He did, and even though to this day some wonder if I ever fully recovered from that traumatic incident, it’s probably true that my life was held in the balance at that point and I’m grateful for his ministry and my survival.
And so at my father’s suggestion in 1970 I researched Father Gribbon’s address and sent him an invitation to my ordination with these words, “I don’t know if you remember a little four-year-old boy you prayed for in Point Pleasant, New Jersey, in 1948, but I want to convey my family’s and my gratitude for your ministry at that critical time.” And much to my surprise he wrote me back and said, “I remember well that hospital visit, and I’m ever so pleased that God healed you and saved you for the ministry in which you are now to be engaged.”
How vulnerable we all are when we’re babies and young children! How vulnerable Jesus was in First Century Palestine! But these are some ways that God’s love is revealed to us, that when we are most at risk, that’s when God’s love can be the most apparent.
I think that’s why Jesus caught on. He was born and lived his life and died in such a way as to reveal the truth and the experience of God’s love for you and for me. I can feel that love tonight surrounding us and enveloping us with its gentle insistence that each baby born into this world, that each one of us here tonight whether young or old or in-between is loved by God unconditionally and for ever. In a world that is so anxious and fearful you and I are given this divine assurance that we are cared for, that we are special, and that God’s life and love are ours. May your Christmas be a reminder of that truth, the most special Christmas gift any of us can ever receive. Amen.
