Christmas Day 2011
John 1:1-14, Luke 2:1-20
It’s a Miracle: Mission Possible
Last night we heard from the Gospel of Luke the story of the birth of Christ. The journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem. The Angelic visitation to the shepherds and their subsequent visit to the birthplace to see the babe lying in the manger. For most of us, the image that comes to mind of that story is one of low lighting and soft focus. There’s Mary, draped in blue and looking surprisingly well, and Joseph calmly at the ready to care for both Mary and the adorable, calm little Jesus. There are angels and shepherds – even animals adoringly looking on. It’s a lovely image – one that is a lot like the crèche before us. But, it’s a sanitized image – hardly the image that Luke means to portray. We’ve so sanitized the image that perhaps it is really closer to an illuminated lawn ornament nativity of plastic people seen through the slightly foggy side windows of our cars as we drive to yet another caroling party.
There’s nothing of the real life mess of a birth, let alone the several weeks journey – on foot or on the back of a donkey by a very pregnant, about to pop, teenager. I contend that our image is one of lifeless almost sterile plastic because our image doesn’t seem to ever include the smells we all know are ever-present whenever farm animals are in our midst. This doesn’t even take into account the facts of dirty shepherds – socially the lowest of the low and even dirtier sheep, the oppressive occupying Romans, nor the backwater locale out in the hills.
Our sanitized version of the story is lovely and I like it. But, deep down, I like Luke’s version – the scary, messy, difficult, and marginalized version – better. Because what better place for God to enter the world than where least expected – in the dirty, confusing, ordinary places that we all inhabit? David Lose, Director of the Center for Biblical Preaching, writes “God comes not at the center of the world to straighten things out a bit, but on the fringe to call the orders and structures of the day into question and herald a new beginning altogether. Ultimately, Luke's story -- if we're willing to listen -- witnesses to the simple yet scary fact that God didn't come in Jesus to make things a little better, a little more bearable. God came to turn over the tables, to create a whole new system, to resurrect and redeem us rather than merely rehabilitate us.” To me that’s not just scary, it’s also exciting – all tingly-feeling enlivening – to think of God in the form of Jesus. That’s a God I can believe in – a God who is capable of, even desires to, come into being on the margins, at the edges of our lives. A God who comes right in the midst of the pain and suffering of a pregnant teen far away from home and family who must deal with fear and violence, stench and discomfort can only be seen as the miracle it is. The birth of Christ is a miracle. Christmas is the celebration of that miracle and I think our sanitized plastic image doesn’t do it justice.
I love this definition of miracle: “a visible interruption of the laws of nature, understood only by divine intervention and often accompanied by a miracle worker.” Or as Pastor Mike Slaughter puts it in his book Christmas Is Not Your Birthday, “In other words, a miracle is a unique event in the world that God does through people like you and me.” You and I are God’s means to change the world. As children of God – “born of God,” John’s Gospel tells us – we are miracle workers, we only need to allow ourselves to be used by God. That’s the scary part of the incarnation – allowing God to enter at the edges of our lives, to take up residence in the wombs of our souls. Accepting that God wants to birth something new for the world through us, radically changes our image – not only of the birth of Jesus but, of the entirety of our lives.
For me, to wrap my head around such an awesome notion of being God’s miracle worker, three things in scripture come to mind. Interestingly, they are all from the very edges of the life of Christ. The first is from the very beginning, not just of his life but, from the beginning. It’s in today’s Gospel lesson. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.” The world came into being through him and we have been given power to become children of God, born of God. Each and every one of us – a child of God. Born of God, for God’s purposes.
The second aid for me to come to terms with being a miracle worker, comes from the angel, Gabriel. We heard it last week in the story of the annunciation when Gabriel, explaining that Elizabeth, too, is pregnant, says to Mary, “For nothing is impossible with God.” Nothing is impossible with God. God can do anything; use anyone – a teenage girl, an aged lady, a priest with an earring, a baby. With God – and there’s the key, with God – nothing is impossible. We must let God use us for the miraculous to happen.
My final place to turn for clarity of vision in imagining myself, any and all of us, working God’s miracles comes from the final words of Christ, himself just before his ascension in the first verses of Acts, in response to the apostles question about the restoration of the kingdom, “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” Jesus does not say, “you might receive power,” or “if the Holy Spirit comes upon you,” or “you could be my witnesses.” No, my friends, Jesus is clear and sure. It’s “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you; and you will be my witnesses.” For nothing is impossible with God for the children of God who like Mary ponder these things in their hearts. The God who was and is and will be, is. Christ is here. Now. And he is pursuing a relationship with you and with me. Hear the miraculous Word of God and turn to the God of miracles. Ponder in your hearts the words of God and know yourselves to be favored by God to be the vessels who will birth his kingdom into being! Imagine that! Amen. So be it!
