Scripture can be found here...
I want to welcome you. It gives
me incredible joy to see you—all of you, those of you I see practically every
week here at Union Presbyterian Church, as well as those of you who make this
place your ‘home for the holidays.’ It gives me great joy to see you. Welcome.
But you know, if the angels are
out and about and looking for a place to announce the birth of Christ, they probably
won’t be coming here tonight.
Not that our hearts wouldn’t be
open to that—they would! We would thrill, we would rejoice, we would sing
louder and more passionately every last carol, and gaze into the flames of our
candles and see with greater clarity than ever the mysteries of God’s love! How
amazingly wonderful that would be!
But the angels probably won’t be
coming here tonight. That’s because Christ is being born where he is needed the
most.[i]
If we’re looking for an angelic
announcement tonight, my bet is that it will come to someone sitting alone in a
bar, or it will come to someone hanging out with a gang in some dark corner of
a parking lot, or it will come to one sitting woodenly in a chair in a quiet
and empty apartment, or maybe in a prison cell, where it’s never truly quiet.
Christ is being born tonight where he is needed most.
On that first Christmas so long
ago, the angels gave their announcement to the shepherds. Here’s the thing
about shepherds. They were the ultimate outcasts in the ancient world—for all I
know, in parts of the world that may still be true. If you were a shepherd, you
came from the lowest rung of the social ladder. You were probably a youngest
son, one with no other prospects, someone who couldn’t find any decent work.
The people—the nice people, the kind of people who could go to services on the
holy days and nights of the year—they, for the most part, thought of shepherds
as thieves and thugs, liars and degenerates. Towns had ordinances preventing
shepherds from coming within the city limits. The testimony of shepherds was
inadmissible in court. Think of the last person you’d like to see walking into
this sanctuary tonight. Be honest with yourself. On the night Jesus was born,
that would have been a shepherd.
As for the professionally
religious people, they didn’t let shepherds come anywhere near the holy places—shepherds’
work meant that they were in a perpetual state of ritual uncleanness, meaning
they couldn’t get in to offer sacrifices or hear the scriptures proclaimed even
if they wanted to.
But why would they want to? Every
message they received—from good, decent, hardworking people—was that the world
had given up on them. God had given up on them. So, it stands to reason that
they had given up on God. Why wouldn’t they? As one pastor writes, “Spend
enough time in the field, shunned by decent and religious folk, disappointed by
God, or overwhelmed by grief, and we stop caring that we are outsiders. We give
up trying to get inside religion, or even on God, to get on with life. But God
does not give up on us. God sends angels to people who have given up on God.”Christ is being born where he is needed the most.
It’s practically a cliché, but
think with me, just a moment, about the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The
angel—the bumbling, adorable, wingless Clarence Oddbody, Angel Second
Class—where does he shows up? He doesn’t show up at church, while the people
are singing and praying. He doesn’t show up around a dinner table filled with
loving people, friends and family come together for the holiday. He doesn’t
even show up at the old Building and Loan. Clarence shows up on a bridge over a
river, where a man at the end of his rope is ready to put an end to the
terrible pain and humiliation he is enduring. Christ is being born where he is
needed the most.
And Christ is leaving behind just
about everything that makes God, God in order to do this astonishing thing.
That’s why the story of the birth of Christ is a story of God going into exile.
In Christ—this is the central affirmation of Christmas, this is why we are here
tonight—God leaves behind the power and majesty and glory of being God, and
takes on powerless, ordinary, unglamorous human life. And not even impressive human life. God does not come
as a king or priest or ninja or something else that would make sense because of
its awesomeness. God comes as a baby, utterly vulnerable, utterly dependent,
frail, and fragile. And the ones God tells first, the ones who get that angelic
announcement, complete with the heavens practically bursting into flames to get
their attention, are the ones who have no earthly reason to think God cares for
them at all. God goes into exile to save a people in exile.
We are exiled from God’s original
plan for us, to love God and enjoy God forever while at the same time caring
for God’s beautiful world. We are exiles—out of place, out of time, not where
we should be, and that exile takes all kinds of forms. We are sinful and
sorrowful. We are angry and filled with hate. We are numb and hopeless. Or
even, we are distracted, removed, out of touch with God, our Creator, our first
and perfect Parent, our divine Lover and Suitor, the one who is always doing
all kinds of amazing things to get our attention, sunrises and snowflakes, to
name just a few. We are a people in exile. Some of us—even some of us here,
tonight, maybe—have given up on God.
But God does give up on us, any
more than God gave up on the shepherds, outcast and exile though they surely
were. God cared for them, and God cares for us, every last one of us. Those of
us who are here completely confident that God will show up and those of us who
have been dragged here because this is what the family does, and we think, it’s
quaint, it’s picturesque, maybe it’s even a lovely tradition, but it’s not real.
Take heart. Christ is being born tonight where he is needed the most. Maybe I
was wrong. Maybe the angels will be here after all.
I read a story at 6:30 this
morning—you know how you can subscribe to something, and they send you emails
every day, and sometimes you think, agggh, enough with this, I’m going to
unsubscribe. But you don’t, for whatever reason. Well, this is what I read in
one of those emails at 6:30 this morning.
One time on Hollywood Boulevard I saw a young girl with a baby. It was
a crisp winter morning and her hair shone dark purple in the sun. She was
panhandling outside the Holiday Inn & the door clerk came out & told
her to be on her way & I wondered if anyone would recognize the Christ
child if they happened to meet. I remembered thinking it’s not like there are
any published pictures & purple seemed like a good color for a Madonna so I
gave her a dollar just in case.
~ Brian Andreas, “Purple Madonna,” 2012.
We just don’t know. But we can
trust. Christ will be born, is being born, precisely where he is most
desperately needed tonight. That may well be in you, that may well be in me.
So, eyes wide open. Ears cocked, like a donkey in a stable trying to figure out
who’s at the door. All is readiness
for the marvelous birth that means we need live in exile no longer. And for
that, all thanks be to God. Amen.
[i] This meditation owes its heart and soul to the reflection by Craig Satterlee at workingpreacher.org. My heartfelt thanks. Craig A. Satterlee, “Luke
2:1-14 (15-20), Commentary on Gospel,” WorkingPreacher.org: http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?lect_date=12/24/2012.
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