Lectionary Readings
Almighty God, with all that we are and all
that we have, we thank you for the gift of your love come to us in Jesus and
ask that his joy and peace might be ours this Christmas ☩
this we ask in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
In
the name of Jesus Christ and on behalf of the Parish of St. Luke’s: Welcome!
Whoever, wherever, and whenever you are – it is a joy to have you with us on
Christmas.
I’m sure you all know the ending of Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas: “And the Grinch did hear a sound rising over the snow. It started in low, then it started to grow. But this sound wasn’t sad! Why, this sound sounded glad! Every Who down in Whoville, the tall and the small, was singing without any presents at all! He hadn’t stopped Christmas from coming! It came! Somehow or other, it came just the same! And the Grinch, with his grinch feet ice-cold in the snow, stood puzzling and puzzling. ‘How could it be so? It came without ribbons! It came without tags! It came without packages, boxes, or bags!’ He puzzled and puzzled till his puzzler was sore. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before. Maybe Christmas, he thought, doesn’t come from a store. Maybe Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more!”
It’s a lesson we’ve
learned this year – Christmas comes even when our children cannot sit on Santa’s
lap, it comes even when we can’t gather with all of our family and friends
around the table for a feast, it comes even when we cannot gather physically to
sing Silent Night and Joy to the World!. And yet, we gather in
this way not because we need to do this to make it Christmas, but rather as a
response to the fact that Christmas, despite COVID-19, has come. Just as that
first Christmas came as pure grace, so does this one.
When it comes to
the nativity text, or really any such well-known story, it’s often helpful to
focus in on just one detail, so that’s what I’m going to do for the rest of this
sermon. I want to call our attention to the manger. The manger was important
and essential for Luke, as three times in this 20-verse story the word “manger”
comes up.
The first time comes just after Ever-blessed
Mary gives birth to God. Luke tells us that she wrapped him in bands of cloth
and laid him in a manger. The scene has become so familiar to us because we
have crèches and ornaments that depict it. But what we all know and sometimes
don’t connect is that a manger is a feeding trough – it’s where hay or slop
would be placed so that animals could eat out of it. This is not a dignified
place to lay an infant. This first instance of the manger being mentioned is a signal
of the poverty of the Holy Family, the humility of Jesus’ birth, and the desperateness
of the situation.
Though we think of
that first Christmas in a very sweet and sentimental way, I imagine that it was
unnerving and chaotic. Neither of our daughters were born when we expected them
to come, both showed up early and with Ellie, there were some minor scares
along the way. Even a normal birth can cause anxiety. Just imagine what it must
have been like for Mary and Joseph. Traveling away from home, scrambling to
find a place to give birth to your first-born child, who, by the way, was not fathered
by the man Mary was engaged to, and having to give birth among the animals, as
that was the only place to find a modicum of privacy. Just as Creation back in Genesis
began with God bringing order out of chaos, the Messiah is born in the midst of
chaos.
This is actually quite
a comforting message for us – God is quite comfortable and experienced in
working with chaos. Whether it’s the chaos of a broken marriage, a child with
an addiction issue, a global pandemic, an overly partisan political system, or
a climate crisis. As the author of Hebrews writes, “For we do not have a high
priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses.” God knows what it is
like to be surrounded by chaos. In whatever chaos you are facing today or might
face tomorrow, the Good News of Christmas is that God is with us.
And not only is
God with us, but God chooses to be with. God does not sigh and say “I suppose I’ve
got to put on this costume of skin and bones to go solve their problems.” No,
God comes out of love, in love, and for love. As St. Paul writes in Philippians,
“Though Christ Jesus was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself.”
When God came, it was not riding on a valiant steed, it was not with an army,
it was not in a horse-drawn carriage. No, God was born of a poor and lowly
virgin, born in a cave among the animals, and laid in a manger. If God came
seeking not comforts but love, that tells us not only something about the God
who loves us, but also something about what matters most in life.
The manger is both
a sign of God coming to us despite the chaotic nature of life and a signal that
humility is next to Godliness.
The next time the
manger is mentioned it is as a sign, as the angel tells the shepherds in the
region that “This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in
bands of cloth and lying in a manger.” What a lovely and odd sign for God to
give that the Messiah as come! Of course, the angel had to tell them that they’d
find the Messiah in the manger, because who would have ever expected the heir
of David’s throne to be lying in a feed trough? And this sign of the manger is
an example of how God leaves us breadcrumbs of grace.
If you attended one
of our outdoor Christmas Eucharists, you heard a reading from Titus that said
that when God saved us it was with goodness and loving-kindness to justify us
by grace so that we might become heirs of hope. Now, there’s a lot packed into
that sentence but it means that God wants and intends for you, for me, for all
of us to flourish in God’s love. God desires nothing but all the best for us –
for us to know that we are forgiven of our sins, for us to live in harmony with
one another, for all people to have food on their plates and a roof over their
head, for all people to be treated with dignity. And because God is perfect,
not only does God want these things, but God has given us the gift of himself
to make these things possible.
Now, because we
are imperfect and have a human propensity to mess things up, we’re going to
make mistakes and get off track. But God is always giving us signs of grace,
breadcrumbs to lead us back into the grace, mercy, and peace of God. And that’s
what the manger was for those shepherds – a reminder to them, and us, that because
God is with us there is no situation that is truly hopeless, no person that is
truly unredeemable, no death that is truly final.
And the third time
the manger is mentioned is when nativity and sign come together. Luke records
the shepherds saying, “Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has
taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.” So they went with haste and
found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger. In Hebrew, “Bethlehem”
translates to “house of bread.” Oh, how marvelous is God’s plan of salvation!
The Messiah of the world, who would tell us that he is the Bread of Life, is
placed in a feeding trough in a city called the “house of bread.” It wasn’t
already orchestrated by God, we’d have to say it’s clearly divine intervention.
Jesus taught us to
pray for our “daily bread” and to expect God’s providence in the same way that God
fed the people in the wilderness with manna. This detail tells us something about
what God intends to do through Jesus – and that is to not only assure us of the
forgiveness of our sins, not only to defeat the enemy of eternal death, not
only to bless with goodness, but also to nourish us in abundant grace. Jesus
comes as food for a hungry world.
Do you all
remember back several months ago in this pandemic when it was hard to find
certain supplies? It was understandable that it was harder to find rubbing alcohol
for making hand sanitizer and cloth for making masks given the need for those
things. It was panic that caused people to hoard toilet paper as if COVID-19
was a digestive tract infection instead of a respiratory one. But in the early
days of this pandemic, when we were settling into the reality that this pandemic
wasn’t going away in 6 weeks, there was another shortage – flour and yeast were
in short supply. How deliciously interesting.
Is it any coincidence
when people could not gather to receive the Body of Christ, the Bread of
Heaven, that they started baking bread at home? Even people who wouldn’t identify
as religious or spiritual were baking bread at the precise moment that
Communion became unavailable. As St. Augustine famously wrote in his Confessions
some 1,600 years ago addressing God, “You have made us for Yourself, and our
hearts are restless until they rest in You.” We have a hunger for meaning, for purpose,
for peace, for love. And of God’s grace, we are fed with these things in Jesus.
This is what the
Incarnation is about, making flesh, making tangible, God’s love so that we
might see it, know it, consume it. Whether we acknowledge it or not, we all
have a Eucharistic longing – a yearning to be fed by our Creator, a need to
give thanks for the gift of life, a hunger for communion with God and one
another. And though we won’t be able to gather and share physically in Communion
in this liturgy, we will pray the Prayer of Spiritual Communion. And just as
God was present in the chaos of Mary and Joseph’s life, God is present in the
chaos of our pandemic world. The manger becomes the very first Eucharistic
paten that holds the very Bread of Life given for the life of the world.
Thus, the manger is
a symbol of salvation, of humility, of grace, of Communion. My beloved in
Christ, I pray that God nourishes you with his peace this season, that Christ’s
love restores all that is broken in our lives and our world, that the Spirit’s
power unites us in love even as we remain distanced from one another. What we
are given at Christmas is nothing less than the meaning and fulfillment of all
things – the bread which shall nourish us for all eternity.
