Into Our World  

Luke 2:1-20
4^th Sunday of Advent
December 24, 2006
Paul Simpson Duke
First Baptist Church, Ann Arbor  

          If you come to the service tonight, you’ll hear and sing gorgeous music.  Interspersed with this music you’ll hear some of the loveliest texts in Scripture, poetry and prose declaring the birth of the Christ Child.  You’ll hear those texts in the old King James Version, not only because of its beautiful cadences, but because that’s the language we’re used to at Christmas, and as I learned some time ago, you just don’t mess with Christmas tradition.

          The most famous text tonight will be the Christmas story told by Luke.  In the stately old language we’ll hear that Mary was “espoused to Joseph, being great with child.”  And the shepherds were “sore afraid” and said to one another, “Let us go now even unto Bethlehem and see this thing which is come to pass.”

          We’ve read the same text this morning, but the translation is form our own time.  Mary and Joseph are not espoused, but engaged; she isn’t great with child, she’s expecting.  The shepherds aren’t sore afraid, they’re terrified.  Etcetera.  The old language is very dear because it’s so magical; the newer language is essential because it’s more earthy and real.

          Speaking of earthy, some earthy details always go unmentioned.  This man and woman are poor people.  She’s drenched in sweat, she screams in pain.  There is blood.  The baby squeezed out is smeared with blood.  He trembles and cries; he’s traumatized.  They put him in a feed-box.  And surrounding all this is the smell of manure.  Silent night?  Of course not.  It’s a bloody, writhing, howling, stinking night.  We tell the story in heavenly language, but beneath it is the messy real world.

          Luke has another way of making this clear.  He names the current administration.  This happened, he says, when the emperor was Augustus and the governor of Syria was Quirinius.  It’s as if he is saying: the story I’m telling may have the flavor of a fairy tale, once upon a time in a misty dreamland; but I’ll give you names from the actual politics of that time – here are secular coordinates for this birth, which incidentally occurred in a town you can find on a map.  It’s exactly like saying: When George W. Bush was president of the United States and Jennifer Granholm was governor of Michigan, Mary and Joe came to Ypsilanti .

Listen, I know, as you know, that to a great many people, for understandable reasons, parts of the Christmas story are mythical or simply nonsense– a virgin giving birth, angels singing in the sky.  But do notice that the central proclamation of this account is that Mary’s baby is born into the actual world in a definite place in a particular economy, under a specific government, led by actual men in real positions of power.  Into the stark real world, our world, the Christ Child emerges.

It’s what we celebrate at Christmas: God is in this Child, and God in a new way has entered the real world we live in.

It’s a messy world.  “Happily ever after” isn’t true for anyone.  Things fall apart.  We make dreadful mistakes, and our institutions fail us, and the rulers of nations make disastrous choices.  Random calamity threatens us all.  Human anguish and suffering are too much to take in.  Resources are too short for too many.  Relationships are complicated; most grow painful and sad.  And death is stalking us all.  Sometimes it seems everything is confusion and struggle.  It’s messy where we live.

And into that, exactly that, the Christ Child arrives.  His hands will not be clean.  His mind will reel with turbulence.  His relationships will mostly fail.  He’ll put himself at the center of sick religion, masses of misguided people, corrupt institutions, politics, cruelty, lethal violence.  And God is in him taking hold of that world, our world.

It’s still true, isn’t it?  Emmanuel means God is in all these messes with us.  He is present in the largest and ugliest of them.  He stands among the millions crushed by poverty, among the millions dying of epidemic disease.  He stands among the bombs and bullet and the thousands on thousands who are struck down.  He is present in all that wreckage, and suffers it, and over it he achingly breathes possibilities for transformation.  But Christ is not only in these huge devastations; he is in the smaller places of our messy lives.  When we are in conflict with another, he stands there between us.  When we are ruined and grieving what we’ve lost, he sits beside us.  When we are paralyzed with confusion, he joins us.  When we have done wrong, he takes his place with us.

Hear it again.  Love came down at Christmas, all the way down.  Into our world, the real one where we struggle to live, Christ is born to live among us, to bear what we bear, but more, to haunt us in it, meet us in it, calling us into life.

 It should make a great deal of difference.  If our world, all of it, is inhabited by Christ, then nothing is finally hopeless here.  And this is our warrant to take hold of the world as he did and to join him in transforming it.  Like him, with great passion, we must be worldly.  To lift people out of poverty, to put an end to warring madness, to establish justice, to feed the hungry and heal the sick and embrace the excluded, to lead the hopeless into hope – Christ is born into all this pragmatic, earthy work, and meets us in it and strengthens us for it. So nothing is hopeless; anything can change.

We can change how we look at the world, how we look at ourselves and how we look at each other.  Love has come so beautifully down, infusing all of our world, transforming everything and everyone, if only we open our eyes to it.  There’s a poem I’ve recited here before; I don’t know who wrote it, but it belongs to any Christmas Eve.

Whether you share the poor man’s mite

Or taste the king’s own fare,

He whom you go to seek tonight

Will  meet you everywhere.

For he is where the cattle wend

And where the planets shine.

Lo, he is in your eyes, my friend

Stand still and look in mine.

If Christmas is magical at all, this is it: to see the world around us and the people before us, suddenly luminous with the holy, the great Love looking from their eyes, and from yours.

          All of us know that the meaning of any sentence will shift, depending on where the accent is placed.  Maybe for you this year the accent doesn’t fall where I have placed it today, but I’ve heard it falling on what has come to where we actually are: “To us a child is born; to us a son is given.”  “Don’t be afraid . . .to you is born a Savior.”  “Peace on earth.”  “Joy to the world” – your world and mine – “the Lord has come.”

          Merry Christmas.