Icon by by Ivanka Demchuk UBP
The story of the world—the story we just heard read in the church as our gospel for Christmas, the world’s true story from which all true stories are told—happened in a world exactly like our world.
It was as is ours a world of emperors and governors, of trade routes and ships, of armies and (less deadly) missiles, of wheat, wine, and oil, of palaces and hovels, of well-appointed houses and simple shacks, of swords and spears, of pubs and caves and lean-tos, of banquets and famines, of night, stars, cold, and sheep...same world.
A person that humans allowed to be important, Augustus, with a big made-up title—“Caesar” (if that sounds ancient, try ones we make up like czar, prime minister, führer, or president [persons who are here today and gone tomorrow, whose power is illusory—it’s not ultimately real and it doesn’t last])—wanted a head count of his conquered masses. And everyone had to go out of their way to appease the bully.
The government order causes hardship for a lot of people. The most trouble (as in our present pandemic moment) is visited on the poor who are made to travel long distances on meager resources to the place of their birth for the census because that’s what Caesar’s order dictates.
The world’s truest story is the story of one such family, a pregnant mother, and her rough-handed carpenter fiancé, who could find no room, out in all of that cold and all of that dark, for the God she bore and the God he protected.
They had both in their own ways made room for God. Mary had said yes to the divine invitation to bear God in her womb. Joseph had heeded the Angel and shielded Mary, his betrothed, had loved her as he had been loved.
They had made room for God but the world had no room for them or for God—you see, it’s the same world as our world—even though she was pregnant and in labor. But such is God’s way in this world, homeless and with no place to lay his head.
The first Christians tell us that the couple found space with the animals in a cave among shit and straw. And then she gave birth like all mothers do: it was painful, and there was blood and sweat and serum, and cords to cut, and a cry from the human God split their ears and their silent night.
Mary wraps his glistening flesh in bands to sooth his very human anxiety after leaving her womb, then lays him in a feed trough because, of course, he has come down from heaven to be our true bread, a bread which grants us life without end.
In nearby fields shepherds were at their late night watch, awake and alert among the resting sheep. Suddenly the skies above them become a theater. An “angel of the Lord” appears above them and the glory that fires all stars in billions of far-flung galaxies illumines the hills and the ground beneath their feet like day and envelopes them in an uncreated light—not the light of the sun, not like the softer reflected light of the moon, not the light of the stars; it was a light they had never seen before, a light from heaven—and they are terrified.
Then they (and we) hear the words that pierce the darkness inside of them (and inside of us), words that invisibly shine in every dark moment of the world before and since—and that is a lot of darkness—“Do not be afraid.”
This is the message that God has for all of us and for his beloved creation: Do not be afraid. Today God is born unto us and this is good news of great joy for everyone.
No matter how bad it gets, and it gets pretty bad sometimes, we do no need to be afraid because God has not left us alone. God has become what God loves and now lives in the world as one of us, flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, helpless and speechless and suffering with us as one of us in a world gone wrong.
And the angel tells of a sign that accompanies the good news. It’s a familiar sign to them—a manger is involved—but it’s also really unexpected and strange: a babe wrapped in bands and lying in a feed trough.
And this good news and the words about a sign are followed by a great song, a wondrous song from eternity, sung by angels who now fill the night and outshine the stars, who make of the hills and all the earth and all her nations a great sanctuary for the beauty of the Lord, and the trees of the wood sing, too.
And their song of exaltation has a transfiguring message: that peace is now revealed by this vulnerable infant as the end of the world’s story—not destruction.
The world does not end with a bang or a whimper but with shalom, a well-being that works its slow, patient way into everything. What did we just pray in the Psalm? “He has made the world so firm that it cannot be moved.” This is now what we humans can trust about the world.
If it’s not all become well it’s not the end because the end is revealed to be very, very, very good.
Then as suddenly as they had appeared the angels are gone with the glory and the light and the song, and the shepherds are there alone again in the dark. But they are changed. The light that had surrounded them is now inside them, the uncreated light of heaven. And they trust the angelic message and the angelic song. They trust that God has done something.
With haste they run to see what God has done. Not what humanity has done; what God has done. And they find the baby just as the angel had said: wrapped in bands and lying in a feed trough.
And if they could have seen it, for this part was yet hidden from them (and everybody else), there among the animals and stink this weary, vigilant mother is clothed with the sun, and the moon is under her feet, and a crown of twelve stars adorn her head. But you have to eyes to see all of this.
Wait a minute. Where did you get that, Father Kenneth?
I got it from the end of the Bible, from the Apocalypse, which many scholars think was written before Luke’s gospel, and it has its own nativity story in chapter twelve. This account tells us things that the shepherds cannot see. And there’s more to the nativity story Revelation tells.
There is out in all of that dark and all of that cold, in the cave where Jesus lies immobilized in the feed box, there invisibly and horribly, is a dragon… ‘roused by the activity of God, awakened by the audacity of a God who becomes what God makes, a God who reveals himself to all the cosmos in this infant as its glad and humble servant, as the one who always puts everyone and everything before himself, and the dragon who deceives and destroys and kills is angry.
God is revealed in the feed trough not as a general or politician but as a helpless child not only because divine helplessness is greater than anything else in the universe but because the only way God could become human and not betray his nature as God is to come among us in poverty and weakness as the one who serves.
He cannot come among us as a powerful or rich man because if he were that kind of human he would not be showing us what God is really like.
God is the janitor, the waiter, the doorman of the universe. And when he does what he does as God he makes the world clean, he makes the world good and inviting, and he puts food on all the tables of the world. It is simply who he is as God and what he does.
As Isaiah foretold:
“For the yoke of his burden, and the staff for his shoulder, the rod of his oppressor, thou hast broken as on the day of Midian. For every boot of the tramping warrior in battle tumult and every garment rolled in blood will be burned as fuel for the fire (Isaiah 9:4-5).
We know the “yoke of his burden” and the “staff of his shoulder” as the cross. We know the government that rests on his shoulders is not force but surrender. We know that God saves the world by descending to the lowest place. We know that war is not eternal.
And already, here at his birth, Revelation tells us, the dragon is plotting how to kill the child.
As we will soon see he is in Herod, who kills all of the young boys born at the same time as this one in the feed trough (those special ones who die for God before God dies for them).
But the dragon is as powerless to stop the weakness of God from conquering death as any of the powers that bear their ugly teeth at God’s creatures and God’s creation: decay, disease, famine, war, chaos, hell and all darkness are defeated by the One who is willing to die so that all might forever live beyond death, who suffers with us so that his creation might receive his permanence.
This is the entire gospel of the first four centuries of our faith summed up by Athanasius: God sees the world slipping into impermanence and desires to make us and the whole creation permanent by becoming one of us.
“For a child has been born for us,
a son given to us;
authority rests upon his shoulders;
and he is named
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
His authority shall grow continually,
and there shall be endless peace
for the throne of David and his kingdom.
He will establish and uphold it
with justice and with righteousness
from this time onward and forevermore.
The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this" (Isaiah 9:6-7).
The Lord has done it. From the moment the virgin consents to the invitation of God the head of the dragon is crushed.
And the zeal is that God is human. And the zeal is that the human God loves what he makes and becomes what he loves.
And as my friend Jason Micheli writes, the zeal of the Lord is that “There is no other God but the God who has determined himself not to be God without you.”
You are his body in the world, and you are not afraid any longer, and we are entrusted with the good news that the end is peace, no matter how alone or sad or hurt or alienated you might feel tonight. It is a blue Christmas for many for so many reasons (and we invite all of that to this table) yet God is now one of us forever and in the end of the story of the world, the good end, this is the song:
“Then I heard a loud voice in heaven, proclaiming, “Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Messiah, for the accuser of our comrades has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God. But they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they did not cling to life even in the face of death" (Revelation 12:10-11).
As Bonhoeffer says in his Ethics, God stands with humanity against all our accusers, human and demonic, even our own hatred of ourselves, and loves us as the real imperfect humans that we are, taking all of the accusation on himself, shaming the devil.
We can sing that song now. The whole world can return now the song the angels sing. For God has done it.
Christmas is believing that God has done it (to paraphrase Henri Nouwen).
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