Christmas Eve Year B 2009

Christmas Eve B 08
December 24, 2008

The night in Bethlehem was probably not very comfortable. Neither had been the ride. I’m not sure what it’s like to be nine months pregnant, but I presume riding a pack mule for any distance at all would probably not be a lot of fun.

Nevertheless, Joseph and his thirteen year-old bride, pregnant with a child despite her virginity, had to make the journey. Why? The emperor Caesar Augustus, with his perpetual hunger for more tax money, had sent out a decree that “all the world should be registered.” Everyone had to return to the homeplace, the village or town where their family originated. Can you imagine if everyone whose family came from Deltaville all arrived at the same time? It’s probably a little like that at Christmas, but that doesn’t even approach the kind of numbers that would have descended on Bethlehem for the census.

There was no room at the inn because there was no room anywhere. The innkeeper, a Jew trained in the real meaning of hospitality, did not turn the weary travelers away, but gave them some space in the shelter of his barn. This practice was in wide use in our own country as little as a hundred years ago, when travelers needed a place to stay and there was no room in the house for them.

The inconvenience and difficulty of it all was not the fault of the innkeeper, but of Caesar.

Little Mary gave birth that night. We don’t know what it was like. We can only presume it was like all birth, painful and bloody, but in the end, joyful. She swaddled the baby so that it could sleep and forget for a little that it had left the safety and warmth of its mother and had embarked its journey in the amazing and wonderful world God had made.

Outside the town lay some dirty and no doubt disgruntled shepherds, possibly a little drunk, as shepherds tended to be in those days. They were living in the fields, as the story goes. It could be they had no other place to live. Those taxes again. If you didn’t pay, some Roman citizen would loan you the money. When you couldn’t pay it back, they took your house.

What can I say? Shepherds were the bubbas of Israel. Probably good-hearted souls who lived rough, played hard and weren’t entirely sure if God was pleased with them. They had little if anything of their own, and a lot of what they were able to scrounge together went, well, you know where: to drink and to taxes for that guy in Rome they called the Prince of Peace, the King of Kings and the Savior, Caesar Augustus, the one who set himself up as a Son of God and who had made being a working shepherd in Israel a losing proposition.

These shepherds were shocked by an experience that historically had been granted only to great prophets and priests of Israel. The heavens split wide open, the glory of heaven shown into the world, and a magnificent and inhuman creature descended into their midst. Now, to top off the usual trouble they were all accustomed to, the angel’s presence was tantamount to a death sentence. “Boys, your partying days are over. Say your prayers.”

But the angel wasted no time in putting their fears to rest. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “I bring good news of great joy for all peoples.” For all peoples? Is that what he said? Wasn’t it only Caesar Augustus who talked like that, who ordered that “all the world should be registered”?

The angel tells them that a child has been born to them. To them. The Messiah.
These boys were Jews. They’d been dragged to synagogue by their mothers all their lives, even if it was too much trouble to go now. They knew what the Messiah was. The Messiah was the one who would get the Romans off their backs, bring the simple, just and peaceful life back to Israel, the life God always promised they would have. The shepherds had probably given up hoping for such pipe dreams a long time ago, had done their share of mocking the religious people in their community for keeping the faith when times were so hard.

Probably knowing that even an angel visitation might not be enough to convince these boys, the angel directed them to the stable in Bethlehem and told them what to look for. And off they ran.

We come to Christmas this year with some worries in our minds. Many people are losing their jobs just as Christmas approaches. Many small businesses are closing. Many retired persons are realizing they may have to take jobs to stay afloat. Many people close to retirement are having to put it off for an unknown period of time as they see their retirement savings evaporating.

In the midst of this crisis, some of great corporate behemoths, as the house of cards on which they were built flies apart beneath them, are calling for a bail-out.

I have to say I’m confused. It seems to me you have to have several degrees in economics to really understand exactly what is going on and what it will take to correct it. Such is always the case when the big and powerful are involved.
Still, the message we seem to be getting from these masters of the universe, our modern-day Caesars, is that if they go down, we’re all going down. And it seems increasingly likely that they will, and so will we, bail-out or no.

The good news of Christmas is that it never was God’s plan that the big guys would save us all. God has a different bail-out plan.

His plan is a baby in a manger in a little town on the edge of nowhere, the baby who was God.

The good news of Christmas is that a new possibility has been offered to the world, the possibility of letting go of our trust in the masters of the universe, the Caesars and the Herods of our day, and trusting in the God who, as the scriptures say, pitches his tent among us.

When the wise men came and saw the child, they were overcome with joy. Here is God with us. This is the joy no power can take away, no master of any universe can diminish, the joy of God’s presence.

Let me tell you about the joy of God with us.

Liz and I went to a Thanksgiving dinner at Earl and Bonnie Simpson’s home. After dinner, four generations of the family, and their friends, hung out in the big kitchen listening to someone playing the guitar. After a little while people started dancing. Grandma and grandpa, mom and auntie, all dancing, right down to the two year-old bobbing around with those wide, continually amazed eyes.

That’s the joy of God with us.

We visited a friend who will probably be spending Christmas in the hospital. He’s twenty-six years old and is suffering from non-Hodgkins lymphoma, a particularly aggressive cancer. He has a wife and a nine-month-old baby. At this point, he is very weak and thin and has no hair at all from the intense chemotherapy. Yet his face lights up when anyone visits him. He shared with us the story of feeding his baby and guiding her little hand as she lifted the spoon to her lips. “After a few times,” he said, “she did it all by herself. I don’t think I’ve ever been happier than I was when she did that.”

That’s the joy of God with us.

This joy of ours will always be ours, forever and ever amen, no matter what the masters of the universe do, the joy of belonging to God, the joy of belonging to each other, the joy of belonging to God’s coming kingdom, the joy of a healthy childbirth in a warm stable in a little town, the joy of sharing a loaf of bread and a cup of wine, the joy of dancing in the kitchen, the joy of teaching your baby to use a spoon.

That’s the joy of God with us.

Amen.