Born in the Dark

Propers: The Nativity of Our Lord (Christmas Eve), AD 2022 A

Homily:

Many ages after God created the heavens and the earth, when man and woman were formed in God's own image; long after the great Flood, when God set the rainbow in the clouds as a sign of the covenant; 21 centuries from the time of Abraham and Sarah; 15 centuries after Moses led God’s people to freedom; 11 centuries from the time of Ruth and the Judges;

A thousand years from the anointing of David as king; in the 65th week as Daniel's prophecy takes note; in the 194th Olympiad; the 752nd year from the founding of the city of Rome; the 42nd year of the reign of Octavian Augustus; in the Sixth Age of the world, all earth being at peace, Jesus Christ, eternal God, Son of the eternal Father, willing to hallow the world by His coming in mercy, was born of the Virgin Mary in Bethlehem of Judea.

Tonight is the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, God made flesh.

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

It’s a farce.

That’s what we have to understand about the Nativity narrative in Luke’s Gospel. This story is turning the world upside-down and inside-out. It’s full of miracles, angelic visions, shock, terror, joy, and song, everywhere song. There are no less than four canticles sung in the early chapters of Luke: by Zechariah, by the angels, by the Blessed Virgin Mary, and by Simeon in the Temple.

And these are so central to the Christian experience, to our ineffable encounter with Jesus Christ, that we sing them all across the world every single day: Zechariah’s Benedictus with Morning Prayer; Mary’s Magnificat at Vespers; and Simeon’s Nunc Dimittus at Compline before bed.

Yet to me the most remarkable of the canticles is the shortest, the Gloria sung by the angels, so central to our hymns and our carols: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace amongst men, with whom he is pleased.” The reason why I find it so significant is likely the same reason why the shepherds cower: because in the Hebrew Bible, angels sing in heaven. Not on earth, but only in heaven. And to hear them sing now, on this night—heaven has come to earth.

Where God is, that is heaven, wherever He is revealed in His glory. And God is fully revealed to us in Jesus Christ our Lord. That’s the wonder of it, the shock of it, the scandal of it: that Almighty God, infinite, eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, not a creature but the Creator of all, is born to us this day of a Virgin in Bethlehem of Judea.

In the old Latin words to “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” God here is gestant puellae viscera—born through the guts of a girl! We’re so used to it, so used to sanitizing and sentimentalizing the scene, that its real significance is often lost to us. But Luke himself is unflinching, uniting extreme opposites in such a way that we have no choice but to sit up and take notice.

The angels are the highest, holiest beings in the whole of Creation, the veritable gods of the nations and the cosmos, yet here they appear unto shepherds, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night. Not to priests in their Temple or kings on their thrones, nor even to the Emperor in Rome, but to shepherds in the field. Have you ever smelled a shepherd?

And the titles they lay out here, proclaiming the birth of this Child! Son of David, they call Him, which is to call Him a king and indeed heir to the greatest of kings, akin to announcing today a modern successor to King Arthur and his knights. Savior, they call Him, which is a title held by the divine Augustus, son of the divine Julius Caesar, Emperor of Rome and thus of the world.

And then they call Him Christ the Lord, and that brings things to a whole new level, beyond kings, beyond emperors. The Christ is the Anointed, the Messiah of God, prophesied for centuries to descend from heaven to remake the world. And Lord is a title of God, the word that devout Jewish people used to avoid saying that holiest of Names, “Yahweh,” the Great I Am. They just called Him God—not a god, not one god, not god with a lower-case G, but the God, the One, the Creator and Father and Source of us all—that is who is born in Bethlehem of Judea.

So pray tell, O angels, where will the shepherds find this infinity of infinities, this holy of holies, this Lord of lords? Why, wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger. In a manger! A food trough for livestock! Are you kidding me? Is this a joke? Swaddled up and laid in a buffet: it sounds like Kronos eating his children. The Highest of the high has stooped down to the lowest of the low. And there He lies, there in the mud and the blood, dirty, weak, helpless, powerless, born to save the world.

For centuries they’ve been waiting for this Messiah. And not just the Judeans, but the Romans too; there were pagan prophecies of the Christ. We all expected fire from the heavens. We all expected legions of angels. Not this. Not a dark horse in the middle of the night, born to the betrothed of a carpenter, in some Podunk town about which none but religious fanatics gave a hoot.

Because, don’t get me wrong, there’s religious significance to all of this. David was a shepherd. Bethlehem is the House of Bread. The winter lambs dropped there were destined for the Passover sacrifice come spring at the Jerusalem Temple. Even Mary is the new Ark, the new Eve. It all makes sense in context—but Luke is not recording this story only for Judeans. He is writing this Gospel account for the world, for Greeks, Romans, barbarians, for the whole of the Empire and beyond.

And to them this is a shock. To them this is a scandal, a story so crazy it has to be true. In the words of Frederick Buechner: “The incarnation is a kind of vast joke whereby the Creator of the ends of the earth comes among us in diapers … Until we have taken the idea of the God-Man seriously enough to be scandalized by it, we have not taken it as seriously as it demands to be taken.”

Tonight, at Christmas, the One who knows all is born all but unknown. The Light of the world is born here into darkness. The spotlessly Holy we lay in a trough. Divinity takes on humanity, the finite contains the infinite, and our only truly honest reaction is either to laugh or recoil. Heaven on earth. God in Man. My God! Here is the seed cast out on the soil. Here is the treasure buried in a field. Here is the pearl of great price. And He is born here tonight to be born now in you.

Whenever God starts something, it seems as though nothing will come of it. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. It’s only finite minds who worry about things like size or strength or honor or glory. God is unconcerned. God has nothing to prove. All He wants to do is be with us; to heal us, forgive us, and bring us all home in Him. For that, He will take on our flesh. He will show us what a human being can be.

For Jesus is not only the One True God; He’s also the only one of us who is fully, truly human, fully, truly alive. He is the New Adam, the New Creation. In Him, Creator and Creation, Alpha and Omega, God and humankind, all are One again at last. And when we lift Him high on that Cross, He shall drag all the world unto Him. His glory did not do this. His power did not save us. It was His mercy, His love, His grace; His self-outpouring unto us, into us, in Body and Blood and Spirit and Word.

Death and life, heaven and hell, justice and mercy, glory and humility, it all comes together in Him. It is all born tonight. Christ is the only God who can save us. For He knows exactly what we are—and loves us all to hell and back.

I leave you this evening with the words of Chad Bird:

Far from home, in the dark, in the cold, in the mess, in the blood, God was born. That’s a Christmas story I like, for it’s one I can identify with. More than that, it’s a story that gives meaning and hope to our own dark, cold, bloody stories of Christmases that seem anything but joyful. Christmas is not about presents. It’s not even about family and friends. It’s about God taking on our flesh and blood, being born as one of us, to share our griefs, to bear our sorrows, and to unite us to himself, that we might find him in our griefs and sorrows.

There’s a reason he’s called a “man of sorrows, well acquainted with grief.” The first sound leaving our newborn Lord’s lips would have been a cry. How fitting is that? God knows what it means to weep, to hurt, to suffer loneliness, anger, loss, and, yes, even the pangs of death. You do not have a Savior unable to sympathize with your weaknesses, but one who has experienced them all, so that no matter what your own hurt, he redeems it, and carries you through it. All I want for Christmas is a God like that.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.