Nothing Special

Motherhood, by honeydewsapphic

Propers: The Nativity of Our Lord (Christmas I), AD 2024 C

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.

There is nothing special about Christmas. That’s the wildest part of the story.

There is nothing special about a young woman growing pregnant earlier than she’d planned, nor having to give birth amongst beasts, quite possibly in a cave. There’s nothing of note about a carpenter’s son, even if one day He might go on to make Himself a rabbi by the lake. Bethlehem was a big deal a thousand years before, but by now it was primarily famous for sheep. Even His mother’s name, Mary, was a dime-a-dozen at the time. Everybody named their daughter Mary, after the last princess, whom Herod first wed and then beheaded.

There’s no reason why we should know about any of this at all—this utterly boring birth—save for the inconvenient truth, that this is how God Almighty has chosen to enter our world.

500 years people waited for the Messiah, 500 years of expectation and of hope. Like the Bible itself, this hope was born in Exile, pieced together from stories of all that went before. Once they had been brothers, 12 Tribes of Israel, liberated from slavery in Egypt and led back to the Promised Land of their ancestors by their fathers’ faithful God. They had no king but God back then, and for a time, that was enough.

But eventually the people found that they craved greater power. They wanted to be more than just a loose confederation of tribes held together by the legends of their elders. They coveted a kingdom, and all that might come with it. Thus they forced their prophet to pick for them a king. In an unlikely twist, the youngest son of a shepherd took the throne. And it worked, again, for a time. But the whole thing was rather a mess.

At last their kingdom fell, as kingdoms tend to do, and all that they had built went up in smoke: their land, their temple, their royal line, and likely their God as well. Thus the Bible truly begins with a lost and homeless people, strangers in a strange land, beneath the tromping boot of one empire after another, an entire nation of refugees.

But the queerest thing happened. These Judeans refused to die. Many were absorbed of course but many others kept the faith, preserving their language, their legends, their legacy. God had come with them into Exile; His prophets continued to preach His promises. And they were ambitious, we must give them that. The nation would be reborn, they prophesied. All would be returned. Their land would be theirs once again, their temple would be rebuilt, and the line of kings would be reëstablished better than before.

An Anointed One would come—a Messiah, a Christ—not like the anointed kings and priests of old, all of whom failed and fell. No, this new Christ would descend from heaven itself, establishing God’s Kingdom and raising up all of the dead! Wild promises, to be sure. And yet they started to come true. The Exile ended. The Judeans returned. They reconstructed the Temple on the spot where it had burned. And now the Prophets offered up a schedule: a week of weeks, 490 years, until the Christ would come to save us all.

And they waited. And they watched. And they hoped, for half a millennium. Neither were they alone. Other peoples prophesied the Christ: Roman writers, for one; Magi, for another. By the time of Jesus, the deadline had come due. Everyone was looking for the signs: for Elijah to herald the Messiah; for a Star announcing His Nativity; and to Bethlehem, the place He would be born. Really, though, they didn’t think He’d be that hard to spot.

Most folks, it’s fair to say, expected a violent messiah. We can tell from the number of would-be christs who kept on rising up against Rome, only to be crushed beneath the hobnailed heels of the Legions. We can tell from Jesus’ Apostles, who thought they needed swords. Then, as now, we expected heroes to all be violent men. Not evil, mind you, but the proper sort of violent, the sort that slaughters sinners and sets the captives free. Kings come to force the world to be good, do they not? To wrangle order out of chaos, by arrow, sword, and stone?

One would anticipate that the Messiah might appear before the Emperor; or come fully clad in armor with an army of His angels; or ignite a holy fire that would burn out all the wicked; that Christ would make the world make sense again over the bones of vile men. Nobody ever missed the advent of Herakles or Alexander or Caesar. You knew when the son of a god was coming to town, typically by all the blood that they managed to spill along their way. The Messiah would come like a bolt from the blue, and everyone take notice.

Because He wasn’t supposed to be just another guy, was He? Not just another king, not even an angel, but in some sense God Himself, come to be our King again. There was debate about this at the time: How could God be both in heaven and on earth? How could God be both infinite and embodied? Did that imply two gods, two powers in the heavens? Because if there were two gods, then neither one of them could really be God, for God philosophically must be One. It all kind of cooks your noodle.

Suffice to say, we did not expect whatever this is that we’ve got: this lowly manger, this silent night. Granted, there are angels in the story, the mighty heavenly host, appearing to shepherds keeping watch over their flocks by night. But that’s half the joke, isn’t it? Angels, basically cosmic gods, singing to the nightshift? To shepherds in a tower raising sacrificial lambs? Angels in the Hebrew Bible typically blow stuff up. They slaughter armies and such. They don’t sing to people; they only sing to God. They only sing in heaven.

Oh, my God. You mean that this is heaven? This is what we’ve waited for? This is God on earth? “This will be the sign,” they say. “You will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.” Are you kidding me? That’s the sign of the Messiah? A kid in rags? Brother, I don’t know how it works out there in the crystalline celestial spheres, but down here in the mud and the blood, a poor kid in a food-trough ain’t exactly something special. He’s just another nobody, a poor and homeless child. They die in droves every single day.

And that’s the point, isn’t it? That’s the wonder and the scandal of the Christmas. God has come to earth, not as a king, not as a conqueror, not with any kind of greatness we would know; but as a newborn, meek and mild, vulnerable and weak, dependent on His mother for her milk. It is astonishing, and terrifying, and awe-inspiring that here Almighty God comes down as one of us with nothing to His name. He is in the simple, in the poor, in the unremarkable.

Here He will cry and bleed and laugh and learn, and be betrayed by those He loves to death. In so doing, He will overturn everything we thought we knew about Goodness and Truth and Beauty, about divinity and power, about love and mercy and a grace outliving the grave. Nothing is more vulnerable than a child, nothing more dependent, nothing more innocent. What if we break Him? God help us, we already have. We didn’t mean to! Oh, yes we did.

Because of Jesus Christ, everything human is holy. Every corner of Creation is now one with her Creator. He embraces all of it: our doubts, our fears, our failures, our anonymity, our anxiety. And He is born within it, born in each of you: Emmanuel, God-With-Us. Nothing is too small to hold our Lord within it. No-one is so lost as to escape His care. Christmas comes to the ordinary, the forgotten, the overlooked, and makes the simple sacred. For unto us a Child is born. And nothing now will ever be the same.

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

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

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St Peter’s Lutheran

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Nidaros Lutheran

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