Sermon, December 24, 2007 Luke 2:1-20

“A Manger Story” (Luke 2:1-20)
Rick Olson, Christmas Eve 2007

Every year there’s a passel of holiday stuff on TV, from Christmas specials to the perennial Christmas movies . . . I usually catch a couple of the movies every year . . . I watch It’s a Wonderful Life, where Jimmy Stewart and Loretta Young dance by the light of the moon . . . I watch Miracle on 42^nd Street – not the new one, but the original, with John not-Wayne-Payne and a heart-breakingly young Natalie Wood. I never fail to be delighted by that final scene, with Kris Kringle’s cane in the new house, proof that he might just be jolly old Saint Nick after all . . . But have you noticed lately, the last dozen years or so, that Christmas movies tend to be on the darker side? They seem to be cynical and – lately – downright nasty. It started with Home Alone, where a family is so absorbed with Christmas stuff – presents, and parties and the like – that they forget their young son when they leave for the holidays. Hilarity ensues. The trend continued through Scrooged, wherein holiday sentiment is made fun of as idiotic and un-hip, and reached what may be the epitome—or nadir, depending on your point of view—with Bad Santa, wherein a drunken, foul-mouthed department-store Santa robs the store where he works every year. Hilarity again ensues.

What’s going on here? Some say that it’s a generational thing, that times have changed, and so have we . . . well, duh! Of course times have changed, of course we’re different, more cynical, the question is, why? What does it mean? Well, maybe it’s that evil, old secularism, coming to the fore, if we’d just get back to God, we’d revere God’s birthday again . . . and again I say . . . duh! . . . of course we’re more secular, of course if we’d get closer to God we’d be happier, but It’s a Wonderful Life is not particularly Christian, and Miracle on 42^nd Street revolves around those ultimate secular symbols, Santa Claus and Macy’s department store. So I ask again, what gives?

Let’s look at the first Christmas . . . it was during the reign of Emperor Octavian, who was given the name “Augustus” by the Roman senate when he came to power . . . he was one of the first Roman emperors to rule absolutely, although on the surface he deferred to the senate. It was under his rule that the Imperial family first became synonymous with the Roman state, leading to their eventual deification. So the coming of Jesus coincided with the first truly powerful Emperor.

And our story begins with a show of his power: the calling of a registration, a census, so the people could be taxed. Luke tells us that all the citizens of the world – those that Rome ruled over anyway – went back to their own home towns . . . and what a hassle, what an expense that must have been . . . there were no airplanes in those days, no freeways, and even though the distances were not great, traveling to your home-town was a hardship . . . it certainly would have been for an expectant mother like Mary . . . can you imagine riding on a stumbling, swaying donkey when you’re nine months pregnant? And when they got there, they found that there were so many other folks in town to register that they couldn’t find a motel room, and had to stay in a barn . . .

I’ll bet they’d have found room in the Bethlehem Holiday Inn for Augustus if he had shown up, or Herod or even Quirinius, governor of Syria . . . but for a poor, simple craftsman like Joseph, there was no room in the inn. The Romans – by dint of their occupying army – could order their conquered people around, they could control their lives through puppets like Quirinius or Herod the Great . . . contrast this with the lowly facts of Jesus’ birth . . . wrapped in swaddling and lying in a manger . . . in a manger, where animals were fed. Jesus Christ, savior and Messiah, born in a stall . . .

But God showed ‘em all . . . on that cold winter’s night an angel appeared out of the heavens, along with assorted seraphim and cherubim, and a glorious light shown round about the heads of Caesar and Quirinius . . . not! The angel didn’t talk to the rich and powerful, he didn’t announce Jesus’ birth to the TV or print media, he appeared to some ratty shepherds, living in the fields – they didn’t even have a barn to stay in – watching their flocks on the night shift . . . it was to these scruffy low-lives, people that Quirinius wouldn’t have let sleep on his doorstep, that the savior of the universe was announced.

And they huddled in fear when the angel stood before them, and wouldn’t you? I know I would . . . if some shining figure with colors and light dancing around showed up on my doorstep, I’d be in a fetal position on the couch quick, quick, quick . . . but the angel told them not to fear, because what she had to say was good news: this day, in the city of David, is born a Savior, who is Christ – Greek for Messiah – who is Christ the Lord. And he gave the shepherds a pointer, a sign, like X marks the spot . . . and it could have been anything, couldn’t it have? It could have been a halo, around Mary and Joseph and the baby’s heads, like it shows in all the paintings . . . it could have been more angels, singing about the good news that had come . . . it even could have been the glory of God itself . . . if it shown around the angels, think how it might’ve beamed around the Son . . . but the sign was a little child, the most helpless thing on earth, wrapped in bands of cloth to keep his limbs straight, lying in a manger.

The sign would be the child himself, and he would be in a manger, matted and covered with straw . . . the sign would be the child himself, but it also would be the circumstances of his birth . . . born to the common folk, to an unwed mother in a rough-hewn trough, with her tradesman husband, his rough-hewn hands twisted with worry . . . the child was a sign pointing to salvation, to the good news that the angel spoke of . . . that this day, in the City of David, a savior is born . . . and in good sacramental fashion, the child was both the signifier, the sign, and the thing pointed to . . .

And when they get there and see it, after abandoning their sheep and hurrying through the night, sure enough, there’s the babe, lying in a manger . . . and it’s the third time Luke mentions manger, and this repetition isn’t for nothing . . . we’re supposed to notice the manger, we’re supposed to imagine the tightly-bound bands of cloth, we’re supposed to see in our minds eye the crude beginnings, the straw and the sheep and the dirt . . . and of course, we do see it, don’t we? We can picture it from a thousand manger scenes on a thousand mantle-pieces, from years of Christmas pageants with hundred of shiny little faces, with parents stalking the sanctuary with flash bulbs and video cameras . . . we’ve got an image fixed in our minds of a beatific Mary – maybe with kind of a Rembrandt-renaissance-y look about her – in muted but fine-cut clothes, with a cute donkey and maybe a cow and a chicken for local color . . .

But you know, that’s probably not the way it was . . . this was no antiseptic, hospital birth, no clean-room delivery . . . they were in a stable, it was dirty and smelly and there was not very much light. There were no doctors scrubbing up, no incubators standing by and the quality of Mary’s pre-natal care was probably not the best – she’d just ridden in on a donkey, for Pete’s sake. I’ll bet she screamed – no anesthetic, you understand – and not to contradict the song or anything, but I’ll bet the little Lord Jesus crying did make. Because that was part of the sign, that the child shall be lying in a manger, not a bed, and in a stable, not the Roman royal palace or even the Sand Dollar Inn.

In short, the birth of Jesus was far from perfect. But many of us have a tendency to want Christmas to be that way . . . we want it to be this Norman-Rockwell, bird-dog-by-the-fire sort of thing, with perfect presents, perfect decorations, perfect table settings . . . we want our neighborhoods to be perfectly-lit winter wonderlands, because that’s the way we remember it in our hazy childhood memories, and perhaps more important, that’s the way it’s presented to us in thousands of TV commercials and print ads this time of year . . . like the one from a few years back where the guy presents his sweetie with a diamond in a snow-covered downtown – I think they actually have the gall to stage it in front of a church – and a cab pulls up and it’s Santa at the wheel, and the last we see is them smooching in the back seat as they’re driven away . . . or the perfect children and father under the perfect tree, shot in soft-focus on a perfect Christmas morning . . . we expect Christmas to be that way, we long for it, and when it’s not . . . depression can set in. It’s not an accident that the highest rates of suicide are around the holidays . . .

And maybe that explains the cynical trend in holiday fare. Maybe it explains all the cinematic Christmas-bashing, showing all the clever – and supposedly funny – ways people can mess up on the holidays . . . maybe it explains why folks who take the holidays seriously are portrayed as either sentimental boobs or jack-booted fascists looking to control entire neighborhoods. Many of us have this perfect image of Christmas in our minds, the decorations have to be just so, we have to get just the right present for our Aunt Bertha, who turns up her nose at everything . . . we have a drive and a need for Christmas to be perfect, and we scramble around in a frenzy trying to make it that way. And when it ultimately turns out fruitless, when things inevitably turn out im-perfect, we can get depressed. I don’t think it’s an accident that as television has invaded our lives – with its treacly, picture-postcard, fantasy images of the season, with it’s constant yammer that if we don’t buy this perfect gift, this Norelco, every-gift-begins-with-Zales, talk-to-me-Elmo present, Christmas will be ruined – I don’t think its an accident that our movie-views of Christmas cheer get more and more cynical. From the time we’re tiny tots with eyes all aglow, we’re conditioned that Christmas must be perfect, and we’re mightily disillusioned when it isn’t.

But neither was the first Christmas . . . Mary had to ride a donkey over rough Judean roads when she was nine-months pregnant, she had to give birth in a stable, and lay her first-born son – whom she knew was the Messiah – in an animal’s feeding trough. There was dirt and manure and flies, and Mary was in pain and Jesus probably squalled like any other child . . . and you know what? That’s the good news the angel told us about . . . God came to earth as one-of-us. Not one of the Romans, not one of the upper-crust ruling class, who could order all his subjects to go on mid-winter jaunts to their home towns, but a little child in a filthy stall, with straw and manger-dirt on his face. A little child with an exhausted mom, and attendants who weren’t princes or priestesses, or gynecological M.D.s or obstetrics nurses, but low-class shepherds who’d abandoned their sheep, and who would sure get a talking-to from their boss when they got home.

The birth of Jesus wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t just so . . . what it was, however, was just us. It was human, no more and no less, it was human. The good news of great joy is that Jesus came to earth Immanuel, God with us, in all our grubbiness, in all our faults, in all our fightin’ and feudin’ and less-than-perfect little hearts. No matter how we celebrate Christmas, no matter how we make a living or don’t make a living, on this night, in the City of David, Christ comes to us just as we are. Amen.