Christmas Eve – George Yandell
Who or what affects you most strongly in the birth story of Jesus? With whom do you identify? Is it Joseph? Or the inn-keeper, or the shepherds? What about the other guests in the inn? I suspect many of us identify with Mary. Maybe it’s too much to focus on Jesus – but we might be well-served this Christmas to do so.
What exactly are the ‘inn’ and the ‘manger’ described in Luke? Those terms fit well with what we know from the later Ottoman Empire. Its ruined caravansaries still border the Silk Road in central Turkey. (Caravansary literally means “camel-caravan-palaces”.) A more primitive version of those structures was likely found in Bethlehem. The inn had a gated enclosure with a central courtyard for the animals; around that were covered rooms without doors from which the animals’ owners could keep an eye on their livestock. Toward the back there were regular closed rooms. Luke mentions those details not only to emphasize the poverty of the holy family, but to be as accurate as possible. As the census drew so many to Bethlehem, the closed and private rooms were gone, and so were all the covered and semi-private ones around the open courtyard. Therefore Jesus was born among the animals in that open courtyard and laid in one of their feeding troughs. [Adapted from The First Christmas, Borg and Crossan, 2007, p. 150]
Had you ever considered that Jesus was born under the starlit sky, no roof, nothing but starlight to be one of the first blurry sights his eyes caught? It gives me a chill, then an understanding. As a gospel passage quotes the grownup Jesus, “The Son of Man has no place to lay his head” but under the heavens.
What about the shepherds? The frightened shepherds became God’s messengers. They organized, made haste, found others, and spoke with them. Don’t we all want to become shepherds and catch sight of the angel? I think so. [Adapted from DorotheeSoelle in On Earth as inHeaven, Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1993].
“Mary treasured all these things in her heart.” All beautiful, all touching, but what must it really have been like for a young mother giving birth in a cold, dark stable?For her, life already had been tough. She was, after all, questionable.
Pregnant and not yet properly married, the villagers probably whispered. Birth is messy and scary at best, but in a stable, or a parked car, or a tenement house, or a shack built on a garbage dump? Many women today can relate to Mary’s concern and fear. Our manger scenes, our art, our music are often too pretty, too warm, too safe.
“Mary treasured all these things in her heart.” I’m sure she treasured the lovely things, the joy of the shepherds, the pride Joseph felt, the birth of her beloved Child. But she also treasured the troubling things, the questions, the fear, the tensions—she held them in her soul, dealing with them with courage and faith.
The example of Mary is profound. We might learn how better to treasure many things in our hearts and let those treasures teach us to be more human, [more loving, more trusting]. [Adapted from Susanna Metz in “Synthesis,” December 2019 issue.]
If we focus on Jesus, we come to realize we are gathered to celebrate and make known what is unique to Christianity alone: that God has become one of us. In this neonate, suckling at his mother’s breast, is the enfleshment of God. Here lies God’s ultimate self disclosure, God’s ultimate risk-taking, God’s bright exclamation point to the proclamation God makes at Christmas: “I love you!”
Some call it the “vulgarity of God” to stoop so low, to descend so far, to leave Power and Glory so far behind. And the miracle of miracles occurs in a nameless place, to obscure peasant Jews, broke and fearful, who simply seek to start a family and to live a decent life for this their first-born child. The only witnesses are livestock and shepherds who arrive later, looking like people from a homeless shelter. No trumpets, no fanfare, no attendants, no OBGYNs or nurses, no incubated nurseries to announce the world-changing event, or to make the birth any safer or easier.
This is God in the raw. Who could have invented such a story but God? Some call it the “scandal of particularity.” The Timeless has entered time. The Boundless, Limitless One has become limited. The Nameless has become named. The All Powerful has become the most powerless of all—a newborn child. The Universal and Unlimited One has become “particularized,” in a specified time and place. [Adapted from King Oehmig in “Synthesis”, December 2013 issue.]
All of the participants together tell us we are to participate with God in bringing about the world promised by Jesus’ birth. Rather than waiting for God to bring heaven to earth, we are to collaborate with God. [Adapted from The First Christmas, Borg and Crossan, 2007, p. 241] Christmas is the mandate for all Christians to make God present every day, in every precinct. God is with us. We are all included.
Morton Kelsey once said, “I myself am very glad the divine child was born in a stable, because my soul is very much like the stable, filled with strange, unsatisfied longings with guilt and animal-like impulses, tormented by anxiety, inadequacy, and pain. If the Holy [Child Jesus] could be born in such a place, the One can be born in me also. I am not excluded.” [Morton Kelsey, quoted in “Anglican Digest”, Winter 2016 issue, p. 30.]
In just a moment, you’ll hear and are invited to sing the first 4 stanzas of the haunting hymn [60], “Creator of the Stars of Night”- the mystery of the birth of Jesus is expanded when you consider the prologue of the Gospel of John. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”
The infant Jesus, looking at the stars above the manger in the courtyard of the inn- that infant son of Mary and Joseph- he was looking up at the stars he had created. It kind of blows the mind, doesn’t it? The Christ made flesh, living among us, is God’s agent, God’s own son. This moment, we are breathing atoms of air that Jesus himself breathed. The stars above us, he knew as creator. Listen and join in singing if you wish, to a part of Hymn 60, printed in your service sheets. I hear the mystery expanding as the music sings of the impossible- the creator of the stars of night is born among us.