Friday, December 24, 2004

Fri, Dec 24, 2004 - Christmas Eve

Isaiah 9:2-7
http://bible.oremus.org/browser.cgi?passage=Isaiah+9%3A2-7

Titus 2:11-14
http://bible.oremus.org/browser.cgi?passage=Titus+2%3A11-14

Luke 2:1-10
http://bible.oremus.org/browser.cgi?passage=Luke+2%3A1-20


Isn’t Christmas wonderful when you’re a kid? You know that one, shining day of perfection is coming, when everything is lights and food, presents and laughter, and the family all gets along. You can’t sleep at night waiting for the magic of Christmas, and the world just glows.

But then you get older, and it doesn’t seem quite as magical. If we could all just stop on Christmas, and not go on to the next day, it would be great, but we know that there’s Boxing Day, and then maybe a few days off, and then life pretty much goes back to the way it was before: the money’s tight, the kids fight, the parents get sick. Nothing really seems to have changed; Christmas doesn’t really seem to have made a difference. It ends up being just the same old thing as it was last year.

But I’m here to tell you that it’s not. That the Christmas story we just heard - this version of the birth of Jesus - is so radical and unexpected and so absolutely outrageous that if we heard it for the first time as adults, I suspect that we might, like the shepherds, be completely overwhelmed. The story of Jesus’ birth is iconoclastic - it completely breaks the mould on what we’ve come to expect from power and grandeur - that it really changes the world.

The realization that something unusual is going on really hits for the first time when the angel makes the proclamation to the shepherds. Up to this point in the story, things seem pretty normal. We have the sad, but not unusual, situation of a couple: poor and forced to relocate for political reasons, who have their first baby boy in the back of an inn, among the cows and the horses. It’s a situation not unlike ones that go on every day in the world - poor women around the world have their children on the dirt floors of their homes, in the fields where they work, by the side of the road where they happen to go into labour, all because they don’t have the resources to go to a hospital, or pay for a midwife, or even take the day off from working. Sometimes these women are married, sometimes they’re alone. But all of them, like Mary and the baby Jesus, find themselves on the edges of society, with nobody to care that they’re there, or to notice if they’re gone. They are, in a word, unremarkable.

Except that, and here’s where we discover the outrageousness of this story, except that there is something so remarkable about this birth, and more particularly this baby, that a host of angels - not just one - a host, bursts into the sky above Bethlehem praising, singing, glorifying God for what has just happened. The Bible has no story of such a choir happening before, and it has no story of such a choir happening again. Nothing like this birth had happened before or since. But what’s so special about this birth and this baby? What’s so special about a son being born to a poor couple in a barn?

Well, this baby, this poor, seemingly unremarkable baby was, in fact, a Saviour. Can you imagine? Listen carefully - the angel didn’t say that the baby was going to become a Saviour. The angel said that the baby already was a Saviour. This baby, who was born to unwed parents, apparently without any extended family to take them in in their hometown, this baby was the Messiah - God’s own anointed one. Now you and I know that Saviour-Messiahs aren’t babies. They’re grown adults, with impressive careers; people who’ve spent a lifetime preparing for the moment of deliverance. They’re not crying, flailing babies. And yet, here we are....

And there’s more. The angel goes on to say that this baby, sleeping in the feedbox of a bunch of cows, this baby whose parents couldn’t afford to bribe the innkeeper for a room, is the Lord. Now, the only one who went around in those days with the title "Lord" was the Emperor Augustus. He was the one with the money, and the power. He was the one, with trumpets and heralds to announce his coming, who was the Lord. He was the one, with the rich palaces in Rome and people obeying his every whims, who was the Lord. Not this little tiny baby, whose birth was heralded by a few clucking chickens, and who was wrapped in cloth. This could not possibly be the Lord, the ruler of the known world. And yet, according to the angels, he was. This baby, who would normally have grown up to be just another poor Jew in the oppressive Roman Empire, this baby who was not rich or powerful or mighty or any of the things that Lords were supposed to be, this baby was the Saviour, the Messiah, the Lord.

Talk about radical and unexpected and completely outrageous! To say that the people who heard and saw this were "amazed" is probably the understatement of the year! God had done something so new and so generous and so beyond the realm of anything that anybody could ever have predicted (except the prophets, of course), that most people couldn’t even understand it. God broke apart every expectation and stereotype that people might have about Saviours and Lord and what it meant to have power, and God remade a new image of a Saviour in the form of a tiny baby. And then God gave this baby to us. "To you" is born this day, proclaimed the angel. Not to Mary, not to Joseph, not even to God, but to you. For you. This amazing birth, this outrageous baby-Messiah, was born to you, a gift of sheer, unconditional love. And this gift changed the world. This gift made the world a new place, one of joy and peace and, most importantly, hope.

It’s hard to see it now. The world this past year has tended to be a place that has made us feel depressed and despairing of any real change. This year we have been confronted with daily deaths in Iraq, with the massacres in the Sudan, with the staggering cost of AIDS in Africa. It seems like every week we have heard of a teenager in Toronto being killed for one reason or another. In our own lives this year we may have experienced families breaking up, or slowly growing farther apart. We have probably been touched, in one way or another, by debilitating illness, or the slow, steady decline that comes with growing older, or maybe even by death. Every day seems to have been like the day before it, there seems to be no expectation of change, and the future looks dim. And by the end of the year, hope is hard to come by.
But the coming of Jesus into the world, the unexpected and unprecedented birth of the Messiah, in a barn in the middle of nowhere tells us that that is simply not the case. Because with Jesus we have something new, something never done before. And with this new thing, we have reason to hope.

Because this new thing, which has been given to us in the birth, life, and death of Jesus Christ, is a gift of love that changes the world. You see, even though on Christmas we focus on Jesus’ birth, that’s just the beginning. In fact, the way Jesus began his life is only remarkable in the context of what he did with that life. And what Jesus did is live a life of transformative love. What I mean is that Jesus lived in such a way that his love for the world, his love for sinners and outcasts, for rejects and losers, his love transformed everyone he came into contact with. His love taught people that, no matter what, they were children of God, and cherished. His love taught people that there was nothing they could do that would ever estrange them from God, or ever keep them from God’s side. And his birth, death, and resurrection are proof of that.

Through Jesus’ birth, we saw that God was determined to do a new thing, crafted out of love, and through Jesus’ death, we saw that this new thing was love, the love of God, and it new no bounds, and would let nothing get in its way. And through his resurrection, we saw that nothing, absolutely nothing, could stop this love from coming to us - not even death.

And this changes the world. This gives us hope. Because in Jesus’ birth, life, death, and resurrection, we see that we are not doomed to repeat the cycles of violence and war, we are not tied to death and despair. In Jesus, we see those cycles broken, we see that love does make a difference, and that life, not death, has the last word. We see that light shines in the darkness, and that the darkness is simply not able to overcome it.

And this light gives us new eyes to see the world. I described to you all the ways in which the world this year has been a depressing place. But with eyes of light, and hope, and love, we can see something new. We see that, according to the Stockholm International Peace Institute [http://www.sipi.org] despite the news time devoted to the devastation in Iraq and Afghanistan the number of wars and armed conflicts has actually dropped significantly in the past ten years. And, the number of people "killed in battle" is the lowest number the world has seen since WWII. With eyes of hope we see that the crime rate in Toronto has actually dropped over the past few years. It’s true that the rate of violence among youth has skyrocketed, but we also see youth like Dru Stewart, who stand up to bullies and protect the weak, even if it costs them their lives. With eyes of hope we see that love does change things, that families do reconcile, that babies being born can bring peace to the world, that people really are reaching out to care for the strangers and outcasts and sinners in their midst.

We are not without hope. Jesus’ birth, the sending by God of a Son into our world, has brought about a new thing. And this new thing, this Jesus, Emmanuel - God-with-us, is in us, changing us. We are not doomed to be the same people we have been. We are not consigned to the darkness. We are given Jesus Christ, the ultimate example of transformative love, and that means that when we go out into the world, we bring light to the darkness of others, we bring peace where there is violence, and we bring new life where previously there has only been death.

And really, when you think about it, that is the most magical and outrageous part of our Christmas story. It’s not just that God brought the Messiah, the Saviour of the world, to us as a poor little baby, thereby changing the world forever. It’s also that God is using us, God is using each one of you, to do the same - to change the world. And this is a reason for rejoicing, for thanking God for the wonderful thing that God has done and is continuing to do in us through Jesus Christ. Most importantly, this is our reason for hope.

So, as you reflect on the gift of love lying in the manger, may the hope and light of Christmas Eve be with you and your loved ones, today and every day. Amen.

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