Real Savior, Real Mess - It's a Boy!

12-24-16 (Christmas Eve Year A)

Isaiah 9:2-7; Luke 2:1-20

Real Savior - It’s a Boy!

When you think of the events that happened at Christmas Eve… what do you picture?  How do the events play out in the theatre of your mind’s eye?  Does it look like the picture on the front of a Christmas card?  Is it staged like a Cecil B. DeMille movie with incredible grandeur and production values?  Does it look more like the nativity set you have sitting on the mantlepiece?  For me, it’s definitely the nativity figures.  When I was growing up, it was that nativity that captured my imagination and shapes a lot of my early Christmas memories.  My father has a beautiful hand-carved antique nativity that he bought while he was stationed overseas in the Air Force.  The figures are exquisitely detailed and sit in a stable that is equally intricate.  The scene has real moss and hay in it, the figures are dressed in real fabrics… my father even kept a little plastic case in with the nativity figures that contained small crystals of frankincense and myrrh, so the figures even took on an almost mystical smell.  There’s always been something almost magical to me about those figures - the special care with which we have always treated them, the time we took to read the story from Luke and Matthew’s Gospels as we added the figures to the stable… there’s a certain reverence to it all that has always translated for me into the way I approach the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ birth.

It’s this same kind of reverence and awe-struck mystery that seems to surround just about every portrayal of the nativity I’ve ever seen, in fact.  No matter what artist has painted it, no matter which hand carves the figures, no matter which director sets the scene… the figures share a universal quality to them.  Everyone gazes at the baby in the manger and the faces are all the same, set, serene and reverent expression, always forming this tableaux of wonder that is both picturesque and mystical at the same time.  It points to the miraculous - this wonderful moment when God burst into the world, and as we stare at that moment frozen into history, as we see it depicted in those special figures… it sparks our imagination and fills us with the reverence that we should be feeling when we consider the birth of our Savior.

But in the midst of this perfect arrangement and reverent mysticism, we forget something terribly important - there are things that a nativity scene can never really portray.  And as we’ve let the nativity scene shape so much of our perception of the birth of Christ, we’ve lost some incredibly important context for our own lives in the process.

This is one of many reasons that I appreciate many of the different ways that people have tried to imagine that Christmas over the years - even more so the ones that try to ask what it might have looked like if Christ had been born today instead of over 2,000 years ago. One that is truly striking for me is this imagining put together by the Reformed Church of Hungary a few years ago:

It’s a different take on Christmas night, a different portrayal of the nativity.  It catches you off guard to think of Mary giving birth in a highway rest stop bathroom.  And yet for me, it’s this imagining that somehow makes the birth of Christ that much more real to me in a way that no nativity scene can ever truly do.  When we look at a nativity scene, we see the birth of Christ given to us in the most romanticized way possible.  You may see the cow serenely laying in the back of the manger, but you’ll never see cow pies.  The nativity will always smell like frankincense, myrrh, old wood and hay, but you’ll never smell the scent of shepherds who’ve come rushing from the fields and who likely haven’t bathed in a week.  And the baby Jesus is always clean, serene, peaceful, never crying… you’ll never see a nativity scene where Joseph is cutting the umbilical cord or where Mary is still covered in her own blood, sweat and tears as she holds her child for the first time.

And while we might scoff at these things being shown in a nativity scene, all the same we lose the reality of Christ’s birth when we don’t stop to think about it.  The nativity may be beautiful and mysterious to us, but the even greater beauty is when we stop to think that God chose to become flesh, to be born in the first place, let alone in the midst of filth and the gritty dirtiness of the world.  Christ wasn’t born in a sterile or a serene environment - he entered into the real world, into our world, our reality, our brokenness and dirtiness.  He entered into a world that was bereft of hospitality, a world that proclaimed there was no room for him.  He entered into a world where not long after his birth, he and his family would become fugitive refugees running from a ruthless tyrant intent on killing him and every other baby born around the same time as he was.  He entered into a world that was real, and he did so in a way that was real.

Tonight we gather to celebrate both the nativity and the reality.  We gather in the awe and reverence of the nativity scene and we celebrate the mystical moment in which God came down to earth. We celebrate the fulfillment of the promise of Isaiah: “Unto us a child is born; unto us a son is given, and he shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” But we also remember the humanity into which Christ was born, the messiness and ugliness, the dirt and grime and reality that marked our savior as both fully God and fully Human.  We celebrate the mystery that reveals to us that, if God is present, a stable, a streetcorner, even a highway rest stop bathroom can be a church.  And we gather at this table together, celebrating that mystery with one another as we remember the promise that Christ will come again, that Christ will break once more into our reality and establish His kingdom once and for all time among us.

May you be filled with the reality of Christmas this year.  May it fill you with wonder and awe.  And may God bless you always in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Merry Christmas!  Amen.