Christmas Eve 2014
Luke 2:1-20
Merry Christmas Bethany Lutheran Church! May the grace and peace of our Lord and Savior, be with you on this fine evening.
My wife and I received an unusual package in the mail the other day. We got out the knife, opened up the box, which was stuffed full of ...Diapers! It was full of diapers.
For those of you who don’t know, my wife and I are expecting our first child in April, and so up to this point, we’ve been getting all of the fun baby stuff in the mail. We have our crib. There are little onesies and stuffed animals that keep showing up at our door. It’s the kind of stuff that makes you want to be a parent.
But diapers? Am I ready for that? The other day, I had this realization that I have never changed a diaper in my life! Whenever a baby needs to be changed, I do what every rational guy does when - I run to the basement.
Of course I tell this to parents and they all just laugh at me. One guy on the council had changed so many diapers in his life that he was showing off how to do it with his eyes closed...literally. I told this to another friend from church who told me, “You know, the first time I changed a diaper I threw up on my shoes!” Yeah. Real helpful guys! Thanks for the moral support!
I’m quickly learning that there’s a romantic, made for TV, side of being a parent that’s all high-fives and hugs, bike rides and baseball games. But getting that box of diapers woke me up to the day-to-day reality of being a parent. It was my first glimpse of the messy side of parenthood.
As much as I would like to take the good parts and leave out the bad ones, the truth is, you can’t have one without the other. You can’t be a parent without changing a butt-load of diapers (pun intended). That would be like saying that you want to experience the thrill of skydiving without the fear of falling. It’s a part of the package, and perhaps we shouldn’t want it any other way.
Every year, I get a similar feeling about the story of Jesus’ birth. We have such a romantic view of Christmas, that we often miss the bigger picture of what it means for the Son of God to be born in a stable.
Often, the images we see of the nativity show all of the good, and none of the bad. They’ll paint a romantic scene of a still, peaceful night, with two calm and serene looking parents, surrounded by soft, cuddly looking animals, gentle shepherds, and a host of angels.
The birth of Jesus is often described as a “humble” birth, which strikes me as being a gross understatement. I think a more accurate way to describe his birth would be “messy.”
Mary and Joseph are essentially in a barn. And do you know what goes on inside of a barn? Everything! It’s messy in there. It’s a stable for dirty farm animals, not a hospital! There’s no crib for the baby when it’s born. It’s just a feeding trough for the animals - a manger. There’s no soft mattress to lie down on, it’s a bed of itchy hay. And these shepherds that came to be the first witnesses to the birth of the Savior of the World - they are the poorest folks from the very bottom of society.
It’s as if God chose to dive into this world he loved, but couldn’t truly do so without falling into the messiness of life.
This is how the Messiah comes into the world. Strange isn’t it? But I can’t help but think that there something beautiful going on here - there’s a harmony between the holiness of God and the messy reality of the world. It’s a message that God is about to do something new - something completely unexpected. Instead of destroying the world like in the story of Noah and the flood, this time God is going to enter into it - change it from the inside out.
The story of Jesus birth declares that it’s in the messiness of life that we encounter the holiness of God. It’s absurdly counter-intuitive. It’s the moment where you get a box of diapers in the mail and realize that this incredible thing that’s happening is going to be intertwined with everything else life has to offer.
It seems that whenever life gets messy, God is in the midst of it. When the world wouldn’t go near the lepers, Jesus was healing them with his touch. When people walked around the blind beggars, Jesus walked up to them. Jesus doesn’t even run from the ugliness of the cross. This God doesn’t avoid the messiness of life - cancer, poverty, war, hunger, death - this God is in the middle of it all.
I’m getting ahead of the story. Here, in front of us today is the Messiah - a mere baby - lying in a feeding trough for animals. He’s in a dirty stable, with filthy animals, surrounded by two exhausted parents. And the only people who know about it are the shepherds working the night shift.
Still, I have to believe that this is the most beautiful scene you could imagine. It’s the most precious gift you could receive. And I don’t believe God wanted it any other way.
Merry Christmas Bethany Lutheran Church
and Thanks be to God. Amen.
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