Each year, as I rush around trying to
get two churches ready for Christmas, I often don’t have time to do all the
other fun Christmas stuff – decorating, sending cards, caroling, parties,
baking cookies. I just barely get gifts done, though sometimes (and this year
is one of those times) I just have to accept that my family will be receiving
Epiphany gifts instead of Christmas gifts. Luckily, they understand. But this
year, I finally did it: I carved out some time one Saturday morning to bake
some Christmas cookies. Of course, I made my favorite: spicy Christmas cutouts,
trees and stars. Because
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| Spicy Christmas cut-outs, made by Johanna :) |
As I
carefully lifted them off the cookie sheet and onto the cooling rack, of
course, I found there were some casualties. There often are, especially with
the various shapes and pointy edges of cutouts. In my family, and I’m sure in
yours as well, the casualties were the ones the family got to eat, while we
saved the ones that turned out perfectly cute and intact for giving to other
people, and for putting on the pretty plate after Christmas dinner. No one
outside the kitchen saw the mistakes.
That’s sort of a metaphor for life,
isn’t it? Especially at Christmastime, we only put forward our very best face –
the prettiest cookies and the best smiles – for other people to see, and we save
the brokenness – both the broken edges on our cookies and our emotional
brokenness – for a more
But you and I both know: there are
very real dark shadows and brokenness in our lives. Speaking personally, I have
been very occupied during Advent year with the darkness of that season. That’s
due to some family and personal things, but also the national and international
scene, in which the news is dominated by illness, torture, racism, riots,
threats, revenge, and last week even the whole-scale displacement of the
homeless community in Rochester city. It has been hard to see the light when
there seems to be so much darkness everywhere we look. It has been hard not to
hear the angels’ song of “peace on earth” as mere wishful thinking.
Perhaps that is why we portray the
Christmas story the way we do. I mean, it is an amazing story, miraculous,
moving, but did you ever notice how much we either gloss over or sentimentalize
the rougher edges of it? Like, Luke doesn’t tell us about the labor pains Mary
undoubtedly felt, or about how her laboring screams filled that silent night.
He doesn’t mention how scared and appalled Joseph was to be there for the
birth, which was not in any way a normal or appropriate place for a man to be,
but who else was there to catch the baby when he came out – the donkey? I don’t
think so! There is no reflection on how mortified Mary and Joseph were when the
dirty shepherds, the lowest of the low in society, showed up with their equally
dirty sheep. Or what about when baby Jesus made a mess in those swaddling cloths,
as newborns are prone to do, and they had no more clean ones to change him
into?
No, those aren’t the parts of the Christmas
story that we like to tell and put on greeting cards. Our preferred version
shows two faithful, saintly people caring gently for their newborn who no
crying makes, oxen and asses before him bowing, shepherds looking like
upstanding citizens, and not a hint of the messiness of a stable that is home
to animals. We don’t want to dwell on the gross, painful or difficult parts of
the Christmas story any more than we want to dwell on the gross, painful or
difficult parts of our own stories. Maybe, we think, just maybe, if the
Christmas story can be clean and sweet tonight, so can our lives. Like the
plate full of cookies that are not at all broken, our lives, too, can be
perfect, at least for one holy night. That is, after all, the expectation we
have for Christmas.
But from the very beginning, you see,
the incarnation, Christmas, did not meet expectations.
This year the kids of
St. Martin showed us this in their delightful Christmas pageant, called, “An
Unexpected Christmas.” It is sort of the prequel to the Christmas story. It
takes place in heaven, with God and the angels, as God tries to figure out what
to do about how far humanity has strayed from his original intention. God has
the idea to send his son in the form of a newborn baby, to a peasant girl in a
stable. The angels urge God to reconsider, to send an army, or at least to send
his son someplace safe, like to a strong ruler in a palace. With each wacky,
irrational, risky idea God has, the angels are aghast – all but one, who keeps
commenting, “That’s brilliant! They won’t be expecting that!”
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| St. Martin Christmas pageant, "An Unexpected Christmas" |
But that’s really the point of
Christmas, isn’t it? That repeated line: they won’t be expecting that. The way
that God chooses to come and dwell among us is completely unexpected,
completely risky, and when it comes down to it, completely wacky.
But that irrational wackiness is what
makes the Christmas story – the real
Christmas story with all the rough, broken edges – such good news. It would
have made sense for God to make His grand entrance into the earthly scene
dramatic, noticeable, and more important
than a baby born in a stable in a backwater town to an unwed teenage mother,
announced only to the shepherds in the fields. But that more “important”
version wouldn’t mean anything for the brokenness of my life. And so that isn’t
what God chooses to do. God doesn’t come and take one of the perfectly intact
cookies from a freshly polished silver plate. God doesn’t come into a family
with a mom and a dad and 2.5 kids and a dog. God doesn’t come into a table laden
with succulent and expertly cooked food, a sparkling Christmas tree with all
the best ornaments on the front, and a meal in which no one says anything
snarky or sarcastic, no one shares the pain going on in their lives, and
everyone is just as merry as can be.
No, God comes to the earth among the
lowly, the hungry, the displaced, the refugees, the weak, the despised. God
comes to earth in the dark of night, when all the scariest and most mysterious
creatures are out and about, where crime happens, where nothing seems quite as
safe. God comes to earth among people who are terrified, like the shepherds; to
those who are exhausted like those traveling many miles to their hometowns to
be registered; to those in pain, like a young mother giving birth; to the overwhelmed,
like the new father suddenly thrust into the role of midwife. God
comes into a
plate full of broken cookies, the ones you never intended for anyone to see,
but which, nonetheless, are a part of your story.
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| Yet in thy dark streets shineth the everlasting light... |
This is where God decides to come to
earth, shining light into the darkest streets, and promising us that, merry Christmas
or not, God is and always will be Emmaneul,
God-with-us, on this dark night, and always.
Let us pray… Everlasting light, as you shone into the dark streets of Bethlehem that
night, shine into our hearts this night. Come shine your light through our
cracks and our breaks and our imperfections, so that we will find peace in the
fact that you love us enough to be with us in all times. In the name of the
Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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