Christmas Eve 2019
St. Paul’s Lutheran Church
My
3-year-old son loves to cook and bake with me. It is simultaneously one of the
best and worst things – best when I have the time to be patient, worst when I’m
in a hurry or really want things to, you know, turn out. Occasionally his
4-year-old sister joins in, and then? All bets are off. I just hope I come out
with something edible.
Such was cookie-baking for this holiday season. Both kids wanted
to help. With our assortment of cookie cutters, and what little knowledge they
had gained from their abundant playdough toys, we made my favorite cookies: spicy
Christmas cut-outs. Now, my mom, knowing that I love these, makes them for
every occasion – hearts for Valentine’s Day, stars and trees for Christmas, we
even had them at our wedding, in the shape of hearts and, obviously, airplanes
(my beloved’s second most loved thing). When mom makes them, they are perfect.
The frosting doesn’t drip down the sides, and although I’m sure there are
broken ones, they are never the ones that end up being passed around on the
pretty holiday plate at Christmas dinner.
 |
| Some of our survivors... messy frosting, rough edges and all! |
Our batch of
cookies? Not so much. There are several with a single bite out of them. Another
bunch with stray marks from the cookie cutters, from over eager children being
less than careful. Frosting that somehow made it on the bottom from the rush
job I did after I got home from some late-night commitment. Of course, the
precious few that are beautiful, I pulled out for gifts to special people – but
the ugly cookies, with the broken edges and the messy frosting? No one outside
the house gets to see those!
That’s sort of a metaphor for life, isn’t it? Especially at
Christmastime, we only put forward our very best face for other people to see
(the prettiest cookies, loveliest dresses, and the best smiles) … and the
brokenness (both the broken edges on our cookies and our emotional brokenness)we
save for a more private place. After all, there’s no reason, especially at such
a merry time as Christmas, to dwell on the dark shadows and brokenness of our
lives, right?
But you and I both know: there are very real dark shadows and
brokenness in our lives. Our country is reeling after only the third
impeachment of a president in our 250-year history. We read weekly, it seems,
about another shooting, another tragedy, another hate crime. Rochester City
Schools’ budget cuts and consequent teacher and staffing cuts will leave
already at-risk students with even less stability in their lives. New and
devastating diagnoses. Broken families. People we love making choices we cannot
understand. It can be hard to see the light when there seems to be so much
darkness everywhere we look. It can be hard, sometimes, not to hear the angels’
song of “peace on earth” as mere wishful thinking. Peace, huh? I’ll believe it
when I see it.
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 Mary’s labor pains, or how messy birth is, or about
how her laboring moans 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? Did he just
have to sit there in a messy diaper?
No, those aren’t the parts of the Christmas story that we like
to tell and put on greeting cards, is it? 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 smell of a stable that is home to animals. You see, 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. Paul’s showed
us this in their delightful Christmas pageant, called, “An Unexpected
Christmas.” It is framed as 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, “Brilliant! They won’t be expecting that!”
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 much 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 the ugly ones in back, into 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, drippy, and partly eaten cookies, the ones you never intended
for anyone to see, but which, nonetheless, are a part of your story.
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 Emmanuel, 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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