Christmas Eve 2021
Grace to you and peace from the one who is and who was and who is to come. Amen.
I came across a comic shortly after my first child was born that made me laugh out loud because it hit so close to home. In it, a woman clearly meant to be the new mother, Mary, is talking to a young boy with a drum, who is ready to play a little rump-a-pum-pum for the baby. She says, “I appreciate the thought, but I just got Jesus to sleep.”
It gives a little comical insight into what it was like for those new parents. There is not much written about Mary and Joseph’s experience in those first few weeks of Jesus’ life, but the topic has been the fascination of mystics and theologians for centuries. I remember that first Christmas as a new mom, with a 3-month-old. That year, this mysterious story of the incarnation hit me a totally new way. The church I was serving at the time put on a pageant for the community – not with children, but with adults. The Rehbaum family, with our new little bundle of joy, was selected to play the holy family. And so, yours truly donned a white robe and Mary’s signature blue veil, and walked the walk (or rather, waddled the pregnant waddle) of Mary. After so many years of hearing and telling this story, participating in this allowed me to experience it in a new way. Kneeling in prayer, I heard the angel’s announcement that I would bear God’s own son, and my hand instinctively moved to my belly, imagining this truth. I stood with Joseph (aka my husband Michael) in the crowd as we heard the centurion deliver the decree that we must travel to Bethlehem, and I remembered the fatigue I felt late in pregnancy just from walking upstairs, let alone 70 miles. I felt anxious as Joseph and I debated whether we should even bother knocking on the door of the inn with the sign that said, “No vacancy.” I waited in desperation for the innkeeper and his wife to figure out where they could put this pregnant lady, and smiled with relief when they said they had room with the animals. And I waddled my pregnant bones down the steps toward the makeshift stable we’d set up in the sanctuary, sneakily slipping out the pillow from my robe and grabbing my own real-life baby, and laid my child in a manger – then grimaced at the prospect of letting her stay there, and quickly picked her back up. While Joseph and I kept our holy spots in that stable, we sang to our daughter, stroked her and bounced her, and when she started to cry we discreetly checked her diaper, and bounced her some more, and whispered soothing things in her ear, and let her suck on my pinky… and because she clearly hadn’t gotten the message that “little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes,” we finally took her someplace more comfortable so the show could go on without distraction.
Of course, Mary and Joseph didn’t have that last option. The stable was it for them. They were stuck with a manger instead of a rocking, vibrating bassinet, and bands of cloth instead of a cozy, zip-up fleece sleeper, and lowing cattle instead of a smart speaker ready to play whatever the new parents requested. They were stuck with this newborn baby boy, with no experience, no conveniences, and presumably no clue what to do next.
My heart goes out to Mary and Joseph, trying to figure out how to parent this child under the worst of circumstances. Joseph being unable to get proper paternity leave and Mary fretting about fitting into her jeans again were the least of their worries, as Jesus literally had his bed eaten out from under him by his bovine roommates.
All this makes me wonder anew: Why on earth would God decide to come to us this way?! To two faithful, but inevitably faulty parents, with no clue what they were doing, and in such crude circumstances? As a friend of mine said after having her first child, “Every day, new aspects of parenting daunt me. Every day I have to ask for help. I rely on others to care for me... Sometimes, I feel as tender as a newborn myself.” And God entrusted the Savior of the world into the arms of two such parents?
Such a tender, vulnerable being, in such unpracticed arms. It wasn’t so long ago that I was in a position of doing absolutely everything for another human being – feeding, burping, carrying them from place to place, dressing them, wiping that cute little behind – and when I remember those days, this reality that we celebrate tonight baffles me: the King of Kings, the Prince of Peace, Wonderful Counselor, Almighty God… come as a baby? And even before he gets to the vulnerable baby stage – did God not know how risky getting there was, how many things can go wrong with a pregnancy, not to mention labor and delivery? How likely it was that Mary would die in childbirth, like so many women did in that time? Entering the world by way of childbirth was not only an incredibly messy choice on God’s part, but also a terribly dangerous one, in which too many things could go wrong. Couldn’t God have come as a fully formed man, just like Adam had?
It’s definitely crazy, but also… I can’t imagine the incarnation happening any other way. Some traditions say that Mary’s labor was quick and painless, even that she immediately resumed her pre-pregnancy figure as Jesus happily nursed (having had no trouble, of course, with that initial latch). I find this possibility frustrating and disappointing. If I’m going to worship an incarnate deity, a God who is willing to become human, then I want – I need – God to go all the way. The thing is, life starts with pain. Every one of us here today came into the world through pain and mess and fear. Since that messy day of our birth, the pain and mess and fear of life have changed and evolved, but those things have always remained a part of the human experience. For God to be truly human, God has to experience the whole kit and caboodle, including the risk, and the fear and pain of birth, and the vulnerability that follows.
Because if God was willing to share that experience with us humans, then I can truly believe that God means it – that God is willing to get down with us in the darkest, messiest, scariest moments of life, that God loves us enough to want to understand, that God cares enough not to bypass any part of the human experience, especially not the scariest, most demanding, and most vulnerable parts, even if that means coming into the world to the sound of groans and screams, and being clumsily fed by a young teenage mother, and inexpertly swaddled by a novice father. God came on that night and continues to come this night and every night into all the mess and fear of life – the pandemics, the grief and loss, the mental illness, the job loss, the impossible family dynamics, all of it.
Ted Loder tells about an experience he had during a rough patch in his life: his mother was dying, his dad depressed, his marriage hanging on by a thread, his kids angry about it, and his professional life on the rocks. One night, as he walked down Lombard St. in Philadelphia to meet his daughter for coffee shortly before Christmas, he saw a home that had dedicated their entire front window to an elaborate nativity scene. He was quite taken with it. But as he looked more closely he noticed two curious things: first, that all the characters seemed to be looking right at him, standing out there on the street; and second, to his surprise, it was missing a key piece. He writes, “There was no manger, no infant Jesus in the window! In effect, the street was the manger, and I was standing in it.” He goes on, “I stood there with tears in my eyes. With a force that lumped in my throat, I realized that just where I was standing, the Christmas miracle happens. In the street, where human traffic goes endlessly by, where men and women and children live and limp and play and cry and laugh and love and fight and worry and curse and praise and pray and die, just there Christmas keeps coming silently, insistently, mysteriously.” (Tracks in the Straw)
Just there – in all the fears and joys and sorrows and mess and beauty and vulnerability of life – just there, the Christmas miracle came that night in the form of a teenage mother giving birth, to an audience of sheep and cattle, and it continues to come to us, in whatever situation our life finds us in this year. God cares enough to do that. God loves enough to do that, tonight, and every night.
Let us pray… Everlasting God, you came into this world through pain and fear, just like we did. When we feel overwhelmed by fear and sorrow, pandemics and pain, loss and uncertainty – come to us again, and again, so that we would know your love with us. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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