Luke 2: 1-20
Good evening and welcome to Holy Cross Monastery. And thank you from the entire Holy Cross community to each of you for sharing your Christmas with us. I know that many of you think you are receiving a gift by being here - the truth is that you are also giving a gift by your presence. But I'll come back to that.
Christmas is a season filled with gifts, with joy and good cheer. So the gift of your being here is a part of the essence of the season.
Christmas is much more than just a season of joy, or peace, or good will toward all. It is more, even, than just the time when we remember the coming of our savior. Christmas is much more complicated - for not only is there great beauty and infinite hope in the Christmas season, the beauty is complemented by ugliness and the hope is accompanied by sorrow. The beauty of a newborn child is accompanied by the ugliness of poverty - of being forced to stay in a barn. The hope of the savior is accompanied by the ugliness of pending crucifixion.
We heard a few minutes ago Luke's telling of the Nativity of Christ. But there are a couple of things that make it a bit difficult for us to really hear Luke.
First, when we are listening to Luke, Matthew has a way of standing behind us and whispering in our ear. While Luke is telling us about shepherds, Matthew is reminding us that in a few days we can also expect Kings. But Luke never tells us about Kings - or Magi or whatever they may have been.
And it isn't just Matthew - when I think of that night in the stable long ago its almost impossible for me to do so without Christina Rossetti telling me what a bleak and snowy winter night it was - in the bleak midwinter long ago... though Luke gives us no weather report.
What Luke chooses to tell us, and what he chooses to leave out is critical to hearing Luke. And what we want tonight is Luke, the whole Luke, and nothing but Luke.
Second, it is hard for us in this day and age not to hear Luke as though he were a journalist. We can be lulled into thinking we're hearing a news story - Dateline: Bethlehem. Headline: Savior Born. And then he starts filling in the details - Cesar Augustus, Quirinius, Herod the King (Herod didn't make it into tonight's Gospel reading, but if we had started a bit earlier he would have been there). Hotels full. Savior born in barn. Animals watch. Shepherds visit. Order is restored. Film and details at eleven.
But Luke is not a journalist and the Gospel may be good news, but its not a news story.
Scholars have struggled for years with Luke's facts because, for example, This particular Cesar, Quirinius, and this particular Herod were not all in office at the same time. There is doubt about the census, and about the need to return to your home town for the purpose of a census. Some scholars develop rather complicated rationalizations for how Luke's facts can be correct. Others excuse him by noting he was writing a long time after the fact and probably just confused some details.
But we're listening for what Luke may be trying to tell us - as an evangelist, not as a journalist.
Maybe Luke is fully aware that these three leaders were not in power at the same time. Maybe he doesn't care. Maybe he is winking just a bit as he writes. Perhaps it is the modern equivalent of saying - "it came to pass when Ronald Reagan was President and Al Gore was Vice President..."
Because maybe Luke is telling us that it doesn't matter who was in office - when or where. The important thing, the thing that does matter, is that these great rulers were not at the stable in Bethlehem on the night in question. The savior of the world is made flesh and the most powerful people in the world are not on hand. The powerful people are not God's agents in this process. They are, more or less, irrelevant... out of the picture... It doesn't even matter if we get their names right...
And who is there? Who is relevant? Who does matter? Joseph and Mary, and a group of shepherds.
We have a very romantic view of shepherds. If we substituted words like cowboys, or ranch hands, or migrant farm workers, for shepherds, we might be getting closer to the reality. Shepherds were dirty, rough, uneducated. They were desperately poor. They were beyond the margin of society.
So the savior comes. The rich and powerful are off being rich and powerful. The poor and marginalized are there, praising God. Already Luke is establishing the special relationship that Jesus has with the poor, the un-empowered.
Luke also tells us about the animals - or at least about their stable. Only Luke. Why is Luke telling us this?
Jesus comes to bring salvation. Polite society, the good folks at the Inn, can't even find space for Jesus - can't make room for him. But the animals can make room for him and share their manger - literally share their table with the infant Jesus. This is table fellowship of a sort - the infant Jesus - with the animals.
As we come to the table in just a little while, are we more like those animals, or those folks at the inn?
The animals, we need to remind ourselves, are works of God's creation no less that are we. This is their creator, their God incarnate, no less than ours. O Magnum Mysterium et admirabile sacramentum says the ancient song - what a great mystery and sacred thing, that animals were there to watch the newborn savior lying in their manger. The animals aren't sweet decorative set dressing. They belong - just as the shepherds belong - just as we belong.
So what is Luke saying to us here and now as we remember the coming of Christ into the world? What sacred power does this great mystery hold?
Christ comes to us not in the midst of the rich and powerful, but in the midst of the margins. If we are looking for Presidents and Kings to lead the world to peace and justice - to lead the world to the kingdom of God, we're looking in the wrong place.
We need to look to ourselves and to the persons sitting to our left and to our right - and we need to do so in humility. Jesus comes to us in the stables of our hearts, not in the palaces of our minds. We must respond as did the shepherds.
We may not be as simple as the animals, nor as poor and marginalized as the shepherds, but we are most likely not as rich and powerful as Herod, Quirinius, or our modern-day Kings and Presidents. And, much more importantly, we are here - at the manger - on this night.
Luke's shepherds don't come with fabulous gifts - unlike Matthew's Kings. No gold, frankincense or myrrh. They come plain as they are - to worship. That is their gift - the only gift they can possibly offer. They worship. And that is the same gift we give in our presence here tonight. You see - I said at the beginning that your being here was a gift... It is the gift we give every time we worship.
And so we cry out, as did those shepherds, glory to God in the highest, and on earth - peace. Amen.
Br. Scott Wesley, OHC
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