Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
December 19, 2004

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

This Advent season we’ve been waiting for the coming of God in the person of Jesus. We’ve talked about a couple of the many, many ways that we need God to come into our lives and into our world. We’ve talked about the nature of Christian waiting itself. We’ve done special things in our service-lit candles, one more each week with a special litany and prayer. We’ve sung special hymns about the coming of Jesus. We’ve read special scripture passages about a promised future king and a transformed world of peace, justice, and wholeness for all people. All in all quite a buildup.

So you’d expect the climax of all this, the birth of Jesus, to be presented as a great spectacle. There should be fireworks at least. Maybe an earthquake. Some lightning and thunder would be nice, don’t you think? We’d expect that at the moment of Christ’s birth all of creation should be transformed. Peace and justice should break out all over the place.

And what do we get? In the Gospel according to Matthew we get...Nothing! That’s right, Nothing. That little bit we just heard is it. That’s the birth story in Matthew. Oh, to be sure, later we get the star and the Wise Men, and the flight into Egypt, and the slaughter of the innocents. I’ll have a bit more to say about those things later in this sermon and next Sunday, but all of that comes later. Matthew is so uninterested in the birth itself that he mentions it only in connection with the complications Mary’s unplanned pregnancy caused in Joseph’s marriage. Mary gave birth to Jesus. That’s it. That’s all there is.

Given all the buildup, don’t you want to say to Matthew: Wait a minute! What’s up with that?! Where are all the dramatics? You’re not giving Hollywood anything to work with here! Mary gave birth to Jesus?! That’s so dull, so boring, so ordinary. Surely you can do better than that! You give us some good stuff after the birth, but about the birth itself you give us nothing!

Now of course when we think of Christmas and the birth of Jesus we don’t think of it this way. That’s because we associate it with some miraculous things-the star of Bethlehem and the Wise Men from Matthew and the multitude of the heavenly host appearing to the shepherds in Luke. But what struck me about these stories this year is that in both Matthew and Luke, which by the way are the only two Gospels to have a birth story at all, all the heavenly fireworks come after the birth. Moreover, they happen not just later than the birth but in a different place from the birth, at least initially. Matthew’s star appears to the Wise Men "in the east," across the desert, far from Bethlehem. And Luke’s angels appear to the shepherds out in the country, in the fields outside Bethlehem, not at the site of the birth itself.

What’s going on here? Why does Matthew, and Luke for that matter, make the birth so ordinary and put the miraculous stuff both later in time and removed in distance, away from Bethlehem and the birth itself? Is it just a lack of imagination? Or, to put the same question in different words, why would God do it this way, with that separation between the birth and the heavenly fireworks? Well, I think the stories are told that way because there’s a profound theological point in that separation.

To get at the point, let’s look at what Matthew’s star and Luke’s angels actually do. Yes, I know that those parts of the story aren’t in today’s lectionary; but you all know the stories. In Matthew a star guides the Wise Men to Bethlehem, and in Luke angels appear to shepherds and direct them to go to Bethlehem. Both Matthew’s star and Luke’s angels do the same thing. They point the way to Jesus. They lead people to Jesus.. They are extraordinary, even miraculous events that point to something completely ordinary, the birth of a human infant.

Just that. An ordinary birth of an ordinary infant by an ordinary young woman. Now, I’ve had the immense privilege of being present at two human births, the births of my son and my daughter. And I know as well as anyone that any human birth is a miracle. It is the most profound miracle I have ever witnessed. Still, if you had witnessed the birth of Jesus you would have seen something that for humans is pretty ordinary.

That ordinariness is important. It is telling us something. The star and the angels pointing to it are telling us something. They are telling us: Look for God in the routine, the unremarkable, the plain, even the meek and lowly. That’s where God comes, that’s how God comes. They are telling us "If you want to see God look at Jesus" to be sure, but what do we see when we look at the infant Jesus? A normal, outwardly unremarkable human infant. In other words, something perfectly ordinary.

Now Bible stories are never just about there and then. They are not just or even primarily about things that happened to someone else someplace else a long time ago. They are about us. They are about our lives, our dilemmas, our anxieties. If they weren’t, the Bible would be a dead collection of ancient writings of interest to a few historians but not to much of anyone else. The Bible is not a dead collection of ancient writings, however. It is, or at least it can be if we approach it properly, the living word of God. It speaks to us here and now, not just to other people there and then.

One good way to get at just how the Bible is speaking to us here and now is often to ask about a Bible story: Who are we in this story? And by the way, the answer is never "we are Jesus." If you ever find yourself making yourself Jesus in the story, start over. It doesn’t work that way. So in the Christmas story, or rather stories, we need to ask who we are in the story, and we aren’t Jesus. We aren’t exactly the Wise Men, perhaps, but I think we are enough like them so that we can identify with them in the story. Like them, we aren’t Jews. More importantly, they are seekers after truth, and so are we. And we are a lot like the shepherds, poor (at least spiritually) and in need of the Good News of Jesus Christ. So then we must ask: If the star and the angels were pointing the Wise Men and the shepherds toward Jesus, and if we are at least enough like the Wise Men and the shepherds so that we can identify with them in the stories, and if this story is about us today as much as about them yesterday, what are the star and the angels telling us? Where are they pointing us? To Jesus, certainly, but what we see in the baby Jesus is the ordinary, the unremarkable, the poor, even the homeless. Sleeping in that stable was, after all, pretty much the first century Judean equivalent of sleeping under a bridge. That star and those angels point us not to the extraordinary and the wonderful but to the ordinary and the commonplace.

Just what does that mean for us? It means, I think, a couple of things. In our own lives, we don’t need to look for God in extraordinary, awesome events or in charismatic people. We can look for God in the ordinary people in our lives, our family and our friends, and even in ourselves; and we will find God there. God is in our ordinary relationships, in the love of family and the warmth of friendship. God is in our fellowship here in this church. The love, affection, friendship, and caring that we feel and express for one another in our ordinary lives are reflections of God’s love, affection, friendship, and caring for every one of us. In our love of others God cares for them, and in others’ love for us God cares for us. We may be ordinary. Our relationships may be ordinary. Christmas tells us that that is exactly where we should expect to find God.

The Christmas stories also tell us that we should look for God in the people in our world today who are most like that little family in a stable in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago-poor, strangers in a strange place, outside the accepted norms of society-remember, Mary was pregnant without being married, a real scandal in those days. And remember too that the same Gospel of Matthew that gives us the star and the Wise Men in Chapter 2 later in Chapter 25 also gives us that little baby, become the risen judge of the universe, saying: Insofar as you have done it to the least of these my brothers and sisters you have done it for me. Jesus and the God Jesus reveals are in the least among us, then and now.

So, is that all there is? Yes. That’s all there is. An ordinary birth of an ordinary child in an ordinary place at an ordinary time. That’s all there is, and that’s all we need. Because that’s where God is. Amen.