Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
December 25, 2009

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.

There is a common and much loved image of Christ in Eastern Orthodox Christianity. It often appears on the inside of those big domes that are such a prominent part of much Orthodox church architecture. It’s called Christ Pantocrator, which means Christ the ruler of all, the ruler of the universe. Christ Pantocrator is the risen Christ seated on a heavenly throne. He looks stern, or perhaps impassive. He is clearly above it all, above all the samsara as the Buddhists call it, above all the inconstancy, the change, the flux of human life. He is above all the suffering, above all the poverty, pain, and death that are so much a part of life in creation. He is imperious and impervious. He is the Christ of power and glory.

And let’s face it. It’s not just the eastern branch of Christianity that has tended to see Christ this way. Christianity generally has tended to turn Jesus into God walking around on earth only appearing to be human. He is Jesus the miracle man. When people think of Jesus they often think of him walking on water, something no mere human could do. We see him as an earthly reflection of God’s power and glory.

That’s how we want him to be, isn’t it? We want to believe that he performed miracles, that he turned water into wine, caused the paralyzed to walk, and calmed the storm. We want deeds of power. We want flash. We want razzle-dazzle. We want to be wowed. We want to be overwhelmed. We want God to come with deeds of power to put an end to all the violence, all the injustice, all the suffering. That, after all, is how we expect God on earth to act. That’s how we expect God to be.

That’s what we want. That’s what we expect. Then we turn around and say that God did indeed come to us with the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. But what do we get when Jesus comes at Christmas? We get something that could hardly be less like what we expect. We get an unwed mother. We get a woman about to give birth driven from her home by an oppressive imperial government. We get a mother about to give birth who can’t find even a poor room in a wretched inn where she can have her baby. We have a baby born in a stable and laid in a manger, a dirty feeding trough for farm animals. We expect glory. We get poverty. We expect glitz. We get humility. We expect power. We get helplessness.

It’s not what we expect, and it’s all so improbable. The Christmas story is so familiar to us that perhaps we take it for granted. Perhaps we don’t think about it very much. When we hear it our hearts are warmed. Perhaps like me you have lovely memories of reading Luke’s Christmas story with your family around the tree on Christmas Eve. It’s a beautifully told story, and it’s part of who we are. We know it so well. It’s so comfortable. It’s so comforting. It’s so familiar that we, I suspect, we don’t see how improbable it is. If you’d asked the people of Jesus time what it would look like on the day they called the day of the Lord, the day of God’s coming to earth, no one would have described the birth of Jesus as it is told in the New Testament. If you asked those Christians today whose faith is focused on belief in a Second Coming of Christ what that coming will look like they will point you to the Book of Revelation, not to the Gospel of Luke. They will speak of tribulation and judgment, not of a helpless infant greeted by poor shepherds of no social account. They will speak of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, not of a humble donkey wondering why the humans have taken over her feeding trough. That’s what we think the coming of God into the world should be like—power and glory not poverty and humility.

But here’s the thing: God did come into the world. That’s the central Christian confession. That’s what we celebrate at Christmas. And when it happened, it wasn’t anything like what the world expected—or expects. It wasn’t overwhelming, it was underwhelming. It wasn’t loud and flashy. It was so quiet and ordinary that only a few shepherds to whom angels specially appeared even noticed it. Matthew says a miraculous star led the way to the event, but apparently only three Gentile sages even saw the star. At least, they’re the only ones Matthew says saw it, and they’re the only ones he says followed it; so how spectacular could it have been? It was all so unexpected, all so improbable.

We could just sit here and wait for God to do it our way, wait for God to do it right, wait for God to come again in power and majesty. A lot of Christians do, or at least that what all the end times prophecy that some Christian groups are obsessed with looks like to me. Yet we claim that nothing less happened with the birth of Jesus than God came to us as one of us. So doesn’t seem that what we should be doing is trying to figure out what God coming to us in the person of Jesus means rather than waiting around for God to do it our way? It sure does to me. Doesn’t it seem that we should assume that God knew what God was doing in coming to us in the poverty and humility rather than in power and glory? It does to me. And here’s at least part of what I think it means.

God chose to come to us in a way that truly answers our need. In coming to us in Jesus God was saying: You don’t need flash. You don’t need power and glory. What you need is for me to come to you in a way you can relate to. In a way you can really understand. In a way that shows you how I am with you—here and now, not in some imaginary future. What you need is for me to show you that I am with you in your poverty, in your humility, in your mortality. What you need is for me to show you that I understand, and I do that by living your life and dying your death. What you need is for me to teach you my ways in a way you can understand, by showing you that a human being can know, teach, and live my ways. By showing you that you don’t have to do things according to the way of the world. You can do things according to my ways. You know that because by coming to you as one of you I showed you that it can be done.”

And it’s all so improbable. It’s improbable because it’s not what humanity expected, or expects. It’s so improbable that God would empty Godself of divine power and come to us as a helpless infant born in a stable in a place of no particular account in the world’s eyes. Yet here we are on another Christmas morning, telling once again the story of how that’s exactly what God did. Celebrating the story of how that’s exactly what God did. It’s so improbable, and it’s so glorious. It’s so powerful. It’s so life saving and life transforming.

So let’s get over how improbable it is. Let’s enter once more into the story of how God chose—in God’s way not ours—to come to us. Let’s let that story once more warm our hearts and touch our souls. Let’s let that story calm our spirits and stir our minds, stir our minds to contemplate anew what it all means. Stir our minds into a resolution to be more faithful disciples of the one whose birth we celebrate. Let us celebrate God’s improbable ways—and rejoice. Christ is born! Halleluiah! Amen.