Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
December 27, 2009

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.

Well, Christmas is over. Or at least, out in the world it’s over. Out in the world Christmas pretty much ends on December 25. Oh sure. We may still have the tree up. The stores may still have their decorations up, hoping we’ll come in and spend any money we received as a Christmas gift. But the feeling is different. It feels like after Christmas, not like Christmas any more. Here in the church it’s different. In the church Christmas begins on December 25—or on the evening of December 24—and continues until Epiphany twelve days after Christmas. This is a Christmas Sunday, not an after Christmas Sunday. So this morning I want to do some more musing with you on what Christmas means.

I have been particularly struck this year by how we tend to romanticize Christmas. Maybe that’s because, as most of you know, I had a pretty rough year in 2009 in my personal life, so romanticizing anything rings a bit hollow for me right now. Be that as it may, I’ve been struck this year by one particular image that comes to my mind when I see the idyllic manger scenes and hear “Away in a Manger” sung by choirs of sweet-faced, innocent looking children. It’s an image from medieval and Renaissance art. Medieval and Renaissance painters loved to paint Nativity scenes. They painted them by the thousands. And they could be pretty highly romanticized themselves, with rosy-cheeked infants and chubby cherubs smiling down. But there was a convention in that art that was a whole lot less romanticized. Those medieval and Renaissance painters always, or at least frequently, painted a cross in the manger with the baby Jesus.

A cross in the manger with the baby Jesus? It strikes us as odd. It makes us uncomfortable. Why do you want to ruin the warm, fuzzy feelings of Christmas by sticking in a cross? Why do you want to spoil the mood by reminding us how the story ends? Why do you want to introduce death into a story of birth? We don’t like it. We want to paint the crosses out of these pictures. Indeed, that convention didn’t outlive the Renaissance. It fell out of use. We never see a cross in our manger scenes. We never talk about the cross at Christmas. We leave that for Holy Week, or we leave it out altogether by jumping from Palm Sunday straight to Easter. After all, it’s so unpleasant. It’s so ugly. It certainly doesn’t fit with our image of little baby Jesus sweet and mild. So we remove all unpleasantness from Christmas, singing “the little Lord Jesus no crying he makes.” But I think that old artistic convention points to something important, and that’s what I want to look at this morning.

We celebrate the birth of Jesus at Christmas. But it seems to me that we have to ask why we do that. Part of the answer surely is: Tradition! Those of us who grew up in Christian homes, or even in non-religious American homes, grew up with Christmas. It’s what we do. It’s an American custom. Our whole society, except for followers of other faith traditions who avoid Christmas as a matter of principle, celebrates Christmas. We get inundated with it. We can’t avoid it, even if we want to. All of that is part of the answer to why we celebrate Christmas. It’s just what we do.

But surely there’s more to it than that. For those of us who have made the decision and the commitment to live our faith lives as Christians, there certainly is more to it than that. We celebrate Christmas because of who Jesus is for us. We celebrate Christmas because it memorializes the birth of the one we call Lord and Savior. Yet the actual event celebrated at Christmas, the birth of an infant, by itself isn’t really worth celebrating. Sure, the Gospel writers who wrote about Jesus’ birth surrounded it with all sorts of miraculous stories. They knew who it was whose birth they were writing about. But the event itself? The birth of a child. Always a miracle to be sure, but by itself not something people are usually celebrating more than two thousand years after the fact.

No, we celebrate Christmas because of who Jesus is for us; and who Jesus is for us doesn’t become apparent at Christmas. It only becomes apparent as the life and ministry of this particular child unfolds over the course of his years on earth. And it only becomes apparent upon his death and the things that happened after his death. Who Jesus is for us only becomes apparent as we hear him teaching. As we see him healing. As we experience the immediate presence of God in him in a unique way that sets him apart from all other people. As we see the world killing him as a common criminal, and as we see God raising him again to show that he was indeed the one we are to follow. Only after all of that does it really become apparent who Jesus is for us.

And all of that is what the cross in the cradle points to. It points most particularly to the part of his story where he dies, where the powers of the world execute him as a threat to their control and their wealth. Jesus’ death sets him apart from the other great founders of other great religions, from Buddha, from Moses, from Muhammad. The world didn’t kill them. They died natural deaths. The world killed Jesus. The cross in the cradle points us to that central fact of Jesus’ story. It warns us against romanticizing the story of his birth too much. It reminds us of the tragedy in his story. It reminds us that the grace that he brings is costly. It would cost him his life.

It costs us our lives too if we take it seriously. It’s so easy to coo and giggle over a newborn infant. I’ve done that some lately with my new granddaughter. It’s so easy to do that and then get back to our lives with nothing having changed. If we do that with the baby Jesus at Christmas we’ve missed the whole point of the holiday, we’ve missed the point of the story. Those old artists knew that when they put the cross in the cradle. That cross says: Pay attention to what this story is really about. See this story as the beginning of a much larger story, one that’s a whole lot harder to romanticize. One that calls us out, out of our old ways and our old thoughts. Out of our comfort, out of our ease. One that calls us to follow where this child would lead. One that calls us to a death to the old ways and a rebirth into new life.

Next time you see a manger scene, imagine a cross in it. Imagine a cross in it, and remember that there is more to this story. That’s not so say don’t have warm fuzzy feelings at Christmas. The warm fuzzy feelings so many of have at Christmas are wonderful. I had them here in this place on Christmas Eve and Christmas morning as we gathered for worship. I had them yesterday as I gathered with my children and their families to have our family Christmas celebration. Those services are a highlight of the liturgical year for me, and I know that your family Christmas celebrations are highlights of the whole year for many of you as mine are for me. There is warmth, there are fuzzy feelings in the Jesus story too. But this morning I ask you just to remember that that’s not all there is to the Jesus story. There’s a cross in it too, and that cross gives it so much more depth, so much more meaning. So remember the cross in the cradle. It points to what this story is really about. Amen.