A Baby Changes Everything

A Baby Changes Everything Luke 2:1-14 I was at Houghton College in upstate New York in the mid 1970’s when Gabe was born July 16, 1976. I remember taking a trip to United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio, to visit and make arrangements to attend there. There was a moment I’ll always ponder, after I had finished all the meetings, that I went and sat at the curb of the driveway of the seminary grounds and thought to myself, “What have I gotten myself into?” I had been married only a couple years. Now I had a baby and responsibilities to provide for a family, far away from home. A baby changes everything. We moved to Lockington, Ohio to begin, as pastor and to start seminary. My first Sunday in the pulpit was December 18, the Sunday before Christmas, 45 years ago. Just as babies forever change the lives of their parents, the birth of Jesus Christ changes the world. For Mary and Joseph, parenthood was all about caring for their baby, like any new parents and much, much more. Besides the usual new-parent adjustments, they have to contend with visits from a couple of angels. One of these divine messengers matter-of-factly informs Joseph: “The Child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 1:20). Well, that’s unusual! The angelic message plunges Joseph and Mary, and their relationship, into not a little confusion and disorder, such as they’ve never imagined. But they get through it. For those two, love triumphs over suspicion. Faith triumphs over doubt. Courage triumphs over fear. Country-music singer Faith Hill captures the strangeness and the terror of Mary’s experience with these lyrics: Teenage girl, much too young - Unprepared for what’s to come - A baby changes everything Not a ring on her hand - All her dreams and all her plans - A baby changes everything … The man she loves she’s never touched - How will she keep his trust? A baby changes everything …” Aside from angelic proclamations, first-time parenthood is a life-changing experience for anyone. Presbyterian minister Frederick Buechner has this to say about the experience of his generation, when fathers weren’t so often present in the delivery room. “When a child is born, a father is born. A mother is born too, of course, but at least for her it’s a gradual process. Body and soul, she has nine months to get used to what’s happening. She becomes what’s happening. But for even the best-prepared father, it happens all at once. On the other side of the plate-glass window, a nurse is holding up something roughly the size of a loaf of bread for him to see for the first time. …The memory will remain with him to the grave. He has seen the creation of the world. It has his mark upon it. He has its mark upon him. Both marks are, for better or worse, indelible.”(impossible to remove) Yes, a baby changes everything. No one’s ever ready for it. There’s no course you can take that tells you how to do it perfectly. There’s no way to obtain a certificate or diploma ahead of time, declaring that you’ve been trained, tested and fully prepared to shepherd a new human life through the perils of mortal 2 existence. It’s the most important job in the world, and no one is adequately trained ahead of time. So we all make the best of it. And that’s exactly what Mary and Joseph do. They make the best of it. Mary certainly learned a few things from her older cousin, Elizabeth. She and her husband Zechariah received their own bombshell angelic announcement about her conceiving a child in her old age. Zechariah, a local priest, was so shook up, he lost his voice for a while; quite the occupational hazard for a man who relied on his voice for a living. Not many months later, Mary and Joseph learn of the need to travel to Bethlehem. Nine months pregnant, Mary continues to make the best of it, as does Joseph, pounding on the door of every inn and guest house in Bethlehem until he finds that grumpy old character who leads them to the stable and shows them the pile of clean straw that will serve, in a pinch, as a delivery room. “And she gave birth to her firstborn Son and wrapped Him in bands of cloth and laid Him in a manger.” A manger, a feeding trough, is surely not the cradle Mary imagined for her little Jesus! But it’s the place to which the Lord has led her, so surely, it’s the right place. The news Mary received from the angel, which seemed so remarkable at the time, is no less remarkable today. It’s not so much Jesus’ miraculous conception, which is, after all, only the first small detail in the fuller story, but rather the greater miracle we call “incarnation.” Literally, the Latin word means “in the flesh.” The Christian church has always maintained as a central doctrine, that God, in the birth of Jesus, entered the world in the same way each of us entered it. We’ve grown used to hearing about the incarnation over the years, so our response may be, “Ho hum, tell me something I haven’t heard.” But try for a moment to imagine - what that claim must sound like - to anyone hearing it for the first time. God becoming human. God is holy, as the Scriptures frequently point out. The word “holy” means “set apart.” Something holy is fundamentally different from the life, and even the world, we know. Between the holy and the ordinary is a gulf that can be breached in only the most exceptional circumstances. Everything changed for us in that Bethlehem stable when, whoever was attending Mary, it could have been a midwife, or Joseph himself, took that naked Baby Boy, wiped the fluids from His body, and laid Him, still connected by the umbilical cord, on His mother’s breast. And Mary, weeping tears of joy and exhaustion, looked into His eyes for the first time. She was overcome with wonder that here was not only the Son she had long expected, but God in the flesh. 3 There was no great light or glory of the divine presence in that humble place. No fear for this awestruck teenager who not only looked upon God, but gazed deeply into God’s eyes. In that stable in Bethlehem, Mary, the most-favored one, was permitted to do something no High Priest of Israel had ever done. She held the Most High in her arms and tenderly kissed God on the forehead. Will somebody sing Mary Did You Know already… Earlier in the Gospel of Luke, we hear of a song Mary sings. She sings it at the time she first learns of the Holy Child on His way. It’s known as the Magnificat. She sings, “My soul magnifies the Lord …” It’s a song about how God changes everything. “The Mighty One has done great things for me,” she sings, “and holy is God’s name.” Mary recounts the mighty deeds of the Lord who has just intervened in her life. God has “brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly … has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty” (Luke 1:46-55). It may seem like these things have little to do with the plight of a young, unwed mother in Galilee, but clearly Mary sees her experience in the context of a much greater plan. Who are the powerful cast down from their thrones? Nothing like that has ever happened in Mary’s experience. The Roman emperors have reigned for generations, and the throne’s present occupant gives no sign of resigning. When has Mary ever seen, in her short life, all the hungry people of the earth invited to a great banquet, and the arrogant rich sent off to try their hand at begging? These promises, compelling as they are to one such as her, have yet to be realized. This baby changes everything, not only for His parents, but for the whole human race. The birth of Jesus changes the religion game completely, because upon hearing this lovely story, we rediscover, or maybe understand for the first time, that God’s deepest desire for us is that we enter this or any place of holiness, not through a portal of fear, but through a portal of love. That same Jesus is calling us this Christmas Day, calling us to Himself and into a deeper relationship with Him. Everything about the life we’ve been living that may be bitter, ugly, broken or shameful we can lay on the straw beside the manger. We need carry such burdens no longer; the grown-up Jesus will bear them for us. There is no anger, no judgment before His manger-bed. There is only grace and acceptance and love. The timeless invitation comes to us this Christmas, to draw near to Jesus Christ, whose coming into our world, changes everything! In the words of the beloved carol “Infant Holy, Infant Lowly”: Thus rejoicing, free from sorrow, praises voicing greet the morrow: Christ the babe was born for you! Christ the babe was born for you!