Christmas 2019

Sermon Notes, Christmas, Dec. 25, 2019 In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. Let’s paint the picture. On the surface, we are in the era known as the Pax Romana, the Peace of Rome. It’s true that peace has been achieved under Caesar and there are no global conflicts to worry about. But there are still plenty of local hot spots that might flare into bloodshed at any moment given any provocation. Judea is one of the most volatile regions. There, the Pax Romana is enforced with an always armed and ready Roman legion. The Judeans hate their Roman occupiers. The Roman soldiers despise their Judean subjects. It’s peace in name only. In the midst of that, Emperor Augustus shakes things up even more. He decrees a registration of all the world, a bold, audacious, and provocative move. Everyone must go to their ancestral home and be registered. You may read that to say: be taxed. It brings on a mass migration with people moving everywhere. The roads are filled. Cities and town crowded with travelers. The Roman soldiers are unsettled and wary, trigger happy we might say. Nobody wants this pilgrimage and yet everybody must do it. Among the least eager to travel is a young couple from Nazareth who must travel to Bethlehem. Just married, the young wife is pregnant with her first child and in no condition to travel. The father is watchful, protective, but like everyone else, compelled to obey the Emperor. It’s a struggle for them but somehow they make it to Bethlehem. Only to find there is no room, no vacancy, no relative willing to take them in. The injury added to their insult is that they must make do in a stable area. Mary, Joseph, the stable, the nearby cattle, no room at the inn. That’s the human side of the story. But there’s another side. While all this human drama plays out, God is active and about to change the human side forever. A baby is born. Joseph, the young husband, names him Jesus because an angel told him to do so. Our story of human pathos becomes now a story of God’s grandeur. Against the impossible, and the unimaginable, the child born in Bethlehem is the Son of God. If we diminish the story because it goes beyond our understanding, we miss the point completely. Luke intends for us to be amazed. To say, out loud, how can this be? How can it be that Joseph, a descendent of David, comes to the David’s town of Bethlehem, cast by the prophets to be the home of the Messiah, with his pregnant fiancé? How can it be that she gives birth there in dire and utterly unsterile circumstances to a baby boy and lays him in a manger, a cattle trough? How can it be that shepherds meet an angel in the night sky and witness the glory of God? The same glory of God seen only by the likes of Elijah and Moses before them? How can it be that the angel points them to the Christ child, and they go to Bethlehem and find him, just as the angel described? And maybe the greatest how can it be of all: How can it be that this story brings us here tonight on this Christmas Eve? Brings us here just as it brought them all to Bethlehem: to see if it is true. Truth reaches beyond credulity. We can’t let our measure of what’s possible limit God’s hand in his world. We know it’s true because it’s too amazing to be anything but true. We’re here tonight to affirm the whole truth of the Christmas story. That Mary was Jesus’ virgin mother. That He was conceived by the Holy Ghost only after Mary accepted her role as the handmaiden of God. That he was born at a specific time in a specific place and in a specific manner. That heaven rejoiced at his birth. That shepherds visited him, saw him in the manger, and proclaimed his birth to all the world. These are the facts as they’ve come down to us through Holy Scripture and the tradition of the Church. We accept them because we believe the Bible to be true. We accept them because we see how the child Jesus born of Mary changed the world as the Son of God. We accept them because we know he is alive in our hearts, changing our life and others even today. We accept them but we also must accept that not everyone does. The stones that are the foundation of our faith may be stumbling blocks to others. If your sense of reality is limited by what is tactile, scientifically proven, and reducible to logic, you have trouble with the facts of the Christmas story. If your sense of natural history doesn’t include the supernatural, you will have trouble with these facts. If your consciousness doesn’t have room for awe and wonder, you will have trouble with these facts. Sometimes it feels like we who have faith speak across a vast chasm to those who don’t, and they probably feel the same way speaking to us. Faith is a language, our language, and a foreign language to those who don’t have faith. We may try to teach the language of faith but it’s really not something that is acquired by learning. It must be experienced. You can’t experience it until you have it. Then you speak it with joy, and wonder how the world looks suddenly so different. That the story you couldn’t believe in before, now seems so right and so true. Coming to faith is God’s grace working in us. The shepherds in their field were called by an angel, a messenger of God, to cross that field and go see the child. They were asked to have faith, leave their flocks, journey into town, witness the impossible. The demand on their faith was to go and see this thing that the the Lord had made known to them. Not to believe it yet, just go and see. And when they did, their faith took hold. The babe in the manger was real to them. His mother Mary was real. The whole company of heaven was real. God himself was real in human form before their very eyes. The message of Christmas to those without faith is to come and see. Come to witness what you don’t believe in. Come and see what is beyond your imagination, and you find it real. The Emperor Augustus decreed all the world to come and be registered. Preposterous. He thought he was calling all the world to be taxed. Little did he know that it was not his call but God’s that echoed through the ages that night. The babe in the manger calls all the world to come and see. It’s an open invite with no strings attached. No registration. No travel involved. It’s all done within your heart. Come and see. That we may all, faithful and seeking, rejoice together with the host of heaven singing: Glory to God in the highest, And on earth peace and goodwill among men. Amen.