Sermon text: Luke 2:1-20
Let us take a journey. Let us travel backward across the millennia and across thousands of miles to Bethlehem on the night of Christ’s birth. What shall we see? What shall we hear? Will it match our expectations, expectations formed from many ideas and traditions of what that singular moment in history looked like? Or will it be something else entirely.
I would imagine the first thing that would hit us is the smell. Jesus is born in a stable, laid in a feeding trough, surrounded by animals: horses, cattle, sheep, goats. Most of us have some experience with farm life. It is not a clean smell. It is the smell of dung and sweat and slobber. The smell of animals.
And Mary, what would she be like? All dainty and beautiful, Probably not. Her skin likely glistens from exertion. There is blood and other fluids here. Childbirth is messy as any mother can tell you. It is a beautiful thing, but it is not clean and dainty.
Jesus himself? He is an infant, brought forth into the world. The sudden shock of going from the warm womb out into the world likely triggered a cry of fear. Not surprising. Infants are really only capable of doing a handful of things: cry, eat, pee, and poop. That’s pretty much it. Would we walk in to see Mary or Joseph changing his diaper or cleaning him up after he’s spit up his milk? Would he be wailing his head off, making that famous hymn about the silence of this night a bit of a lie. That is what infants do after all. They’re messy. They’re noisy.
That’s all a far cry from the sanitized nativity scene as we so often picture it. There’s always this tendency in our minds to think of Jesus and Mary and Joseph and these events as somehow holy, clean, ethereal, and unreal. Jesus doesn’t poop. Mary isn’t covered in the mess of childbirth. The animals don’t stink. It’s all nice and pretty and clean because it’s Jesus and it’s supposed to be different from what it’s like for the rest of us.
But if that’s truly the claim we make about the events of this night, then in many ways we are missing the point. God did not incarnate as this tiny infant, born of Mary, to be different from us, to be above us, to be greater than us. He came to be one of us and all those goes with it: the mess, the stink, the dirt, and the grime. That’s all part of the deal. God didn’t avoid all that. He dove right into it.
That’s what the incarnation means. That’s what it’s about. God-with-us. Emmanuel. And if God is to be with us through Christ, then he’s got to live life as we do. And life is messy. It’s dirty. It’s hard. It has pain.But it also has joy and happiness, pleasure and laughter. It’s all those things. God didn’t come to stand above it all. He came to get into the thick of it, where we are, where we live.
He needed to do that. To be with us and one of us. How then can you or I, as his disciples, go to one struggling with disease and say “Jesus understands?” How can we go to one struggling with grief at the death of a loved one and say “Our Lord gets this. He’s been there?” That’s what the incarnation means. Jesus isn’t above or detached from those moments of mess in our lives. He’s right there in the midst of it, granting his strength and his tears in equal measure to us lowly humans. He is beside us, holding fast to us, in the moments of terror and grief. He knows what it means to be us, because he was us.
Neither is he above or detached from those moments of triumph in our lives. He’s right there in the midst of those too. The birth of a child, success in school or work, finding love with another person; he is beside us in those moments as well, granting laughter and joy in equal measure as he celebrates our lives. It’s all that jumbled up together, the glorious mess of life, the good and the bad, the hard and the easy, the joy and the sorrow. All of it together.
As a pastor I have often been critiqued for preaching “downer” sermons on Christmas Eve. But this is why I do that. God isn’t just about the happy moments. He’s there in the midst of the sad and difficult as well and Jesus is proof of that. After all, the moment when Jesus is most human is not really his birth, it’s at the other end of his life. And in that moment, even our best efforts to sentimentalize things cannot remove the blood and the gore and the pain of the cross. God is born in the glorious mess at Bethlehem and he dies even more messily on the cross at Golgatha. And that’s glorious too, because it is in that moment and that only in that moment, that our lives become holy.
It really is about the mess. The mess of life and the mess of death. That’s what Jesus is about. He’s in the middle of it all, experiencing it, sharing it with us. That sharing is of vital importance, because it goes both ways. God became human to experience life and death as we do, and because of that we will experience life as God does. Eternal, unending, unlimited. The road to our salvation is paved with the mess of Christ’s life and our lives. The parallels are intentional. They are deliberate.
I conducted a funeral yesterday for the husband of one of my wife’s friends. And in that funeral rite, there is a reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans that points to this truth. He writes that because “we have been united with Jesus in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like this.” That was the plan. For God to dive into the muck and the mire that is human existence, to be one of us, so he could lift us out of that and give us eternity. On this night, the most important step in that plan came to light, in the blood and the fluids, in the stink and the crying of the stable in Bethlehem. Christ is born. Amen. Alleluia.
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