Christmas Day

Some years ago, the songwriter Jerry Herman wrote a song that speaks of our need:

“For I’ve grown a little leaner, grown a little colder, grown a little sadder, grown a little older, And I need a little angel sitting on my shoulder, Need a little Christmas now.

“For we need a little music, need a little laughter, need a little singing, Ringing through the rafter, And we need a little snappy ‘Happy ever after’, Need a little Christmas now!” (lyrics by Jerry Herman)

We do indeed need a little Christmas, maybe we even need a lot of Christmas now. But what kind of Christmas do we need? We do not need a Christmas that helps us make a political point about who is a better person, or American, or Christian. It is true that our relationship with Jesus Christ may impact every aspect of our lives, but that impact is determined less by any political, pseudo religious litmus test than it is by how we love and serve him and God’s people.

We certainly do not need a little Christmas in any commercial sense. Surely our love for the Christ child is not measured in what we spend on presents. Life would go on if we exchanged modest and simple gifts instead of breaking our bank accounts every year to get expensive presents. It is not gifts that make this season so bright, it is our acceptance of the grace of God being opened to us. Presents are great, I know I am not alone when I say that I love giving them and I enjoy receiving them. But the truth is we can celebrate Christmas whether we spend two dollars or twenty or two hundred or more or no dollars.

We need a little Christmas, and here is the kind we need. We need the kind of Christmas that helps us to remember that Jesus is born, the Messiah, the Christ has come into the world and that is good news.

We spent the Advent season asking the question what child is this? This child, this Jesus is indeed our hope, our peace, our joy, and our love. Last night we emphasized that Jesus is the Prince of Peace as we worshiped the coming Christ. This morning we add and we celebrate that he is Jesus, our Emmanuel – Jesus, who is God with us.

How is he Emmanuel? It began in human need. As Isaiah describes it, Ahaz was in need of help. He had gotten himself into a mess by making some unwise alliances. God offers to give him a sign of presence and help. Ahaz says, “no thanks”. We do not know why, but Ahaz will not ask God for a sign, which he calls a test. But it is not a test God is interest in, it is instead an offer to stand with one who has been urged to stand firm with his people and with his God. God will give you a sign, Ahaz. God presents us with signs, with people, with a spirit of discernment, with a good idea, with a feeling in the pit of our stomachs that means don’t go there – with a sense in our souls that says take the risk now. God gives us signs all the time – will we pay attention?

Ahaz is not paying attention, but God knows what we need more than we do sometimes, and so God gives Ahaz’s sign the sign he needs. The sign was this – a young woman will have a son and she will name him Emmanuel. He will be wise knowing good from evil, and protecting Ahaz and the people. It is true for us too. God has given us a sign. Christians believe, we believe the sign of God was made fully alive in Jesus Christ, who is the word made flesh the one who dwells with us (John 1.1, 14). Emmanuel, God with us.

We know the story well and we know that Jesus was born in an interesting time. Matthew places the birth of Jesus against the background of Herod’s reign, and he included Joseph’s dreams and visitors from the East. Luke places the birth of Jesus against the background of the Roman Empire. Octavius Gaius was the emperor of Rome at the time and had, by the time Jesus was born, brought about a time of peace in the Roman Empire. He was the “August” one, honored and distinguished. We know Octavius as and it was during his reign that Joseph and Mary found themselves in Bethlehem for the time of registration and taxation (www.lectionary.org/luke, p.2).

Luke tells the story quickly and simply. In just a few verses he tells us that Jesus is born, and like babies of his time, he is wrapped tightly in swaddling cloths to keep his arms and legs straight. But because of the crowd of people in Bethlehem for the registration, there was no room at the Holiday Inn, no picturesque bed and breakfast, no hospitable place for a newborn, so Jesus is placed in a feeding trough most likely behind a house and near the barn. What a strange way for God to come into the world.

But come into the world he did. A columnist named Danny West describes it this way. “God sneaked in among us at Christmas disguised as a baby. Leave it to God to go incognito and to slip into the human family by way of the back door of heaven. God came to us under the shadow of darkness into the manger of Bethlehem. There was no fanfare or red carpet. Under the stars of heaven and in plain view of the barnyard chorus, God’s unconventional arrival occurred.

“At long last the promised hope of God had come and with it the possibility for all of us to be reborn. Not only was a baby born that night; Incarnation is God’s pat on the human back hoping that we will take our first breath, too!

“But it all started with a baby. It was Mark Twain, I think, who once quipped, “a baby is God’s opinion that the world should go on.

“In essence that was God’s declaration that holy night in Bethlehem. There is hope for the future. There is reason to awaken to a new dawn. The prophetic longings are now fulfilled in the coming of the Christ child” (“God Sneaked into the World In A Manger” by Danny West in the Kingsport Times – News).

He is God with us and his humble birthplace signals that he will have a special relationship with the poor. He will reach out to us in humility and invites us to greet him with our sense of awe and humility as we meet him in this out of the way stable and manger.

Jesus is our Emmanuel, even when we are on the margins. Many of us know how it feels to live on the margins – not enough money to do all that we need to do, too long unnoticed, too long disregarded, not thought of as humble, or in vain – just not thought of at all.

It is to such marginalized people – shepherds, on that long ago night, that word of Jesus’ birth comes. We like to think of shepherds as kind of romantic figures who like David rise up from tending sheep to do great and heroic things. But when Jesus was born to be a shepherd was to be a member of a despised profession. So while it is true that “the reference to shepherds provides calls to mind a positive, almost idyllic image for the modern reader and underscores Jesus, the Good Shepherd’s association with the line of the shepherd David (I Samuel 16.11; 17.15, Psalm 78.70), in the first century, shepherds were scorned as shiftless, dishonest people who grazed their flocks on other’s lands (New Interpreters Bible, volume IX. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995, p.65).

Yet it is to these despised, marginalized folks that the birth of Jesus is first announced. And they are terrified. Such is the power of God and the power of Emmanuel that we like the shepherds hear words of calm, “do not be afraid.” We hear it again and again in scripture: “Do not be afraid, I am with you” (Joshua 1), “Fear not, the flood will not overwhelm, nor the fire consume you” (Isaiah 43).

Emmanuel is here – this is not a time for fear, this is a good news, great joy time. Not just for you or Israel but for all people. This day the savior has been born. This is a time to give God glory. “To give glory is to recognize that power and honor and might belong not to Augustus or Quirinius or their equivalents, but to God and God alone” (lectionary.org, p. 4).

Luke wants us to know that the shepherds are on the margins, but it was to the margins that the word came – this glorious birth announcement, this choir of angels comes to the outcasts and makes them bearers of God’s good news to all people, those on the margins, and at the center, to the rich and to the poor, to young and to the old, to all in between, the Savior has been born and waits for us to greet him and to praise God.

We are the shepherds called to do now what they did then, to get to Bethlehem, to experience again deep in our spirits news of the Savior’s birth. We are called to meet Jesus as he lays as a helpless infant. He is God with us. We can tell the story that one writer calls scandalous: born to a young couple, not yet wed, born on the road, laid in a feeding trough, visited by shepherds, identifying with the powerless, oppressed, poor, and the homeless. Among them, God could do the divine new work.

“The birth reveals a new world order, a world not under Caesar but under the direction of God’s design for the redemption of all peoples. In this world, God’s word is heard by the humble. There is a place even for shepherds. There is hope for the oppressed, and those who heard what God is doing were filled with joy. God has not forgotten us or abandoned us to the brokenness we have created. The story of Christmas, therefore, is both an announcement of hope and a call to humility (New Interpreter’s Bible, p. 66-67).

In his name, let every soul killing kind of discrimination end. In his name, let every child be loved and every person be seen as made in the image of God. Let every home be a safe place for all of the household, every school an educating place, every nation a justice seeking place for all of its citizens, and every church a healing, welcoming, God loving, Spirit praising place.

We need a little Christmas to declare one more time that in Jesus Christ is God with us; Emmanuel has come. He starts life as we all do, small and helpless. But as we all must, he will grow up.

Danny West concludes his article with these words about Jesus: “Be glad that God tipped the scales of human history that night, for in so doing the balance of the world was shifted forever. God chose the love route. The face of God came to us not through military might or secular power but through the subtle and tender mercies of human birth. God did not have to do it this way but he did. And a world that had for centuries been holding its breath in anticipation could now inhale God’s air for the very first time”.

This Christmas day, and every day in grateful praise to God for the gift of Jesus Christ, may we say, thanks be to God, and may Jesus Christ be praised.

Dr. LaTaunya M. Bynum
Senior Pastor