The following is Matt's Christmas Eve sermon. I did not get to hear it, per se, due to the inability of my youngest to maintain for even 10 minutes in a church service thus far. But Matt basically preached it to me afterward (there was a break between the 7 and 11:00 services, and he came home to help put the boys to bed), and I'm thinking it's pretty good. It is also an excuse to put off any actual writing of my own ...
What Child Is This Anyway?
Christmas Eve, 11 PM
While I studied for the ministry in Washington DC, I worked as the Youth Minister at a downtown DC church. A few years before I worked there, the church had gained a measure of fame (or notoriety) for being the Clinton’s church while Bill was in office as president. The people who were there during the Clinton years loved telling me about the elaborate preparations involved if you care to host the president and his family at your church.
Secret Service agents would arrive a couple hours early to scour the building. They set up metal detectors at every entrance. They put snipers on the roof. Only after everything had been double- and triple checked would the Clintons arrive at the church. When you’re the president, even if you’re just going a mile, you never go alone. The presidential motorcade is typically 20 to 30 vehicles including police cars and motorcycles, an ambulance, and a communications van. More vehicles hold a counter-assault team. There’s an SUV with equipment that will scramble the signals of rocket-propelled grenades and anti-tank missiles. And then, finally, there are several heavily armored limousines all driven by professional drivers. The one the president rides in has the strongest defenses of all. It’s called The Beast.
Contrast that if you will with the scene in Bethlehem some 2000 years ago. We’ve had 43 different presidents, but there’s only one eternally begotten son of our heavenly father, and his protective detail was two unmarried Jewish peasants and their donkey. If Jesus was so important, where was his motorcade?
You probably have heard the story before, about how Mary, the young Jewish girl heard the news from the angel Gabriel that she had been chosen by God to bear a son, in spite of the fact that she’d never been intimate with a man. Her fiancé Joseph wanted to leave her but he got news in a dream to stick it out. Fast forward nine months and here we are. Joseph and Mary, pushed around by a Roman decree, have to travel back to Joseph’s ancestral home of Bethlehem. When they get there, the town’s so jam packed with other travelers that they are forced to spend the night in a stable. It was there where their baby was born. He would be given the name “Jesus” – which means God saves.
Bethlehem was an unlikely backdrop for what C.S. Lewis calls “The Grand Miracle.” It was a place not unlike a rundown home in east Greensboro or a rural village in east Africa, places from which most people wouldn’t expect God to do great things. But we who have been part of this church for long know better don’t we? That’s exactly the kind of place where God loves to work.
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We tend to think of that scene in Bethlehem as a moment of hushed majesty, like the picture in the greeting card, but if we’d been there we probably wouldn’t have thought it was so special. Imagine if you had been there looking at Mary and Joseph getting turned away from the inn and somebody elbowed you in the ribs and said, “Behold! Thus begins God’s plan to rescue and redeem the world, starting with Israel.” You would have thought he needed his head checked.
And what if this person went on to tell you that time forever after would be divided into the years before and after this child’s arrival? What if he told that the baby born that night would never write a book, never command an army, or lead a nation, yet, because of him, over half the world’s population would become monotheists? What if they told you that people would be crowded into rooms like this one 2000 years later in order to sing carols and light candles as we remember and celebrate this child’s birth?
You wouldn’t have believed it for a minute and yet here we are. Whatever brought you here, I want to reiterate how glad we are that you’re here. Some of us worship every week, maybe some of us are entering a church for the first time. Some of us are here for the music, some for the candles. Some are here for the sake of their kids and some are here to please their parents. Some of us have come here after great feasts while some of us will go home to the wire shelves of an empty pantry. Some of us are overflowing with joy. Some of us have almost totally run through our reserve of hope.
And for once, at least, you may be at an advantage if you are low on church experience, low on food or low on hope. Those who haven’t had their senses dulled may find it easier to hear how truly astounding message of Christmas is.
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I don’t know about you but my days are not just filled with a sense of wonder. Thankfully, I have two young boys who help me see how special the Christmas season is. David, the younger of the two has some developmental delays, and as a result doesn’t have a big vocabulary. But he reminds me 20 times a day how special everything is when we pats me on the arm or leg, points and says, “Whoa!” It’s whoa when he sees the poinsettias, whoa for the stars and whoa for the Christmas trees. And when he gets old enough to understand the story about how the God of the universe entered into our world in the form of a helpless infant who had to be fed , burped and changed… well I hope he says “Whoa!” to that, too. That’s the biggest “Whoa!” of all.
None of us were around to be amazed 2000 years ago, so the angels turned instead to a bunch of shepherds. That was an interesting choice. A few centuries before shepherding had been a noble profession. King David was been a shepherd. But by Jesus’ time shepherds were just hired hands. On the night Jesus was born they may have had the smell of booze on their breath and one may have been getting ready to tell the others a dirty joke when – all of a sudden – they got the second biggest surprise of their lives. They saw a sky full of angels who announced to them that the long-awaited Messiah had finally been born and the shepherds needed to get there pronto.
I say the angels’ announcement was the second-biggest surprise of their lives because the biggest surprise came when they got to the stable and realized they were the only human beings who had been invited. The angels were in on the celebration, of course, and there was probably some livestock around. The wise men only came later. No, on the night Jesus was born God singled out these third-shift shepherds to be the first people to hear the greatest news in the history of the world.
So, to recap: On that first Christmas, Jesus was born in one of the last places you’d expect… to some of the least likely parents… and was greeted by people you’d think would be the last to know or care.
I could spend a loooong time waxing on about the significance of that first Christmas and what it means to us today, but you know what? More than anything else I just want you to hear the story tonight, as if for the first time, and to join me in wonder and awe. Think of this as me saying “Whoa!” to you.
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