Our Sunday Message

Christmas Day Sermon : Luke 2:16
Rev. Dr. Kenneth A. Corr
December 25, 2006
Christmas Day

   We now have the Christ candle lit and the infant is safely returned to his place in the nativity scene. This is a picture that is familiar to us at Christmas. I want to think about what we see. This morning I want us to join that ancient band of shepherds and look into the manger for the first time. What do you see?
    It was an ordinary night in the Judean hillside.
    They were minding their own business.
    They didn’t deserve a special visitation from angels.
  And suddenly, the whole sky erupted into a divine display, a spectacle of sight and sound and they were told to go to Bethlehem and find a newborn infant, swaddled in cloth, lying in a feeding trough, resting quietly in a stable. With that kind of announcement, who would not go? “Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.”
  And sure enough, there was a swaddled newborn, lying in a manger, resting quietly in a stable. Go figure!
  But what do you see when you see this picture?
    The Word of God made flesh?
    The Alpha and the Omega?
    The Rose of Sharon?
    The Balm of Gilead?
    The Eternal Godhead?
    The King of kings and Lord of lords?
    The image of the invisible God?
  Yes, all of those things are true and that is what we believe. But that is not what we see. What we see is a tiny infant, bundled against the night chill, lying in a somewhat dirty manger, rooting for mother’s milk. I want to think about what we actually see.
   1. We see an infant that is small and vulnerable.
  This child is vulnerable to infection, disease, and diaper rash. This child is vulnerable to all the forces that are at work that will seek to destroy it:
  Political forces that can issue and order and kill all the children from the age of two and that will make him a refugee; economic forces that make life very difficult for average people, like this child and these shepherds; religious forces that support the status quo and keep the political and economic forces in place; family forces or as we might say, family dynamics, in which a father can’t even provide a clean, safe place for his wife to birth children, and a mother who can’t always understand her precocious child. What we see is an infant, who is at-risk in a world of violence, greed, struggle, and sorrow.
   2. We see an infant that is small and dependent.
  He can’t feed himself, hold himself, or care for himself. All he can to is to cry and hope that there is a good enough parent with enough milk, enough care, and enough intuition, to meet his basic needs. What we see is an infant who is totally dependent, for better or worse, upon the caregivers and the community of care into which he is born.
   3. We see an infant that is small and messy.
  This child may be the eternal Godhead, but right now, he has a poopy diaper that must be changed because diaper rash in this germ infested barn could be life-threatening. Infants are messy and they must be tended. What we see is an infant who was just as messy as every other newborn.
  That is what we actually see. What we believe is that this vulnerable, dependent, messy infant is the incarnate God. Why would God choose this form in which to come to our world? When we look at this nativity this morning, I want to ask the question, “Why?”
God could have come in any form. He could have ridden into town in a golden chariot. That would have been impressive. He could have appeared in the temple in a cloud of smoke with fire shooting out of his hands. That would have made people believe. If anything, this appearance as a small, vulnerable, dependent, messy, swaddled infant made it more difficult to believe. Do you remember what his neighbors said? “Who does he think he is? We know his mother and father.”
  I don’t know why the eternal God chose this way to become incarnate. But let me suggest that just maybe it is because we are vulnerable to the same forces as he was: political forces that put our best and brightest sons and daughters at risk in foreign wars; religious forces that abuse the very people that need the ministry of the church; economic forces in which the poor get poorer and the rich get richer; family forces and dysfunction that make family times, like holidays, stress-filled.
  Maybe God came in this way because we are dependent, for better or worse, on the caregivers and the community of care into which we were born. From birth until death, we find ourselves dependent.
Maybe God came in this way because our lives are messy. When Dr. Darren Middleton was our Theologian-in-Residence, we were dealing with a difficult church problem. He observed in his unique theological perspective, “Work in the local church gets sloppy.” I think that is what Jesus had in mind when the disciples were particularly obtuse and he said, “How long am I going to put up with you?”
  Life in church gets messy. Life at work gets messy. Life in the family gets messy. God knows.
  Look again at the nativity this morning. What do we see? Maybe God came in this way to know what it is like to live at-risk in a world of violence, greed, struggle, and sorrow.
  If God is for us, who can be against us? That is good news. Thanks be to God.