Christmas in Our Time

The Rev. Paddy Cavanaugh, Christmas Eve – Christmas 1, 12/24/23

Readings: Isaiah 62:6-12, Titus 3:4-7, Luke 2:(1-7)8-20,

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, amen.

Dear friends and newcomers alike, today is finally the Eve of Christmas and we are gathered this evening to hear tell of the story that you have no doubt heard told countless times by now, in your life, and during this season of Advent. It’s the story of the fulfilment of a long-awaited promise. It’s the story of the light of hope breaking into the darkness in the least likely places. It is the story of the incarnation of God through the birth of Jesus Christ in the manger.

At the beginning of Advent I preached a sermon about how the Christmas story expands our sense of time. We tell the story of Jesus’s arrival on earth again and again and again, not just as a nostalgic recollection of an event taking place long ago, but as a story that is real for us now. As a story of Jesus’s light being born in our hearts each new day and shining on us again in his coming on the last day when all earthly sorrow will be turned to joy.

So as we wait with expectant hearts this night for Jesus’s arrival with us now, I wonder what this old, beloved Christmas story is telling us about how Jesus might be born, if he were indeed born again tomorrow. Let’s start with how inconspicuous this whole story is. That sounds like an absurd thing to say right? Considering that the story of Christmas is the least inconspicuous thing in the world for us right now. We can’t leave our neighborhoods or enter a grocery store without being reminded by lights, and advertisements and carols that it’s Christmas! But this was far from the case during that first Christmas. And perhaps the most inconspicuous thing about that first Christmas is Bethlehem.

A few weeks ago my wife and I actually took a day trip to Bethlehem. Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, I should clarify… lest you think my life is more exciting than it actually is. Bethlehem, Pennsylvania is in many ways like Bethlehem in Israel, which is precisely why it was named so. It’s a small town about an hour away from the big city of Philadelphia, which like Jerusalem, is the capital and the center of politics, finance, and I daresay sports. If you are from Pittsburg, I do apologize and look forward to hearing about the Steelers in the receiving line.

Now Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and Bethlehem, Israel were both founded as provincial outposts by shepherds and farmers whose humble lives were far removed from what anyone in the capital cities would have deemed important. With the rise of industrialization at the turn of the century, the community of Bethlehem, PA became home to one of the largest steel mills in the country. And even though the workers at that mill toiled to produce the raw materials that built Manhattan, they and their families remained seen as a members of a working-class outpost, whose existence seemed only important to those in the capital cities insofar as their labor allowed everyone else to continue with their normal lives. The same was true of shepherding communities like Bethlehem in ancient Israel, and it was even true for Jesus’s own family. The Gospels tell us that Jesus’s earthly father, Joseph, was a ‘tekton’ – a Greek word meaning something like craftsman or manufacturer.

As my wife, Winnie, and I strolled beneath the now closed steel mill in Bethlehem, PA, which was transformed into a community arts center that was hosting a Christmas market, I couldn’t help reimagining what the Christmas story would be like if it was told today.

If we tried to recreate the Christmas story in our own times, Jesus very well may have been born to a blue collar family. He may have worked alongside his father in the steel mill or at an Amazon warehouse that produced the materials and products that make Christmas morning possible for other families around the world.

Perhaps he would have been born to a young unwed mother who lived in a boarding house or affordable housing unit while working day shifts and taking night classes to complete her GED. And who, I imagined, might have visited them when her child was born? Maybe his father’s friends; burly union men, like the shepherds, still wearing their work hats and overalls as they clocked out early from their shifts to celebrate this joyous new arrival.

You see, the way we tell and remember and imagine the Christmas story, in its time and in our own, has a powerful way of reminding us what God is trying to tell us in this miraculous, inconspicuous story.

The promise of a new life comes out of the periphery. You see, God could have chosen to become incarnate and dwell with us in any number of ways. Jesus could have been born to a powerful family in Jerusalem, Philadelphia, or Washington, DC. But instead, the Lord of Lords and King of Kings; the long-awaited Holy One of Israel who was to come and establish his eternal kingdom so that all of creation which, through sin and death had fallen away, might be reconciled into the marvelous love of God the Father…

Was born to a poor, lowly, and humble peasant girl, with absolutely no worldly power or estate to speak of.

God’s profound poetry here is that our new life of redemption and resurrection came to all of us through the lowly. God did this in order to show us that he came not to give us more of the life we already knew, but to give new life. Life in which the spiritual and material deficits of worldly life might be filled by wholeness and love of life in heaven.

God loved the shepherds and came to be with them, and they did the same.

But if you are not a shepherd or a steelworker and if you do not live in Bethlehem, then do not distress! The Christmas story of the incarnation of God’s son is just as much for the sake of us, living and working in the Jerusalems of our day.

You see, we ought not forget that the in Matthew’s Gospel, the wise men – the strategy consultants, federal employees, and middle managers of their day – also came to pay homage to the newborn king that day.

A star shining bright in the darkness cast its light onto them, and they saw it and recognized that they needed what it was pointing to, even though they hadn’t the faintest clue of what it was that they needed. Isn’t it funny that that’s so often the case? We’re aware of our need but aren’t sure of where or what will satisfy it? So these wise folks set themselves out in search of an answer.

They sensed that the hope that they, like the shepherds, also so desperately needed, had come to them – and they ran to that hope in the manger! I would have loved to see the looks on their faces when they found it, because we know what they saw. It probably sure wasn’t the kind of king they were expecting. What they found was a child laid in a feeding trough, surrounded by a ragtag crowd of shepherds who were “glorifying and praising God for all that they had heard and seen” (Lk 2:20).

And what did these wise men do at this sight? They gathered around that rickety manger, unburdened themselves from the riches they had brought, and knelt side-by-side, with their unlikely companions, in awe of the gift that God had brought to them.

That gift that they needed as much as the shepherds and steelworkers and unwed mothers. That gift which we all seek so sorely in a world wrought with struggle, dissatisfaction, and confusion was the consolation that God had not abandoned them. In fact, God had done just the opposite.

God knew that the new life they sought came not from the promises of worldly riches in Jerusalem, but from the promise of a poverty that was truly rich. God called them to witness what poverty to sin and alienation looked like. God called them to experience the wholeness that fills all of our own worldly anxieties about not doing, making, or being enough.

God loved the wise men and came to be with them, and they did the same.

On that first Christmas Eve, people from every walk of life set out in search of God and God ran down from heaven to meet them. To be born for them, to die and rise for them so that there might never be any question that we are as beloved to God as his own Son in that trough. His Son who feeds and sustains us with the promise of a new life renewed by immaculate love. A life in which our relationships with God and neighbor can be restored to the harmony which God intended.

God loves us too much to leave us to leave us alone and wondering, and so he sent his Son to share his life with us.

So friends, now it’s our turn to experience the Christmas story in our own time. God loves us and comes to be with us. May do the same. Amen.