Sermon for Christmas Eve                        12/24/05                          Preached at ULC

Text:  Luke 2:1-20          Title:  Here in the Real World

Main Message:  Jesus’ birth was a real event in history.

Dear friends in Christ…

Merry Christmas! 

On this Christmas night, we remember the gift that started it all.  On this night, we celebrate the gift of a child, the gift of a baby for whom the angels sang in the sky, a baby who changed everything in how we relate to God.

On this night, I want to start by asking a question, and I’d like a show of hands.  How many of you have been present, physically in the room, for the birth of a baby?  OK, now I want you to think about that experience and keep your hands up if you would use the following words to describe labor and delivery as you remember it –  silent, calm, easy, peaceful, quiet, serene. 

You know, as you sing through the hymns of Christmas, these are the words you sing over and over again.  Silent night.  All is calm.  Solemn stillness.  No crying this baby makes.  I know there is a reason for these words, but I’ve been there twice as a witness to the miracle of birth.

Here in the real world, healthy babies cry when they are born.  Dads aren’t always peaceful and calm.  Even if they look calm, they aren’t always calm; trust me.  And the only way Moms in labor are silent is with some serious help from the pharmacy, the epidural man, my wife’s angel in a white lab coat.

Now I don’t want to take anything away from the wonder of Christmas.  Mary’s son was a miracle.  He was born to a virgin, heralded by angels, God come into the world to save us. 

But his birth was still a real birth.  This miracle happened here, in the real world, to a real mom and dad in a real place at a real point in history.  The Bible says it happened in Bethlehem because of a census, and then it goes on to tell us that, “This was the first registration, and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria.”  If you ever wondered about the reason for that line, now you know.  The Bible is telling you that this was a verifiable event, not a legend or a fairy tale or something that happened once upon a time.  This is history.

Christmas is about a miracle, here in the real world.

In fact, this story is more real than we sometimes want to believe.  When you read the story of Jesus birth in the Book of Luke, and you forget everything you think you know and just focus on the Word of God, this story gets more real than we sometimes are willing to believe.

Luke 2:4 says “So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Bethlehem, the town of David.  He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him (not yet married), and who was expecting a child.”

Now, the route from Nazareth to Bethlehem is about 80 miles.  Help us out, women.  How many of you would want to ride a donkey or walk from here to Owatonna when you were 8 or 9 months pregnant?  There’s a dose of reality for you.  How many of you guys would look forward to telling your wives, “Hey, honey, you know that census I told you about?  Yeah, it looks like we’re going to have to walk down to Owatonna when you’re 8 or 9 months pregnant.”

One thing to remember, though, is that at the time of the Christmas story, Joseph wasn’t traveling with his wife, because Joseph and Mary weren’t legally married yet.  According to Roman law, Mary didn’t have to go with Joseph for the census. 

So why did she travel 80 miles at 9 months pregnant when she didn’t have to?  The Bible doesn’t say for sure, but here’s an educated guess.  One of the slanders that early Christians had to endure was that Jesus was conceived and born out of wedlock.  Mary and Joseph were the only two people in the world who had an angel let them in on the secret that this baby was the work of the Holy Spirit.  What do you suppose everybody else in Nazareth thought about this situation? 

The same thing anybody would think.  Mary went and got herself pregnant with another guy.  Maybe now we think that’s no big deal.  I think that’s the wrong answer, but back then it was dangerously the wrong answer.  Mary could have been exiled from her community or even sentenced to death for adultery.  It’s highly possible that the scandal was so bad in Nazareth that a 160 mile round trip seemed better than one more day of humiliation at home.

So, the story continues that while they were in Bethlehem, the time came for the baby to be born, and Mary gave birth to her firstborn, a son.  She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room at the inn.

How many of you have ever seen a cow eat?  When I was a kid, my dad used to raise hogs and dairy cattle, and I’ve seen what cows look like at the trough.  They are not tidy and dainty animals.  They snort, and snuffle, and slobber on whatever you set in front of them.  What do you suppose it looked like in the bottom of that manger?  Nothing you or I would want to touch with our bare hands.

And that wooden thing you always see in the nativity scene, shaped suspiciously like a cradle?  The cows and goats at Bethlehem would have destroyed it every other day.  An animal manger in Bethlehem was a trough made of stone, chiseled out so that the animal’s food could be placed inside.

So here it is.  A child, born to unwed parents who walked 80 miles when mom was pregnant to escape the scandal back home, a child born in a barn and placed in a cold, hard rock filled with cow drool.  At the same time, you have a miracle child, born to a virgin in fulfillment of God’s word, heralded by a host of angels as the one true savior, visited by kings and honored as the Son of God.

When you put it all together, does any of this make sense?  I’m not sure if it does.  If you try to explain this story of Christmas to a person from a different religion, or a person without any religion, many of them will tell you that it doesn’t make sense, and they might be right.  We have an emotional attachment to the holiday that they don’t, and they may see the contradictions of this story more clearly than we do.

But here’s the question you have to ask yourself when you think about Christmas.  So what if it makes sense.  Is this real?  Is it truly God who was truly born as a baby?  Does this story have to make sense for it to be real?

Here in the real world, here in the world as I have lived it, things don’t always make sense.  Things aren’t always as we plan them or expect them and things happen that we can’t figure out.  Good people die young and scoundrels live to be 100.  Kids in school get pregnant after one bad choice while married couples have years of heartbreak trying for a baby.  A hurricane wipes out the poorest neighborhood but leaves the rich part of town barely touched.  It doesn’t make sense.

Maybe what God is doing at Christmas isn’t about making sense.  Not to a neutral observer, anyway.  The Christmas story is about the degree of God’s commitment to be with us, here in the real world where things don’t make sense.  The birth of Jesus isn’t a made-for-TV movie with a perfect script.  It’s the reckless love of a God who will do what it takes to save us, even if it means being born to a teenage mother in a barn and laid in a cold, chiseled-out rock filled with cow drool. 

The Christmas story is about a real, loving God who made the choice to come down from heaven and experience life side by side with us, so that when life doesn’t make sense, he can say, “I know.  I’ve been there.  I understand.”  And when it hurts, he can say, “I know.  I’ve been there.  I can help.”

Christmas is an answer to the question so many people ask precisely when things don’t make sense.  “Where is God in all this?  Where is God?”  The answer of Christmas is that God is right with us, not up in some ivory tower, not off on Mount Olympus, not far apart from the cares of ordinary people, but right here among us.  When we suffer, he suffers.  When we are happy, he is happy.  He has been there, done that, here in the real world, for us.  Only a God who loves us this much, who would go that far and sacrifice so freely on our behalf, could truly be able to save us in a world like this.

I’ll close with a story of a father long ago who had told his son that he would send him to sleep in the attic, with bread and water for his supper, if he broke the laws of the house one more time.  The child disobeyed and was sent to the attic.

But the father sat downstairs and could not eat.  He had the boy on his mind and in his heart.  His wife said, “I know what you’re thinking.  But you can’t bring him down now.  He would disobey even more than before.  He would have no respect for your word.  You can’t cheapen your relationship as his father by failing to keep your promise.”

To which the man replied, “You’re right.  I will not break my word.  To do so would do more harm than good.  But he is so lonely up there.”  So he kissed his wife good night, and climbed into the attic to eat bread and water with the boy, and when the child went to sleep on the hard boards, his father’s arm was his pillow.

This is pretty close to the message of Christmas.  It is a miracle.  It is not a myth.  It is a miracle but not a fairy tale from once upon a time.  This miracle really happened.  That is why we have hope, real hope, and a real reason to celebrate because God is with us, here in the real world.  God bless your Christmas.  Amen.