Chetwynd Shared Ministry
December 24, 2017
Scripture: Luke 2:1-20 and John 1:1-5, 10-14
“For a child has been
born for us, a son given to us.”
A baby is born. An ordinary, every-day occurrence. Earlier this week, my sister gave birth to
her second child, a healthy baby boy. He
was one of many babies born that day. On
average, every day in Canada, 1068 babies are born. If you expand that to a global scale, an
estimated 360,000 babies are born every single day. That’s more than 4 babies being born every
single second.
And yet if you’ve ever
held a newborn baby, you know that each and every single one of those babies is
a miracle. There is a new life where
there wasn’t before. This infant is a
3lb or 5lb or 9lb bundle of potential.
All of the things that this baby is going to do and be are yet to be
discovered. The extraordinary miracle of
life is found in the middle of the ordinary every-day.
Every Christmas, we
read the same story about how Mary and Joseph travel from Nazareth to
Bethlehem, and when they are there, Mary delivers a child. “And she gave birth to her firstborn son and
wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no
place for them in the inn.” The story
doesn’t change from year-to-year. After
we’ve heard it a couple of times, the story can become so familiar to us that
we don’t give it a second thought.
This is a birth like
any other birth, filled with pain and messiness, followed by joy and
relief. But even though all births share
some things in common, each and every birth is unique. We tell birth-stories after babies are born. When my sister tells her birth story from
last week, she will probably tell of how she went to the hospital and was told
that there was no room at the inn – in other words, the nursery was full – and how
she was sent home and told to come back later.
I wonder what Jesus’ birth story looked like. Imagine all of the details that are left out
of the story that we read – all of the details that the narrator isn’t telling
us.
I wonder if Mary was
attended by a midwife; and if she was, what was the midwife’s experience of the
birth? The baby is placed in a manger –
a feeding trough for animals – so I assume that there were some animals
nearby. I wonder what animals witnessed
the birth of this baby? I wonder if they
were surrounded by Joseph’s extended family, or was the young couple alone in a
strange city? Even though the songs we
sing at this time of year tell us, “the little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes,”
I’ve never met a baby who didn’t cry. I
wonder if he was a fussy baby or if he was easy to settle.
A baby is born. An every-day experience. But like all births, there would have been a
unique birth story – after all, this was the only time that this
baby was born.
And not only would
there be a unique birth story, but in the middle of an ordinary, messy, and
painful birth, was born a special child.
Nine months previously, Mary had been visited by the Angel Gabriel who
told her that she would be giving birth to a holy child, the Son of God. God’s Word had become flesh and had come to
the world to dwell among us, to be one of us. God had become human and the world would
never be the same again.
In the middle of the
every-day miracle of birth, God is born in human form. In the middle of the ordinary, the
extraordinary breaks through. “She gave
birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a
manger.”
The first people in
the story to hear about the birth of this baby, other than his parents, were
some shepherds living in the fields. Now
shepherds weren’t people who held positions of power, or people who were
respected. Shepherds were people who
lived on the margins of society; people who were not trusted; people who lived
transient lifestyles. Shepherds worked
hard, were often cut off from society living in the fields, and their hard work
was not well rewarded.
But that night, to a
group of shepherds in the field, at first one angel and then a multitude of
angels appeared to them. In the middle
of an ordinary night, the extraordinary breaks through.
Can you imagine what
those shepherds must have been thinking or feeling? The first thing that the angel says to them
is “Do not be afraid” so their first reaction was probably one of fear or
terror. An army of angels is not what
you normally expect when you are working on the side of the hill at night. But after the angels leave them, the
shepherds leave the hillside, visit the baby lying in the manger, and when they
return to the hills outside of town, they are praising God for everything that
they heard and saw that night.
And here we are, more
than 2000 years later, gathered once again around the manger. The story is the same one that we read last
year and the year before. The baby is
the same, the manger is the same.
The manger, another
ordinary, every-day object. A trough,
maybe made of wood, but more likely carved out of stone, filled with animal
feed. Yet did you notice that this is
one detail that the narrator does include in the story? We aren’t told about the midwife, we aren’t
told about the animals, we aren’t told about relatives, but three times the
narrator tells us that the baby was lying in a manger.
In an everyday,
ordinary animal feed trough lies a baby who will grow up to say, “I am the
bread of life.” The one who lies where
animals are fed will grow up to feed the world with the bread of life. The extraordinary is breaking in again, and
is lying in the ordinary.
One of my favourite
Christmas Hymns, “See Amid the Winter’s Snow,” captures this perfectly, when
the second verse begins:
“Lo, within a manger lies,
He who built the starry skies…”
And so here we are,
gathered this night around the manger.
We are reminded once more that God is with us – that God has become
human so that we, in our humanity, can no longer be separated from God. The extraordinary has once more broken into
the ordinariness of a birth; the extraordinary has once more broken into the
ordinariness of marginalized workers just doing their job on the fringes of
society; the extraordinary has once more broken into the world and lies in a
manger from whence he will feed the world.
How are we going to
respond to the extraordinary this year?
How are we going to be changed by the birth of this baby? How are we going to live as though we can
never more be separated from God? How
are we going to let the Christmas story change us?
Will we be like the
shepherds, rejoicing and singing praises to God? Will we be like Joseph, trusting that God has
a plan for us and for the world? Will we
be like those who heard what the shepherds told them, amazed at what we are
hearing? Will we be like Mary, and
treasure the message we have been given and ponder it in our hearts?
My prayer is that each
one of us might be changed by this Christmas story. That we might know not only that God is
always with us, but that we might know that the extraordinary is always
breaking into the ordinariness of this world.
Let us pray:
Holy God,
we give you thanks for this holiest
of nights.
We thank you that you
are always present with us –
always breaking in to our ordinary
lives.
Fill us with the awe,
the wonder, the joy
that comes with the birth of a baby
–
with the birth of your
Word-Made-Flesh;
And let this awe
transform us,
and keep us close to you.
We pray this in the
name of the Christ-Child.
Amen.
(Preparing the worship service)
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