When I was in seminary I was serving as youth pastor at a church in Ohio that had a tradition of doing a living nativity scene outdoors during the Christmas season.
The deal was that the kids would volunteer for half hour shifts sitting out in a makeshift barn we would build out of old boards. We had the whole crew – Mary and Joseph, shepherds, wise men, even live animals (donkeys, sheep). We even had some beautiful Christmas music pumped in over a loudspeaker and as people drove by they would stop and just look at the scene for awhile.
But every year we did this thing something would go wrong – well, not really wrong but something that made the scene less than the postcard image of the nativity that everybody expected. For example, a couple of years before I came to that church the story was that they actually had a live camel at the nativity. Everybody came to see the camel…until one night the camel dropped dead right before the people starting showing up. Had to cancel the performance while they tried to figure out a way to haul out a dead camel (who do you call?)
The first year I took over there was this misty 35-degree rain falling the whole first weekend. It was freezing out but we went ahead with it. The youth piled on the layers underneath their costumes and when you looked at the scene you would get the impression that the now rotund Mary and Joseph could have each afforded to lose a few pounds and the wise men should have walked a little more on their journey as they waddled up to the manger. Not exactly what you put on the postcard. (Also, while everybody else was bundled up, baby Jesus was wearing only a diaper – they forgot to cover up the doll – silent night, freezing night!
Then there was the time that one of our Mary’s came up to me one evening and said, “Um, Bob, what are we supposed to DO out there…I mean, we’re just staring at the baby and that’s cool and all, but…well, this might be sacrilegious or something but I have to say that it’s, like, kind of boring.” Now, my wife and I didn’t have children yet so I told her to ask her mom what it is that moms do when their baby is first born.
She came back with, “Well, mom said I should hold the baby for awhile, take a handful of pain killers, and go to sleep while Joseph makes phone calls.” Thanks, mom.
Try as we might, the scene was never “perfect” in the nativity sense. But the more Christmases I’m a part of, the more I realize that this imperfection, this reality, this messiness is really the heart of the Christmas message.
Nothing illustrates this more clearly than an incident I read about that happened at a church in Arizona a few Christmases ago. The church was having a living nativity at their Christmas Eve service – a packed house– there was Mary and Joseph and a real, live baby Jesus who, halfway through the service, performed precisely as live babies do…seems that little Jesus had one of those apocalyptic, diaper-exploding, overflowing baby bomb boom-booms that was soon all over him and all over Mary with the toxic smell now wafting through the rest of the stuffy, crowded sanctuary. Right there in the middle of the story, the King of Kings was really more like Prince Poopy-Pants.
Well, the pastor, Jim Schwartz, looking out at the wrinkled faces of his congregation, stood up and put it all in perspective… “Now we have an idea of what Christmas, the incarnation, is really all about. It’s not clean, it’s not pretty, it’s not fragrant, and there’s no halos around the holy family. There’s an odor not an aura, and God becoming a human was a messy, smelly business!”
In other words, the mess is the message.
When God chose to come into the world, to show us his love in person, it wasn’t on a cloud or in a lightning flash – it was as one of us – a leaky, burpy, messy, and wonderful little child born in a barn of all places. Shepherds were the first to visit him – the lowest of the low, the people who engaged in the smelliest job imaginable at the time. Nobody expected this, yet it’s the reality of the story. God becoming human was a messy, smelly business and it would continue to be that way.
John’s Gospel doesn’t have the story of the manger, but of the four accounts of the life of Jesus, John’s is the one that captures best the theological significance of his coming. The “Word” became flesh and dwelt among us. And becoming flesh is a messy business.
John wants us to be reminded that God has always been about engaging the messy business of humanity. John begins his Gospel “in the beginning” which takes us right back to the creation story, when God got his hands dirty creating the world and creating humans out of the dust of the earth. Notice, though, that he does all this with simply a word. God speaks and what he speaks becomes a reality.
Here, in John’s Gospel, God speaks again, but his word does not merely become another word—it’s not a recommendation, it’s not a set of rules, it’s not a treatise on how to be nice people—it’s a word that become flesh. God does not primarily reveal himself even in a book, though the Bible is an important vehicle for the story. God reveals himself in a person—one who is fully human, as well as fully divine.
In Jesus’ humanity, God identifies with us in a very personal and powerful way.
The baby grew up, walked as we walked, learned as we learn, laughed, ran and played, skinned his knees, made jokes (I imagine him leaving doors open wherever he went, just his mother would yell, “Close that door! Were you born in a barn? Oh wait…). Like us, he probably got sick every once and a while, loved people, hung out with friends, loved a good party, challenged authority, worked with his hands, made a living. To top it off, he was falsely accused, beaten, crucified, and made a bloody mess by the very people he came to be with. As Paul puts it in Philippians 2, “made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. 8 And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death—even death on a cross!”
Surely, God could’ve chosen a different and more dignified way of revealing his love toward us.
But then again, maybe not. For me, the reality of Christmas is that God is not a distant, sanitized deity who dispenses judgment from on high – an old man in a long beard who, like the Far Side cartoon,is simply waiting to push the “smite” button on his computer and drop a piano on our heads. Instead, this story teaches us that God is really quite close, quite accessible, willing to get into our messes – a God who knows how we feel, who hurts when we hurt, who feels joy when we feel joy, who knows what it’s like to have everyone against you, who loves us up close and personal, like a parent holds a little child.
In Jesus, God became one of us. To be in relationship with us, to laugh and cry with us, to teach us, to hold us, challenge us, change us, and even die for us.
If you’ve learned anything from this Advent sermon series, I hope that you’ve learned that the reality of Christmas is anything but a sanitized experience. Mark reminds us that Jesus brings good news, but it is good news that is costly. Matthew tells us that Jesus was in danger from the very beginning. Luke reminds us that Jesus is born into the world of Caesar, but that this little child will be the one to conquer Caesar and the principalities and powers. He is the one who will bring true peace to the earth.
God became human in Christ. God’s ultimate Word is revealed in the midst of human life-- a life where messes are sacred things; a life where we can see new possibilities and break old patterns, a life where we spend each day walking hand in hand with God and continue writing the greatest story ever told. John reveals that Jesus is the true Emmanuel—God with us. He comes to us in the midst of our imperfection and loves us with a perfect love. He understands that in the mess is where the true message, the real good news, is best known. God comes to be with us in person.
My best illustration for this comes from our own house. When our daughter Hannah was just a toddler, probably her second Christmas, she had quite an imagination and loved to put together stories starring all her toys (preface-I am authorized to tell this story only if you all promise not to tell her how cute it is). We have this wooden nativity set that Jennifer and I go when we were first married, and since the parts were pretty big and chunky, we displayed it under the Christmas tree. Interestingly, it was largely undisturbed for a couple of weeks until one morning I was sitting on the couch and noticed that baby Jesus had gone missing. Just baby Jesus, not the wise men or the shepherds. He was clearly snatched from his manger on purpose, it seemed.
So, I started looking everywhere for him (because what’s a manger scene without the star). I looked under furniture, looked in the toy box, even looked inside the VCR (because other things had wound up there in the “cave”). No Jesus was to be found. All day I looked for him whenever I had the chance. But Jesus had flown the coop.
Well, in the evening, after Hannah was tucked in bed, I started to straighten up the room where all her toys were kept, when I noticed Hannah’s little
Fisher Price bus—you know, the one with all the smiling people on it. The smiling bus driver, the smiling construction worker, the smiling mom, the smiling business man, etc. When I picked up the bus, I noticed that someone else was inside. It was baby Jesus. Smiling there with the rest of the smiling people.
It was then I knew that this was the perfect image of the incarnation. Jesus doesn’t simply stay in the manger, aloof from real life, but instead hangs out on the bus with all the rest of the peeps. Hannah seemed to know that that’s where he belonged—with the people, with us.
The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us. It was messy, it was not easy, and it was painful. But the gift of Christmas is that we know that the God of the universe knows us because he has walked among us.
May we welcome him on to the bus!
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