Year C
Luke 2:1-14(15-20)
The Very Rev. Denise Vaughn
What a sight the church is tonight. Just beautiful! Everything is decorated and ready; ready for a very important event. And I’m pretty sure you know the event that I am talking about-the one the angels announce and the shepherds make haste to go see. I never get tired of hearing the Christmas story with Mary and Joseph, the angels and the shepherds. It always makes my spirit sing with joy for it was on a holy night like tonight that a miracle occurred. Not only was Jesus born but time split and nothing has been the same since. Everything that occurred before this night we call B.C and everything afterwards A. D. That moment in time with the arrival of God in the flesh Emmanuel-the God with us forever connects the two different worlds and makes them one. With tiny baby hands Jesus brings all generations before and after together to save us.
Paul puts it this way: “For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all, so that we might turn away from impiety and worldly passions. He gave himself for us that he might save us and purify for himself a people who will live godly and upright lives. That is the message and mission of the entire gospel of Jesus Christ. This is the message we proclaim as his followers. The God of creation became for our sakes lowly and helpless, at our mercy, to take away our sins, to form us into people who live godly lives, and offer us a glorious future. What a revolutionary message and certainly not an easy mission for anyone to follow.
Yet, Luke’s whole theme in his story of Christ’s birth is that the world has changed and salvation has come-before Jesus has done anything at all. Jesus is here and so salvation has come. A new time has entered the world-a new age. This new time is characterized not by the drudgery of business as usual or the threat of imperial power, but by the inbreaking of the heavenly realm, the song of angels, and the “good news of great joy for all the people.” There is a new Lord, born in humble surroundings to Mary and Joseph who will inaugurate a new reign. A reign announced to lowly shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night, who are so amazed by what they see, they “made known what had been told them about this child.”
A new reign that clearly says Jesus is born to us and for us. God bypasses the proud and the powerful in favor of a stable surrounded by livestock and visited by lowly shepherds. God is not wrapped in royal purple or gold cloth but with rough pieces of cloth and lying in a manger. God is born to people much like us-trying to make their way in the world, squeezed by rising taxes and family demands, weary from a variety of struggles, and badly in need of someone to understand their identity as individuals who are precious in God’s sight. In Jesus, God was reaching down into our world and offering hope. Providing a light to guide us to safety, so we would not be tossed every which way with no hope of being saved.
In this reaching down into our lives, God calls us to a way of life that will bring fulfillment, but we still have to make the choice as to whether we will follow it and make it a part of our present circumstances. God has attempted to capture our attention by providing a guiding light but we still have to find room in our lives for Jesus to fit in. So often we assume that people’s lack of acceptance of Jesus, and all he came to be, is deliberate. Yet, the reality is that more often than not a refusal of Jesus is not thought through—he just doesn’t quite fit into our lives. When we are busy, when we have so many concerns pressing in all around us it is not so much that we make a decision about what to accept or not but that things slip by unnoticed.
The lack of room for Jesus in our modern world is sometimes deliberate but more often than not, there simply isn’t quite space for him. But we can make the decision to set our course toward that light. The light of course is the coming of Christ that we celebrate tonight. Christmas is God’s own doing but getting ready for Christmas is something we do ourselves, by responding to God’s action. If we have not done that, then we are not really ready and Christmas will come and go without making a real difference in our lives. If we do respond by following the light that God has sent, then we are not only looking back on that mind blowing event that took place in the past, we are then on course for spending eternity with God.
God, the great designer of the universe, and the author of our beloved Christmas story, that I never get tired of hearing, has in the fullness of time caused the light of divine love to shine upon a savior child in a stable. Born to love and guide us back to God. And so tonight, Luke would have us linger a little in this story of divine love to feel the terror of the shepherds, the joy of the angels, the wonder of the villagers and the example of Mary, as she pondered what had happened. As we do this we just might capture the wonder of that very first Christmas and find ourselves hurrying like the shepherds, to share the good news that we have seen and heard, proclaiming as the angel “To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.