This is how the birth of Jesus Christ took place. When Mary his mother was engaged to Joseph, before they were married, she became pregnant by the Holy Spirit. 19 Joseph her husband was a righteous man. Because he didn’t want to humiliate her, he decided to call off their engagement quietly. 20 As he was thinking about this, an angel from the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph son of David, don’t be afraid to take Mary as your wife, because the child she carries was conceived by the Holy Spirit. 21 She will give birth to a son, and you will call him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.” 22 Now all of this took place so that what the Lord had spoken through the prophet would be fulfilled: 23 Look! A virgin will become pregnant and give birth to a son, And they will call him, Emmanuel. (Emmanuel means “God with us.”) 24 When Joseph woke up, he did just as an angel from God commanded and took Mary as his wife. 25 But he didn’t have sexual relations with her until she gave birth to a son. Joseph called him Jesus. (Common English Bible)
“The First Christmas:
Recreating a Holiday’s Original Meaning,” Week Five
One
of the things I associate Christmas the most with, for better and for worse, is
the music. Sometimes, it really does feel magical to hear a Christmas song
played a way that I’ve never heard it, and other times, when I’m hearing some
hackneyed, tired rearrangement of Jingle Bell Rock, I want to pull my nonexistent
hair out. But most days, it is capable of bringing to me—and to the world—joy.
But
the music makes up so much of this season for me, and so much of my life. I
listen to the jazz radio station to and from work most days. I still keep an
extensive collection of CD’s for when I’m not in the mood for jazz. And I still
end up moved by stories like this one from the Washington Post, which conveys
the story of a homeless man in Montreal, Canada, named Mark Landry who is a
street musician who plays the violin quite beautifully—at least, he did until
his violin was stolen, and he turned to his faith in God to find a new one.
This
is not nothing—this isn’t someone asking for something utterly superficial. The
violin represented Mark’s livelihood. But then Jean Dupre, the CEO of the
Montreal Metropolitan Orchestra, heard about Mark’s predicament, and I’ll let
the Post take it from there:
The Montreal man doesn’t
have much in terms of material things. He lives on the streets, but he
brightens many commuters’ days with his violin, which he’s been playing since
he was 17 years old, in Metro stations around the city. That small piece of
hardwood and taut strings also kept him fed, as he used it to busk during rush
hour…
Landry prayed, convinced
in his faith that God would deliver him a new instrument.
“God’s gonna give me a
new one,” Landry said. Otherwise he would “go through a lower level of poverty,
which is to live without my violin.”
He told Dupre that he was
lost without his instrument.
“I talked to God this
morning and said I cannot live without my violin,” Landry told him…
Tuesday afternoon, Dupre,
joined by a CBC news crew, delivered the violin to Landry. The resulting video
shows the bearded man’s eyes light up as he rips off his red-and-black
checkered jacket to free his arms and begin playing.
“Immediately when I gave
him the violin, he opened the case and said, ‘God listened to me,’” Dupre said.
“He just grabbed the instrument right at that exact moment and began playing.”
There
is joy to behold in that story, but that joy comes as a direct result of human
participation—or of God participating through us. We pray to God, but, as the
Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard is quick to point out, prayer is meant to
change us, not God, and then we in turn change the world!
This
has a sermon series for the church season of Advent, which is known pretty much
in every other context as “the Christmas season” or “the holidays.” Except it
isn’t the Christmas season: the twelve-days-long Christmas season (yes, just
like the Twelve Days of Christmas carol) begins today, on Christmas Day, and
extends to January 6, the traditional date of the Epiphany, when the Magi
arrived at where Joseph, Mary, and Jesus had been bedded down.
Advent
was meant to be a season of preparation, and not just preparing for the
Christmas dinner parties and the tinsel and ornaments, but a preparation for
the least material of all things: of divine life becoming human life. To help
us prepare for the birth of the Christ child this year, we revisited the work
of John Dominic Crossan and the late Marcus Borg who, if you remember, were the
authors of The Last Week, a book I used as the template for my Lenten sermon
series a couple of years ago. The First Christmas represents their sequel to
The Last Week, and much as The Last Week sought to go verse-by-verse through
the Passion narrative and place it into its historical and anthropological
context, so too does The First Christmas deliver a similarly thoughtful
treatment of the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke.
We
end this sermon series, then, one day after the last day of Advent and on the
first day of Christmas, with an excerpt from the book’s final chapter, aptly
titled “Joy to the World:”
Advent and Christmas are
about a new world…How will this transformation of the world come about? To say
the obvious, it has not yet happened, despite the passage of two thousand years…Does
this mean that the Christmas stories are a pipe dream? That they (and the New
Testament as a whole) are another example of failed eschatology, of hope becoming
hopeless…?
We who have seen the star
and hear the angels sing are called to participate in the new birth and new
world proclaimed by these stories…
The birth stories are not
a pipe dream, but a proclamation that what we see revealed in Jesus is the way—the way to a different kind of life and a different future. Both
personal and political transformation, both the eschatology of rebirth and the
eschatology of a new world, require our participation. God will not change us
as individuals without our participation, and God will not change the world
without our participation…
Jesus is already the
light in the darkness for those who follow Him. Conceived by the Spirit and
christened as Son of God by the community that grew up around Him, He is, for
Christians, Emmanuel: “God is with us.”
God
is with us. Today, we celebrate that at long last, God is indeed with us.
When
it feels like we have been abandoned, when we have had something most precious
taken from us, like Mr. Landry, or when we feel like we ourselves are that
precious thing that has been taken, we are reminded on this day that one day,
over two thousand years ago, God decided that it was finally time to become
flesh and bone and blood in order to speak to us, minister to us, and save us
in a way never quite done before.
And
truthfully, we don’t know for sure if that grand adventure began on December 25.
We celebrate it on this day, but neither Matthew nor Luke say that this was the
day. We rejoice in it, though, because we know that regardless of the day, God
worked within us and upon this earth in a brand new way in sending to us, as
the angels in Luke said, a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.
It
is the prophecy in Matthew, though, which Borg and Crossan refer to here, and
it comes from the seventh chapter of the book of the prophet Isaiah: “Look, a
virgin will become pregnant and give birth to a son, and they will call him
Emmanuel, which means ‘God with us.’”
God
is with us. What a revolutionary thing to say to a people who have felt so
trodden upon!
Because
when we do feel abandoned, when we do feel bereft…well, part of that feeling of
loneliness is a feeling that maybe God is not with you after all.
But
Christmas changes all of that. Forever.
And
for that, we say joy to the world. We say that the Lord has come. But when we
say those things, we are saying something very particular, and very special:
that not only are we meant to be changed by what has taken place in Bethlehem,
but that the world is meant to be changed by what has taken place in Bethlehem.
It
does us no good to keep that joy for ourselves. The carol does not go, “Joy to
the church…” It does not go, “Joy to the United States…” It goes, “Joy to the
world.”
We’re
taught that this world is only a temporary home, that we’re just passersby
here, and yet, joy is meant for this world. Joy is a part of God’s design and
wish for this world. Joy is a part of what should be our experience of this
world.
I
know that were I in Mark Landry’s shoes, I might well find joy hard to come by.
I could easily wallow in self-pity and resentment at being shelterless and at
losing one of the dearest possessions I had.
He
did not. He trusted in God, and acted with great joy when that trust was
rewarded.
So
this Christmas, keep your trust and faith in God, however hard it may be for
you to do so.
And
when God does appear in your midst, when you do indeed believe that Emmanuel is
here, that God has come and is with you, then it is right for you to react with
great joy.
Earth,
receive your king! Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
December
25, 2016
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