Read on Twitter
It's Christmas Eve, and this is as close as most of you will ever get to hearing me preach, so let's do a little thread, eh? @EricSchu_Ras
Actually, think of this as either two short threads or one long one in two parts. Your call.
Years ago, I went with a church group to see some holiday spectacular put on by an evangelical theater company (if you've lived in Central PA, you'll know this is a thing).
It was garbage. Noisy, poorly acted, terrible theology. The high point was the live camels they paraded through the theater. My parishioners loved it. When they asked me what I thought, I said, "Boy, those camels sure were neat, weren't they!"
I don't remember that much about it, to be honest. Forgetfulness is a blessing sometimes. There were a bunch of references to THE KING who was BORN AMONG US, get it?
(GET IT?)
The show closed with the Magi gathered around the manger front stage, and then suddenly Calvary lit up in the background as the music swelled and the narrator intoned something about THIS STORY ENDS ON EASTER.
And I thought, "No, you sh*theads, it does not." For one thing, the cross is Good Friday, not Easter. For another, Jesus wasn't born simply to die for us. Gross.
(Half of this was repellant theology, half of it was an ad for the theaters Easter spectacular. Double gross.)
And yet, it is the same Jesus born in a manger who goes on to die on the cross, for us. It is the same Jesus born under humble circumstances who is called King of Kings. So what gives?
Well, first we have to shrive ourselves of what Moltmann calls the Theology of Glory. The Christmas story as we hear it tonight is not about the birth of a king. In fact, there's a pretty good case to be made that Luke is *parodying* royal birth narratives in this story.
It's a story about scared young parents giving birth to a vulnerable child under less-than-great circumstances.
That's it.
That's it.
Put all the theology out of your mind for a minute, even the theology and the hints at importance that Luke gives us on either side of this story and let the simplicity fill you.
There was a guy named Joseph and his wife Mary who had a baby named Jesus. They had to do that far from home because politicians are sh*theads, and not even indoors, because the place was crowded.
Mary and Joseph had a baby boy and they named him Jesus. That's it, that's the tweet.
It's only when you've wrapped your head around this being a birth like any other, Jesus being a baby like any other, just a little poorer than most, that you can start to understand what's really going on here.
Bonhoeffer says "Only a weak God can save" because only a weak God can end the deadly cycle of domination and retribution.
Here he is, that weak God in the flesh, wrapped in a swaddling cloth so he doesn't cry and laid down for a good long nap until his mother is able to feed him.
We often speak of Jesus being with, or standing in solidarity with, the weak, the suffering, the oppressed.
It's more than that. Jesus isn't with the weak. He *is* them. In Jesus' birth, God didn't choose glory in disguise. God chose weakness, frailty, vulnerability.
It's precisely because of that weakness that the baby Jesus can go on to become the Christ who dies for and thus saves humanity.
It's not that THE KING BORN AMONG US is stronger than sin and death, it's precisely that he is weaker than them. They win!
But because Jesus is weak, the weak, because Jesus is us, we are also him. His death is ours, and the ridiculous gift of new life becomes ours as well.
That gift, that whole sequence, only begins with weakness, though. Think of this the next time you see a newborn: this is how the Jesus story started.
There's a parallel to what I've just said in the Mary story, which comes out in quite an odd way.
In the west, we customarily think of Jesus being born in a stable, more or less. If you think about the standard Christmas creche, it's probably a little rough wooden building, right?
But the Orthodox church has the tradition that Jesus was born in a cave: https://orthodoxartsjournal.org/the-cave-in-the-nativity-icon/
This is not so weird as it might seem at first. People in Jesus' day did use caves to shelter and feed animals. And it makes a nice bit of parallelism: Jesus is born and laid to rest in caves, protected by men named Joseph.
Here's where this connects to Mary: her womb is like a cave before Jesus' birth.
Or rather, the cave is like Mary's womb, in that it shelters and protects the infant Jesus.
Now, on the one hand, ew, what the hell were these people thinking? Turns out exactly what you think they're thinking!
There is a lot of writing about the paradox of Mary's womb being able to give space to the universe, i.e., Jesus, the Word of God who was present at creation.
I believe this is why Mary is sometimes referred to as Queen of the Universe? Somebody correct me if I'm wrong.
Anyway, the point of comparison is love: the cave is Jesus' first home on earth, but he is loved and cared for even before birth.
Mary, too, risks weakness and vulnerability in this story. Giving birth was no sure thing in her day, especially not for a very young woman such as herself. And yet, out of love, so goes ahead with it.
There was a guy named Joseph and his wife Mary who had a baby.
There's nothing supernatural or even particularly saintly about this, but there is something holy. Out of love, Mary chose to bear a child, just like any other.
Or rather, this is to say that the holy and the saintly and yes, even the supernatural arise from the very commonness of human existence. The story of God coming to humanity as a person begins where any other person's story begins: with a woman giving birth.
But the image I want to leave you with is this. When human babies are born, they're pretty helpless. Somehow, they have to give their caretakers incentive to care for them.
But what can a baby give? Not much, except a look of sheer openness and love. When newborns look at their mothers, they see the universe.
...And when their mothers look back at them, they likewise see the entire world.
...And when their mothers look back at them, they likewise see the entire world.
Those reciprocal looks are evolutionarily extremely important, scientists say. They are what attach a newborn to its parents. Mom and Dad learn to love the kid, the kid learns to love them. If all goes well, it builds on itself from there.
Even though none of that is mentioned in the text, I choose to see it in between the words. That is how God chose to come into the world:
Mary and Joseph had a baby. The baby looked at them and said, "Take care of me?" And they said, "Sure. Take care of us?" And he said, "Sure."
What more do you need in a gospel?
What more do you need in a gospel?
The end.
If you liked this, be nice to the next baby you see.
Preachers hard up for tonight's sermon, feel free to steal and get the he** off Twitter already.
Preachers hard up for tonight's sermon, feel free to steal and get the he** off Twitter already.
The rest of you make sure you're not on Robot Santa's naughty list.
