Christmas Eve 2021

St. Luke is widely considered to be one of the best writers in the Bible. He is a good storyteller, and he captures our attention with the timeless narrative of Christmas that all of us know so well.

In particular, what I want you to notice is how efficiently and quickly Luke gets us from Emperor Augustus to the baby wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.

What Luke intends here, I believe, is to highlight the immense contrast between the Emperor of Rome, who was essentially the King of the Whole World at the time, with the true King of the Whole World, the Creator and Sustainer of All Things, lying helplessly as a newborn in a cave.

Let’s expand our vision for a moment of how Luke gets from the first King to the second, from Caesar Augustus to the baby in the manger.

Imagine with me how a film version of this scene might begin. I see a wide shot of the entire universe, nothing but galaxies and stars, nebulae and constellations flying by as we zoom in, eventually, to our galaxy, the Milky Way. Then we continue on our journey to the planet Earth.

We see the rising construction of a great Empire, the Roman Empire, sweeping across vast sections of Europe, Asia, North Africa, and the Mediterranean. We fly around this great Empire, observing its wealth and power. We see Emperor Augustus, the Lord of the Whole World, being inaugurated in 27 BC. We see him consolidating power, reaching out to grasp more and more land, to absorb more and more people into the noble ideals of Rome that Augustus intended to spread throughout the world.

We see Roman engineering in the aqueducts and even indoor plumbing of the great cities of the Empire. We see great artworks, intellectual life, and a robust flourishing of the legal profession.

We see a top-down hierarchical organization that still has few rivals, 2,000 years later, with a vast and well-oiled bureaucracy ensuring the smooth operation of this Empire. And, of course, we see an incredibly disciplined and well organized military throughout the entire Empire, a fantastic and efficient army that protects the Emperor and all of the ideals he stands for.

But as we leave the advanced technology of the Roman cities and head to less populated regions, we see fewer and fewer markers of wealth, power, and prestige. We see stark contrasts from the big cities. Instead of engineering marvels and glorious temples, we see poverty, fear, need, and resistance.

We see a people trying to maintain their culture and religion as everything around them changes too quickly to keep up. We see a people taxed beyond their means. We see governors and other leaders who do not extend the benefit of the doubt to their subjects, but who assume that they are up to no good, plotting rebellion, acting in bad faith.

We see an army that exceeds the boundaries of good discipline and training, lashing out violently and cruelly when people step out of line. And we see the dark outlines of crosses against the sky, a merciless and inhuman punishment reserved for the enemies of the Roman state.

It is against this backdrop that we also see Mary and Joseph taking their long and arduous journey to Bethlehem at the behest of the Emperor. Most Jews at the time were very resistant to being counted by the Empire. Their history had showed them, after all, that large Empires did not have their best interests at heart when they wanted to count their people. This was not a census as we have in our country to ensure proportional representation for a democratic process! No: this was a census to count for the purposes of taxation, a census to treat the Jewish subjects of the Roman Empire as numbers, as economic units, not as living, breathing, human beings worthy of dignity and respect and honor, despite their poverty and uselessness, from the Empire’s perspective.

And so: into a world that measures human worth and value by monetary wealth, by violent power, by family heritage and influence, the very Word of God who spoke Creation into being comes.

He comes with great humility, concealing his Divine power and glory in the womb of a young woman of little account, of little means, from the middle of nowhere in particular, nowhere worth anything in the eyes of the world.

He comes with such humility in order to reflect his love, the love of God, into every human heart.

He comes with such humility in order to show that every human heart is worthy: worthy of God’s love, worthy of God’s grace, worthy to receive the gift of God’s very self.

And he comes with the humility that brings vulnerability as well.

I remember before we had our first child learning about the “soft spot,” also known as the fontanelle, the spaces between the bones of a baby’s skull that haven’t grown together yet. If you look carefully and closely at a baby’s soft spot, you can even see it pulsating with the rhythm of the blood that is being pumped through their tiny body.

Among the many ways in which I was terrified as a new parent, one was that I would somehow harm this soft spot. It is, of course, quite literally a vulnerability–a place open to wounding.

In becoming human for our sake, God opens himself up to vulnerability, literally and figuratively. The baby Jesus we sing about this evening had a soft spot. He was a baby, after all, incredibly tiny and frail, fragile and vulnerable. He was able to be wounded, as are all of us, as soon as he was born.

And the God-human Jesus was also vulnerable in other ways. Vulnerable to be misunderstood. Vulnerable to grief and loss. Vulnerable to self-doubt and fear.

Vulnerable to the entire range of human emotion and experience. Vulnerable to King Herod, vulnerable to Pontius Pilate, vulnerable to suffering and death on the cross for our sake.

Surely this vulnerability is one of Mary’s main concerns as a new mother. She has faithfully opened her life and her experience to allow God’s own self to be born into the world as a helpless newborn with a little soft spot on his head.

After the long journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem, after the sheer exhaustion of searching for lodging and finding none, after the pain and joy of childbirth, after the angelic visitations and the shepherds coming to worship the newborn baby, Mary is thinking about vulnerability.

She treasures the words of the shepherds and ponders–meditates on–what they might mean. And just eight days later, at Jesus’s consecration at the Temple in Jerusalem, the prophet Simeon illuminates for Mary some of what that vulnerability might mean, telling her that Jesus “is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed. And a sword will pierce your own soul too.”

Mary will learn of the appallingly strange beauty of her son as he grows into a man; she will know on an intimate level the division of which Simeon speaks. Jesus will not provoke a neutral response, after all, in those he encounters in this life.

Mary, the Mother of God, as Jesus’s first Disciple, knew before the rest of us what following Jesus means. It means, as the lovely Christmas hymn puts it, allowing him to be born in us today.

And then, with Mary, to treasure all the words we have been given about Jesus and to ponder in our own hearts what they mean, what he means, this God who loves so deeply and beyond our knowing, to take on our frail and fragile human body, to take on our vulnerability.

In his book “Ponder These Things,” the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, takes a look at three icons of Mary and Jesus. One of these, called the Eleousa, shows Jesus eagerly embracing Mary as an infant. According to Williams, this type of image gives us a clear picture of Jesus’s love, a love that is active, eager, and free, a love, he says, that reminds us “of an eager and rather boisterous child, scrambling up on his mother’s lap, seizing handfuls of her clothing and nuzzling his face against hers, with that extraordinary hunger for sheer physical closeness that children will show with loving parents.”

Jesus’s vulnerability does not only mean that he opens himself up to suffering, though it certainly does mean that. It also means that he opens himself up to the sheer joy of life, and in particular, the sheer joy of loving us without boundaries or borders.

God’s love for us in Christ Jesus, as Rowan Williams tells us, is as “unselfconscious and undignified as the clinging child, as undignified as the father in the story of the Prodigal Son running down the road to greet his lost child, an image of the immense freedom of divine love, the freedom to be defenceless and without anxiety.”

This is the key to our Christmas Joy, this Divine Humility that is in such great contrast with the Empire into which Jesus was born and all subsequent earthly Empires. In humbling himself, in taking on our humanity, God proclaims to the world such Joy as we cannot even begin to imagine.

It is the joy of the Creator himself, the One who Speaks the World into Being, and who eagerly loved his mother as a Baby.

It is the Joy of the One who Bridges the Gap between Humanity and Divinity.

It is the Joy of the One who made himself vulnerable, as a baby with a soft spot, in order to show the Softness of his Love and Tenderness for us.

It is the Joy of the Birth of a Savior.

O Come.

Come: Let us Adore Him, Christ the Lord !!

AMEN.