JOY IN BETHLEHEM?

December 4, 2005

Texts – Isaiah 40: 1-11

Mark 1: 1-8

            How are you doing with Christmas this year?  Have you shifted gears yet?  That’s what this time of year always seems like to me – shifting gears, moving from one reality, one state of mind, into another . . . an attitude adjustment, if you will.  It’s what Advent worship is about for many of us.  We need to hear the carols of Christmas before we can fully enter into its spirit.  “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” we sang last week; just so this morning’s “O Little Town of Bethlehem.”  In a few weeks on a Saturday night we’ll sing them all again; now, we’re just rehearsing, getting ready, trying to learn the gear shift again after a year’s time of driving on automatic.  Going from first into second without grinding those gears is tough for some of us.

            “Hanging of the Greens” is next week, another time for rehearsal.  It is such a lovely tradition, evoking memories of earlier years.  Oh, to be a child again, even if just for a moment.  In the thrall of sentiment and song, lights and greens, for a little while many of us feel that way, don’t we?  It can be wonderful, a moment of enchantment in the midst of a sometimes dreary and difficult season and world.

            But you have to shift gears to get there . . . you have to enter into the story of the season, and when you do that with your eyes wide open the gears grind just a bit.  Why?  Well, for one thing, it’s because the story begins in Bethlehem.  A more uncomfortable place it could not have been.  It was and is a strange place to speak about joy. 

            The simple folk lived in caves in Bethlehem, kids and goats, sheep and kin, all in one room.  Family at one end, livestock at the other.  That is likely where it happened, a fourteen year old mother-to-be in pain and with no privacy.  It would have been smoky and crowded.  The smell and cry of a wrinkled new one contrasting sharply with the odor of stale sweat and dirty sheep skins.  Could there really have been joy in such a Bethlehem?

            The whole scene would not really do for our pageants of carols and greens, with kings draped in bathrobes and wooden donkeys on wheels rolling down the center aisle.  Some churches have begun to create live manger scenes for precisely this reason.  Most of them do it out doors on the lawn for obvious reasons.   We did that one year in the church I served down on Long Island.  A local farmer brought in livestock from his barn.  Two of our youth were overheard discussing it ahead of time.  One said, “What is this going to be?”  The other one answered, “Oh, they are building a live fertility scene.” 

            Now I have no quarrel with the way we rehearse the story in our congregation.  I look forward to it every year.  But I find it helpful to remind myself of what the story really says so that I don’t lose sight of its true meaning.

            What do you see when you look carefully at the root story of Christmas?  Mostly it’s about a mother and a child, isn’t it?  Oh, Joseph is there, and so are shepherds and kings, but they all stand to the side, or behind in the shadows.  Front and center is just this young mother with her little one.  That's the heart of the story.  And, says the story, in this simple, ordinary human event, God in this

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particular babe is embracing life in precisely our kind of world.  When we learn to embrace life as he did – as precious gift – and begin to live it in gratitude no matter what comes – again, as he did – then we discover a kind of joy that sustains even in the midst of sadness and trial.  Because of Jesus and the story of his birth and life, Christians have learned to rejoice and trust that life is fundamentally good and worth the living for every child that sees the light of day.  Joy in Bethlehem indeed.

            Every newborn child brought into this world is an affirmation of this way of seeing life as a good and gracious gift.  The mother who endures nine months of discomfort is, whether conscious of it or not, expressing faith that in spite of it all, it is right to bring another life into this world.

            The joy of Bethlehem is the joy of embracing life just as it comes to each of us.  One man puts it this way – “Joy in life seems to me to arise from a sense of being where one belongs . . .of being four-square with the life we are given.  All the unhappy, discontented people I know (he says) are trying to be something they are not, to do something they cannot do . . .  Contentment and indeed usefulness comes as the infallible result of great and trusting acceptances, . . . of surrendering ourselves to the fullness of our own lives.” [David Grayson]

            Which means that joy comes as we are able with a full heart to say, “Here is my place.  Here are my people.  Here I shall be content to live out my years doing God’s will as God gives me strength and grace.”  Is that something you can say?  If not, why not?  It is the key to a truly joyful life.

            This is not to say, of course, that our lives will be or can be untouched by sadness or pain if we embrace this story.  That is a luxury life seldom affords anyone.  But joy in Bethlehem comes as life is embraced in trust, even as the Christmas child came and embraced it, and as that first young mother embraced her life though it led her to a manger cave shared with oxen and sheep.  

            As we gather around this table today, then, let us shift gears together and re-enter that sacred space called Christmas.  Let us be content with the gifts of time and place which God gives to us this day.  This is, after all, our place.  We are surrounded here by our family of faith.  Together we shall live out our years doing God’s will as God gives us the strength and grace so to do.  In this shall be our joy, and our joy shall know no end.  Amen.