Overjoyed
Luke 2:1-20
Last week I went home to Connecticut to visit my mother to, among other things, decorate her condo for Christmas. My mother is 89 years old and a widow, so there was no way she was going to haul up from the basement a Christmas tree and several boxes of ornaments and decorations. The current tree is much smaller than the one we had in the house where I grew up. My parents finally got rid of the old one when they moved into the condo. That tree had lost enough bristles over the decades that it was looking like the sickly tree that Charlie Brown selects for the Peanuts Christmas pageant. You know, the one that bends to the ground under the weight of a single ornament.
Even with the tree downsized, for a time the number of ornaments on the tree only grew, as seven grandchildren each contributed their own handmade creations. These were added to the ornaments that my siblings and I had made 40 to 50 years earlier. Yes, it warmed my heart to find the clothespin angel that I made in kindergarten—the one with wings made from a cupcake wrapper and a pipe cleaner for arms—still safely secured in a plastic bag, its cotton ball hair puffed up like Don King’s.
The grandkids’ ornaments weren’t the only additions to the collection. Years ago my mother had a friend from church, Karen, who insisted on giving her a gift each year. It began innocently enough. My mother had once mentioned to Karen that she liked the word “joy.” For Christmas that year Karen gave my mother a handmade pillow with the word “joy” embroidered on it in bright red letters. In giving the pillow, Karen mentioned how she remembered that my mother liked the word.
That could have been the end of it. Really, it should have been, but it wasn’t. The next year Karen gave my mother a joy ornament for the tree. My mother, ever the gracious gift recipient, accepted it with nothing but gratitude, even as she probably feared that this could become a yearly tradition.
Sure enough, each Christmas thereafter the amount of joy in the house steadily increased: a candle holder here, a candle there, a stocking, another ornament, another pillow, a picture frame, another ornament. On and on it went. The house was absolutely overflowing with joy! But my mother could never bring herself to tell Karen, “Please stop. We have enough joy.” Instead, she received each gift of joy with a silent, “Oy, not again.”
Her other concern was my father. My dad was a practical man and a minimalist. Everything in the house needed a purpose and a place, and the fewer things the better. And so, all this joy neither served a purpose nor had a place. My father, a man who never had a thought that he didn’t express, could not contain his disdain for all the joy that was piling up around the house where it didn’t belong. Seeing all the joy only made him angry.
We reached peak joy the year that Karen left on the front porch a large wooden carving—a statue really—of a teddy bear perched on a pedestal of—what else—joy. It was the size of a 5-gallon bucket of paint and just as heavy. It was so large that it blocked the front door from opening all the way. Fortunately, my father was not home at the time, and my mother quickly retrieved it and hid it away before he could lay eyes on it.
I tell this story because here we go again with the same Christmas reading that we hear every year. I’m sure you’re familiar with the outline: the emperor’s decree, Bethlehem, the manger, the shepherds, and the angel proclaiming good news of great joy. There’s nothing new here. We’ve heard it all before. Another year and more joy. “Why thank you. It’s just what I wanted.”
In preparing each Sunday’s sermon, I listen to one or two sermon podcasts. These aren’t sermons but rather preachers talking about what to preach on for the upcoming Sunday. It’s a kind of passive brainstorming in which you can listen to some really smart people talk about what they might preach on in a particular Bible passage.
I heard a common theme in the podcasts this week about preparing the Christmas sermon: keep it simple. Don’t try to say something new. Don’t try to be profound. Just share the good news: Jesus Christ is God made flesh and was born to redeem and reconcile and make new sinners like us.
Therefore, with that advice in mind, which to be honest, was my instinct anyway, I’m going to keep this short. I’m just going to share with you something about this passage, that no matter how many times I read it, brings me to my knees and, yes, gives me joy.
To begin with, there are so many ways that God could have chosen to appear to us. The Old Testament mentions a few ways that God appeared in days of yore. God appeared to Moses in a burning bush, then to all the people of Israel in a cloud. Later, God appeared to the prophet Elijah on the side of a mountain, not in the roar of the wind, the tumult of the earthquake, or the raging of the fire, but in the sound of sheer silence.
God could have appeared like the emperor, trumpets blaring, soldiers marching in parade, all pomp and glory. We don’t see the emperor in Luke’s telling of Jesus’ birth, but we certainly feel his presence. He decrees that all subjects of the Empire register for taxation and it happens. Joseph and a very pregnant Mary obediently travel for days from Nazareth in the north of Judea down to Joseph’s ancestral home of Bethlehem.
The Son of God takes on human flesh in a mess of straw and mud and manure.
God could have chosen to make his presence felt with a show of power and authority on par with the emperor’s. Show the emperor where real power lies! After all, if it were us, that’s probably what we would do. But that’s not what God does. God chooses to enter the world not with a show of force but in the most vulnerable way imaginable, as a helpless infant. And not just an infant, but an infant born to a young, unwed peasant living in a remote part of a vast empire. And to top it off, he’s born amid the sounds and smells of livestock and laid in a manger, a feeding trough. The Son of God takes on human flesh in a mess of straw and mud and manure.
And this is no accident. “This will be a sign for you,” the angel announces to the shepherds. “You will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.” The shepherds must have wondered whether they heard correctly. That’s the sign? A baby lying in a container that horses and cattle eat from? This is the sign of the Savior’s birth? This is the one whose birth has been foretold, on whom the nation’s hopes rest?
When you think about it, it truly is amazing. “Glory to God in the highest heaven” is proclaimed over a baby lying in a feeding trough. That’s where God’s glory can be found, not in the emperor’s palace but in the barn, in the manger, in the refugee encampment, in the holding cell, in the AA meeting in the church basement…down among the muck and mire of human folly and sin.
Indeed, this is the sign. It’s a sign of God’s love, for there is no length that God will not go, no depth to which God will not descend, in order to redeem you. And it’s a sign of hope, for God is not ashamed to crawl down into the mess of your life and lift you out of the pit. In the mud and manure of our lives—the broken promises and broken relationships, the failures we never forgive and the grievances we never forget—we have a Savior who comes to us right where we are. And that—no matter how many times we’ve heard it—is cause for joy. May you be overjoyed this night with the gift of God’s love for you.