May your day be filled with joy and connection.
Reflection on the Christmas Story, Luke 2:1-20,
from Rev. Kara Root and Rev Lisa Larges, shared on Christmas Eve, 2021.
Luke 2:1-7
In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. 2This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. 3All went to their own towns to be registered. 4Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David. 5He went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child.6While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. 7And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.
A first century Middle Eastern home design show would be big on the open concept. House hunters would follow a large family with their animals, looking for a place for them all to be comfortable. The homes they would visit would all be variations on the same theme: a split level with two entrances. It would consist of one large room, where all the life happens, with a portion of the room several feet lower than the rest, and a small set of stairs going down to it. This portion would be open to the outdoors, because of course they would want their animals to be able to comfortably crowd into it at night to bed down safely next to the family.
The savvy designers of these homes ensured there was a classic manger – a dugout feeding trough in the floor of the main room near the edge where the floor dropped lower, so that a hungry cow could easily reach forward and eat.
Then, because hospitality was so central and important, on many of these homes a guest room was built on the roof or the side of the house. The word Luke uses in our text that we’ve translated as “inn” is not the word Luke for inn later on. It’s the word meaning guest room. Perhaps the house hunters would find or build such a home, and our show would end with the family happily settled into life in their new digs in Bethlehem.
A few months or years later, Mary and Joseph came to the small town of Joseph’s ancestral family. While they were staying there in this very home, the time came for Mary to deliver her baby. Elizabeth and Zechariah did not live not far, and since Luke begins the whole story of Jesus with them, it’s not unlikely that they came too, baby John strapped to Elizabeth’s chest, to be for Mary and Joseph what Mary had been for Elizabeth in her own time.
There was no place for them in the guest room, we’re told, or perhaps our family had selected a home that did not yet have a guest room, so right in the center of the home, Mary labored and birthed her baby and laid him in the manger. The animals looked on. The women of the village, the midwives and the aunties, assisted with the birth.
Not apart but alongside, not beyond but within, right into the center of a world in upheaval, right into the center of a crowded room, in a peasant home teaming with life, into a neighborhood rallying to the needs of a birthing mom and an anxious dad, fetching water, offering food, neighbors clapping shoulders, sharing joy, strangers lifting voices in thanksgiving for the baby’s safe arrival, the Lord of the universe entered into this world: Jesus Christ was born.
Entering a world already in motion, interrupting narratives already unfolding, just like every child born in every time, God came in.
Luke wants us to see this:, Into a hungry world comes the Bread of Life, his first bed a feeding trough. Into the chaos, with no privacy from other humans or animals, and no capacity to be treated as an honored guest, comes the Word through whom God speaks into being all order and design, life and light, animals and humans alike.
And into a corrupt system that takes advantage of the poor, under a government that wields power personal gain, comes the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, ushering in a different kind of kingdom. An empire of kindness and belonging, justice and equity, love and forgiveness, and power through sacrifice. And he shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Prince of Peace.
Instead of turning the Almighty face away from our hunger; Jesus becomes for us the bread of life. Instead of recoiling at our dread, Jesus says Fear not, I will be with you. Instead of shunning us in our arrogance and ignorance, abandoning us to our violence and hardheartedness, God comes to us in humility and weakness, a helpless baby, needing us to show up for him and take care of him, knowing all the while we would then betray and kill him, and coming all the same.
Instead of concocting a way for a few very good people to escape dying, God came to die alongside, with and for us all, to end the power of death over us, and give us Christ’s life of unbreakable belonging to God and each other as our own life.
In our chaotic, unprepared, unwelcoming, unsuspecting and unjust world, God’s home is with us, in our homes, in our neighborhoods, in our circumstances, whatever they may be. God makes our ordinary holy; God makes our everyday sacred. Because the first and final word is love. And by the power of God’s love this world is being redeemed. Our lives are being redeemed.
- Pastor Kara
Luke 2:8-14
8 In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. 9Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. 10But the angel said to them, ‘Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people:11to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.12This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.’ 13And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying,
14 ‘Glory to God in the highest heaven,
and on earth peace among humans, whom God delights in!’
There’s a layer of earth’s atmosphere called the ionosphere. The ionosphere, for a certain little slice of human history, connected late-night romanticists and restless spirits with faraway places.
Back when radio was a thing, for the news or the weather, or the baseball game, or the latest top forty hits, or for companionship on a long road trip, there was the radio. There was FM, with its clear signal; but before FM, and then alongside it, there was AM
At night, some of the less powerful AM stations would go off the air, and a handful of bigger stations with more powerful signals would own the airwaves. After the sun went down, AM radio waves would behave differently up there in the ionosphere. They would get bounced around, and returned to earth, and be scattered far beyond their normal daytime range. And so you could, and still can, sit up late at night, and with patience and focus, slowly, incrementally, turn the tuning knob on the AM band of any old radio. Maybe you’ll get Detroit, or Denver, or Madison. You’ll hear late night preachers, and sports talk radio, and late-night callers with their theories of how everything works. The signal, bouncing around up there in the ionosphere, will be clear for a while, and then fuzzy, and then go away altogether; but you can twist the radio dial a little to the left or a little to the right, and maybe you’ll get that station back again, or maybe another, from another town not close to here.
Shepherds, on a night that was no different than a thousand nights before or a thousand nights to follow, got tuned in to a cosmic frequency. The music of the universe, which hums at a frequency just beyond human hearing, was suddenly audible to them. The cosmic glory, which continues in a range beyond human seeing was suddenly visible to them.
God’s love and human love collided on the earth, and the realm of grace and glory was especially electric that night. It danced in the skies. It hummed and reverberated, until at last it connected. It broke through on a patch of open land on a hillside, where sheep were gathered, and shepherds watching.
Why shepherds? Was it because they were awake and watching, alert, as a habit of the work, to any anomaly? Did their work of caring and tending predispose them to the announcement of newborn love? Were they lonely out there, and did that cosmic song come as a salve to their spirits?
However it was, the song of the universe, with news of God-with-us, came to shepherds, in the middle of an ordinary night. And the signal was so strong, so clear, so persistent, that not only could they feel it, but they could hear it, and not only could they hear it, but they could see it, and not only could they see and hear it, but they understood it, and not only did they understand, but when at last the signal faded, they got up, and went searching for that source of love.
Here we are this night. And there is music in the air.
The song of the universe is singing for you. Not just here, not just this night, but always. The song of the universe sings around you.
One day, you, and I, and everyone else in this room and with us across the invisible spaces, every one of us will be taken up into that cosmic song. We will return to the song, be enfolded by it. The ground of our being is love. We have come from love, and to that love we will return.
And here, in this life, maybe, not unlike the shepherds, a few times in our life we might actually hear the song. Maybe you have heard it? Maybe there’s been that moment when the joy was so strong in you, or love was so powerful, or your very own deep longing welled up from the core of your core and suddenly you were palpably connected to a signal – a field force – a shimmering – an awareness of love and grace that is the music of the spheres.
Sometimes, some of us are just that lucky – lucky like the shepherds, to hear the music. But whether or not we ever hear it – whether or not it ever breaks through and sings in glory around us – that music, that song of love is still there. It holds us. It renews our hearts for love. It gives us strength. It is always and forever singing the good news: God is with us. God is here.
- Pastor Lisa
Luke 2:15-20
15 When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, ‘Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.’ 16So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger. 17When they saw this, they made known what had been told them about this child; 18and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them. 19But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. 20The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.
In our rotation of holiday music the other day, while I was baking cookies, Go Tell It On the Mountain began to play. Maisy said, “This isn’t a Christmas song!” and I assured her that, indeed, it was, and we paid attention to the verses, which turn out to be about the angels telling the shepherds and the shepherds telling too.
Having been drawn into the cosmic celebration, inducted by a stunning angelic pronouncement into the growing collection of humans in on this world-changing scheme of the Divine, the shepherds rushed to share in the reality alongside those who were also experiencing it. Just like Mary did when she went with haste to find Elizabeth and Zechariah.
This is a truth that must be shared, a mystery to be treasured and pondered in our hearts, a reality to join in, a message to be told (Go tell it)
on the mountain, over hills and everywhere:
The trajectory of the universe is shifted,
A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn
Because
In our dark streets shineth the everlasting light,
a light that no darkness can put out!
The hopes and fears of all the years are met
tonight in God-with-us,
and in his name all oppression shall cease.
God crept in beside us,
and the soul felt its worth.
Love is born! Come share in the wonder,
Love is God now asleep in the hay.
Love is Jesus within and among us
Love is the peace our hearts are seeking.
So
come let us adore him!
So the breathless shepherds go! And they find the baby swaddled tightly in a manger, in a regular peasant home not unlike their own, his tiny black lashes resting on his soft brown cheeks as he sleeps, reminding them of their own grandsons, their own sons. And they excitedly share what the angels told them about this child. And all those who hear - Mary and Joseph, all those neighbors celebrating in the yard, and our proud little host family, in whose living room this miracle took place, and by whom visiting hours are graciously extended as the wee hours of the morning begin to break around them all – they were all amazed at what the shepherds told them. And Mary treasured these things and pondered them in her heart.
And just as their message changed all those who heard it, the shepherds went away changed too. They were transformed by the experience and also by the sharing of it. Altered by both the supernatural encounter with the music of the cosmos, and by the sight and smell of the baby in the feeding trough.
Beyond the bounds of daily routine and rhythm, even beyond time and space and life and death, the shepherds eyes were lifted to a further horizon.
By witnessing heaven leaking into earth and earth invaded by heaven, angels and strangers and God-with-us sharing in this extraordinary ordinary event together,
their awareness was opened to the vast interconnectedness of all things.
In praise and gratitude for all they had seen and heard,
their hearts were turned toward God.
God comes in. Nothing stops God, nothing deters God, nothing hinders God from coming in. God’s love and salvation are for the whole world.
Not a perfect world, this world. Not ideal lives, these lives.
Right now, in the midst of every single thing happening on the earth, every life, every death, every moment of joyous celebration, every cry of devastating loss,
any and all chaos and upheaval,
into weariness and despair,
corruption and violence, beauty and simplicity,
in all of it,
God is with us.
We are every day invited to join in the world-changing schemes of the Divine. Because the first and final word is love. And by the power of God’s love this world is being redeemed.
So tonight we turn our hearts toward God, and we lift our eyes to a further horizon. Tonight our awareness is opened to the interconnectedness of all, and we are too drawn into the cosmic celebration. Christ has come.
Glory to God in the highest heaven! And peace on earth, good will to all!
- Pastor Kara
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