Bill Countryman at Good Shepherd Berkeley

CHRISTMAS 2023

Year B: Isaiah 9:2-7; Psalm 96; Titus 2:11-14; Luke 2:1-14 (15-20)

The daily news this year isn’t making it easy to celebrate the Christmas season. Our world is proving dangerous in so many ways—from Putin’s blatant aggression in Ukraine to the bloody conflict in Gaza and Israel to the seemingly endless civil wars of Africa to the broader issues of climate change and the vast numbers of refugees fleeing from all these causes of distress. One feels a bit awkward about being too joyful even on a great festival like this.

And yet the Christmas story has something important to say to us precisely in this difficult moment. It tells us that God is still with us, still loves the world God has made and wants to find of reconciling us with God and with one another. 

The Bethlehem story tells us that God long ago decided to come into the most intimate possible relation with us. God made us, to begin with—and then gave us an extraordinary degree of freedom. And we’ve wandered off in all sorts of directions, some of them horribly destructive. But, even so, God was looking for some way to draw us back, to find a true reconciliation with us. And God decided to do it by becoming one of us, human—fully human—which means, among other things, starting out as a helpless infant. 

Mary and Joseph agreed to cooperate in this project. Did they really understand fully what they were letting themselves in for? Who could?! But now they find themselves are in Bethlehem far from home—forced to make the trek south because of some bureaucratic red tape about a census and lines of descent and so forth. (Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?) And Mary’s time has come and there’s no room in any inn and they’ve been shuffled off into a shed where the innkeepers keep their cow and their donkey and maybe some chickens. And there we find the God who is also a human being, swaddled up and lying in the feed trough. 

Was this really a good idea? Well, God did at least choose the early Roman Empire—a relatively peaceful era in human history. If God had chosen our own times, the child might easily have died in infancy. Still, this newborn will have to face all the challenges common to human life. Why choose this risky course of action?

It isn’t as if God had no alternative. The Bible tells us that God knows how to do the big sound and light show. Just think of Mt. Sinai! And God knows how to strike awe and wonder straight into the individual human heart. Think of Isaiah in the temple, seeing God high and lifted up—and the Seraphim flying overhead and singing Holy Holy Holy.

But God isn’t here this time to impress us or to awe us. God is here for something else. God is here to love us and be loved by us. It starts with Mary and Joseph. The circle grows a little with the visit of the shepherds, who know a thing or two about nurturing newborns from their line of work. It will continue growing through Jesus’ childhood and early adulthood. God-in-Jesus will find some people so drawn to him and his teaching and his work that they give up the lives they’d been living just to be with him. It will lead on to the crisis point when the powers that be attack Jesus and kill him precisely because God’s divine love and goodness and generosity are spilling over and threatening to undermine their own power—political, economic, and religious. And, still, the triumph of God’s love will culminate on Easter when that love proves stronger even than death.

For there is nothing, ultimately, stronger than God’s love. It is the power by which God created all the beauty and wonder and vitality in our world—and in us. And God comes to be one of us in the infant Jesus in order to invite us to accept that love, rejoice in it, respond to it, and share it with the rest of the world.

There’s a wonderful poem by Robert Herrick, a love-song addressed to God, that captures it all perfectly:

TO GOD

Come to me, God; but do not come

To me, as to the general Doom,

In power—nor come thou in that state

When thou thy Laws did promulgate,

Whenas the mountain quak’d for dread,

And sullen clouds bound up its head.

No, lay thy stately terrors by

To talk with me familiarly;

For if thy thunder-claps I hear,

I shall less swoon than die for rear.

Speak thou of love and I’ll reply

By way of epithalamy,

Or sing of mercy, and I’ll suit

To it my viol and my lute:

Thus let thy lips but love distill, 

Then come my God, and hap what will. 

And, yes, that’s exactly what God has done. And it’s what is still giving us life, and strength, and grace, and hope, and the power to love in return.

And so I wish you a Blessed and Joyful Christmas—especially in these troubled times.