From Bethlehem to Eternity

Sermon preached by the Reverend Patricia Farris

December 24, 2003

Scripture:  Isaiah 9:2-4, 6-7 and Luke 2:1-20

One of the best things about Christmas for me happens each year when our nativity scene goes up out in the courtyard here.  It’s a simple one—the stable, the Holy Family, a few lambs, the manger and a couple bales of hay to add a touch of authenticity.  But even the mild California winters have taken their toll over the years.  Our figures are old now, and a bit worse for the wear.  Still, each year, their very presence creates something special, something precious and holy in our midst.

Every year, the nursery school kids from Trinity Baptist around the corner come to sing carols around our crèche.  I have a birds’ eye view out my office window, and I hear them before I see them, little voices singing “Joy to the World” and  “Silent Night,” accompanied by their maracas and jingle bells.  However, the best thing I heard this year was on a Sunday morning in Advent.  A family was arriving for church and Sunday school, and a thrilled little boy came running up to the crèche exclaiming:  “The baby Jesus is back!  The baby Jesus is back!”

Yes, indeed!  Isn’t that precisely why we’re all here tonight, out late, on this silent night, this holy night, to see for ourselves what the prophets foretold and the angels sing and the shepherds honor, to see for ourselves this wondrous thing, this marvelous gift, this amazing grace: the baby Jesus is back!

“How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given!  So God imparts to human hearts the wonders of his heaven.”

It was Francis of Assisi on Christmas Eve 1223 who created the crèche as we’ve come to know it for the townspeople of a small village in Italy.  At the time, there were already a few birth scenes in the great cathedrals in Rome and elsewhere, but these were not accessible to most ordinary people who could not make a long and dangerous journey to see them.  Even more importantly, those scenes depicted Christ’s birth as something that had happened long ago, in the distant past. 

Francis wanted everyone to know the story and to know the great love of God that is its true meaning.  He took from Luke’s account the setting of the birth in a stable.  From the words of the prophet Isaiah, “the ox knows its owner and the donkey knows the manger of its master,” he asked a local farmer to bring livestock and tether them close to a young, local couple with a newborn baby.  He had a few of his friars represent the shepherds and the Wise Men who appear in Matthew’s Gospel, and there you have it.  It was a living crèche, free for everyone to see, with characters completely familiar to the villagers.  At midnight, Francis preached his sermon right there, next to the crèche, so that their eyes could see the words he was saying:  God is merciful and tender, sending the gift of love into the world in the birth of this baby. 

That Christmas, Christ was born in Greccio, Italy, just has he had been born in Bethlehem many years before.  For this is not just a “once upon a time, long, long ago…” story—it is new and real each year and in every place.  The Babe of Bethlehem is born each Christmas in the hearts of those who welcome him and receive his Word.  Our little guy was quite right to exclaim:  “the baby Jesus is back!” 

This birth is timely and timeless.  It is specific—Mary, Joseph, the baby Jesus--and it occurs again and again and again and again.  It carries us from Bethlehem to eternity on the wings of divine love, always passing through our world and our hearts along the way.

The specificity of Bethlehem, of Mary who said “yes” to God, and of Joseph, told in his dream to name this child “Jesus,” that specificity makes all the difference in the world.  If we only knew in a general way that “God is love,” for example, we might miss the fact that God knows our names, too.  Mary, Joseph, Jesus … Bill, Ann, Linda, Tom, Suzy, Jeff, Megan, Emily, Sam, Debra …God knows us by name and loves us so much as to become one of us and live among us and share our joy and our sorrows and stay with us through it all and finally when the time comes to bring us home.  God cares in specific and loves us all, in each and every place.

The specificity of Bethlehem is important too, for from this we know that God cares for all the Bethlehems of this world as well as for each person--the cities and towns and villages, every place, rural and urban, large and small.  God cares for London and Rome, for Baghdad and Johannesburg.  God cares for New York City and Los Angeles and Santa Monica and Helena.  God cares for East LA and Julian and especially this year for Paso Robles.

On this night when again this year too many places in our world are shadowed by danger and violence, God weeps, and God causes the Prince of Peace to be born to bring hope.  The baby Jesus is back to come into our very real lives, into the places we live and work, to restore God’s righteousness and peace to all the peoples of the world.

The baby Jesus is back -- in our lives, in our world, in our sorrows and heartbreak, in our hopes and dreams.    This baby, our Messiah, is our “gateway into all that God means,” and on this night, God means that something new and beautiful is possible for our lives and for our world.

From Bethlehem to eternity: the specificity is important, but the timelessness, too, the vastness of this love.  We are never limited by what we now see and experience or by the confines of what we now know.  The wings of God’s love carry us from a lowly stable all the way to signs in the heavens, to a bright star and angelic song.  We are lifted from the ordinariness of everything we know to a truth far beyond our comprehension, a beauty far surpassing anything we can see or create.  We look up and out and into and beyond and we are graced to know that God’s love has created the whole creation and sustains the whole creation and redeems the whole creation in the birth of this Holy Child. 

The love of God, you see, is personal and expansive, intimate and all-inclusive.  We can see it and know it and touch it and hear it—and at the same time it is far, far beyond anything our minds can ever limit or control.  As the Psalmist sang:  “When I see your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you set in place—what are humans that you are mindful of them, mere mortals, that you care for them?  Yet, you have made them a little lower than angels and crowned them with glory and honor…O Lord, our Lord, how awesome is your name through all the earth!”

There is an ancient legend that says that on the night Christ was born, the stars in the sky and all the planets stopped in their course while Mary was in labor and only began to move again when the infant drew his first breath.   

The writer, Madeleine L’Engle has described a clear night in which she could look up and see the expanse of the Milky Way brushed across the sky.  Looking at stars, she observes:  “A sky full of God’s children!  Each galaxy, each star, each living creature, every particle and subatomic particle of creation, we are all children of the Maker.  From a subatomic particle with a lifespan of a few seconds, to a galaxy with a life span of billions of years, to us human creatures somewhere in the middle in size and age, we are made in God’s image, male and female, and we are, as Christ promised us, God’s children by adoption and grace…”

How, we ask?  She continues:  “God’s explanation is to send Jesus, the Incarnate One, God enfleshed…it is love, God’s limitless love enfleshing that love into the form of a human being, Jesus, the Christ, fully human and fully divine.”  

“Joy to the world, the Lord is come!  Let earth receive her King; let every heart prepare him room, and heaven and nature sing, and heaven and nature sing.”

From Bethlehem to eternity:  the specificity of this birth awakens us to the cosmic and “eternal dimensions of our time-bound existence.”  It causes us all to “search for meanings that go deeper than the skin.”  It removes the confining walls of our self-centered pride.  It places everything in proper, sacred perspective.  The reality of this birth lifts our heads so that we can see through and beyond the challenges and limitations of this present moment to see the promise of God’s eternity:  a new heaven and a new earth.

The Babe of Bethlehem is back for each of us this year.  Because of him, thanks to him, we can imagine a new life and a better world.  The Baby Jesus is back!  Because of him, we want to grow from our pettiness to fulfill all our possibilities.  Because of him, we long to move beyond our narrow sight to comprehend the fullness of this life.  Because of him, we yearn to rise above any unworthy ways of being to find the more excellent way.  Because of him, we dare to love and live and give and grow.

So God imparts to human hearts all the blessings of the heavens.

May the gift and sweep of God’s love find you this night at the manger in Bethlehem and number you among the bright-shining stars through all eternity.

Amen.

Notes:

Spoto, Donald.  Reluctant Saint:  The Life of Francis of Assisi.  New York:  Viking Compass, 2002.

Bishop John Shelby Spong.  “Bishop Spong Q&A”, December 10, 2003.

Forrest Church in “The Living Pulpit:  Christmas.”  December 1995.

Madeleine L’Engle in Watch for the Light:  Readings for Advent and Christmas.  Plough Publishing, 2001.