2016 Christmas Eve Sermon

The readings for December 24, 2016, Christmas Eve at St. Peter Lutheran Church in Greene, Iowa, are Isaiah 9:2–7, Micah 5:2–5a, Luke 2:1-21, and John 1:1-14.

How many of you have favorite memories of Christmas from when you were a kid? Maybe you have a traditional favorite Christmas dinner food, or maybe it’s hearing Linus from Peanuts read the Christmas gospel. Maybe it’s opening presents around the tree at Grandma’s, or watching Christmas Vacation. Maybe it’s attending worship services like this.

For many of us, this Christmas Eve service is a sacred time. Some of my own favorite Christmas memories are singing Silent Night in a dark church made bright by candlelight. It feels like stepping outside of our normal lives into a sacred space, into a mystical, magical time.

I hope tonight’s service can be a sacred time for you as we sing and hear this familiar story of Jesus’ birth. Tonight, we celebrate the greatest miracle of all—the miracle of God the creator, the almighty, coming to live among us. God loving the world enough to come be born in it. This celebration is sacred.

What’s stuck out to me this year about the real Christmas story, however, is not all the wonderful traditions that have grown up around it, the sacred carols, or the candles. What’s unique is how ordinary it all appears.

If there was a fairy tale, or a Disney movie about the creator God coming to the world, it would be dramatic. There would be music, thunder, celebrations, parades. It would be an occasion no one could miss. God coming to earth. Wow!

But in this story, that’s not exactly what happens.

Sure, there are a few miraculous parts, like the shepherds. They’re in a field having an ordinary night at work when a flock of angels appears to them. They do get the sacred, dramatic elements, the sky lighting up and an angel chorus singing. That’s the next part of the story we’ll read.

But for the most part, it’s amazing how ordinary this birth is, especially for the people directly involved.

Luke begins telling the story by establishing where we are in history, naming the emperor and governor, but then he zooms in to focus on something the emperor would never notice. There’s an unwed, teenage mother and her fiancé, giving birth to her child in a corner of someone’s barn. It doesn’t appear majestic, or sacred. There might be candlelight, but to see, not to sing carols by.

I like that hymn we just sang, “What Child is This?” because it asks the question, “What’s so special about this baby?” By telling us about the census, Luke emphasizes that there are many hundreds of thousands of people around in Israel.

This family, this child don’t appear to be special, just a couple of travelers visiting relatives.

Sometimes I think we build this story up so much that we lose sight of the ordinariness of it all. We attach so many traditions to it and pay so much attention to how sacred it is, that we forget, Joseph is a carpenter, not a prince. Mary gives birth in a small town, a town best known as the hometown of David, someone who happened to live there centuries earlier.

If this story were taking place in Iowa, it would be somewhere like Greene or Allison, not New York or Washington. As that reading from Micah says, we’re not talking about someone from a big, notable family, but rather a family from one of the little tribes of Israel.

The ordinariness of this story is important, because the reality, of course, is that Jesus is special. Jesus is sacred. We know what the angel will tell the shepherds in the next few verses: this child is the Savior, the Messiah, the Lord.

This child is God in the flesh, the Creator coming to live with us, coming in the most mundane, unexceptional way.

And the fact that God comes to us in this ordinary way is important, because you and I are ordinary people. Our lives aren’t perfect. Well, maybe yours is, but mine certainly isn’t. Our lives are messy.

Sometimes, our lives have moments of being sacred. Sometimes we’re filled with the kind of peace you think of on Christmas Eve, that ideal Norman Rockwell vision of a perfect holiday. But most of the time, that’s just not how life is.

I suspect some of you right now are thinking about what time supper will be ready tonight, or about remembering to call grandma tomorrow so she doesn’t think you forgot about her on a holiday. I’m thinking a little bit tonight about what all I need to have packed to go see family in Wisconsin tomorrow after worship and how bad this freezing rain might get in the morning.

Maybe you’re concerned about how well your kid is doing in school, or about what your boss thinks at work, or about your friend in the hospital. Sometimes everyday life interrupts what we think is supposed to be sacred time. And yet, God still enters in, even when we’re not quite ready.

I love the carol “Away in a Manger” and we’re going to sing it during communion, but I think it’s misleading. “The cattle are lowing; the poor baby wakes, but little Lord Jesus no crying he makes.” Really? No crying? That’s not in the Bible. Trust me, Jesus cried. Jesus had messy diapers. Jesus was human.

The promise of this Christmas story, the promise of God coming to us in this ordinary way, is that ordinary matters.

In God’s decision to become human, we can see that our humanity matters. God doesn’t become some sort of idealized, perfect person; God becomes one of us. God makes our everyday lives something sacred.

God doesn’t wait for us to get everything in order; God comes to us as we are.

Christmas tells us God chooses to come into the midst of ordinary life. That’s why we do what we do as church, as followers of Christ. We can’t write off people who don’t seem to be living holy lives, we can’t ignore people who are too busy for church, or who don’t look like us, because these are the people God comes to.

God cares about people like you, and me, people who are far from perfect. The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light, not just those already in the light. God’s light shines for ordinary people, like you and me.

I hope as we worship tonight that you will catch a glimpse of the sacred, a glimpse of how wonderful and awesome God is.

And I hope that glimpse comes through the ordinariness, the revelation of a God who loves you enough to come live with you, as one of us.
Merry Christmas!