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The following is the text of the sermon preached on Christmas Eve at Christ Church Cathedral, Cincinnati, Ohio:
O great mystery,
And wonderful sacrament,
That animals should see the new-born Lord,
Lying in a manger!
Blessed be the Virgin,
Whose body was worthy to bear Christ the Lord.
Alleluia.
Luke 2:1-20
Luke's account of the birth of Jesus is a study in courage. Luke has already told us about how Gabriel appeared to Mary, informing her that she was about to become the mother of the Messiah. She asks how this will happen, since she is a virgin. When Gabriel tells her she will conceive by the power of the Holy Spirit, she replies simply and straightforwardly, "I am the handmaid of the Lord. Let it be to me according to your word." And think of Joseph, taking his fiancé under his wing, even though she was pregnant, not by him. In tonight's reading we meet them both, on the road to Joseph's ancestral home, obeying the demand of a distant emperor that all his subjects should be registered and counted.
(Just an aside here: in the Jewish mindset, there was no greater act of tyranny and blasphemy than for a ruler to count his people, as if they belonged to him rather than to God. So we see in Mary and Joseph yet another example of courage: the courage of any oppressed people who manage to hold onto their dignity despite daily humiliation.)
And finally, there is the courage of a birth with little or no shelter and no midwife.
Then there are the shepherds, terrified by a theophany in the night -- more glory than most of us could take. Yet when the angels depart, the shepherds don't rush to re-establish some semblance of normalcy in their lives. Exchanging fear for involvement, they choose to stay with the divine drama as it unfolds. It is through their eyes that we first see Jesus, swaddled and lying in a feeding trough.
But there is another subtext about courage running through this whole passage, and that is the courage of God. We might easily overlook this dimension of the story because the notion of a courageous God seems like an oxymoron. Courage usually has to do with overcoming fear: we learn courage as we practice navigating the risks and dangers of life and managing the fears that can so easily paralyze us. But what does God have to fear? What risks could God possibly have to contend with?
The rabbis have long taught that God did, in fact, take on a risk in bringing forth the human race, a species capable of terrible evil as well as God-like good. Christians go further, claiming, as we do tonight, that God chose to save us from ourselves by becoming one of us. The baby in the manger is the Word made flesh, as vulnerable to abuse and violence as any child on earth. He shares in his parents' exclusion when there was no room for them in the inn. News of his birth occasions the murderous violence of Herod against Jesus' infant cohort in Bethlehem. He grows up to experience the full measure of imperial cruelty through crucifixion.
That's all well and good, you may say, but when the incarnation was set in motion, God knew the end of the story. God knew it would turn out all right. Where's the risk in that? Well, if we are believers, we also know that our own journey as disciples will turn out well. But we know the road to new life leads us inevitably to the cross. Who would say we were less courageous for knowing Easter lies on the other side? Indeed, our God is a courageous God, who faced not only the risk but the certainty of sinful push-back, and chose to come among us anyway.
But we can also think about courage in another way, with less emphasis on risk. Courage comes from the Latin word for heart, and literally means facing life whole-heartedly. I wonder if this aspect of courage, which has less to do with bravery than with relationship, doesn't get us even closer to what we're celebrating tonight.
I don't know how many of you have seen a U-Tube video that went viral about two years ago. It's a talk given by sociologist Brene Brown (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCvmsMzlF7o&feature=youtube_gdata_player)
in which she presents the result of her research into people who don't seem to be afraid of connection and who exhibit generosity and mercy in their dealings with others. She found that what they all had in common was courage, that is, courage "as distinct from bravery." Here's what she says:
"Courage as distinct from bravery means to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart. [These people] had the courage to be imperfect, and to be kind and compassionate to others. They had connection as a result of authenticity, that is, they were willing to let go of who they thought they should be in order to be the people they really were. They also fully embraced vulnerability, believing that what made them vulnerable made them beautiful. They didn't experience vulnerability as either comfortable or excruciating, but embraced it as something necessary: the willingness to say I love you first, the willingness to take on an important task when there are no guarantees of success, the willingness to invest in a relationship that may or may not work out."
Isn't this precisely what we are saying about God tonight? God said "I love you" first. God took on our vulnerability without any guarantee of success. God invested in a relationship with all of us that might or might not work out. It's true, God is perfect, and we are not. But that perfection expresses itself in God's fierce and whole-hearted determination to befriend us, espouse us, indwell us. Jesus said we should be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect, but surely it was God's unrelenting insistence on relationship he had in mind. In order to match that perfection we must, ironically enough, stop trying to measure up and accept the fact that our worth lies in God's boundless love for us, nothing more, nothing less.
So if we don't take anything else away tonight, let's take this: God's love for us has been made known to us in Jesus Christ, and nothing can separate us from that love. That's what we mean in the Great Thanksgiving, when we thank God for Jesus. "In him," we say, "you have delivered us from evil, and made us worthy to stand before you." Whoever we are, whatever failures we have sustained, however much we have fallen short, no matter what darkness we have known, the Word made flesh declares us worthy to stand with him, here and now.
But there is more to be said. God's willingness to be connected with us is a challenge to risk embracing our connection with one another -- the more so since our worth in God's eyes should give us courage to be heart-whole. If, like Joseph, we are called to be care-takers, let's claim the honor and give ourselves over joyfully to those we serve. If, like Mary, the God-Bearer, we are invited to be a vessel of grace in God's hands, let no false modesty excuse us from saying yes. If, like the shepherds, and through no intention of our own, we become witnesses of the kingdom of God in small ways or great, let's not fail to look into it and to tell others about it -- even if in so doing we risk reframing the story of our lives.
May the news of Jesus' birth give us new courage to live lives of giftedness and service. May the Word made flesh convince us, once and for all, that we are loved. May that word encourage us to walk whole-heartedly in the path he leads us on, until we come to that endless feast where, with all the angels and saints, we shall stand before the Lord of Glory, face to face.
Let us pray:
O God, who wonderfully created, and yet more wonderfully restored, the dignity of human nature: Grant that we may share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity, your Son Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
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