Everyday Holy

Luke 2:1-20
The Rev. Sara Fischer

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."

Dear People of God, on this holy night, let us hear once more the message of the Angels. Let us celebrate the story of the glorious redemption brought to us by God’s holy child Jesus, and let us make this place glad with our carols of praise.

These words are from the traditional Christmas Bidding Prayer. If you came tonight to hear the angels, to celebrate the story of glorious redemption brought to us by Jesus, and to sing carols of praise, you’re in the right place.

There was a Bizarro comic in the Oregonian about ten days ago which showed a woman standing on the stage of a school auditorium and saying to the audience, “This year’s multi-cultural, generic holiday play is “Mary and the magic baby”.” This comic speaks well to the cultural tension where we live, the debate in 21st century America about whether Christmas is a secular holiday where we’re allowed to celebrate Santa and Frosty but not Jesus, a Christian holiday, an American holiday, or some weird combination of the three. Every December there is more debate about what to call the trees we decorate, especially if those trees stand in public places.

Earlier this evening, at our 5:00 service, we had our Christmas pageant. We didn’t call it “Mary and the magic baby,” we just called it “the pageant.” And there was no magic baby, but a real baby, flesh and blood, being adored by all those around him. Not unlike the first Christmas. It is a great relief to finally have arrived at this holy night and be in a place where we are not only “allowed” to celebrate Christmas, it is what we are all about.

Once we finally arrive at Christmas Eve, we get to celebrate the whole story with all the trimmings. This is the story that begins in Advent, with the prayer “O Come, O come Emmanuel.” And all of the wonderful Advent hymns that express the longing of people waiting for a savior. And waiting, and waiting. The story begins with O come, O come Emmanuel and Come thou long-expected Jesus, and continues with O Come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant…come and behold him, born the king of angels. Jesus is among us, and we are to go and find him.

How do we go and find him? How do we come and adore him?

We can begin to go and see Jesus by entering into the story. If you’re like me, you’ve done a fair amount of rushing around to get to this moment. You may have struggled with a sense of the disconnect between the reality of December and the ideals of Christmas. And if you’ve got more to do when you get home tonight, that disconnect may be even more acute. So, I’ve got Good News. Jesus is real, and our celebration this evening is not even about all that hard work of Christmas. Take a break. Close your eyes, even.

We begin to go and see Jesus by listening to the story. He was born in a barn. Or a cave. In a trough for straw in some kind of an outdoor shelter. Sort of like being born under a bridge or in someone’s garage. The first people to hear the news of his birth (other than his parents) are shepherds, of all people—the least likely folks in ancient Jewish society to be privileged with news of a savior—and they hear the news in an unlikely way. These shepherds would no more expect a choir of angels in a field in the middle of the night than you or I would expect an announcement from the heavenly host while we were out walking the dog or driving home from work on a rainy night. They do as they’re told, go see the child. We don’t know if they actually recognize the baby as the Messiah, or if they simply respond in faith to what the angels have told them.

Mary, who has already heard the Good News from the Angel Gabriel earlier, hears it again in a new way. It begins to sink in for her, as she realizes that the shepherds have also been visited by angels. We can imagine that as they gaze upon her baby, she sees in their faces what before now she had only heard about in words. And so she treasures the shepherds’ visit, and ponders their words in her heart.

This is the story: it’s nighttime, there’s a birth, there are some angels and some shepherds and two proud parents who are beginning to believe more deeply that God is up to something. But really, you may be thinking: what does this have to do with us? What does this second chapter of Luke’s gospel have to do with my life? Tonight’s gospel is no different—really—from the whole of Jesus’ ministry: Jesus comes into the lives of ordinary people and asks them to do something extraordinary.

Christmas is a time when many of us struggle with the ordinary. Ordinary families, ordinary loneliness, ordinary finances, ordinary chores, ordinary chaos. Deep down, we want to measure up to some metric of the extraordinary. Admit it. You want to get your loved ones the best presents, cook the best meal, feel better than you’ve been feeling, get back into the shape you were in 25 years ago, etc. Pick your own version of extraordinary, and somewhere that same popular culture that doesn’t like Christmas trees, only holiday trees, will show you some way to be extraordinary. The perfect gift, an extraordinary meal, the best outfit, and perhaps even an extraordinary Christmas Eve church service for all of you for whom this is your annual or semi-annual church fix.

But—and here’s the good news—all these are not the “something extraordinary” that God asks of us when God becomes human. God becomes human in a dark, crowded untidy place so that we can see our own untidy lives as holy. I’m going to say that again: God becomes human in an untidy place so that we can see our own untidy lives as holy. That is the something extraordinary that God asks of Mary and Joseph, the shepherds, and us. God calls us to live holy lives, asks us to give ourselves to him, as he gives himself to us, not just this season when giving is our national obsession, but always.

Now I know that whenever many of you hear the word “holy” you think: she must be talking about someone else. “I’m not that holy,” we love to say. And yet this is why Jesus came into the world, this is indeed “the reason for the season.” What we celebrate on this holy night is that God became human so that we might become divine. On this night, when ordinary shepherds hear angels, see God, and become evangelists, where do we find Jesus? Look around at the ordinary, untidy places in your lives, and rejoice.