A
Sermon for Christmas Eve
And
Mary gave birth to her firstborn son,
and wrapped him in bands of cloth,
and
laid him in a manger.
In my life as a professional singer, I usually do at least one
performance of Handel’s famous Oratorio, Messiah,
at this time of year. Less famous,
but just as great a piece of music, is Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, in which I’ve
sung the role of the Evangelist several times. The Evangelist is the narrator, who sings the
Biblical story of Jesus’ birth to a kind of simple accompanied chant. When I started learning the part the first
time, I noticed something strange: whenever the word “manger” turned up, the
music suddenly turned to minor, dark harmonies -sounds usually associated
with sadness or pain.
“How odd,” I thought. How different from the peace and joy we usually
associate with Jesus’ manger.” “Why,” I wondered, “should Bach have written
sad manger music?” As I puzzled over
this, I recalled another piece I’d sung that has similarly disconcerting text: the poet, writing
of the sleeping Christ child, uses the phrase “wood of pain” to describe the
manger. [1] As
I mused further, this more familiar, but still plaintive, carol came to my mind:
I
wonder as I wander out under the sky,
how
Jesus the Savior was born for to die...
And then I suddenly understood what Bach was getting at in his sad
manger music: Jesus the Savior was born for to die.
Jesus’ birth already foreshadows his death; the wooden box in a stable in Bethlehem
foretells the wood of pain on a hill outside Jerusalem; the manger in which Jesus sleeps is a sign of
the cross on which Jesus will die.
To speak of the cross in the midst of Christmas joy may seem odd. But, in fact, it is only when we recognize the
connection of the cross and the manger that we can claim the deep Good News
that is at the heart of this night’s festivity.
That Good News is that in this birth in a manger, God comes into the
world. God comes into the world, God
comes into the real world of our
lives, a world in which birth and death, pain and joy are constant,
inextricable companions. God comes not only into the world of children’s
excitement, and joyous music, and beautiful decorations. God comes also into a world where family
gatherings may as often be occasions of conflict as togetherness; where people are as likely to feel depressed
as happy at holiday time; where illness
and death come in every season.
God comes into a world, as Luke reminds us, where poor people live on
the streets because there is no room in the inn; a world of recession and unemployment; a world, too, of Emperors, governors and
politics; a world of injustice, violence
and war. Bach’s sad manger music reminds us that God
chooses to be born not into some fairy tale world, but into this
real world of joy and pain, a world
where the angels sing and the innocent die.
Yet only if God does comes into this world, this real world in which
you and I live, can there be real good news tonight: The good news is that God chooses to be
Emmanuel, God with us, as we live in this world of pain and joy. The good news is that God chooses to be with
us in the whole of our lives in this world. The good news is that there is no part of our
lives, no matter how painful, lonely, or desolate that can remain separate from
God’s presence. God chooses to take on
this world in its beauty and its brokenness, in its glory and its sin; God chooses to take up all of this world in
the embrace of divine love, and through this manger birth, and the death and
resurrection that are to come, to bring it to the renewed wholeness of God’s
Kingdom.
The power that makes all that possible is the power of love. God’s coming into the world this night is an
act of love. And the birth of Jesus in a
manger that foreshadows a cross reveals the depth of giving that is at the
heart of God’s love. God’s love is not a
sentimental love, sweet and sticky, where everything comes easily and without
struggle -- for that, after all, is not how real love works in this world that
God has chosen to enter.
The few who managed to get here through
the snow this past Sunday heard me preach about how blessing and wounding are
often two sides of the same coin – and so it is with love. To give and receive love is an experience of
great joy, just as birth is an experience of great joy. But like the birthing of a child, the joy of
love does not come without pain. Any act of giving in love, no matter how
joyous, carries with it also some suffering. We rejoice to receive and give love, but there
is always a cost to the giver. Parents
who love their children know pain when a child is sick, or acts out, or simply
grows up and leaves home. There is pain
when we sacrifice something dear to us for the sake of someone whom we love. There is pain when we are separated from a
loved one by the circumstance of life or the finality of death. I often say to
families grieving a loved one’s dearth, “If
you didn’t love, it wouldn’t hurt.”
Yet who among us would choose not to experience the pain that comes
with loving, since to do so would be to lose love itself? No more does God choose that. The infinite God who at unimaginable cost made
space in God’s being for the universe to come into existence, the God who
created human beings in God’s own image that we might share love with each
other and with God, the God who is
love in Trinity: this God will never refuse to love, no matter what the cost.
What we celebrate on Christmas – as well as on Good Friday and Easter
-- is the magnitude of God’s love and God’s gift. For the cost to God of God’s love is the
giving of God’s own self, God coming to dwell with us in human flesh, being
born in a manger to die on a cross. Tonight, the stars are heaven’s tears, wept
over the cost to God of this self-giving love. And tonight the same heaven’s angels sing
God’s praise for joy that this love comes into our world, that this love comes
to embrace our pain and joy, that this
love comes to wrap our lives up in the infant arms that will soon be stretched
out on a cross, but still manage, somehow, never to let us go. And in that embrace, the creating power of
love takes our pain and joy, God’s pain and joy, and with them begins to make
new love and new life, bringing hope and healing to what one of tonight’s carols
calls all this weary world.
That is the Good News of this night, that in love, God gives God’s very
self in this manger birth and in the life and death which lie ahead of this
baby. God gives God’s very self so that
God’s love may be here with us in our world of joy and pain, and at the last,
to bring us to that heavenly Kingdom where God’s love will be all in all.
Because this gift of love is so great, it is right that we should
celebrate this manger birth with festivity;
right, too, that Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, with its sad manger music,
should also be full of joyous choruses of trumpets, timpani, and human voices. And it is right that we ourselves should, as
we have tonight, return God’s love in our own song of praise:
Child
for us sinners, poor and in a manger,
we
would embrace thee with love and awe.
Who
would not love thee, loving us so dearly?
O
Come let us adore him,
O
Come let us adore him,
O
Come let us adore him,
Christ
the Lord!
The rev. Jack Zamboni
December 24th, 2009