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My first church here in Canada was a small church but we had enough youth to have the challenge of a youth group. One year they decided they wanted to come up with a drama of what if Jesus were born today somewhere in the Greater Toronto Area. It was an interesting presentation that culminated with them gathered around the piano singing The Beatles tune, Let It Be. What they came up with was Jesus being born to a young, unwed teenage couple at the Finch subway station. They were disappointed that there was not a station at Jane and Finch. They thought they would have been able to highlight better the circumstances of prejudice that surrounded Jesus’ birth. You see, Mary and Joseph were from Nazareth and Nazareth was considered to be an undesirable little town in Northern Israel. “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” they used to say. The youth also had this child’s parents resting Jesus in a homeless man’s shopping cart. Not the cleanest of places for a newborn, I’m sure. Jesus himself was wrapped in rags and laid in a feeding trough…not quite the image we have of “swaddling clothes” and a “manger”.
In the Bible, the baby Jesus had several visitors the night of his birth, shepherds and Magi. Shepherds in his day were near the bottom of the food chain along with drunks and lepers. The Magi were indeed kings and scientists. Their science was astrology. They were following a heavenly sign they had discerned to mean the birth of a great king in the land of Judea. God’s announcing his coming to shepherds and astrologers was a bold slap in the face of the Judean king and the religious leaders who should have known this but didn’t for they were blinded by power and privilege. The birth of the Son of God, the Lord Jesus Christ caught them by surprise and threatened their privileged positions. When Herod found out, he wanted Jesus dead and actually killed all the male children in the area of Bethlehem under the age of two. In the youth’s drama they have Jesus’ birth announced to some homeless people y who go to welcome him which should remind us that we church-going, upper-middle class white folk just might not have a monopoly on the things of God.
Lastly, the paternity of Jesus truly did create a stir. Mary was pregnant. Joseph knew the baby wasn’t his. His choices were to believe an angel or break the engagement as quietly as he could. He wanted to not go through with the marriage for Nazareth was a small town and everyone was thinking that he had dishonoured himself by having relations with his fiancé before being married. Truly, according to Old Testament law Mary’s life would have been ruined had Joseph not decided to continue with the engagement and adopt the child as his own. This adoption is important. It is what links Jesus to King David and Messianic bloodline. Moreover, in the same way that Jesus was adopted as child of Joseph so are we, through him, adopted to be children of God.
The story of the Jesus birth really is an eye-opener. Our Lord was born out of wedlock, to say it politely, to a couple who were a young teen-age girl and a man likely in his thirties. They came from Nazareth of all places to a stable in Bethlehem outside of an inn because, for whatever reason, no one in the inn had compassion enough to forfeit their room to a birthing mother. In a stable was where Jesus was born. How scandalous can that be? God choose to unite himself to humanity in not only a humble birth but indeed under humiliating circumstances. The scandal surrounding Jesus’ birth was not unlike the scandal surrounding his death. It leads us to believe that if we want to know where to find God maybe we should start looking in the most troubling of circumstances.
While we’re on the that topic, maybe we should stop and ask where is it that we should look if we want to find God? If the profoundest meaning of Christmas is that God is with us and deeply bonded to us, then where is he? The answer would be not in the nostalgia of religion but in reality, in the brokenness, in the shamefulness of human existence. Jesus was not born in the glamour of the temple in Jerusalem and praised by the good, upright, wholesome, and devout “hypocrites” of his day. He was born to an unmarried couple; a teenage girl and a slightly older gent who both said “yes” to a call to endure shame and scorn for God’s sake and human healing.
Henri Nouwen was a catholic priest who taught at Notre Dame, Yale, and Harvard but left the glorious life to live among the differently abled folks at L’Arche Daybreak Community in Toronto. He says for us to really understand Jesus Christ we have to let go of power and follow Jesus. He writes: “The world says, ‘When you were young you were dependent and could not go where you wanted, but when you grow old you will be able to make your own decisions, go your own way, and control your own destiny.’ But Jesus has a different vision of maturity: it is the ability and willingness to be led where you would rather not go…being led to unknown, undesirable, and painful places. The way of the Christian…is not the way of upward mobility in which our world has invested so much, but the way of downward mobility ending on the cross.”[1]
It never ceases to amaze me that we celebrate the humble, indeed humiliating birth of Jesus the Christ with the most vulgar display of consumerism and materialism ever known to human history. When December rolls around it becomes painfully evident how conformed we Christians are to the world. It is an amazing fact that if the Christians of the world would simplify their Christmas celebrations we could collapse the global economy. That is how fickle we and this world are and to think that in the midst of this fickleness there are people, indeed children, going hungry because of it. I have to wonder if we, the disciples of Christ, have more in common with King Herod than with King Jesus.
I’ll back off of that and once again raise the question of where should we look for this Jesus. Well, getting together with family and friends is a good place to look, even better if you welcome into your celebrations those who have not the luxury of family and friends, and even better if you all gather to worship and to pray and even better if you try to heal the rifts that exist your families with confession and forgiveness. But, I think there is an even better place to look for Jesus. That is to look inside ourselves and go to that person called “me” that hides, hoping that nobody ever finds out who “me” really is…we all have a “me” that we try to compensate for… a “me” who’s been victim as well as victimizer, a “me” who is powerless as well as powerful in this world, a “me” who grieves because life is unfair…go there this Christmas…that’s your dirty, dark, dank stable in the basement of the inn. It is there that Christ will be born in you and you shall be born from above. In an inexplicable moment of grace your heavenly Father will pick you up and say “My Beloved.” That, my Beloved, is the miracle of Christmas. Amen.
[1] Nouwen, Henri J.M., In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership, (New York, Crossroad, 1989), 62.
