Yet In Thy Dark Streets Shineth (Luke 2:1-20; Christmas Eve; December 24, 2014)

Yet In Thy Dark Streets Shineth

Luke 2:1-20
Christmas Eve
December 24, 2014

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

Paul Shultz, a colleague and friend of mine, and former Director of our campus ministry at the University of Iowa, died in early January this year.  I heard a story about him.  He got a call late one night from a woman who was a friend of his.  “Tell me again,” she said, “I need to hear it again.”  And so Paul, knowing what she meant, told her again, “Everything is not going to be okay.”  She had been struggling.  Her friends and family and well-wishers kept telling her that everything was going to be okay.  She knew better.  Her struggles would leave their mark.  She would find her way to a new life, but the old life was gone.  She would regain her health, but she would always bear the scars.  Everything was not going to okay.  Paul had the wisdom and the courage to tell her the truth.  After a while, after hearing the loving lies of those who hoped to heal her wound lightly, she needed to hear the truth.

I can’t know all the reasons why you are here tonight.  Some are here because you’re in town visiting your parents or grandparents and coming to church with them does their heart good.  Some are here for the Christmas songs and the story.  It’s part of your image of the perfect Christmas.  It goes along with the Christmas tree and the presents and the dinner with all of your traditional favorites.  Some are here because they are Christians and this is what Christians do.  Whoever you are, why ever you are here, you are welcome.  I hope that each one of you gets what you really need. Our life’s way is long and our God is too generous to deny us what we need for the journey.

But some of you are here because you bear an unbearable burden.  Maybe no one else knows but God.  But the burden is crushing you and you don’t know how you are going to make it through.  You don’t know what else to do, so you’ve come here where you have heard that we keep the mystery of God’s love for us, hoping that we, the stewards of the mystery, will be wise enough not to mistake optimism for hope.

You have come because you need to hear the truth and you are hoping that someone will speak it.  You are hoping that someone like my friend, Paul Shultz, will tell you, “Everything is not going to be okay.” 

Christmas can be our collective way of whistling in the dark, of keeping up our courage when we suspect that something is behind us, and that, no matter what, we dare not turn around and look because if we see it we are done for.  And now we dare not stop whistling.

So let me say to you what you and I both know is true: Everything is not going to be okay.

That is an odd message for Christmas Eve, to say the very least.  It clashes with that syrupy mixture of nostalgia, idealized mystification, and wishful thinking that we call “the Christmas spirit.”  But I take courage that it doesn’t clash with the story in Luke that brings us here in the first place.

Luke begins by focusing attention on the rulers, the elite.  Caesar has issued a decree.  Scholars will tell us that this report stands on very shaky historical ground, but that doesn’t really matter much.  The point was and is that Emperors and the fine folk order and people like Joseph and Mary obey.  Augustus had ordered them to Bethlehem, heedless of the inconvenience or danger to a young woman in advanced pregnancy, and to Bethlehem they would go. 

To Bethlehem they went.  The Emperor knew nothing about the realities of their lives and, if he had known, he would not have cared.  There was no mercy in his decree.  Happily for Joseph and Mary (now in active labor), there was mercy in the heart of the innkeeper.  The “guest room” was filled wall to wall with people making the floor their shared bed.  It was no place for a woman in labor.  So the innkeeper offered them the stable.  Otherwise, Jesus might have been born behind the stable instead of in it.  The stable was better, more comfortable, more private and, if the animals in the stable gave off certain pungent odors, well so did the people in the guest room.  Kindnesses like these were how the folk of Joseph’s and the innkeeper’s class managed to survive as they clung desperately to what little dignity the Romans had left to them.

Mary had her baby, whose birth we celebrate.  The shepherds were visited by divine messengers, angels, who announced the good news to these rough dwellers in the margins of their culture.  The shepherds hurried to visit the newborn Jesus, wrapped tightly to compensate him for the loss of the close comfort of his mother’s womb.  The world to Jesus was as the world is to every newborn: a cold world of loud noises, hard surfaces and scratchy hay. 

The shepherds told their story and disappeared into the night.  They never enter into the story again.  Eventually this family went home.  And nothing had changed.  Caesar was still in Rome thinking up decrees.  All the Mary’s and Joseph’s in Rome’s empire struggled to stay live and keep a little dignity in spite of Caesar’s thoughtlessness.  Jesus’ birth had not changed any of that.

Joseph and Mary’s folk had longed for a Messiah, one to set things to rights, to throw off the shameful yoke of Roman rule, someone to make everything okay.  What they got instead was an infant who cried when he was hungry or lonely or, apparently, for no reason whatsoever, who soiled his diapers with astonishing frequency, an infant who was tiny, fragile and weak.  He was another mouth to feed.  Another body to be exploited by Rome.  Everything was not going to be okay.  That was the truth.

But that wasn’t the only truth.  It is true that the world was and is a dark place in which most people struggle to stay alive and keep a little dignity, a world where a few enjoy power and plenty.  It is true that some us are bearing unbearable burdens.

The rest of the truth is that it is precisely into the darkness of Roman Palestine that God chose to shine.  It was precisely among the displaced peasant folk like Mary and Joseph that God chose to dwell.  It was precisely to shepherds, rough characters who would more likely be found at the Corner Bar than Rubaiyat, that the angels appeared, announced good news, and sang God’s glory.  It was not in a palace in Rome or in Jerusalem, but precisely in a stable, that God was born.  And it is precisely with you who carry an unspeakable weight that God comes and stays this night.

Everything is not going to be okay.  True enough.  But that is only part of the story.  Now that God has been born, now that God is here, who knows what will happen next!

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