Scandalous Audacity
Eve of the Nativity
Luke 20:1-20
December 24, 2015
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa
Christmas is more than a little scandalous.
There is the scandal of how Jesus was conceived. Jesus was born to a woman who was not married. The fiancé of this woman did not break off his engagement with her, even though he knew (as no one else could know) that he was not the child’s father.
But that’s not what I mean when I say that Christmas is scandalous.
There is the scandal of what Christmas has become. I guess we could have seen this coming. After all, no one knows Jesus’ birthday. Choosing a particular day to call the day of Jesus’ birth is completely arbitrary. There is simply no reason to prefer one day to another. December 25th got picked because it happened to coincide with a Roman festival called the Saturnalia. The Saturnalia had a carnival atmosphere. Normal rules were set aside or even turned upside down. Citizens and slaves alike wore the pilleus, the conical cap worn by freedmen. Masters served their servants. Gifts were exchanged. No public business could be conducted. This was just as well because much wine was consumed. People overate. For days.
Christians were not allowed to observe the Saturnalia, since it was a pagan festival. Christmas was an alternative, a sort of consolation for Christians who eyed their holidaying neighbors with envy. Of course there were religious services connected with Christmas—that’s where the “mass” is Christmas comes from. But Christmas was always a time of revelry.
So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the revelry part has always threatened to take over. And in our day Christmas has become a several-week party in which we are far too busy and eat far too much. A larger scandal is that Christmas has become the principal festival of consumer capitalism. We are told that it is the season for giving, but behind that lurks something less benign: it has become the season for reckless and unrestrained buying in the service of someone else’s profits.
But that’s not what I mean when I say that Christmas is scandalous.
At Christmas we celebrate the birth of Immanuel, God with us, which we can read in two senses. We can read Immanuel as God with us in the sense that God will be with us and bless us in what we think, undertake and do. The prophet Nathan once said to David, “Do what is in your heart, for God is with you.” This isn’t so scandalous itself, although I think it would be better for us to be with God so that we are aligned with God’s purposes and working toward God’s dream, rather than for God to be with us as a sort of pet who makes sure that we get what we want.
The second sense, though, is where things become rather strange. Immanuel means God with us in the sense that Jesus, called Immanuel, is with us as God. The Christian tradition—and what better time for tradition that Christmas Eve—says that God has taken the astounding step of entering into and becoming a part of human history.
This theme is not a new one. The ancient Greek and Roman gods and goddesses would get bored with life on Olympus. The would have some fun by putting on human form and having adventures among mortals. Of course, if you have read the stories, you already know that the gods and goddesses were the ones who had the fun. The mortals ended up pregnant, transformed into some beast and plant, or dead. Not so much fun for them.
A youth group in one of our churches went to Minneapolis to do some mission work at a downtown church. It was not just a work mission, but designed to educate our youth about living conditions in a low-income urban neighborhood. One morning a group of them were being escorted by one of the counselors on a walking tour of the neighborhood when they were stopped by a woman who lived there who loudly objected to being part of their educational experience. She didn’t want to be photographed, looked at, examined, or questioned as if she were there for their benefit. She told them to go back to their white suburbs and leave her and her neighborhood alone. The kids were shocked, but she had a point. The youth were on an adventure that was pretty safe for them and, anyway, would only last a few days at most.
There is a program in Chicago in which you can learn about homelessness. Part of the program is to experience three days and nights of life on the streets, trying to find food and shelter and trying to stay safe. I read about it in an article by a man who had gone through the program. When it came time for the hands-on part of the experience, though, he stuck his driver’s license and a credit card in one of his socks. Just in case.
He learned a great deal. But he knew, as all of us might guess, that having his “get out of jail free” cards in his shoe changed the experience greatly. You can’t really be homeless when there is a home you can go to if you take your cards out of your shoe. And the ancient gods and goddesses had a habit of “pulling rank,” of revealing what they really were at critical moments in their lives as tourists among us mortals.
The scandalous part of Christmas is that God has become Immanuel without a “get out of jail free” card. God is all in.
Sometimes we Christians imagine that Jesus was a human body with a God-consciousness inside. Sure, Jesus looked human, sounded human, acted human, but inside, looking out through Jesus eyes was God who is all-knowing, all-powerful, all-present and immortal. When Jesus seems to be limited in his understanding, we say, “Ah, well, really Jesus already knows what’s going to happen, because Jesus is God.”
If that were the case, the God of Jesus would be little more than a Hebrew version of Zeus or Aphrodite, pretending to be human but ready and able to claim divine honors in an instant.
But that wasn’t the way it was for Jesus. In Jesus God became limited in knowledge, ignorant of many things and wrong about many others. In Jesus God had only the physical, political, and economic power of a Galilean peasant. In Jesus God was not everywhere, but instead, was confined to one person who lived in one place at one time. In Jesus God was mortal. There was no way for God in Jesus to say, “Okay, I’ve had enough of this. It’s time to be God again.” God was in Jesus in the same way that we are in us. We don’t know what is going to happen and we’ll have to deal with whatever comes next. There is no magic for us just as there is no magic for God in Jesus.
The scandalous thing about Christmas is that God who is all-knowing and all-powerful, who created and sustains the universe, became one of us. God was a human infant who shivered in the cold Galilean night, who soiled and wet his diapers, who could neither understand nor use human language, who would be hungry and lonely and scared and dirty, who would need to be fed and held and comforted and changed and bathed. When he fell down, he skinned his knees. When he got sick, his mother and father worried over him and nursed him back to health.
At Christmas we remember that God has come to us as one of us. At Christmas we remember that, in order to make us whole, God has become vulnerable, and not just vulnerable, but vulnerable to us. This is scandalous.
Another thing is scandalous. Since God has come to us in the form of a human baby, every human baby now comes to us in the form of God. Every baby. Every baby that we baptize comes to us in the form of God. Every Salvadoran and Guatemalan baby who languishes in our “processing centers” while waiting for permission to escape the violence of their homeland comes to us in the form of God. Every Syrian baby, carried in its father’s arms away from the devastation of home, comes to us in the form of God. Every American baby born into poverty comes to us in the form of God. Every baby born on the many shrinking islands in the Pacific Ocean who waits for us to do our part to halt the rising of the sea comes to us in the form of God. Every baby born into a household where there are loaded and unsecured weapons comes to us in the form of God.
When God becomes human; humans become divine. This is scandalous, but now there are no excuses, for God has become Immanuel. That is the scandalous, astounding, and joyful news this night.
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