God's Dream Is Born (Christmas Eve; Luke 2:1-20; December 24, 2017)

God's Dream Is Born

Christmas Eve
Luke 2:1-20
December 24, 2017

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

This is an old story, this story we have heard, the one that Luke includes in his gospel. It's an old story, and a familiar one, but I confess that I have seen something new in it this year as I have been preparing for this evening's worship.

Luke's story begins in Rome where Caesar Augustus is busy doing emperor stuff. He needs to know how much money he can raise for the legions, the navies, and the monuments he hopes to build--propaganda in stone and the military strength to add muscle to words. He needs to know how many tax-payers there are in Rome's empire. So, the story tells us, Caesar ordered a census. You know this part: everyone was required to go to the city where they were born. Joseph and his fianceé Mary went "up" to Bethlehem. Joseph was descended from David the King and was born in the same town where David was born and raised.

Mary was pregnant, pregnant enough to make travel difficult, pregnant enough that she gave birth in Bethlehem. She and Joseph tried to find accomodations, but inn's guest room was completely filled with travelors. The story tells us that they then found shelter in the stable and, when Mary had given birth, they used a feed trough as a rough crib for Jesus. What isn't clear from the story is just how they got to the stable. Did the innkeeper offer them a place there? The guestroom was crowded and Mary would have some privacy in the stable. This may well have been a kind gesture on the innkeeper's part.

The other possibility is that, having found no place for themselves in the guestroom of the inn, they helped themselves to the stable. It was quiet and certainly no smellier than a room crowded wall-to-wall with people who had spent the day sweating as they travelled. They did the same thing as a homeless couple might in one of our cities today: they found a warm place and hoped not to be disturbed during the night.

Either way we read the story it is clear that Caesar is the sort of person who is both willing and able to order people around without a thought for the inconvenience or even danger it would cause to others. And Joseph and Mary were two of those others who, when the emperor told them to go, had no choice; they went. So far there is no news at all here, let alone good news. Powerful people push powerless people around. There is nothing new about that.

But at this point, the story turns. There are shepherds outside of town who have bedded down with their sheep for the night. Shepherds were never terribly well thought of in the ancient world. When shepherds came through, villagers would make sure that anything of value or use was secure and that their daughters were indoors. Everyone recognized that shepherds did important work. It's just that everyone wanted that work done somewhere else. "Not in my back yard" is nothing new.

But it was to shepherds, rather than to anyone important or rich or powerful, that the news of Jesus' birth was announced. By heavenly messengers, no less! The news came with glory and terror. "Don't be afraid," the angel said. And, as usual in the Bible when someone says "don't be afraid" it's already too late. The angel told the shepherds the good news and then suddenly in the skies there were legion upon legion of angels all singing God's praises.(Do you think there were as many angels in the heavenly host as there were soldiers in Caesar's legions?)

When the angels had gone and the Judean countryside was itself again, the shepherds decided to go to Bethlehem and see the marvelous thing they had been told about. So they did that and they found Mary and Joseph, and Jesus lying in the feed trough. They told the couple what they had experienced. There was general amazement. Mary we are told tucked all these things away in her memory to mull them over later. Then the shepherds left and the stable was a stable once more instead of the throne room of the king. Mary and Joseph were a couple tired from travel and, Mary especially, tired from the labor of childbirth. And Jesus was just another Jewish child with a hero's name, a baby like all other babies with a loud noise at one end and no responsibility at the other.

So the story tells the powerful, the privileged, and the prosperous of the world that when God's dream came into the world, it didn't come to the emperor's palace in Rome, it didn't come to the Roman Senate or to the city assemblies of Corinth or Antioch, and it didn't come to the business offices of the empire's bankers. From Caesar down through the imperial bureaucracy, through the houses of the nobility, through their flatterers, through the chains of command in the navy and army, no one whose opinion mattered, no one who could make things happen, no one who could hire done what they wanted, not a one of them knew anything at all about Jesus' birth.

In the good news about Jesus, power is thwarted, privilege is set aside, prosperity is penniless. In Mary's words, "God has pulled the powerful down from their thrones and lifted up the lowly. God has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty-handed." This is the political economy of the good news.

You have some notion of where I am coming from, perhaps an even better notion than I do on most days. Like Luke I believe that the birth of Jesus heralds an end to every economic system and every political process that does not lift up the lowly, that does not feed the hungry. No wonder, then, that Jesus is born in a stable behind an inn, instead of in some Senator's house, attended by midwives and servants. Where else would he be born? No wonder, then, that the news of his birth would come to shepherds first of all, instead of to Caesar in Rome. Who else could have gotten the first notice?

Were these the things that Mary thought about after the shepherds left and it was just her and Joseph and a sleeping baby, and the donkeys? I don't know. I do know that a week and a chapter later, they take the baby to the Temple to receive the physical mark of entry into the covenant people. An old prophet Simeon who had been promised that he would live to see Messiah, or perhaps it was a curse that he would not be allowed to die until he saw Messiah. It isn't clear to me which it is. I do know he is grateful enough when he sees Jesus and knows that he can die happily. "Now, master, let your servant go in peace according to your word," Simeon says, "because my eyes have seen your salvation."

Wait. What? "My eyes have seen (past perfect) your salvation." What salvation? He has only seen Jesus and a new-born Jesus at that. So what is the salvation that he has seen?

And so it occurs to me that I have missed the good news of this text. Like Simeon and Anna and all the people who were hanging in the courtyard of the Temple when Jesus was circumcized, all those people who were, in the words of the text, "looking forward to the redemption of Jerusalem," I look for the justice and peace that I believe lie at the heart of God's dream for us and for our world. I look to see a steadily increasing justice and a steadily advancing peace and I just don't see it. You watch the news. Do you see it? If the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice, it bends more slowly than I can detect. Sometimes God's dream seems to be a little closer; sometimes it seems further away. But God's dream isn't emerging into our world in any steady way.

In spite of the fact that Caesar's opinion doesn't matter, I've been coming at this from his perspective. Caesar sees the world from a global perspective. He wants to know how many taxpayers there are. He wants to know how much money he can raise. He wants to know if the borders are secure. He wants to know how many bushels of wheat will be harvested this year and whether that will be enough to feed Rome. He wants to know what the Scythians are up to. He wants to know if the pirates in the Aegean Sea are contained.

He doesn't want to know how life is for a pregnant peasant woman from Nazareth nor how it will be for her newborn baby. He's too focused on the big stuff to care about the small stuff. But it is precisely in the small stuff that God is at work.

Some I'm wondering what I've been missing and especially if hope is so hard to come by because I've been looking in the wrong places for it.

Like a lot of people, I worry about global warming and the climate change that comes with it. I believe the climatologists when they say that it is largely caused by human activity. I look at what needs to be done and how little will there is on the part of our political or financial leaders to do anything about it and it's hard to find my way to any sort of hope.

But good news is going to happen in the small things. For instance, I saw an eagle this morning. She wasn't doing anything special, flying in circles, soaring off the hot air from a house whose occupants had the heat turned up too high. She was just doing her eagle thing like it was nothing extraordinary. But it was extraordinary because she wasn't supposed to exist. Eagles were supposed to become extinct.

I remember when Rachel Carson first told us that a particular pesticide was working its way up the food chain from bugs to fish to eagles and how, unless we stopped using DDT, there would come a day when there would be no eagles. But getting rid of DDT wasn't possible, the makers of DDT told us. But, in spite of their doomsaying, DDT was outlawed. And then, after several years, the eagle population began to recover, slowly at first, and then more rapidly. And here they are in a time and place where they were never supposed to be.

I get discouraged about the struggle against racism in our country. By any measure too many much violence has been suffered by too many black folks at the hands of too many police departments who seem to be immune to accountability. Beginning a couple of summers ago there have been marches and protests in a number cities. Black people have organized. Letters have been written. But nothing much seems to have changed. And when things do change here is a deep backlash as racism finds new energy and new ways of expressing itself. It's hard to find hope.

But then I see the picture of Ieshia Evans. She was part of a march in Baton Rouge, a city with a particularly ugly record. Ieshia is a young black woman who was snapped by Jonathan Bachman while facing down a line of advancing riot police. They are armored like robocops. Two officers have stepped in front of the line and are just about to arrest her. She is wearing a summer dress and stands calmly, erect, and proud. I don't know what she was feeling on the inside, but her face and posture show no fear. She offers no defense or resistance, but she is determined not to yield.

The actions of the police that day were designed to make people want to get out of the way, to force them off the street, to break up a protest. They would make me scared. I don't think I would have stepped in front of them. I don't know how Ieshia did it. But there she is, quietly insisting that her presence be noticed.

I sat with a seventy year old man in an oncology unit. He was going through his third round of radiation and chemotherapy for prostate cancer. The second round had been awful. It had been painful and debilitating. He had volunteered for yet another round
and I asked him why. And he told me that for himself, he would have been content to let things take their course, but he said his wife wasn't ready for him to die and he hoped to give her more time to be prepared. I said, You must love your wife deeply. His eyes filled with tears. Mine, too. We sat for a moment in the God-filled quiet. I was conscious of being in the presence of a love that death could not and would not conquer.

These are the small places--the stable, the poisoned wilderness, the angry streets, the cancer ward--where no one thinks to look. And certainly not if we're looking to see if that moral arc is bending yet. But they are precisely where God is at work, confounding the power and privilege of the world. No wonder then that Simeon can look at an infant in his mother's arms and call it God's salvation. No wonder then that the shepherds can come and see an ordinary baby, swaddled and lying in re-purposed feed trough, and go away rejoicing. No wonder that we come back this night every year to peer into the cradle, to hear an old story, to light candles, and to go away knowing somewhere in our hearts that we have seen the world change.

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