Christmas Day sermon by Michelle

What does the birth of Jesus mean to you?

This week, I’ve been thinking a lot about one of my seminary professors. She taught preaching, but she did that after a career in ministry. She liked to tell a story about her first ministry position after she graduated from seminary.

She and her husband were assigned to co-pastor a cluster of three yoked congregations in a sparsely populated part of Virginia, as I recall. It worked reasonably well. She would be at one church on Sunday morning, her husband would be at a second, and the third would have a lay-led service. The following week, they would all rotate. But it got interesting, she said, around Christmas. That’s when she realized that these three congregations – though they were all small, and in similar areas – were each very different.

Her first hint at this difference came as she was discussing Christmas Eve services with the worship committee at one of the three congregations. They were planning to do a pageant, “And it will be just great,” gushed one of the committee members, “because this year, we can use your baby as the Baby Jesus.”

My professor was a little startled. She had been pregnant when she first started this position, and in the fall had given birth to a beautiful baby. She had been nervous about the pregnancy – this was a while ago, when ordained women were still rare. She hadn’t been sure how any of the congregations would react to a pregnant pastor. To her relief, they were all okay with it. But this first congregation obviously loved the idea more than most. Like many small congregations, they were aging, and so having a baby in their midst was exciting. And, the prospect of having the pastor’s baby as their Baby Jesus at the annual pageant, was more exciting still.

Buoyed by this response, the pastor went to her second congregation’s worship planning meeting. Like the first congregation, this was a group of greying adults with a small number of families, and no babies in sight. “Would you like to use my baby for the pageant?” she offered. “Oh no,” they replied, “We would never use a real baby in the pageant.” You see, real babies occasionally fuss or cry during pageants, and we know from the hymn “Away in a Manger,” that “Little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes.” And there are other problems with using real babies. Sometimes they spit up, or just generally don’t behave right. Rather than risk having Jesus behave so inappropriately, the congregation had long ago found themselves the perfect Jesus: a doll, who appeared in the pageant every year.

Having learned her lesson, the pastor asked a different question when she went to the third congregation’s worship committee meeting. “And, what do you use for the baby Jesus?” she asked. It turns out, that congregation didn’t have a baby at all – just a spotlight that shone from the church rafters and into the manger. It’s a beautiful image, if you think about it – a pure beam of white light coming down from above to rest in the manger.

At that point, the woman got a profound insight into those parishes. Because, as she pointed out in class, the birth of Jesus meant very different things to those three congregations.

The first congregation – the one that was so excited to have a real, live baby – was all about the incarnation. The fleshy-ness of Jesus, who was a real human living among us, presumably doing things that all real humans do, like cry, and fuss, and eat and drink. And, while I’m sure the baby Jesus was very considerate and slept through the night right away, so Mary wouldn’t be inconvenienced, the fact was, Jesus was human. That is who Jesus was to that first congregation.

The second congregation said, well, yes, Jesus was human, but he wasn’t just a human like the rest of us. It’s like the creeds say, he was perfect man. He was human, and faced temptation, but didn’t submit to it like the rest of us did.

The third congregation emphasized the divine side of Jesus, who was fully man, but also fully divine. He was the light that came down from heaven and dwelt among us.

This Christmas, we celebrate all that.

The fact is, all three of these understandings of Jesus are perfectly fine. There’s no right or wrong here. You can read through the Gospels, and depending on what you’re reading, you will find Jesus depicted in any of those ways. Read through the book of Luke, or the beginning of Matthew – go to last night’s Christmas pageant – and you will see Scripture very much focused on the incarnation, the word made flesh. Read through the end of Matthew, or of Mark, and you will find more about the perfect Jesus. Think of the story of Jesus in the desert, tempted by Satan; or Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, where he prays all night, asking God to take this cup from him, but in the end tells God, your will be done. And then, he emerges to find the disciples fast asleep. That’s Jesus as the perfect man – able to withstand temptation in a way that I don’t think I could. And, if you read the Gospel of John – like the beautiful opening of John that we read this morning – well, that’s the divine Jesus right there. Jesus is the Word, and the Word was with God, right there in the beginning, and through all time.

And, just to plug for a minute – the great thing about being an Episcopalian is that it doesn’t matter which of these understandings is most important to you. All are fine.

But, here is why they are important.

For those who really identify with Jesus the incarnate – the fleshy – they are the ones that celebrate that Jesus got dirty with the rest of us, the unfortunate, the sinners. That he sat with the Samaritan woman at the well, at a time when no respectable young man would be doing that. That he broke bread with tax collectors. This morning, my thoughts are with the congregation of Atonement, Carnegie, who every year celebrates Christmas by making a big dinner at their parish for anyone who wants to join them. But, more than that, more than just providing a meal and fellowship for the folks who live alone, or who lost loved ones, Atonement Carnegie remembers that there are people who are working on Christmas day. So after they have fed the people who can come to their church, they go out and bring dinner to the police, the firefighters, the first responders, the folks who cannot even come to church. Like Jesus, they remember what is like to be human, in an imperfect world, and they minister to the other humans in an imperfect world. That’s following incarnate Jesus.

But, for the people who remember perfect Jesus, there is the call to be more. There is the recognition that Jesus was fully human but withstood temptation. It is the reminder that if we want to follow Jesus, we have to be ready to ask ourselves “what would Jesus do?” I don’t always like that slogan, but it reminds us that we are called to transform the world, not just be part of it. We are called to challenge the things that are wrong, and make it a better place.

And, finally, for those who worship the Light that came into the world, there is the recollection that it is God who makes all this possible, not us. We celebrate that God chose to come into the world, to be among us, and remember that this shows once and for all that there is nothing that we can do that can separate us from God’s love, if we are willing to let it in.

That is what the birth of Jesus means this day, to all of us. Amen.