THIS EXTRAORDINARY BIRTH John ii, Buchanan
Luke 1:39-+48 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
December 19, 1982 Columbus, Ohio

It was a Thursday night not long ago. ‘Several members of this church were
meeting in the library to interview applicants for the recently-established
social worker position. Now, Broad Street Presbyterian Church on a Thursday
night ig a very busy place. ‘The parking lot is full. There are people in the
dining room taking a@course in accounting. There are people in the gym playing
basketball and there are people watching basketball. Those people are cheer-
ing, clapping, stomping on the floor, Two stores below there are people in the
kitchen clearing up from the choir meal. The choir is rehearsing, and there are
three or four other meetings going on. The traffic at the back door is steady
and heavy. It is a noisy, slightly chaotic place and in the approximate middle
of the building a small committee was interviewing social workers. What I
remember is that someone had just asked a particularly good candidate how she
coped with the stress of working with economically disadvantaged people ail
day long, how she fed her spirit and intellect, how she refueled, And she had
just said that she stayed pretty healthy because she really did love those people
and she thought that the ability to keep loving even when you're tired and
depressed and about loved-out was a gift of God, and that she was happy that
God had seen fit to give her that gift. And suddenly, through the cold air
return in the library, cama the sounds of the choir which had just started to
work on dandel's "Messiah". What came through the coid air return, as clear
as a bell, were the magnificent strains of chorus “And the Glory of the Lord”,
almost as if someone had arranged it that way to be in perfect counterpoint to
what she had just said. I wrote down what I thought sitting at that conference
table because it seemed to me that the “Glory of the Lord" is defined rather
well by what the social worker said about the gift of loving. What I wrote was
to the effect that the Incarnation we observe at Christmas is best celebrated,
not by a sophisticated theological treatise delivered from this pulpit, but by
all that good, human noise going on here, right on Broad Street, Columbus, in
the name of that same Jesus whose Bethlehem birth we are observing.

What comes through each year is this marvelous tension between the subline
beauty of the birth and the real world in which it happened. That translates
for me into an equal tension between the gorgeous Christmas celebrations we
enjoy and the reality of our world in which any faith worth thinking about must
be expressed, articulated, lived, “Can I bear, without breaking apart, this
extraordinary birth?" one writer asks and means, I suppose, that there are some
very different, almost opposite, ideas to contend with as soon as you begin
thinking about God's own son being born in a cow stall.

It is no secret that we are inclined to break that tension and focus on
the parts of the feast, the ideas, the vignettes that are manageable. The
theological history of the incarnation is the story of people believing either
in the divinity of Jesus Chirst, or his humanity, but having a very hard time
believing both at the same time. At Christmas we break the tension by Spiri-
tualizing the birth, removing it from anything that resembles real life. The
art of the Renaissance did that sometimes. Overwhelmed with the divine mystery
of the expectant mother of the Lord, artists in the Middle Ages painted her
vight out of the human race as an angelic, perfect, madonna, It was an act of
adoration, of course, but it broke the tension of incarnation.

-2—

Do you recall the great flap when one of the first of the modern transla-
tions of the New Testament said that Mary was pregnant instead of “great with
child", What a stir when someone simply said what her condition was. People
thought it was vulgar, crude, blunt; that somehow if it's Mary and Jesus,
“great with child" is better than "pregnant", And what that really means is
that we can't bear the tension which is inherent in an incarnation. Mary,
mother of Jesus, was pregnant; and what the birth means is that our humanity
is blessed, that pregnancy ~ like all that is human - is blessed by God's
appropriation of it as the way to express his love, and that to spiritualize
it and miss the humanity, is to badly miss the whole point of the incarnation.

And sometimes we break the tension of the incarnation by simply refusing
to see that one of the implications of God's choosing our humanity to live in,
is that our humanity can be a lot better, a lot more honest and moral and just
and loving than we ever thought: that we can change into better people because
of what happened in Bethlehem, William Willimon wrote in a Christian Century
recently thet the appropriate way to respond to the story of Jesus’ birth is
not to feel sentimental - but to repent as John the ERaptist advised. “Unfor-
tunately", he went on, "we have psychologized the Gospel, turned it into a
feeling, transformed the kingdom of God into a mood, We have deluded ourselves
inte thinking that the tlessiah, whom we await, is the great cosmic affirmer of
everything we hold dear and of all our illusions." (Christian Century, 12/8/82,
page 1247)

Well, he is not. He is, we believe, God among us: our judge and our
savior. You see, the fundamental Christian claim is the child born in Bethlehem,
the man he became, teils us the truth about God and the truth about ourselves.
This birth makes a very nice story but it is, also, what we Christians know or
believe to be, a revelatory event, Every divinity student used to have to read
H. Richard Niebuhr's The Meaning of Revelation in which the distinguished theo-
logian wrote:

‘Sometimes when we read a difficult book, seeking to follow a difficult
argument, we come across a luminous sentence from which we can go for-
ward and backward and so attain some understanding of the whole.
Revelation is like that. The special occasion to which we appeal in
the Christian church is called Jesus Christ..." (p. 93)

In Jesus Christ we can see what God means by our humanity, and we can also
see what God is. Eoth are troublesome. We would not always choose to be as
good, as forgiving, as loving as God has created us to be. There is an inherent
tension, therefore, in celebrating this birth. Nor would we choose God to be the
God revealed in Jesus thrist.

“What kind of love is this?‘*, Madeleine L'Engle asked in an essay in Advent.
"Cribbed, cabined and confined within the contours of a human infant? Why

would he do such a thing? Aren't there easier and better ways for God to
redeem his fallen creatures?" {The Irrational Season, page 16)

a oe

There is tension between the human and the divine, between the uncompro~
mising righteousness and justice God sent his son to establish, and the moral
compromises his latter day sons and daughters make every day of their lives.
There is tension between saying “great with child” and "pregnant"; and in the
story itself between heavenly hosts and rough shepherds.

he lesson for the day is a corrective. The tension is kept marvelously
by St. Luke. The young Mary, according to Luke, was something less than
ecstatic with the first announcement of her pregnancy. She was troubled,
afraid, and well she should have been. The divine may be about to appear in
the flesh, but first there are some very human fears getting expressed by a
young girl unexpectedly expectant.

What a thoroughly human pair they make, when Mary packs up and travels
to see her elderly cousin, Elizabeth. How thoroughly human the two of them are
precisely in their peculiarity: one far too old, the other much too young for
what was happening: yet somehow reaching out to each other for support and
strength, and receiving both. Elizabeth's baby jumps in her womb when Mary
speaks and William Willmon observes that Luke's "first two chapters sound like
conversation in an obstetrician's waiting room." (Christian Century, ibid., p. 1276)

We miss part of the power and the beauty of this Christmas gospel when the
tension becomes too great and we break it by spiritualizing it. We miss the
beauty if we neglect the humanity and the points at which this story connects
with our story. God chose human birth for his incarnation. It is the only
experience common to every single one of us. Some of us know about it in a
most personal way, having given birth, having known about waiting, and worrying
and feeling life, and the awkward discomfort, and the pain, and the fear and
the glory. And some of us waited and shared what we could, and watched, and
we will never forget what we saw as long as we live. God chose that most human
of all experiences for his incarnation.

We miss the power and beauty of the Christmas Gospel when we break the
tension by removing it geographically from human life. The Christmas cards
are adorned with little country churches, mostly, nestled in little villages,
white with new fallen snow, candles in windows, smoke curling gently into the
early evening sky. The birth did not happen in a setting like that. It was
not very placid and peaceful in Bethlehen, I imagine. It must have been a
noisy, crowded place. The stable was not pretty. My family and I one time
slept in a room directly above five cow stalls, and the odor was so powerful
none of us could sleep and we are still talking about it years later. We miss
the power if we remove the birth from the rough humanity of its setting. And
we miss the secular power and relevance of the gospel of Jesus Christ if some-
how we remove it from its human base. There is nothing peaceful, placid and
gentle about the city. There is very little that is pleasant or pretty in the
city blocks surrounding this church. What you will find are people, many of
whom are severely hurt. What you will find are people who are hungry, elderly,
alone, unemployed, afraid, powerless, helpless; people whose plight - according
to current fashionable Washington rhetoric - is their own fault. The gospel of
Jesus Christ was meant to be articulated in the middle of that, and on behalf
of those poor people, Luke reminds us. As the baby was born in a stable, so

ile

his people are called to their discipleship precisely in the middle of the
human city. "And the Glory of the Lord" the choir sang as the social worker
talked about loving the poor. The glory of this church, season in and out,
is precisely its willingness to be the instrument of the Gospel's secular
relevance.

The final tension is the most difficult, I suppose. We would not choose
a God who acts like this. We do love the story of the birth, but we would not
choose, nor are we very comfortable with the vulnerability, the weakness, the
limitation on God to which the story inexorably leads. Given a choice, we
would prefer a God whose omnipotent strength controlled history and who, there-
fore, not only took care of his only son but assures that good things always
happen to good people. We do love the little story of baby Jesus, but we'd
surely prefer a God who is more demonstrably in control of things in his world.

Every religion deals with it in one way or another. Some regard human
suffering as God's will, God's punishment of the wicked or, at least, the way
God teaches admirable traits such as endurance, and patience. Some religion
tries to explain it in terms of cause and effect. What the birth of Jesus
Christ in Bethlehem means to Christians is that God doesn't cause suffering,
nor explains it. What the birth of Jesus means is that God identifies with
the sufferer: God bears human suffering.

That tension becomessunbearable sometimes and in spite of ourselves we
demand to know why God is doing this to us. What have I done to deserve this?
If God is good, why is he allowing this to happen? What Christianity says to
that most human of questions is that in Bethlehem of Judea, God came among us
and was born as we are born and shared our humanity, and suffered and died
as we die: and although that is not an explanation it is an expression of a
great and yunexplanable powerful love which allows us to bear with grace and
confidence whatever comes at us.

When her Mother was critically ill she became confused on occasion,
frightened, disoriented. Madeleine L'Engle would hold her mother in her arms

and say: "It's all right. Don't be afraid. Everything will be all right."

She writes: "What's all right? What am I promising her? I'm scared
too. How can I say it? But I do, I hold her close and murmur, it's all right,
Motner. It's all right.

"T mean those words. I do not understand them. Perhaps one day I will
find out what they mean. They are implicit in everything I write. They are
péhind everything." (The Summer of the Great Grandmother, p- 20)

-5-

We may mot understand. That is part of the tension. In his Christmas
letter, a friend, whose wife died this year, wrote: "We miss her deeply,
but I can say that we are beginning to move on, welcoming tomorrow while
being richly blessed by the past. I think that is what this season is all
about for Christians. It is a look forward in the hope we are allowed in God,
who asks us to believe in that which we cannot know for sure." TF don’t under-
stand what IT believe all the time. But with my friend I believe you and I may
welcome tomorrow. I, too, believe “it will be all right". And while I may
not always understand I can locate the reason why I am able to believe without
always understanding. It is because on a dark night, in a stable behind a
crowded inn, a young Galilean girl had a baby. I can believe that some
ultimate issues about you and me have already been decided and we are unima-
ginably free to be human and whole and alive because that young girl's baby
was Jesus the Christ.

She didn't understand it either, at first. So she shouted: "Hy soul
magnifies the Lord’. So it is always best articulated in an embrace - in love
extended and accepted - in loud, joyful singing,

The Lord has come, And he shall reign forever. Hallelujah! Amen!