Pitching a Tent Among Us
Rev. Mark Schaefer
Stillwater United Church
December 27, 2009
Isaiah 52:7-10, John 1:1-14

Isaiah 52:7-10 · How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation, who says to Zion, "Your God reigns." Listen! Your sentinels lift up their voices, together they sing for joy; for in plain sight they see the return of the LORD to Zion. Break forth together into singing, you ruins of Jerusalem; for the LORD has comforted his people, he has redeemed Jerusalem. The LORD has bared his holy arm before the eyes of all the nations; and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God.

John 1:1-14 · In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.
He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.
And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth.

I. BEGINNING

Merry Christmas.

I say this because contrary to what you may be hearing on the radio stations around the country, Christmas has really only just begun. Today is the Third Day of Christmas out of Twelve. That means that I am giving you permission to keep your tree and your Christmas lights up until the Epiphany, January 6. (If you'd like to leave them up until Easter, you're going to need some kind of Papal dispensation). But they've already stopped playing Christmas music on the radio, because according to the secular culture, Christmas began the day after Thanksgiving and ends on the Twenty-fifth. It makes me wonder if we really get what Christmas is about.

The holiday has become much more about commerce than Christ. The "season" we encounter most is not the season of Advent, the four weeks before Christmas, but the retail season during which time retailers count on sales to make their businesses profitable. Indeed, the reason Thanksgiving is on the day it is, was the result of a Depression-era decision to create a Christmas shopping season to stimulate the economy.

There is much we get wrong about Christmas,. Christians get this wrong as much as anyone. The culture has so overwhelmed us that we buy into it. We get upset when retailers wish us "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" without ever bothering to ask ourselves why we care what some clerk at Wal-Mart or Target says to us as we buy our goods. But commerce and Christmas have become incredibly intertwined, that even for us Christians it is not always easy to separate.

That, of course, is not the only thing we tend to get wrong about Christmas.

Even when it comes to our own traditions, we're not always clear. For example, how many of us realize that while in Luke's gospel, Mary and Joseph travel to Bethlehem for the census, in Matthew's gospel, they already live there?

How many of us know that the wise men weren't kings, but astrologers, probably not any more respected in the ancient world than the shepherds were (who were always considered to be a kind of riff-raff). How many of us know that the wise men probably didn't arrive until two years after Jesus' birth? Or the fact that the Bible nowhere mentions animals in the nativity stories. In reality, we imagine the Christmas story to look a certain way because that's how St. Francis of Assisi designed it when he built the first nativity scene.

In the Stanley Kubrick film Full Metal Jacket , there is a scene where we find the platoon in its barracks being led by their overbearing drill sergeant in a chorus of "Happy Birthday." It's only when they get to the end and sing "...happy birthday, dear Jesus..." that you realize that this scene is taking place on Christmas Day.

So many things we often get wrong about Christmas, surely we're right when we celebrate Jesus' birthday.

But is Christmas really about Jesus' birthday? The early church never celebrated Jesus' birth: Jews didn't observe birthdays and the early church was influenced by that idea that celebrating someone's birth was a pagan custom. So, Christ's birth was not celebrated by the early church for a couple of centuries.

When Christians did start celebrating it, the selection of the date had little to do with when Jesus was actually born. Roman Christians started celebrating it during the Saturnalia, or during the solstice festival of the Birth of the Unconquered Sun, a festival that celebrated the beginning of days getting longer and the sun's return.

Indeed, even when we try to figure out when Jesus was born, the clues from scripture are few. Matthew mentions nothing of the time of year. Luke's mentioning of the census raises more problems than it solves, and the detail that shepherds were watching their flocks by night suggests a time in the spring. Maybe.

For all that matters, we don't even really know what year Jesus was born. Dionysius Exiguus, who calculated the calendar year in the early middle ages, made some errors in his figuring. So, most scholars believe that instead of being born in the year A.D. 1, Jesus was born sometime between 6 B.C. and 4 B.C. That makes it hard to have a birthday celebration for Jesus when we're not sure what date we should have the party on or how many candles should go on the cake.

But if we don't even know when Jesus was born, and the church had an aversion to celebrating birthdays to begin with, why on earth do we celebrate Christmas? Shouldn't we, like the Puritans who banned the celebration of the holiday, or the Jehovah's Witnesses, who refuse to celebrate any birth (even Jesus'), do the same?

II. The Incarnation of the Word

Perhaps it's because Christmas is not really about Jesus' birthday. It is interesting that the lectionary readings for Christmas day--which we read just a few moments ago--do not mention the nativity at all. Oh sure, on Christmas Eve we read the accounts in Matthew and Luke. We read of wise men and shepherds, angels and prophets, visions and dreams, of a child in a manger. But on Christmas day we read from the Gospel of John, a gospel that along with Mark's, has no nativity story at all:

John 1:1-14 · In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. ... And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth.

"And the Word became flesh and lived among us." The Greek original is actually a little more colorful, it says the Word became flesh and "pitched a tent among us". Or "built a tabernacle"--the way the Israelites encamped in the Wilderness. God set up camp in our midst.

Christmas is the Feast of the Incarnation in the church. It is not a celebration of Jesus' birthday, though Jesus' birth is not irrelevant to the celebration. But it is a celebration of the Word becoming Flesh, God's own self-communication becoming present in our midst. Present physically, in our flesh. God is one of us. God is with us. Immanuel.

A belief and proclamation that is a bedrock of our faith.

III. God's Solidarity

Now, there are a lot of things that Christians will assume their faith is about. Some will tell you that Christianity is essentially a morality system designed to maintain order, tell right from wrong, and enforce the status quo. New Testament Scholar Luke Timothy Johnson summed this up by saying, "There are those for whom the central message of Christianity is ‘Support your local sheriff’”.

Some will tell you that Christianity is a system of rules. Commandments to be obeyed. Failure to do so gets you on God's bad side with eternal consequences for your soul.

Others will tell you that Christianity is essentially a theology exam: if you believe the right things, that gets you eternal life.

The martyred El Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero said that "Christianity is not a collection of truths to be believed, of laws to be obeyed. That makes it very distasteful. Christianity is a person, one who loved us very much, one who calls for our love. Christianity is Christ." [1]

Christianity is Christ.

That is, Christ himself is the message of Christianity. And what is that message?

My friend David Hosey was a United Methodist missionary in Palestine. This Christmas day he made the following comment:

The first time I got the Nativity was in Yanoun, in the northern West Bank. The shepherds we were with showed us where they keep the sheep. It was a low, dark, cave. Noisy, crowded with animals, and smelling like--well--sheep shit. The mangers were rusty, with sheep pushing at each other to find space to eat. Not the sort of place you'd want to have a kid. If God can be born here, I guess God can be born anywhere.

And that is exactly right. The true message of Christmas is not in the parties, it's not in the Capitalist onslaught that is the Holiday Shopping Season or in the giving and exchanging of gifts. It's not in the trappings of the season, not in the greetings we get from retail clerks. It's not really even in the birth of a baby in a manger.

The message of Christmas--and of Christianity--is that in the midst of our sorrows, our suffering, our brokenness, God should dwell with us , in our midst. God should take on our life, our pain, our suffering, our joys, our being, even our death. God pitches a tent among us and sets up camp as one of us.

Christianity is about the Word becoming Flesh and dwelling in our midst. Of the radical declaration of the Eternal God's solidarity with mortal humanity: and all the implications and consequences that that solidarity has for us.

The Word becoming Flesh means that our lives have meaning. Our puny, mortal existences, that fly past in the blink of an eye, that are statistically irrelevant in the cosmic span of time, are nevertheless embraced and affirmed by the Eternal God.

Our physical existence, our embodied life, is vindicated by the Incarnation. Our flesh has value, our physical wellbeing matters. Our ordinary, mundane earthly existence is not one shunned by the deity, but embraced . Ours is not a Gnostic faith, one that teaches that materiality is evil and only spirituality is good. Ours is a faith that teaches that God so loved us that God should become one of us, to live our lives, to suffer our death, to be raised to our resurrection.

My friend David is right--if God can be born in a smelly, crowded, noisy sheep cave, then God can be born anywhere. The power of the Christmas message is that God is present with us in surprising and wondrous ways. If God can be made known to untrustworthy shepherds and somewhat sketchy astrologers, then surely God can be made known to the rest of us. If God can be born in the midst of an oppressed people dominated by the most powerful empire in the ancient world, then surely God can be born in the midst of the oppressions we might face, political, personal, spiritual, emotional. The old Latin Christmas chant sums it up perfectly: O magnum mysterium... O great mystery and wonderful sacrament, that animals should see the new born Lord lying in a manger... " The great mystery and power of our faith is in this radical, and surprising declaration of God's solidarity with us.

The implications of God's radical solidarity with us are profound. But not limited to our understandings of our own lives, but our understandings of our lives with one another.

IV. Our Solidarity with One Another

Archbishop Romero would also speak of Christmas and say:

We must not seek the child Jesus in the pretty figures of our Christmas cribs. We must seek him among the undernourished children who have gone to bed tonight with nothing to eat, among the poor newsboys who will sleep covered with newspapers in doorways. [2]

If Christ is the demonstration of God's solidarity with us, it is the demonstration of God's solidarity with all of us. And that necessitates that we relate to one another not as people separate and disconnected from us, but as fellow human beings, likewise made in the image of God, and as ones for whom Christ also came.

The poor, the oppressed, the lowly. The outcast, the despised, the marginalized, and rejected. The alienated, the friendless. The declaration of God's solidarity with mortal humanity in the flesh means that our lives have fundamental dignity and meaning. All of us. Every single one. There is not a person on earth whose life does not have a fundamental human dignity, because our human lives were validated by the Eternal, who pitched a tent among us.

V. END

In all the distractions of the holiday, all the clutter--the gift buying (and the gift returning), the parties, the greeting cards, the food, the family get-togethers, the pageants, the services, the carols, the decorations, the television specials, all of it--it becomes hard to remember this most basic message of Christmas: God is with us.

God is with us in the joys and celebrations, God is with us in our times of sorrow. In those places of comfort and ease, and the crowded, noisy, smelly caves. With the healthy and strong, and with the sick. Among the lofty and the lowly.

We are a people who celebrate Christmas not just because the music is so good, or the church looks so beautiful when decked out with holly and pine. Not even because of the charming and sweet stories of the Baby Jesus in the Manger. We celebrate the Incarnation of the lord of Love in human flesh and all the things that means for us.

There are many things we can get wrong about Christmas and our own faith. But if we get this one thing right: if we remember that what we celebrate is not a God distant and removed, but a God who lives in and among us, who pitches that tent in our midst, who knows our lives, our deaths, our sorrows, and our joys; if we can claim the power of the message of the Incarnation for ourselves and for one another, then we can live out lives of hope and love, for God and one another, that can transform the world itself.

Merry Christmas.

Notes
[1] Oscar Romero, The Violence of Love , compiled and translated by James R. Brockman, S.J., Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY (1988)
[2] Ibid., p. 179,.

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