Christmas Eve 2011 – Luke 2:1-20
Luke 2:1-20
Movin’ on Down!
Christmas Eve – December 24, 2011
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
The Bible begins with stories about families.
Adam and Eve. Abraham and Sarah. These are ordinary people.
And, blessed by God, the great promise of Bible is that Abraham’s family and
his descendants would bring blessing to all the families of the earth.
But after a time the biblical story becomes preoccupied with big deals,
with kings and states and, emperors and empires, with king-makers and deal-breakers.
And as times goes on, things don’t go so well for Abraham’s family and its descendants.
And the longer things go on like this, the more the people long for someone to save them.
And the longer people long for someone to save them,
the greater and more powerful this person becomes in their imagination.
This Messiah becomes in their minds a new David who will single-handedly
defeat their enemies, the biggest deal of all.
But on this night, when the Messiah finally arrives,
the New Testament, near its beginning, returns to a story about a family.
A story about Mary and Joseph, these two ordinary people.
A story about God coming to them. A story about God coming through them.
The story we read this evening has to do not with grand Rome or even great Jerusalem, but about
tiny Nazareth and little Bethlehem, two of the countless small places of this world.
God, we discover on this night, often chooses the small places of this world to appear.
God appeared to Abraham in out of the way Haran.
God worked for the benefit of rag-tag slaves in Egypt.
And on this night God chooses to appear in out of the way Bethlehem to ordinary
Mary and Joseph and some very lowly shepherds.
God chooses, on this night, to place the greatest gift imaginable,
into the hands of ordinary people.
It’s not as if God hasn’t offered grace to people before.
God has offered grace to people over and over again.
And yet over and over again the people have misused the grace and misused the gifts.
Nevertheless, today God sends the gift of a vulnerable child.
A vulnerable child who will indeed grow up to be misused by the world,
something God knows is a possibility.
And yet God loves us enough to send us this gift anyway. To try to woo us.
And to place this gift into the hands of ordinary people, this gift of life, this gift of love.
This gift comes to us.
The Bible, on this night, returns the narrative of God’s dealings with us to the realm of family,
the realm of friendship, the realm of neighbourliness.
Around town there’s advertising for a Real Estate agent whose slogan is, “Movin’ on Up!”
As if our purpose in life were to move up, to accumulate more, a bigger house, a bigger yard.
More isolation from our neighbours. And a more expensive car. Or cars.
Up and away from poverty. Up and away from need.
And yet on this night, as the Bible returns the narrative of God’s dealings with us from
big deals to little deals, from kings to peasants, from royal courts to village mangers:
on this night it is not too much to say that perhaps God’s slogan should be,
“Movin’ on Down!”
Down into alienation. Down into despair. Down into illness. Down into meaninglessness.
Down into poverty. Down into hunger. Down into death.
This child Jesus will grow into a person who will move on down into all these things.
Right to us. Right with us.
God on this night comes down, down to where we need God most.
To the ordinary and the everyday.
This is Good News.
God is given to ordinary people. God is given to you.
The greatest gift is placed in the hands of ordinary people.
As it will again this evening in Holy Communion: the greatest gift,
the gift of life, the gift of love, the gift of forgiveness, will placed in your hands.
Martin Luther said long ago that you can best receive this gift by making your own hands
into a manger for him: he will be placed into your hands.
He will come down to you.
What will you do with him? How will you use this gift?
Will you move on down with him? The good news is that when you do, he will be with you.
Way back in the beginning of the Bible, there is a sense that something went terribly wrong.
For a couple of chapters, all is well, but when people choose to put something other than
the God of love and mercy at the centre of their lives, things go terribly wrong.
The Biblical story is the story of God desperately seeking to set things right again.
For God’s one passionate desire is to set things right again.
On this night God seeks to set things right again, very personally,
by changing one heart at a time, one person at a time, one congregation at a time,
one neighbourhood at a time.
You are given a great gift on this night: what will you do with it?
The good news on this night is that in Jesus God becomes human so that we may become divine.
The extraordinary God becomes ordinary so that the ordinary might become extraordinary.
We discover on this night that to be divine is to move on down.
To be divine is to move into the ordinary. To be divine is to seek out people face to face.
To be divine is to forgive, to feed, to heal, to mend, to raise to new life.
It’s happening here at First Lutheran Church.
We fed 80 people from our neighbourhood with the best we could muster for a Christmas meal.
Turkey and ham, potatoes and yams, cranberries and gravy, home-baked cookies.
It was all rather ordinary. And it was all rather extraordinary. Jesus was born there.
One person said to me after the meal,
“I know God exists because you good people are in this neighbourhood with us.”
On this night, God comes again and gives the most extraordinary gifts to ordinary people.
To you. That you might become divine.
On this night, let us receive blessing that we might be blessing. And together let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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