Stealing Jesus (Christmas Eve Meditation, Dec. 24, 2010)

Isaiah 9:2-7
Luke 2:1-20

For many of us, Christmas Eve just isn’t Christmas Eve until we sing Silent Night by candlelight. Although this hymn was written in 1816 by an Austrian minister, Joseph Mohr it wasn’t put to music until Christmas Eve 1818, when the organ at Mohr’s church broke at the worst possible time: Christmas Eve. Like most churches, the music had been carefully planned and rehearsed, and a broken organ was the last thing anyone had anticipated. In a panic, Mohr took the text he had written two years before and gave it to his organist, Franz Gruber. That day, Gruber composed a simple tune which he played that night on a guitar. (1)

Thanks to the fiasco of a broken organ on Christmas Eve, the world has this beloved Christmas hymn...a hymn that, let’s face it, perpetuates a lie.

Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright. What happened on that night is what has happened multiple times every day since: a woman had a baby. And unless there are some serious drugs involved -- and sometimes even when there are -- childbirth is far from silent. And newborn babies aren’t so quiet, either -- in fact, doctors and nurses start to get really worried when a baby emerges from the dark quiet comfort of the womb and doesn’t start making a ruckus.

But even beyond Mary and Jesus’ cries, Luke’s description of the first Christmas is, simply put, noisy. The shepherds are in the fields when a whole host of angels appear, singing. There couldn’t have been anything silent about that.

We may cherish this hymn’s images of silence and peace, but the reality is, Christ’s entrance into the world was anything but silent or peaceful. But one of the reasons we love this hymn so much, especially on Christmas Eve, is because we so desperately want to come to church on this night and escape the chaos of this season -- the lines, the traffic, the planning, the gathering, the cooking and cleaning and preparing and anticipating. We want to come and hear beautiful music and look at a lovely manger scene and forget, for just a moment, all that isn’t right in our lives and in the world. Regardless of whether that first Christmas night was silent, silence and peace are what we long for tonight.

The problem is, when we do that, we miss the whole point of what we’re celebrating. We risk forgetting that what we are here to celebrate is the incarnation, God taking on human flesh.

The incarnation has always been a controversial idea. In the days of the early church, there were many heated arguments about just exactly how Jesus was both human and divine. One of these arguments was between two theologians, Marcion and Tertullian. Marcion and his followers had a strong belief that God was perfect, immortal, and entirely good. Because of this, the Marcionites really struggled with the idea that God, good and perfect God, would actually become part of our sinful, fallen creation. That seemed to them to be beneath God. So they argued that Jesus wasn’t really human, more that he was a fully divine being who took on humanity kind of like a Halloween costume; it was never really what he was.

On the other side of this debate was Tertullian, who argued vehemently against the so-called Marcionites. Tertullian published a paper in which he urges Marcion to imagine Jesus growing in the womb. Tertullian uses vivid descriptions of body fluid and blood, of a fetus growing in an ever-expanding womb, of a baby born on straw and hay and followed by a messy afterbirth.

Not exactly the bleached-white, porcelain manger scene we usually imagine, is it?

Tertullian wants to make Marcion squirm, and after this gruesome description, he gets personal. “I know you reject this whole idea,” he says, “But how were you born?”

In other words, if we believe that the reality of conception, development, and childbirth are too messy, too pedestrian for God, then we risk believing that we ourselves are too messy for God. (2) And when we think this way, that we are not good enough for God to get involved with, then we come to church thinking that we can only meet God here, where everything is neat and clean, where we wear our best clothes and use our best manners, where the music and the lights and the decorations are meant to inspire us with God’s beauty and goodness. And from here, we’ll go home, back to the messiness of our lives, back to the brokenness of the world, and most of us will leave God here, a clean, silent, sweet, baby boy sleeping in heavenly peace.

For years, John and Joan Leising put a lighted manger scene in front of their home in Buffalo as part of their Christmas decorations. But on Dec. 23, 2005, they looked outside only to discover that the 18-inch tall plastic statue of the baby Jesus was missing from the manger. In its place was a note, that the statue was needed for something and would be returned in three days. But three days passed, then three weeks, months, and half a year. Finally, one morning in late August, John opened the front door to find the statue with another note and a photo album. The album was full of pictures of the Jesus statue taken at various locations all over New York state...in front of Thruway signs, on bridges, at rest stops, and even at a psychiatric center.

Although the whole incident was deeply disturbing to the Leisings, it is a wonderful reminder of what the incarnation is really about, of what this night is about. Yes, it is first and foremost a celebration of God’s incredible love for us, a love so deep and sacrificial that God chose to enter the world as one of us, not as a great king or ruler, but as the child of poor peasants who grew up to be a peasant himself and who reveals to us the true nature of God. But if we leave all that knowledge here at church, if we leave Jesus here in the manger, we have missed the point. We should all be stealing Jesus, taking the Christ child out of the relative peace and safety of the stable and with us into all the messiness of our lives -- the chaos of the holidays with too many presents and too much rich food, the challenges of our relationships with the arguments and uncertainties and old wounds, the fears that -- for all of us -- lurk just beneath the surface of the polished appearance we show the world. Because if Jesus isn’t there, in the messiness of human life -- my life and your life -- then it doesn’t matter at all if Jesus is in the manger, silent or not.

Without a broken organ, we wouldn’t have our beloved Silent Night. And without a broken, messy world, and a first Christmas night that surely was not silent, we would not have a God that stands with us, as one of us, and loves us not just at our Christmas Eve best but in all the messiness of life. So don’t leave Jesus here when you go tonight. Take him with you. After all, that’s why he came. Amen.

Endnotes:
1. Robert Morgan, Then Sings My Soul, Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2003, p. 93.
2. Thanks to David Lose for making available online the chapter “God con Carne: Incarnation” from Making Sense of the Christian Faith that includes a helpful overview of the debate between Marcion and Tertullian.