Welcome to the Mess

 Christmas Eve noon service,

Rev. Dr. Dale G. Tremper 

Isaiah 9:2-9

            Today we embrace Isaiah’s prophecy of the promised Child: Wonderful Counselor, the Strength of God, Eternal Protector, Champion of Peace.

            But, just as Isaiah knew so well, and just as Luke and the early church knew, we know that our current circumstances are not so wonderful.  Isaiah sees the present reality of a yoke of bondage, a rod of oppression, boots on the ground and clothing dragged through blood.  Beyond that oppression, it is the promise of a God who keeps on caring and keeps on acting that pulls us through the messes that so often characterize our lives.  It is the hope that shines through faith that lights our way through the darkness and the deep shadows. 

            The late Maya Angelou was not only a poet and a prophet, but also a key leader in the freedom struggle, working closely alongside MLK, Jr., Nelson Mandela and others, as shapers of history.  She writes:

I found that I knew not only that there was God, but that I was a child of God.  When I understood that, when I comprehended that, when I internalized that, ingested that, I became courageous.  I dared to do anything that was a good thing.  If God loves me, if God made everything from leaves to seals and oak leaves, then what is it I can’t do?

            That’s it!  The wonder, the promise, the hope and the courage are found in the mess.

            John begins his Gospel with the great declaration: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”  The Word, the Presence, the Reality of God, with us, right here, right now.  And the Word of God among us is always a very earthy, living thing.

            There was a small church that had a Christmas Eve tradition of a living nativity scene in worship, much as we will be doing this evening.  Only this particular year somebody had the bright idea of including a real, live baby in the manger in the place of the Baby Jesus.  The preacher was in the middle of her sermon when the baby did what babies do and filled his diaper full to overflowing.  The stench of the result began to fill the crowded, warm sanctuary, packed with a wall-to-wall, standing room only crowd.  The preacher saw the wrinkled noses and the eyes beginning to water.  They were not shedding tears of joy. 

            She looked at the grossed-out congregation before her and back at the now smiling baby and said, “Now we have an idea of what Christmas, the Incarnation, is really all about.  It’s not fragrant and there’s no halo around the holy family.  There’s an odor, not an aura, and God becoming human is a messy, smelly business!” 

            Do you get it?  We tend to come to Christmas with images of nice clothing, if we only could have nice clothing, of the best gifts we could afford for people we care about, of a holiday table heavily loaded with special foods, with images of a happy, perfect family gathered around a tree.  We think that this is what Christmas “ought” to be, and we end up shoulding and oughting all over ourselves. 

            This Christmas some of us are facing the mess of a family broken apart by divorce or by the untimely death of somebody who is missing and won’t be coming back.  Some of us are on the street and life on the street goes on and on and on.  Nothing ever seems to change and we can never seem to get off.  Maybe something good happens once in a while, but it is hard to notice, hard to recognize, hard to remember, because we are so ground down by the indignities of survival on the edge.

            God’s Word is that in the midst of our darkness, that is where we can see Light.  God-With-Us, Immanuel, in the here and now, God with us just the way we are, that is the good news that changes us.  I don’t have much use for “God talk” that refers to some other place, some other time.  What matters is a Word that speaks in the midst of the mess.  When we are at our wit’s end, when we admit that we are powerless over all of the stuff that we can’t control, that is precisely when God’s power, the power of love in action, begins to come into effect. 

            We do not need to understand all of the subtleties of salvation to claim the experience of being saved.  When our delusions and our rationalizations no longer protect us from the complexities of our lives, that is when we are ready to hear God’s Good News. 

            The great activist preacher, William Sloan Coffin once wrote to a young man who was trying to understand this thing that we call the Incarnation: “What’s finally important is less that Christ be godlike and more that God is Christlike.  That means that in the world of pain, God is anything but immune from it.”

            God is in the pain, in the midst, in the mess, right there with us.  Jurgen Moltmann was a teenager who was drafted into the German army in the dying days of the Third Reich.  Being a smart kid, he surrendered to the first British soldier he met.  Now, Moltmann had grown up in a completely secular family, with no faith at all.  As he was locked up with other German POWs, he began to think about spiritual things.  What could it all mean?  What happens next when all our dreams have died?  He devoured a German New Testament that an American chaplain gave him.  He bounced those words against the horrible images of the Holocaust that his captors had nailed to the walls of his crowded hut.  Later, as he got his hands on a whole Bible, he has spend the rest of his life delving deep into the Word, being inspired and impelled to share what he learns with the world.  Hear what he says about the words we are considering from Isaiah:

This phrase touched me directly when in 1945 we were driven in endless and desolate columns into the prisoner-of-war camps, the sticks of the guards at our sides, with hungry stomachs and empty hearts and curses on our lips.  But many of us then, and I was one, glimpsed the light that radiates from the divine child.  This light did not allow me to perish.  This hope kept us alive.

A people in darkness: Today I see before me the millions of the imprisoned, the exiled, the deported, the tortured and the silenced everywhere in the world where people are pushed into this darkness.  The important point is not the nations, which can be accused of these things.  What is important is the world-wide fellowship of the men and women who are living in darkness.  For it is on them that this divine light now shines.

And so it is.  Light in the darkness.  The Living God in the midst of our mess.  God With Us.  No longer confined to the manger.  I want you to affirm with me: “Welcome to the mess, Baby Jesus”.   We are not alone!  Amen.