Some of us, as children, were told that the way a new baby comes into the world is that it is delivered by a stork. Perhaps you have seen the illustrations of a stork with a cleanly wrapped bundle to be delivered to your doorstep or through your chimney. One minute, there is no baby. The next minute, there is your baby, all clean, powder fresh and perfect. If I were going to have a baby [– and I am not] – that is how I would like the process to go. Nice, neat, clean, no discomfort, no effort, no pain. That would be such a nice deal, I suspect for many.
When it comes to God and us, I suspect most of us secretly wish for the stork approach to God – quick, painless, no work on our part. Today’s Gospel makes it abundantly clear that in spite of what most of our Christmas cards look like, God did not just deliver some little neatly wrapped bundle of joy. No, the whole process was messy, involved, and hard. To complicate the already difficult act of childbirth, Mary’s ‘normal’ pregnancy/delivery, was co-opted in the swirl of world events with the great Roman Census. On the road, strange city, no family midwife or doctor, Mary, saddle sore from the ride, finds herself giving birth in a stable. Joseph had to have been frantic, searching for any kind of room, until at last he was at least able to beg those humble lodgings from an overtaxed innkeeper. It was into that concrete messiness that God CHOSE to be birthed.
From the very beginning, God was trying to teach us that God is not SEPARATE from us, like a stork delivering some little completed package for us. No, God came into the messiness of it all, bearing new life, not from outside the process, but right in the middle of it all. And Jesus’ birth is a divine pledge, isn’t it – of God’s choice to be EMMANUEL – God with us, supporting, encouraging, helping in the painful process that births new life. That is how God ALWAYS loves us. God is not aloof … but is always in the mess with us.
I was reminded of that yesterday, when I went to take my mom to the doctor. Mom is 17 days shy of 90, and her short term memory is mostly gone. Which is painful for us, her children to see, but I suspect, even more painful for her. I promised I would call her in the morning but the phone line was constantly busy. I did catch her right as I left and told I’d be there in a half hour – get ready. I get to her apartment at Our Lady of Life, she opens the door, and there she is, stocking feed, hair disheveled and going in a hundred different directions. And then she has to brush her teeth, and as she turns, I see blood in her hair from where she had fallen, and some blood in the carpet. And so I am trying to make sure she is okay, and get her into shape, and get some stain remover from the carpet and make sure she’s not bleeding, and she’s trying to run a comb through her hair, and the clock is ticking for the appointment. Then she keeps looking for something she doesn’t quite remember what it is. I ‘find’ her lost glasses, in her purse, inside the glass case where she put them, and we head out. I am not sure what I was expecting, during the trip to the doctor, but that was not it. And yet…
… on the way home, as she forgot for the 10th time what she was talking about mid sentence, she paused and said: “Thanks for being so good to me, Billy. Thanks God for all my kids for being so good to me.” Wow, I thought – “Here’s 90 old mom, hair still matted with some of the blood from her fall; who was startled when I reminded her that Christmas was two days away – and on some level “Knows” that everything is falling apart – and yet can still voice her thanks to the God whom is the center of everything. Talk about finding God in the mess.
That is the pledge of Christmas. That in EVERY circumstance of life, God is EMMANUEL – God with us.
So maybe your life is like my day with mom yesterday. Or maybe it is the sadness of missing parent who just passed away. Maybe, like one of my students, you are praying that the family Christmas gathering does not turn into a shouting match again. Maybe like the people in Ferguson, you are trying to figure out how Christ, the Prince of Peace might help us find a way forward to a just and non-violent society where every life matters. Here God’s pledge to you this day: – I am with you in all these moments…
So too, in the blessing of family being together from out of town; – in the goodness of the welcome and greetings we receive from strangers, – in the charity of folks who give so generously this time of year; in a thousand ways, may we know, both in the good times and the bad, that God is with us
Do you pray to God as if God were the stork? As if everything would ‘miraculously be dropped into our laps just by our wishing it? Christmas reminds us that God is bigger than that, and has a better plan than that. Instead of dropping new life upon us from the outside, God chooses to redeem us from within. So in the mess and muck, the joy and laughter, the struggle and yearning of these days, let the Christ be born in you…
Merry Christmas!