Christmas — Proper 2
Isaiah 62:6-12
After many years during which the grain and the wine from the vineyards of Jerusalem had been given by the Lord God to the enemies of its people, the people of Israel are depicted here as streaming back to the city from the broad highway cleared of all stones and obstructions over which they were returning from their exile in Babylonia. The people who return to the city are called the “holy,” because they are the people of the Lord; they are called “redeemed” because the Lord has purchased them from their captors. The people of the Lord will again eat their bread and drink their wine in the holy city.
Psalm 97
The land and its people will rejoice, because the Lord God is now the King. The throne of the Lord God is built upon the foundations of righteousness and of justice. All adversaries of the Lord God are consumed by his fire. The earth trembles under his feet. Those who are righteous will welcome the coming of the Lord and give thanks to their God.
Titus 3:4-7
While in the Isaiah 62:6-12 and Psalm 97 texts, God is depicted as the Savior, active in the lives of the righteous, the people here in Titus 3:4-7 have been washed and reborn. What is new and different in this text from the Newer Testament is that God as the Holy Spirit is said to have been poured out upon the people through the activity of Jesus Christ our Savior. The Lord God is coming in new forms. As arranged in Proper II of our texts for Christmas, Titus 3:4-7 provides a transition from the idea that the Lord God comes in power and might to the belief that the Lord God comes in the birth of the baby Jesus in the Lukan Christmas story.
Luke 2:(1-7) 8-20
This vivid Christmas drama written by the inspired author of the “Gospel According to Luke” within popular Christianity dominates all other texts. We as leaders in public worship services should, therefore, center our proclamation upon it every Christmas Eve. If we were to do otherwise, it would hardly be Christmas Eve for us and for the people worshiping God as Christians among us, so powerful has this Lukan drama become! Here and in the other instances in which the writer of Luke-Acts was not dependent upon written sources known to us, it is likely that the writer researched the subject thoroughly and then composed freely and with inspired creativity, much as we do when we prepare sermons and homilies.
We must read this text with every oral interpretation skill given to us, or perhaps, after memorizing a particular translation of the text, proclaim it with the techniques employed in dramatic biblical storytelling. We can also portray it in vivid chancel drama with parts for both children and adults and with the “holy family” of the parents of the youngest child and their infant “baby Jesus” seated in the chancel. (We did this in a young mission congregation in which I served many decades ago. During the worship service, the infant cried and the mother discreetly nursed him.) Infants and children should certainly be highlighted during the worship service on Christmas Eve.
But what in addition can we do to make this worship experience as meaningful and as memorable as possible? We all want to sing our favorite Christmas carols, hear well rehearsed anthems from the choirs, gaze at the Christmas trees with their white lights and Styrofoam glittered symbols. How can we best explicate and apply the message of the Lukan Christmas story? What will God do within us that will be a continuation of what God has done within the Lukan writer? How shall we paraphrase the text with a bit of additional historicizing?
It then, now, and always the Lord comes within the activities of the people of God, as we see in all of the texts selected here, should we not proclaim some specifics about how God comes as Savior, Christ, and Lord (the three designations used in the message of the angel in Luke 2:11) within the parish in which we serve? We can, also with well-researched and inspired creativity like that of the Lukan writer, proclaim something such as “During the early decades of the 21st century, while _________ was the President of the United States and ________ was the governor of ______, within a local congregation in (your location), the Lord God came to a woman stricken by cancer and sustained her and her family and friends in their grief. The Lord came to a young businessman who would not sacrifice his moral principles to gain an advantage over his competitor. The Lord came to an old rancher and his wife who shared some of their land with people who were unemployed, etc., and the Lord was born here, and the angels in the church choir sang, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on the earth peace and good will!’ and the shepherds in the congregation told this story, and Jesus was Savior, Christ, and
Lord among all of them.”
Are we not the “shepherds” where we are? Can we not repeat what the “angels” have sung about what happens when the Lord comes within the activities of the people of God where we are? This can then be our most meaningful Christmas Eve message, a proclamation and application of the texts selected for this night. Perhaps it would also be a proclamation and application that Jews and Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists, and our other non-Christian guests could receive in a Christmas Eve worship service to which they were invited. They may want to be invited to this Christian mountaintop experience, if they know that their religious traditions and practices are respected by us.
I cannot leave this text, most of all Luke 2:7 with its depiction of the mother of the baby Jesus wrapping him in soft material and tenderly placing him into a “manger” so that he and she could sleep, until I share with you an experience that I had during the years in which I was growing up on our small farm in Northwest Ohio. While my friends in town were playing sandlot baseball after school and later going to football, basketball, and track practices and games, I, five miles from town, was doing what my parents wanted and expected me to do, the daily chores of feeding our chickens, hogs, and calves, and helping to cut and husk corn with hand tools, drive our Farmall H tractor so that my mother could come back to our house to begin to prepare our supper and bring in our 4-5 cows to be milked by hand as well, which she often did so that my father and I could keep the tractor and team of horses going until dark during planting and harvesting times.
We had a calf shed, which unlike our other farm buildings, we never painted, in which as any given time, we had one or two calves. There was a narrow walkway along the north side of the shed, which we used so that we could bring straw to soak up the manure that the calves produced, hay and corn fodder for roughage, water for the calves to drink, and a small scoop of oats, which the calves relished eagerly. Apart from the larger area into which we placed the hay and the corn fodder, there were two feedboxes into which I would pour the oats. (There had to be two feedboxes for two calves. If you know anything about animals eating oats, you know why there had to be two feedboxes.)
The relation of all of this to Luke 2:7 is that these feedboxes, built into the feeding area by my grandfather, were raised from the floor perhaps twenty-four inches, were approximately ten inches wide and eighteen to twenty inches long, with sides perhaps five inches high so that the calves as they licked up the grains of oats would not spill them out of the manger. Many generations of calves, over a period of more than four decades had with their raspy tongues licked the boards smooth, even wearing away with their tongues over the years grooves in the soft wood between the darker bands of hard wood. These feed mangers were just the right size into which a mother could place her newborn child! We did not use these mangers for that, but in the Lukan Christmas story the Virgin Mary did. In Luke’s Christmas story the mother of Jesus placed him into a feedbox like the ones into which I had poured scoops of oats for our calves. The mangers in the feedlots in Bethlehem were intended for use by the sheep and goats, but Mary used one of them into which to place the baby Jesus, while Caesar and Herod languished in their richly adorned palaces.
