(I diverged from the text last night and went in other directions for the message. I figured that I would share it.)

On this Christmas Eve, we believe that the infinite Creator God who is absolute mystery–beyond all our conceptual thought, beyond our imagination, and beyond our language; this God has drawn near to us in the birth of Jesus. This was a decision of God to incarnate before creation happened. The first thought of God in the depths of eternity, well before the Big Band fifteen years ago, was to incarnate as Christ to communicate God’s compassion and love for us and all creation.

God has embraced us as humans by becoming human, and humanity has been graced with this divine embodiment. Christmas says joyfully that we are not alone. The universe is not accident; even though its chaotic development, unfolding in an evolutionary process beyond our current human understanding but under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

But Christmas for us celebrates the marriage of the divine and the human: The infinite and finite were woven together in the conception and physical birth of Jesus.

Nick Page writes, “The story of Jesus’ birth is not one of exclusion, but inclusion…Joseph’s relatives made a place for Jesus in their heart of their household. They did not shun Mary, even though her status would have been suspect and even shameful (carrying an illegitimate child) they brought her inside. They made room for Jesus in the heart of a peasant’s home.”

By the time of the birth of Jesus, Joseph had welcomed Mary and her unborn child into his family. The story begins with no room, no hospitality for the family and Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem, the city of David. Jesus is born in a cave used for sheltering nonhuman animals. Jesus is born in the womb of the earth, and his dead body would later be placed tenderly in another cave or womb of the Earth. Earth and heaven are united in the body of Jesus at birth, connected in his birth in the cave and re-connected as he laid in the cave tomb. Christmas, in one sense, is all about interconnections between Jesus and ourselves, all creation.

Jesus begins his first moments after birth by being placed in a feeding trough in a cave with animals. Ironically, he will end his life with crucifixion as the lambs are slain in the Temple for Passover. He is surrounded by animals in his birth and dies like a paschal lamb during the cutting of the throats of the lambs and draining their blood in the Temple by the priests, so that the lambs can be kosher, holy.

His life started in the marginality, outside human residences in Bethlehem and ends outside of Jerusalem on a cross. Jesus’ birth was in a cave used to shelter nonhuman domesticated animals as we portray in our Christmas crèches. He died outside the city, near the garbage heap of the city. It is the human act of ultimate inhospitality. Jesus was born as an outsider and died as an outsider. He lived as God’s outsider preaching a message of breaking down walls of exclusion. Today we welcome Jesus in our hearts.

In this child of both human, earthly, and cosmic destiny, he will inspire us as he inspired laying those who visited him in the manager to embrace our inner Christ child.

The marginal location of the birth of Jesus makes it accessible to the marginalized shepherds outside of the town of Bethlehem. Angels appear to the shepherds, announcing “Today in the city of David, is born a savior, who is Christ the Lord.” The shepherds are told to search for a sign—a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. This, of course, is an unusual sign for a Savior and Lord, born in a cave with nonhuman animals.

And in Luke, shepherds, outsiders and despised Jews, came to venerate him in a feeding trough as Savior and God’s Child. The shepherds too found the inspiration of hope for today and the future, for an innocent child in a feeding trough illuminated by a star and the arrival of expectant shepherds who experience wonder. Later stories from his mother about the incident might have been the inspiration for Jesus to tell his audience the parable of The Good Shepherd. No Jewish person at the time would ever speak of shepherds as “good”—let alone apply it to God. Jesus also identified himself as the good shepherd, who would leave the ninety-nine for the one lost sheep.

And then there were the three Magi, non-Jewish religious seers who brought gifts for his birth. As Jesus asked stories about that time in Bethlehem, his parents narrated the events. Mary and Joseph told stories about the Magi, for God worked through them, providing necessary funds to flee to Egypt from Herod’s massacre of the holy innocents in Bethlehem and live for a couple as refugees. God’s grace came also from outside of Israel, for Israel was not the only people that God blessed and graced. God’s inclusive love was universal beyond all tribalism and beyond all religious barriers and exclusions.

Both shepherds who were poor and unclean outsiders and the Magi who were unclean Gentiles were directed by God a new message of universal compassion. The stories at his nativity were imprinted in Jesus being and his message: “Be compassionate as God is compassionate.” He would incarnate God’s compassion in the world.

God’s first thought before creation was to incarnate Godself in Christ. This means that incarnation and birth of Jesus originated from God as divine love for all creation and for ourselves. It was not primarily a divine rescue mission to save from sin. That was secondary. The birth of Christ was originated from God’s love.

God became flesh and lived among us. Through the incarnation, God learned and experienced human sensory experiences. God experienced birth in all its liquidity and messiness. God experienced the sensations of hunger, sights, sounds, crying, and smells of a newly born child. Smells in the stable had originally triggered my thought processes about God and smells. The night God’s birth into the world irrupted into a world of amazing barnyard smells. How many have you ever been in a barn or stable? You are bombarded with a range of animal smells, hay, excrement, and so on. Yet our crèches romanticize and sanitize the event and do not carry the barnyard scents of sheep, goats, and cows.

And in Luke, shepherds, marginalized Jews, came to venerate him in a feeding trough as Savior and God’s Child Shepherds from the nearby hills visited the newborn at the manger. Pastors from the slopes beheld a different lamb, a lamb born to save the world from selfishness and violence. The shepherds came and found the child wrapped in swaddling clothes in a manger. They left giving praise and glorifying God.

Heaven and earth come together in a two-way revelation in a baby born in Bethlehem. The baby begins receiving revelatory experiences and sensations that all new born babies experience: an eruption of sensations, smells, noises, tastes, touch, and sights. The baby begins a journey to become human, experience what an ordinary human being experiences with sensations, experiences, emotions, and reflective processes. The divine has taken on embodied life, experiencing what it means to be human. On the other hand, God reveals to the shepherds the true mystery of God’s incarnation in a place unexpected for God.

We experience a dual revelation: First, our humanity has judged to be worthy of the embodiment of the living and loving God. Secondly, tonight’s Christmas story unfolds the deep truth that we are not alone in the universe. The universe is not mindless evolution; it is more than matter and energy, stars and black holes. It radiates the Spirit of God, for as God embodies God’s self a human body, God took on the materiality and energy of the universe. That means not only God has undergone change but ourselves and our universe. We can sing with the angels: Glory to God in the highest, and peace to humanity. For we know in our hearts the great mystery that God became human so humans can become divine. God gave us part of God’s divine life.

God’s incarnation means change for us. As I mentioned earlier, God’s incarnation meant a change in God’s being. God became more lovingly accessible to us through embodiment. God became Emmanuel, God with us. But it also means change in ourselves. It means God coming into being results in us becoming co-creators with God in the world around us. Every moment holds the potential for new birth because this birth is the birth of the Light in the world of darkness. The darkness, even the darkness in ourselves, cannot overcome the birth, and as long as we hold the candle of our faith in front of us, guiding us, we cannot be overcome. We too will be born anew, giving birth to the divine child within ourselves.

On Christmas Eve, when we want absolutely nothing to change, when we nostalgically want to relive our Christmas past, but we are, in fact, celebrating the greatest change ever—change in our God and change within ourselves. Change is not something that we as Christians should ever fear. Change is the nature of our lives as Christians. We must not fear change but embrace change and become agents of change under the influence of God’s Spirit. God’s brings the “new” into the world every moment, and the birth of Christ signifies the reality of change. We change and are open new possibilities in the birth and the death of Jesus; it is the foretaste of the change of resurrection where God can bring our physical and spiritual bodies together as well as the universe into a fullness of change –where God will abide in all. We will be born into the fully divine universe.
We can journey to those places that become Bethlehem for us, the places where God is abiding in our midst. God invites us to recognize the birth of the Christ child in our midst.

The Christian martyr Oscar Romero wrote,

We must not seek the child Jesus in the pretty figure of our Christmas cribs. We must seek Jesus among the malnourished children who have gone to bed tonight with nothing to eat. No one can celebrate a genuine Christmas without being truly poor. The self-sufficient, the proud, those who, because they have everything look down on others, those who have no need even of God – for them there will be no Christmas. Only the poor, the hungry, those who need someone to come on their behalf will have that someone.

We are once again invited by our loving Creator to come, worship, and adore….and experience the change of birth…It is a change of vision where we can see the face of love’s pure light in the face of the poor, the homeless, and the suffering.

May the Blessings of Love’s Pure light be with you this Christmas.

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