My older daughter Sona was born on June 12, 2005. You hear this all the time, that the experience of becoming a parent is one that no book, no council of elders, no class can fully encompass: you have to live it to understand it. I won’t deign to understand the intensity and pain that Julie went through in labor and delivery, though I imagine the moms this morning can tell you some stories. What I remember of those first few hours and days after Sona’s birth was that car ride home. I think I drove, like, 4 miles an hour. And the whole time, I’m thinking, “Jesus, they’re in our lane! Move over! Slow down!” The hospital was 3 miles away from home, and I think it took an hour to make the trip. When we parked, I carried Sona in her bucket seat into the house. Julie whispered to her, “Welcome home.” And then she shut the door. Sona was awake but quiet. The house was musty and silent. And in that moment, as it dawned on me that we had this new creature in our home, I muttered to myself, “What fool thought it was a good idea to leave this child with us?”
I can’t help but wonder if Mary and Joseph felt something similarly when light broke that morning after their first child was born. Our crèche scenes and our paintings and sculptures of the Holy Family can shield us from the awesome sense of vulnerability that must have dawned on Jesus’ parents that morning: my God, we are responsible for this baby, the task is ours, and we are unmoored. Joseph and Mary were poor Jews living under Roman occupation, from a small village that held probably no more than 500 people. It’s a miracle that Mary survived her labor and delivery, as maternal death during childbirth was not uncommon in the ancient world. And then there’s the stark reality of infant mortality during this period: modern scholarship estimates that one in three children died in infancy in the time that Jesus was born. Even as she might be caressing her baby, Mary may have also been thinking, “Will it be too cold this winter? Will I be able to produce enough milk?” And Joseph might have wondered anxiously, “Will enough people want me to carve furniture or erect a shed? Will I be able to buy enough flour and oil for Mary to cook? Will I be able to escape being harassed and shaken down by Roman soldiers?” The Holy Family wasn’t especially protected from the fraught circumstances of life in the 1st century. They lived, like everyone else in Palestine, precarious lives. Every day was a day of risk, and so that morning, as day light poured into that mucky, manure-smelling barn, the question unvoiced but ever present in the minds of this young couple might have been something like mine in 2005: who left this child with us?
In the Gospel of John’s version we don’t actually get a birth narrative like we do in Luke. Instead, we get a prologue that describes Jesus in seemingly abstract terms: the Word, the Word with God, the Word as God. But John does tell us toward the end of that prologue that “the Word became flesh and lived among us.” Eugene Patterson’s version in The Message puts it this way: “The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood.” This is the extraordinary, unbelievable story of the Gospel, that God puts God’s very self at risk by moving into the neighborhood as a flesh and blood, fragile, vulnerable human being. God puts God’s self into the loving, caressing, trembling arms of a young Jewish teenager and her poor husband, this couple living such precarious lives, and it is this radical act of Emmanuel, God with us, God in the muck and danger of our world, God moving into the neighborhood, that moves the shepherds to wonder and to praise God in our Gospel lesson, and that moves John in his gospel to say that “we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” Again, Peterson helps us discern the radical, risky act of God’s taking on human vulnerability: “We saw the glory with our own eyes, the one-of-a-kind glory, like Father, like Son, generous inside and out, true from start to finish.”
What God shows us this Christmas morning is that God’s power is in the simple of transformative act of generosity, of solidarity, with God’s creation, a creation that is always at risk and in danger. And God tells us through this fragile child that is God incarnate, God with us, God as us, “I will put myself in the same kind of risk that my creation is in.” God leaves God’s self with us, and while we might wonder at such divine wisdom, we can also marvel at this act: if God is willing to be with us in our human fragility then there is nothing and no place, NO PLACE, where God isn’t willing to be with us.
And this promise, God with us, always, gives Mary and Joseph and you and me the capacity, the energy, the responsibility to do the work of Christmas each and every day, even as morning breaks in and we hold the vulnerable Christ child in our arms and keep him alive one more day. This work of Christmas is best summed up by a poem with this very title, “The Work of Christmas,” by civil rights leader and theologian Howard Thurman:
When the song of the angels is stilled
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the Kings and Princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flocks,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost
To heal the broken
To feed the hungry
To release the prisoner
To rebuild the nations
To bring peace among brothers and sisters
To make music in the heart.
Sisters and brothers, who left this child with us? God left this child with us, and because God left God’s self with us, the promise is here, now, and eternal: God will never leave us. And because God will never leave us, we are inspired, called, and challenged to care for God’s creation, to do the work of Christmas not just on December 25, but each and every day of our lives. May we, this day and always, care for the Christ child, God who risks it all, by recommitting ourselves this morning to the work of Christmas, to find the lost, heal the broken, feed the hungry, release prisoners, bring peace to all, and to make music hum in the heart of God and all of God’s children.
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