Christmas isn’t merely about the birth of a baby. The baby is the revolution. And the very spirit of Christmas is a constant reminder that we are too.
The baby is the revolution.
Christmas Eve | Luke 2:1-20
When planet Krypton is exploding, Jor-El and Lara put their baby in a spaceship and send him out into the universe to save him. The baby follows its path to earth, crashing near the farm of Jonathan and Martha Kent. They adopt the baby as their own, calling him Clark.
This is, of course, the origin of Superman. And Superman has been a model for saving the world with power and responsibility for decades.
It’s also a really 2018 American view of a savior. He’s the strongest and the most powerful. He can fly so fast he can change time. He isn’t just a Messiah, but a god himself.
But if we think about that origin story, it was always about Kal-El/Clark Kent/Superman. Even from the beginning. His origin was always about him.
Now think about this story we just heard from the Gospel we call Luke.
It’s about this couple who are engaged: their travel and plights along the way. It’s about angels and shepherds.
And if we were to go back and read the first chapter of Luke’s gospel, we’d read about an angel coming to a priest named Zechariah and his wife, Elizabeth, foretelling the birth of a child they never thought they could have.
We’d read about an angel coming to Mary with an incredible offer.
We’d read about Mary’s visit with Elizabeth, Mary singing a song of God’s dream for creation, and we’d read about the birth of John the Baptist.
Then we’d read about that priest, Zechariah being struck mute for not following God’s dream. And when naming his son John, he is able again to speak. Freed, he bursts into song, like Mary.
The first two chapters of Luke are an incredibly rich and beautiful origin story for Jesus. And the most remarkable part for the modern reader is that none of it is really about Jesus.
We can say it’s a lead up to Jesus. And we can say it’s literally about these people, but really all about God.
But the real reason this origin story sounds nothing like Superman’s origin, or the origin of any modern myth is that the story isn’t the origin of a person.
It’s about a relationship.
This story is not an origin story at all. It isn’t a “birth” story, but a rebirth story. Because it isn’t truly about a baby Jesus being born, but about the rebirth of God’s relationship to the whole world.
That’s why the details and manner of this story are so beautiful and revolutionary, even 2000 years later. Because if we were drawing up a Messiah today, we’d tell a dramatic story of a humble birth, for sure. But we’d do what Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster did with Superman. The story would be all about him.
But it’s not only about Jesus.
So we get a young woman and her fiancé pushed to return to a family home they’ve never known. A home town they aren’t welcomed into; no spare bedrooms or couches to surf on. Where’s their family?
Somehow they have to find someplace to deliver the baby, so they find an upper room and a feeding trough.
And then God sends out a message to the world’s most unlikely and unprepared heralds: shepherds. And you know, these aren’t the adorable children of Christmas pageants or the clean figures in your home nativity sets.
These shepherds are ritually impure, dirty men. They haven’t bathed in weeks because their home is under the stars next to livestock. Many were even “assigned” the work of shepherd like an ancient Israel version of prison work release.
So this is like God taking the most important message the world has ever known, skipping over the nightly news anchor in a three-piece suit, and giving it to day laborers and homeless ex-cons.
And these are the people who go to Mary and Joseph to see this baby. The one who came to change everything.
What God Does
Yesterday morning, we sang the Magnificat, Mary’s song about who God is. It’s the song she sings when visiting Elizabeth a few months before coming to Bethlehem with Joseph. And she says she knows who God is because this is what God does. God shows up to the powerless and gives them grace.
She sings that she has been given grace. That she is blessed to be counted among Christ’s reclamation project.
That’s why we get a story that isn’t anything like a 21st-century origin story. Why we get an origin that isn’t really about Jesus. Because it isn’t only about the coming of Jesus and who he is. It is about what Jesus is.
Jesus is the project. And that project is about reconciling and transforming the world.
So this birth is an event in the project. The Christ taking human form as Jesus is an event in the project. Jesus coming into the most humble of situations is an event in the project. But it all represents the very nature of the project.
Because it’s about our humanity, not our power and privilege. It’s about our relationships and commitment to love and justice. This is the project.
The baby is the revolution.
Because the baby reveals that in being transformed, we become the revolution, too.
A revolution of our hearts and minds and social order and society. We become as our world becomes.
This is the Incarnation.
This is why we love Christmas. We might not realize that. We might call it simply “the spirit of Christmas”. But that love and hope that fills our songs and gifting and giving and sharing and the feasts we prepare—all the stuff we think is so far removed from that night in Judea so long ago. It isn’t!
The Christ is in exactly that stuff!
Christ is in it when we are pulled by the Spirit into moments of transformation. Moments when we make that Spirit real — playing with children, sharing food, loving the child or the stranger sitting next to you. When we all sing together and pray together and long for a better world together!
The Christ Event isn’t just Jesus becoming incarnate, becoming human, becoming physically present, but it continues when we continue to incarnate Christ with each other. When we help Jesus be known through us. When we help God’s dream be reflected in our homes, businesses, workplaces, governments, and whole communities.
This is God’s dream for us!
Because Christmas, this Feast of the Incarnation is about that partnership, that being humanness of God and our being human with each other. The very stuff of this holy day is our being with each other in a spirit of love. When we be as present and filled with the great Christmas trifecta: love, joy, hope!
When God feels as present in everything as God does in this story. Not exercising power to save us like Superman, where God’s action has nothing to do with us. It has everything to do with us.
So may we be as filled by that spirit, inspired by its love, joy, and hope, and driven to reflect all that grace. May this whole time, these twelve blessed days of Christmas bring out the living Christ in our lives. And may God love you and bless you. Amen.