Luke sets us up to see the birth of Jesus as more than the uncommon birth of the Son of God. It is a common flashpoint for love.
seeing the Christmas story as ours
Christmas Eve | Luke 2:1-20
My favorite part of telling stories is the reveal. That’s why they always need a set-up. I like to tell you at the outset what you need to know, then fill you up with details, and finally, unleash the big reveal.
The problem is that I do this in casual conversation too. So people constantly interrupt me to say “what are you talking about?” They feel like they’re missing something. And I’m like Yes! You totally are! I’m getting there! The part you’re missing is the best part! So we’ve got to build that up! But listen to the set-up because it’s gonna be good!
You can go straight at the small stuff, but we never truly appreciate the big stuff without context.
Stories often need this sense of drama for us to really internalize them. So if I’m telling you about my lunch, we’re just going to cut to the chase. You don’t need a setup or details. You’re barely listening to that anyway.
But if I’m telling you about my lunch because its the setup to a story about how I almost died, that anchors the story. And now the details become pregnant with meaning.
This is why we love stories. Be they galactic or supremely grounded and local.
And it’s why this story we read every year radiates with life.
An Uncommon Birth
Luke’s setup for this birth story is monumental and glorious. We get angels appearing to Mary and her cousin; two prophetic birth announcements, a priest struck mute and divine proclamation. The setup is huge and it makes clear that God is stirring things up with humanity! God is bringing a divine overhaul to the world.
Then Luke grounds us in a really local moment in time, speaking of the Emperor of Rome and the governor of Syria by name. That Joseph was living in Nazareth and had to come to the royal city of Bethlehem.
The setup yields to these familiar details of a census, no room in the inn, birth in a manger, the shepherds keeping watch. These vivid details sound like they should be remarkable…if we could just wrap our heads around what Luke is trying to tell us.
Which is the beautiful excruciating agony of this story. The elements alone are evocative but the story radiates so much more.
So we must keep in mind the big thing God is doing. It has something to do with this divinely made baby. And it has something to do with transforming the world. As Mary sang a few months before:
“He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.
There is nothing common about the baby in Mary’s belly.
The details beg to differ.
Now that song Mary sang when she was a few months pregnant is called the Magnificat. And it starts like this:
“My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.”
This isn’t false modesty.
She’s engaged to a man from the royal family. This is why they have to go to Bethlehem. But notice that they don’t live there now. They have none of the trappings of royalty and are stuck in a backwater town in the middle of nowheresville. So either they’re shunned by their family or by the usurper King Herod.
Perhaps this is also why they have to go home for the census but have no place to stay. They represent the mighty brought low.
And when the labor progresses, there is nowhere for them to be. They look like vagrants without even a park bench to sleep on. They do find a manger—a feeding trough to put the sleeping baby in.
To YOU is born this day
Meanwhile, out in the fields, angels appear to shepherds, declaring this uncommon baby of such common birth. And the angels declare
“to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.”
Scott Hoezee reminds us that this declaration “to you” is dative, a tense not used in English, but it is specific. He says that “the dative is reserved for things that come directly to another party.”
The angels say the savior is coming to them. He has been born to them. He is theirs. The Messiah has come to the shepherds. The dirty, ritually impure, and downright stinkiest members of society.
The lowliness of Mary and these shepherds: these are to whom the Savior has come.
This is how God is transforming the world and overturning the powerful. And why the message keeps coming to us in new voices. God keeps looking with favor on the lowliness of servants.
This story radiates with a message of joy and unexpected grace precisely because it isn’t the powerful getting more power, the rich getting richer, the mighty getting mightier. Because the message comes to the lowly. A message of grace and love to people who receive so little of it from the world.
This is such good news!
Can you imagine trying to find the grace of God if it only ever came to billionaires? Presidents and governors? Wall Street traders and media execs? If the grace of God only came in the clothing of power to those already clothed in power?
As Jesus says in Matthew’s gospel:
“For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have?”
If God only loved the ones who already have everything, then what’s the point? They already have it!
God gives grace and love to those who most need it. Grace comes to you because you need it. It is yours. You don’t have to earn it. It doesn’t show up like a direct deposit from an employer. Nor is it wealth and power to exploit your neighbors.
It is grace and mercy and love and hope: the radiance in the darkness. Because God looks with favor on our lowliness! God’s heart breaks at our inequality and our pain and sees fit to shower us with love. Because that’s what we need most.
And seeing in us, a flickering candle in the darkest night, God offers us the sunrise earlier and earlier; a sign of new life and a restored sense of hope. That we, the lowly, the broken, the misfits, the outsiders, the peasants, and even the disgraced royalty, receive this baby. This liberator. This son of Humanity.
We receive the Incarnate One as those shepherds. It is our story. A story which radiates, incarnates, God’s very grace in us.