This Will Be A Sign for You!
The Rev. Scot Sherman
Christmas Eve, December 24, 2022
Isaiah 9:2-7 • Titus 2:11-14 • Luke 2:1-14(15-20)
Luke 2 was the 1st passage I ever memorized. I recited it in full at my elementary school Christmas pageant over 50 years ago, in a historically-researched shepherd’s garb of a beach towel and a pillow case–and basically gave Linus’s speech from A Charlie Brown Christmas. But I was upstaged by my fellow shepherd, Jeff Nicholson, who fell asleep on his staff, and then fell off the stage just as I got to the ending—a sign of my public speaking future. I’ve been putting people to sleep ever since.
But this story doesn’t put anybody to sleep. It has incredible power to stir up joy or great sadness, because it gets us in touch with our deeping longings. It’s enmeshed in some of our best stories of longing: we’re moved when George Bailey finally prays, when he finds ZuZu’s petals, and tells Burt that his lip is bleeding; we’re moved when Scrooge stops living for himself and shares with the Cratchits and Tiny Tim does NOT die! This is sentiment–not sentimentality– it’s the manifestation of a higher, refined feeling rooted in thought. The Christmas story confronts us with our hunger for a new world, where things are as they are meant to be, one where we’re at home. C.S. Lewis called it “the inconsolable longing in the heart for we know not what.” It’s a longing that is utterly real. Don’t dismiss it!
Think of Christmas as an invitation to go deeper, to move from sentiment to “seeing.” The shepherds are told “this will be a sign to you...” and they go. And what’s the sign? Well, the holy family is staying in the only room available to them, a stable. And Mary of Nazareth, presumably, has the good sense to convert the feeding trough into a crib. Luke mentions this crib, the manger, 3 times! Why? Because this is the sign for the shepherds. It told them the baby they were looking for. Now, it’s not about the manger. It’s about who’s lying there and that the first people God calls to see are these shepherds. They are from Bethlehem, the city of this child’s Ancestor, David, the humble shepherd who would become a king. Theologian Justo González points out that this is the only place that the titles “Savior,” “Messiah,” and “Lord” are used all together. They go and see God incarnate, swaddled, and lying in a food trough for donkeys.
This child is the one who will upend every power structure in the world. Augustus, the adopted son of Julius Caesar, is registering his empire, which brings Joseph and Mary to the very city which fulfills the prophecy. Augustus claimed to have brought peace to the earth, he styled himself “a son of God”--the world’s savior and Lord, but the Shepherds see the true King.
Do you see what Luke is doing? This beautiful birth story is the beginning of a confrontation between the kingdom of God in all of its apparent weakness, insignificance and vulnerability and the kingdoms of this world. It is amazing! Augustus never heard of Jesus but soon his successors will try to wipe out Jesus’ followers, only to see the Emperor himself profess belief. The manger is a sign, pointing to the promise of a different kind of world.
Here’s the hard part. It’s a sign pointing to a reality we only know in part. The shepherds went back to life under Herod, the unhinged monster who would go on to slaughter the male children in their town–the Holy Innocents! And friends, tonight we’re going back to our lives and all their disappointments and heartbreaks. But do you see what the shepherds saw? Did the human story begin a new arc that night?
Theologian Kate Bowler calls Christmas “ a delicate season.”
“A baby is born who is somehow God, and He will save the world. But first, He will be crucified and leave us, and we will only see glimpses of any evidence that He was here at all. We are asked to live on the cutting edge of hope, mindful that we teeter between delusion and despair.”
Christmas is an invitation to take your longing seriously, to see the sign of the manger, to listen to the high drama of heaven, of ecstatic angels saying that your pain, your fear, and your broken heart are not the last word. To look to where the sign is pointing and to rejoice.