Christmas Eve Story, 2014
I admire their learning, but some biblical scholars are a little pompous. Last week I was reading a well known writer’s comments on tonight’s gospel lesson. With great relish he ticked off what he took to be problems with Luke’s narrative:
 50 generations of David’s ancestors would have had a hard time making it back to
Bethlehem for the census.
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Quirinius did not become governor of Syria until 6-7 AD, long after most experts think
Jesus was born
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There is no Roman record of a census in Palestine around the time Luke sets it.
 It’s absurd to think a man would take his near-term pregnant wife on a 94 mile journey over bumpy roads.
Reading his comments, I felt sorry for him. First, because he seemed to think his observations constituted breathtaking scholarship and that he was exposing a fraud deliberated perpetrated on generations of gullible Christians. But more than that, I pitied him because he seemed so tone deaf to the song of the story. If he is truly that worried about the chronology Luke 2 he is like a guy who goes to a performance of Macbeth and loudly complains if the Scottish accents are not perfect.
Let’s be clear. There is a historical core to the Christmas narrative. Very few deny that Jesus was born in humble circumstance to a Jewish couple called Mary and Joseph. But this is a story , more like Shakespeare than a New York Times dispatch from the Middle East. Luke’s goal is to tell us something about how God usually acts in the world. His intention is say more about the importance of Jesus than about the specifics of his birth.
The great writer Flannery O’Connor was often asked to explain her sometimes bizarre short stories. In frustration she observed, “A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is…if I could say it in a sentence I wouldn’t have written the story.”
Luke could have written an essay on the nature of God, one which I suspect my jaded scholar might prefer, but instead he wrote a story. He wrote a story because the central mystery of this night defies definition: The infinite creator of the cosmos comes to us in the finite limits of a baby. The majestic source of mind-numbing complexity draws near in the simple and the ordinary.
We are all familiar with Christmas tableaux which depict the holy family gathered in a stable. It often seems as if there is a hidden spotlight on them, highlighting their holiness. But almost everything in the story emphasizes how unremarkable it all was. The casual observer would have given the holy couple no more notice that you’d give to a passing traveler on a busy airport concourse. Mary and Joseph were two weary people far from home, bedding down in a small town, lost in a swirl of humanity. Pieter Bruegel’s painting, The Numbering at Bethlehem, gives a sense of what it must have been like. Bruegel fills his canvas with small figures doing the stuff of daily life. His painting seems more like a random photo of a busy urban street than a depiction of a pivotal moment in the history of the world. Finding Mary and Joseph in the

painting is like looking for Waldo in a children’s book. Far from spotlighted they are all but invisible as they trudge into town surrounded by a sea of oblivious humanity.
And when the momentous event occurs how does Luke story announce it? Not with a splashy news release to the movers and shakers inside the beltway of Rome, Athens, or Jerusalem but to shepherds in east nowhere in the middle of the night. There are angels to be sure, heavenly hosts which bear witness to just how important this birth is, but they are like a great fireworks display which briefly lights up the sky and then passes away. The angelic announcement creates no great buzz beyond that hillside. The shepherds travel to Bethlehem but then the birth seems to be forgotten.
When you strip the story down to its basics it is not terribly dramatic, which is why we have often felt the need to embellish it with grumpy innkeepers and talking animals to fill out the story line for bathrobe pageants. But for Luke, the simplicity is just the point; God comes to us in the unexpected and the hidden. Just when we least expect it, we receive a glimpse of the holy which can sustain us in the ordinary places of life.
Luke does not care a great deal about his story’s historical details, but he does want to us to understand that the God who comes to us in this child is a different kind of savior, not one who trumpets and flaunts his power, but one who comes in vulnerability. This understated story serves notice that the babe in the manger is going to be the kind of savior whose defining sign is a cross rather than an imperial banner. This is a messiah more defined by understanding pain than inflicting it.
Maybe the reason we embrace this familiar story each year is because it does not try to assert too much. It does not give glib answers to life’s painful paradoxes. It does not say that God has come in power to make it all right. It does not suggest that all our darkness has magically given way to light with this birth. It says that in the midst of the darkness, in the midst of the daily struggles of life, God comes to give us light by sharing our lives. This story does not offer us a conquering hero; it offers us Emmanuel, “God with us.”
Christmas Eve is not just marking the anniversary of a distant event; it is actively remembering that what God did once, god continues to do, coming to us in love. So
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As we anxiously await the surgeon’s verdict, God comes to be with us.
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As we grapple with the agony of fresh grief, God comes to be with us.
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As we long for a more just world, God comes to be with us.
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As we weep for broken marriages and struggling children, God comes to be with us.
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As we confront darkness of all types, light flickers from Bethlehem to push back our fears.
We are not alone. That is the point of Luke’s story—God is with us and for us—may that promise give us joy and hope, this night and always.