Grace,
mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our LORD, Jesus Christ.
I keep a lot of our family history and sometimes as I have looked back through old records, I’ve found birth announcements. Often, they looked like postcards printed with the parents’ names, the baby’s weight and length, and the time of day, day of the week and date when the birth occurred. Today digital birth announcements with photographs of the newborn are shared on social media, but they once were printed and mailed and even printed in newspapers.
Our gospel today is Jesus’ birth announcement.
But instead of being splashed on the front page of the newspaper, prompting a banner headline on a website or sounding a notification from an app, this announcement is made in the middle of the night.
And the angel who made the announcement wasn’t in a royal courtyard but in a field.
And his audience wasn’t religious experts and teachers of the Law, but people working the graveyard shift.
From the very beginning nothing about Jesus is what we expect when a royal King is born.
We are meant to be, like the shepherds, surprised about the Christ child born this day.
Unlike the births of emperors and kings before him, Jesus brings a new promise, the promise of peace on earth to all people. It is good news for the whole world because salvation is for everyone, not only for those who already hold power.
Our Lord and Savior, Emmanuel, God with us, brings grace upon grace into the world for us all.
But while we glory in the birth of the baby Jesus in Bethlehem, as Nathan Mitchell, Professor Emeritus at Notre Dame wrote, “Christmas does not ask us to pretend we were back in Bethlehem, kneeling before a crib; it asks us to recognize that the wood of the crib became the wood of the cross.”[i]
As we celebrated the Christmas story yesterday morning, some of the children saw a newborn in his father’s arms and exclaimed, “He should be the baby Jesus!” It’s a sweet sentiment, except the baby who is born this day to us is the man whom we will crucify on Good Friday.
William Dix’s Christmas carol “What Child is This” puts words to the adoration of the shepherds but reminds us “Nails, spear shall pierce him through, The cross be borne for me, for you.”[ii]
Jesus is the incarnation of God’s love for us, born into the world with the certainty that he will suffer and die for our sin and brokenness.
Today we join the shepherds in glorifying and praising God for his birth because in Jesus we see God’s boundless love for us.
This Christmas season, may we be led by the bright morning star who is our Lord and Savior, resting in the assurance of what God has done for us all.
Amen.
[i] A Christmas Sourcebook, edited by Mary Ann Simcoe. Chicago:
Liturgy Training Publications, 1984.
[ii] William Chatterton Dix. “What Child is
This”, 1865.
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