Sermon:  “There's a Baby in My Breakfast!”

Prayer:   “May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of our hearts and minds here together be acceptable to you, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.”

This reading from Luke is the lead-in to the one I like to call “the Linus reading” – you know because in “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” Lucy’s little brother did such a great job of reciting it from memory. It’s as much a part of the season as all the Christmas carols we have sung.  It fills the soul with warmth like a wonderful cup of hot chocolate. 

In seminary, one of my preaching teachers made us all memorize it, for a storytelling class – because she believed so strongly in having us understand the importance of the oral tradition in the ancient world.  She especially wanted us to get the nativity stories all the way in into our bodies – heart and soul – so we could fully “own” them and begin proclaim the Good News to the world.  She wanted us to become “prophets for our time” as we have been urging you to be this Advent – to learn how to tell and retell the Jesus story for our times.  Also, when we have to learn, really learn, to speak another person’s words by heart we get an entirely new perspective on their perspective. We gain empathy, a very great gift of the Spirit. 

It’s easy to forget, in our mostly literate society, how Luke’s Gospel would have sounded to those who first heard it in Caesar’s Empire – people who were poor and illiterate, women and slaves, people in occupied nations who had no rights at all.  What would it have sounded like the first time Luke shared his version of this difficult and inconvenient birth of Jesus – can we hear Luke’s Good News for the powerless, for political outsiders, for poor women and their children? [Reciting the following scripture from memory.]

     In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus
that all the world should be enrolled.
This was the first enrollment, when Quirin'i-us was governor of Syria.
And all went to be enrolled, each to his own city.
And Joseph also went up from Galilee, from the city of Nazareth,
to Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem,
because he was of the house and lineage of David,
to be enrolled with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child.
And while they were there, the time came for her to be delivered.
And she gave birth to her first-born son
and wrapped him in swaddling cloths, and laid him in a manger,
because there was no place for them in the inn.

Do you hear it?  What sentences!  There are so many side comments and tacked-on phrases – it’s very much the way people tell stories.  And the ancient Greek ran like a modern blog with no verse numbers, no capital letters, and no punctuation.  It is a tale of such great annoyance, physical inconvenience, and political injustice, that it reminds me of the arrival of my own first-born son: 

In those days, a decree had gone out from President Bill Clinton that all the world should be cleansed of pollution.  This was after the first enormous state budget reduction, when George Deukmejian  was Governor of California and abolished the Caltrans Office of Bicycle Facilities and reduced state spending for bicycle projects from $5 million to less than a half-million dollars per year. 

And lo, the time came and went for me to be delivered.  The baby was one week past due and I was VERY great with child.  A call went out from my doctor’s office that I should come to be enrolled at the hospital and my body was to be taxed with a non-stress test.  And so I set out to walk one mile up to the hospital, south from Berkeley, toward the Oakland Hills.  When my doctor beheld the child on ultrasound, she saw that he was extremely large and needed to be delivered. 

And lo, there were abiding in the streets of Berkeley, environmental activists called “Critical Mass,” who believed more money should be allocated to the Department of Transportation for public transit and bike lanes.  They were watching over the flocks of bicyclists jamming up the main intersection just outside the hospital.  But, lo, my husband had to follow in a Startlet – his 1982 Toyota Starlet – which by the way, was a very low-emissions compact – and yet his path was blocked by those who loved the earth.  But the Angels of the Lord who worked in Labor and Delivery at Alta Bates Hospital, said to me, “Fear not, for we bring you Good News of great joy – your dear husband is on his way and you are soon to be set free from these monitors and made to deliver your first-born son. And lo, you will lay him in one of those clear plastic hospital tubs that you can keep beside you in the hospital room until you are released to go home.”

You get my point?  When it is our own story, when we own it, we tell it in a certain way – in a different way – and we are much more deeply invested in the emotions, the events, and the outcome than we are when we just read it in a book.

And so, people of God, your challenge– if you choose to accept your call to transform the world with Jesus and become a “prophet for our time” – is to figure out how to tell the story of your own deliverance from bondage.  That was the challenge to the Israelites, by the way, at Passover – to tell and retell not just the story of their ancestors’ deliverance from slavery in Egypt but the story of their own deliverance from bondage.  What is your part, your starring role, in that story?  How will you tell that story, in your own words?  Remember, as prophets and storytellers, we have choices about how we tell it.  I went for humor just now, in the telling of Jacob’s birth story, but there were several other versions I could tell, that I did tell back then, when people asked.

The version I told to my childbirth class, my new mother’s group, included the induction of labor that began at midnight, the 12 hours of hard labor, the way the doctor pushed me to take the epidural, even making fun of me for trying to be a “mighty Berkeley earth mother,” the 3 hours of pushing, and finally the emergency C-section to get my son unstuck from my pelvis – during which, by the way, this awful doctor (NOT my regular doctor) chatted to his nurses about his golf game and upcoming retirement. High drama, and of course, I emerge the “mighty” heroine of the tale – the “Berkeley earth mother” delivered of her enormous child.

And then there was the version I told my pastor friends: Never have a baby on a Saturday when you’re serving a church one mile from the hospital.  I must have had 100 visitors on Sunday afternoon, after Jacob’s arrival had been announced in worship.  And I had some not so great reactions to surgery, so I was a mess – VERY doped up on drugs.  Who knows what I said or what I looked like!

And there was the version I maybe should have been telling – the story of our long struggle with 4 years of infertility, the way wonderful women in my church (of all ages – those with kids and those without) all supported me and prayed with and for us as we suffered through a miscarriage and tried to conceive again.  The miracle, during Advent 1992 – when I was leading a group for women grieving infertility or the loss of a child – that I did finally conceive my son.  The easy pregnancy– where I was never once sick – and my gratitude that I had a wonderful husband with a great job so that I could afford to work part-time and finish my Master’s Thesis. The long California summer before his arrival when I got to swim or hike nearly every day, stay in shape, and enjoy the gorgeous weather.  And then, finally, the moment that it was all over and my son’s beautiful warm face was pressed up against mine in the delivery room.  Praise the Lord!  We must never forget this: miracles and wonders are everywhere – not just in the Bible, not just in church, and not just at Christmas!

How do you tell the sacred story of your life with God?  Do you remember the places where God’s grace and glory breaks through, or only the mundane daily annoyances and inconveniences of this life in human flesh? If get stuck with heads always bowed down under our troubles, we will seem as ridiculous as one of these animals in the “Friendly Beasts,” the hymn that we are about to sing.  I mean, how would the donkey or the cow or the sheep really have told their story?  Their vision was too limited for them to ever see beyond the baby they found Christmas morning in their food trough.  Their version of the nativity might have been, “Hey!  There’s a baby in my breakfast!” Not “The Good News of the birth of Jesus Christ, son of God and savior.”  Let us get our heads out of the hay and give thanks for our call to be disciples of Jesus Christ. Remember, we are called to be prophets, messengers of the Gospel, and not mere flesh.  We get to rise up with the angels, lift our voices, and proclaim God’s love for the world!  Thanks be to God for this Good News.  Amen.

---

 

Luke 2:1-7

In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus
that all the world should be enrolled.
This was the first enrollment, when Quirin'i-us was governor of Syria.
And all went to be enrolled, each to his own city.
And Joseph also went up from Galilee, from the city of Nazareth,
to Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem,
because he was of the house and lineage of David,
to be enrolled with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child.
And while they were there, the time came for her to be delivered.
And she gave birth to her first-born son
and wrapped him in swaddling cloths, and laid him in a manger,
because there was no place for them in the inn.