When love came down #2 : Messy love Reinbeck UMC 12/7/14

When love came down #2 : Messy love

Reinbeck UMC 12/7/14

When Robyn and I were in college, we were assigned the task of putting lights on the campus Christmas tree in preparation for Christmas at Westmar. I don’t know how that happened.

Now, you have to understand that the campus Christmas tree was a big tree in the center of campus. It was probably 20 feet tall. In my memory, I want to say 30 feet tall, but it was probably more like 20. And it was fat-- almost as wide as it was tall.

It was a big job.

As I recall one Saturday morning we got the lights out of the fourth floor of Dubbs Hall and brought them down to the tree. We started stringing lights -- And more lights --  and more lights --and more lights until we finally covered the tree. We got a really long extension cord and plugged it in and it looked good.

That night or the next we all gathered for the lighting of the campus Christmas tree before we went to the chorale concert and wasail at Calvary UMC. We all gathered around the base of the tree. Ready to oooh and aah at the beautiful bright lights. When the big moment came, someone plugged in the extension cord and … only the bottom half of the tree came on. I still don’t know what the problem was- something probably came unplugged.

Our hopes for the most beautiful Christmas tree ever came unplugged too.

I think in that image of the half lit that tree we can find a parable about Christmas. No matter how hard we work. No matter what our hopes are. No matter how bright and shiny the wrapping paper is. No matter how well we plan… Christmas often doesn’t go quite like we think it should. Frankly, sometimes Christmas can be kind of messy.

But it has always been that way. You do realize that, don’t you? Do you think the first Christmas was all neat an shiny, wrapped up in a bow? Not by a long shot.

Let’s start with the genealogies, in the beginning of the gospels. Right away we get a hint this is not a neat, sterile story wrapped up in a proper Christmas bow. Four of the women in the family tree were about as opposite of Mary as you could get. Tamar and Rahab were prostitutes---and they are named in Jesus’ family tree! Ruth was a foreigner and a widow. Bathsheba was married when she had sex with King David, was complicit in her husband’s murder, bore David’s son and suffered the pain of her son’s death. None of these women were dressed in their Christmas best, baking cookies, and humming Christmas carols. The Christmas story is messy.

Then there is the story of Mary and Joseph. The young couple whose lives were turned upside-down by this strange baby. The prospect of Joseph divorcing Mary was bad enough, but that wasn’t the only fear. There was always the possibility of her parents rejecting her, people ostracizing her, or even being stoned to death as an adulteress. The Christmas story is messy.

As the story rolls on, Mary rides to Bethlehem on a dirty, dusty, old donkey. Someone lost their reservation at the Radison, so they were stuck in a little barn, which smelled of every kind of animal dung you can imagine. Finally, Mary gives birth – never an easy process under the best of circumstances -- and has to lay her firstborn infant not in a cradle built by grandpa, but an animal feeding trough. There was no midwife, no cradle, no cute little outfits, no first picture, no big to-do… just a young girl giving birth to an unplanned baby in the dust and dirt of a stable. I tell you the Christmas story was a messy story.

Then there are the Shepherds.

·        They were religious outcasts and considered unclean by the Jewish religious law.

·        Their jobs kept them from regularly attending church.

·        They were social outcasts, constantly on the move, regarded with suspicion.

·        They were accused of being thieves and didn’t have much contact with other people.

·        Their job was lonely, wearisome, often boring, tedious, and dangerous.

·        The shepherds were not the kind of people you socialized with, or wanted around at all,

let alone to visit a newborn baby. What a mess they were.

From beginning to end, the Christmas story is a messy story.

Sometimes when I look at what we do with Christmas, however, it is just the opposite – we make it almost like a Norman Rockwell painting, or a Christmas card, or a hallmark special. We get glimpses of a flawless virgin Mary in a pristine wrinkle free rob, a steady and untroubled Joseph in an equally immaculate robe, a cheerful stable with clean straw and friendly animals, and the arrival of shepherds in newly laundered snow white tunics with dirt-free sandals on their feet. But the Gospel of Luke makes it clear that the first Christmas was far messier! If we really listen to the story, we sense pretty quickly it is no glittering Christmas card. It is real life and it is messy.

When we sanitize Christmas it makes it hard for us to imagine a holy God coming into the middle of this messy, messy world. It is hard for us to accept that the shepherds may have been asleep in the dirt after drinking too much. It makes it hard to imagine animals really doing what animals do.  It’s hard to imagine the real Mary, pregnant, scared and screaming in labor pains. When we imagine Christmas in this way, we understand God only in such a way as to keep God clean and separate from the harsh, shameful mess of our world—and of our own lives.

Part of the good news of Christmas is that “messy” doesn’t bother God. If messy bothered God, would he have made Adam out of the mud and eve out of a bloody rib? If Messy bothered God, would he have created wallowing pigs, stinky skunks, or quite frankly any of us? If messy bothered God… holly cow… he would have given up on humanity a long time ago. If messy bothered God he sure could have found a better way to save the world than a baby in a barn, or a Christ on a cross, or a church full of people like us.

No messy doesn’t bother God and that is part of the good news of Christmas

Please understand what God is doing at Christmas.

·        God chose to be born into our messy, despairing world, into the middle of hopelessness.

·        God chose to come not into a cleaned up palace, but into the squalor of humanity’s injustice and cruelty to one another,

·        God chose to come into a family that wandered without a home,

·        God chose to be announced to shepherds in a pre-dawn stupor,

·        God chose to come in a place only good enough for smelly barnyard animals.

·        God chooses to be in the mess of our lives.

·        God is not too distant, or too holy, or too clean to be in our unholy and messy lives.

The message of Christmas is that the God of creation is not afraid to get his hands dirty. Love came down at Christmas and it was a messy love.

·        God was not afraid to enter the messiness of the first Christmas.

·        God is not afraid to get into the mess of sin and sadness.

·        God is not afraid to get into the middle of our broken lives and offer healing.

·        God is not afraid of the messiness of our relationships- the way we hurt each other- the way we put each other down—the excuses we find for not serving one another.

·        God is not afraid of the messiness of our broken family relationships.

·        God is not afraid to step into the hospital room where the child has just been diagnosed with cancer,

·        where the patient can’t stop throwing up,

·        or to sit by the bedside of the dying woman.

·        God is not afraid to get into the middle of the argument about the line between law and order, police brutality, and state sanctioned murder.

·        God is not afraid to appear among those who cross our borders illegally,

·        nor is God afraid to stand up to leaders who fail to have the backbone to reform our immigration policy, which we can all agree is broken,

·        nor is God afraid to face down those who spew hatred and intolerance toward people just because they have different color skin or speak a different language.

·        God is not afraid of the messiness of feeding the homeless, clothing the naked, healing the sick, or visiting the imprisoned.

·        God is not afraid to speak of love in the face of terrorist bombers,

·        faith in the countries where faith is illegal,

·        or joy in the deepest darkest slums of Calcutta.

·        God does not hesitate to work among the poorest orphans in the Consolation center in Haiti. 

·        God does not hesitate to enter the rooms of Ebola patients in West Africa.

Get the idea?

o   Christmas means that there is no part of creation that is too messed up for God to show up there.

o   Christmas means that there is no person so hopeless that God cannot redeem them.

o   Christmas means that God’s love for you is so great that there is no mess you can make that God can’t help you clean up.

o   The first Christmas means that God will go to any extreme in order to speak his love and grace to a sinful and broken humanity.

Sure it is a messy love, but that’s because it is God’s love…for our messy lives

·        So push aside the clutter just for today

·        Step over the litter of things you have left undone

·        Forget that pile of deceit and depression

·        And that pile of fear and faultfinding

·        And that pile of hurt and hopelessness

·        Look past the glittering lights that blind us to all that is wrong with our lives and the world.

·        AND OPEN THE DOOR TO THE CHRISTMAS CHRIST

·        Open the door for God to come into the mess of your life not to clean it up… but to redeem it.

·        And, oh, don’t worry.  God’s not afraid to get his hands dirty.