It is so unusual to me to come to church at night. It feels very different than Sunday mornings. It feels darker and colder—it feels like more work to get here, which is counter-intuitive since it’s later in the day, but there’s a watching of the clock—do I have time to do this before I have to get ready for church? It feels subversive and secret—the windows are dark, the parking lot lights might be out….it is a little unsettling. It’s a bit odd. Sunday morning, it feels more like we are where we belong. A time for suits and dresses and bright sunshine and hope and possibilities. But night time is not the place for such things. After all, my mama told me early in life that not much good happens out in the world after midnight, and when you get in trouble, mostly, it doesn’t happen at noon. I’m not ruling it out, mind you, but “the night time, is the right time” as Bro. Ray Charles has told us, “to be with the one you love, now,” It is not the right time for Church Stuff, the time for God to be at work. If there are things going on at night, they are probably of a nefarious nature or if there’s good stuff going on we will miss it because we are asleep. I am most particularly likely to be asleep…in my middle age, I can no longer make it through a 9 o’clock movie!
But on Christmas Eve, we make an exception to this and we come out to church, because of this birth story from Luke. See the angels appeared with this good and surprising news of a savior born in the city of David at NIGHT. While all the respectable world was asleep, having set their ADT alarms and turned on their dishwashers and closed up their gated communities. Presumably, the birth took place as Bethlehem lay sleeping. God worked in the still of the night, in secret almost, like the way yeast works in bread dough in a dark place. God worked to bring a baby into the world whose name would be called Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. And he wasn’t born in a palace or even a Hampton Inn…or for Pete’s sake, a Best Western, he was born where the animals were kept and he was laid in a feeding trough, like an unwanted child, like a homeless stranger. The savior of the world had come and it wasn’t 10 a.m. after we’d all had our coffee, it was at night. Without the heavenly host to come down and lay it out in no uncertain terms, the world could have easily missed it. Even the wise men who’ll come later need a neon sign to find him…The Savior was born in the last place in the world you’d think to look. And it happened on the night shift.
While most folks were sleeping, the angels appeared, not to the “Most Likely to Succeeds” or the pastors or the Pharisees or the Presidents, but to the shepherds. Shepherds were not wholesome farm boys from Kansas or cute 4 year olds with bathrobes and pretend crooks in their hands. Shepherds were not the people you’d want to be in the ancient world. They were unclean, they were the outcasts, they were looked down upon as low class and no-count. In a modern day Christmas play, they’d be working the thankless jobs, the night shift, or they’d be homeless, under a bridge somewhere, drinking out of bottles in brown paper sacks. And THEY were the ones who got the word from the angels. They were the ones who got to hear the angels sing. The coming of our Lord was good news of great joy for all the people but the news rang out first to the very last folks you’d expect to receive it. And this good news of great joy was decidedly NOT good news for folks like Herod, btw. I’d like to think I’d be a shepherd in God’s Christmas play, but considering my income, my education, and my overall spot in life, I don’t think I’d make the cut. Someone like me would have likely slept right on through it.
Christmas eves remind us that, in case you had forgotten, this is a God-thing. It is not a Rudolph thing or a Santa thing. It is not something that we thought up. This night is about remembering that God is God and we are not. It is a reminder that when we could not save ourselves, when we had run out of money at the end of the month, and run out of sanity and options and ideas… our God came down, to us. God came into our 12 midnight worries and our messy marriages, into our world of business and usual, into our nightly news and our wars and rumors of wars, and God did the very thing we could not. God cared enough to send the very best—and it wasn’t a hallmark card. It was God’s own self, wrapped, not in ribbons and bows, but in flesh and bone, for us and for our salvation. That salvation is for shepherds and soldiers, for beggars and kings, for you and for me.
God has acted first, like God always does, creating and loving and caring and forgiving. Christmas comes to give us a new chance to see the gift we have been given—the gift is not an X-box, or some air Jordans, but the gift of a Savior, the gift of a life that has meaning, the gift of freedom from fear and death, the gift of freedom to love and to forgive. The gift has already been given—once for all—a present for you and for me. It’s a gift for people we don’t like, it’s a gift for people who are right now proceeding with their lives as business as usual, preparing to go to the store or the club, going to bed like this is a night like any other. The gift is for all people—it is good tidings of great joy. When you open your presents, don’t forget to open that gift, the only one that really matters. And then once you’ve opened it, and given thanks, share it. Go looking for folks who are watching their flocks by night—in hospitals, in prisons, in bars, in stables of fear and doubt, and tell them, show them, love them, for to them is born this night in Bethlehem a savior, which is Christ the Lord., Night time, you see, is just the right time, for God to be with the world God loves. Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to those whom God favors.
No comments:
Post a Comment