I’ve seen a lot of birth announcements on Facebook recently.
In the old days – you know, a decade or two ago – when the baby was born you called people, using the telephone. Grandparents, siblings, dear friends: the new baby’s family circle, got the call, and printed announcements or word of mouth took over from there.
Today, within hours of the baby’s birth, family, dear friends, and perhaps hundreds of near strangers are informed of the baby’s arrival, stats, name, and first photos online. An extraordinary number of unrelated people now share that intimate access to the birth day, including folks you didn’t even eat lunch with in high school.
But it’s oddly similar to that moment two thousand years ago when the sky around Bethlehem suddenly rang with the angelic birth announcement.
To an unrelated group of shepherds minding their own business, the sudden and prodigal news of a baby’s birth, stats, name and general appearance were even less expected than a former colleague’s hospital photos.
But the joy was real, and in this case the news was meant precisely for the hundreds, then millions of near-strangers who would eventually learn the baby’s story.
That’s the thing about Christmas. The thing that’s oddly contemporary in a wireless, internet-connected world. The news is for EVERYONE.
This miracle of God, born human, living among us, is remarkably public and undiscriminating.
It’s because that baby, born in a stable, announced by angels, is our all-access pass to God. Near-strangers, the ones who don’t even appear on the Christmas card list, that’s who gets intimate access to God, tonight.
In Luke’s story and in Matthew’s, the people who come to see this baby, to witness and celebrate the birth, are precisely the people we would never imagine in our own family nativity stories.
There are shepherds – the first century Palestinian equivalent of day laborers, widely regarded as unreliable and socially marginal.
And there are magi. Foreigners. They hang out with governors and kings (also not the folks who usually come to visit the baby in the hospital) but they probably had accents and funny clothes.
That scene around the manger is full of people who don’t belong there: the infant asleep in a feed trough, a mother and father far from home. Animals. Laborers. Foreigners.
That picture is God’s announcement to us that in Jesus, everything changes. This infant is God’s gift to us of unrestricted welcome and access.
God, born human, is wide open to the unlikely, to those who seem undeserving, to strangers, to you and me, reaching out our hands to hold a baby.
For the last couple of months, Brian and Ruth Ann Pfohl brought their foster baby Easton to church, and I watched as he passed from arm to arm, cradled by people he’d barely met. Like the infant Jesus, Easton was on loan to us, and like Jesus his love and nurture came from strangers, adoptive parents, and unexpected friends.
Like the infant Jesus, Easton simply let us fall in love.
Other parents of this congregation have told me about watching their child pass from arm to arm, in worship and at coffee hour, held and loved by friends and near-strangers in a mutual and unplanned act of trust.
Holding a baby is an act of radical intimacy.
And here, especially tonight, you don’t have to be a parent to hold the baby, to nurture growth and love with the ordinary physical support of your arms and body.
You don’t have to be a family member, or even a close friend, to fall in love, to have grace and compassion kindled in your heart by the weight of an infant in your arms.
God is born – in an unlocked, temporary stable, open to all and sundry – so that you and I can never lose that intimate, nurturing, radical access to God. God is born an ordinary, extraordinary, human infant so that you and I, strangers to the family but beloved of God, can fall in love tonight.
And over and over again.
The Christmas miracle of birth and angel news is a miracle of invitation. You and I are invited to family intimacy with God, tonight and forever.
Of course, intimacy isn’t easy.
Once they get inside our hearts, babies grow and change and take us to unexpected places, demanding that our hearts grow with them. It’s the same with anyone we relate to in love. Intimacy erodes our defenses against grace and joy as well as grief and pain.
So vulnerability is part of Christmas.
At this season our dependence on one another for hope and happiness is more obvious than usual – around the table, under the tree, in a mall or in a candlelit church – when the world insists on brightness and cheer.
And that, too, is why God is an infant, tonight, surrounded by strangers. A baby’s fragile body depends on the constant support of others for nourishment, cleanness, and even warmth, and God invites us to offer that care.
Tonight, God the baby is vulnerable to us, open to the pain and the delights of human relationship. From this time forward, every human hope and pain, every fear and every joy, is felt by God.
Once we fall in love with a baby, we belong to that baby for life.
Through sleepless nights, new discoveries, bruised knees and hearts, abundant growth, the care and joy never end.
And that, too, is why God is born in a stable, announced with exuberant joy to strangers in the field, and visited by foreigners. God the infant invites us to open our arms because tonight no one, no one at all, is left out of that invitation, that love, that belonging, because it doesn’t end in that stable.
This miracle is meant to go on and on.
Day in and day out, the Christmas miracle of birth and love keeps hold of us.
Tonight, there is this infant, God made flesh, so that the unlikely, those who seem undeserving, strangers -- you and I -- can fall in love with God.
Because once we fall in love, the miracle claims our days and nights, our hearts and hopes,
and filled and surrounded by love, we belong to God for always.
Merry Christmas!
Christmas Eve 2010
