In the Ordinary

Luke 2:1-20

About a week ago, I admitted to some friends here at Trinity that while I was looking forward to a lot about our Christmas celebrations, somehow I just wasn’t feeling the Christmas spirit this year. The joy and the wonder just weren’t connecting for me. Nothing felt…special…about the season.

The next night I happened to need GPS directions, and fished out my phone. At unpredictable intervals, when I connect the phone to the car, I get a sudden eruption of They Might Be Giants or Vivaldi or a Bill Bryson audiobook – always the things I forgot I ever loaded into my phone.

That night it was “Joy to the World.”

And I realized suddenly that – for all the wrapping and shopping, Christmas program prep and family schedule shuffling I had been doing to prepare for Christmas – I hadn’t yet turned on the music.

In fact, I’d almost forgotten about the carols this year.

And music is my touchstone, my talisman – the thing I turn to to ground myself in my faith. Music is my key to opening up my heart and mind to experience, truth, and memory. Singing is the way that I reach out to and receive the presence of God when I most need it in my life; the way that I pray.

So that night I didn’t frantically push at buttons to turn the unexpected music off, the way I usually do. After a verse or so I started singing along, still creaky and spotty from my Advent laryngitis. The next song in the shuffle was “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing,”

and as I sang “pleased as man with us to dwell; Jesus our Emmanuel,” I started to cry, because I finally felt the season I had been missing. I felt the awe and wonder and joy of the presence of God come to dwell with us in my car, in the world, and in my heart.

It may not be music for you. It may be something else.

At Christmas, maybe you need lights, twinkling in the darkness. Maybe it’s the fresh winter smell of evergreen, or the warm scent of candle wax. Maybe there’s a certain family ritual or personal tradition; a story you tell or hear. Or a particular prayer. Something you turn to, that you count on to trigger that rush of Christmas into your life; to trigger a sense of, or a hope for, the presence of God in the world.

Because you need that.

I need that.

There isn’t one of us here today who doesn’t need the presence of God; doesn’t need to feel the love and strength of the infinite, almighty and eternal.

There is not one of us who does not need to know, somewhere in our hearts and souls, that God shows up for us, is with us.

Many of us need to experience the reality of God’s presence because we feel alone or powerless in the face of grief, anger, tragedy, illness, loss – all the things that are rubbed raw by the holiday rush and emphasis on celebration.

But many of us also need, even more, to experience the reality of God’s presence – to know that God is with us - when things are, well, fine. When life is good and there’s a lot to look forward to, but we feel disconnected.

We need God, whether we think of it that way or not, when we sense a lack of meaning or power in our lives; when we are content but not particularly hopeful or active. We need God in order to be grounded and strong when things are ordinary. Need that sense of God next to us, with us, on our side, when things are so normal that we might be, well, bored.

And we are here today because God wants that for us, too.

Wants us to know that presence of unlimited power, powerful love, extreme hope, of awestruck wonder close beside us in our world, and in our lives.

God wants us to know beyond a doubt that God is with us in times of tragedy and pain; and just as much in the midst of the ordinary, mundane, and average.

So God becomes a baby.  

Jesus – all the divine power and presence of heaven and eternity – born in the profoundly ordinary crowd of a not particularly special village.

The story we tell about that birth has accumulated a lot of romantic detail over the years we’ve told it, and it doesn’t often feel much like our real, daily life. Few of us nap with cattle, or bed down our babies with sheep. The holy light doesn’t glow out of our kitchens, workplaces, and cars, or many of the people we spend time with. Heavenly peace, nature singing, and angelic choruses seem far removed from the places and tasks, hopes and griefs where you and I need God to come.

Still, Luke is telling us a story of just how ordinary, just how grounded in daily reality this God incarnate is. He frames the moment of God’s birth in the political realities of emperors and governors, places the infant Jesus in a feed tray, and reminds us he’s wrapped up to sleep in the same way as any ordinary baby of his day. The details have become special to us over the centuries, but for Luke they are as ordinary as those blue-striped hospital blankets and a hand-me-down car seat.

The specific ordinariness of these details is a sign – a gesture of promise and meaning from God – that God shows up for us, too, in the places where it’s easiest to overlook the presence of God. God comes to us in the car on a dark winter’s night, in the constant round of meetings and emails, chores and meals; the relentless drive for results and milestones; even in the cold blue glow of a slow evening in front of the TV.

The ordinariness of the details around Jesus assure us that God shows up specifically in the places it’s easiest to overlook our own need for God with us, for God filling our routine with vibrant, active hope, profound love, powerful joy.

In fact, one sign of just how ordinary God-with-us is in this story is the presence of the one extraordinary detail: the angels. A sudden glorious awe-inspiring mighty host appears in the fields outside Bethlehem because otherwise no one would notice how ordinary God has come to be.

God provided angels that day long ago so the shepherds would notice the extraordinary in the ordinary; sent them to spark the story that you and I hear and tell and sing today.

God sent the angels.

God sent carols to my car.

God sends to you, sends to us, the original story and everything we have built around it since: lights and candles, song and prayer, family rituals and cultural traditions; trees and wreaths and candy canes, so that you and I will notice, too. So that we will not miss God’s constant commitment to be among us, to be with us.

So that we’ll also experience the presence of profound, proactive love; of powerful hope and deeply grounded joy and peace in all of the most powerful, painful, and above all, ordinary moments and ages of our lives.

So listen today to the angels.

And listen again in August, in March, in a busy week, on a dragging Thursday afternoon.

Hold on to the story, the lights, the prayers and stories and symbols; hold on in season and out of season, treasure these things in your heart, like Mary. Because these things are how God reminds us to notice God’s constant presence.

Listen, always, to the angels, singing:

Veiled in flesh – in the familiar and ordinary – the Godhead see; Hail the incarnate Deity; pleased… with us to dwell. God with you and me and us, Jesus, our Emmanuel.