Manger

Luke 2:1-20

She brought forth her firstborn son, 

and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, 

and laid him in a manger; 

because there was no room for them in the inn.

 

That’s it right there, the Christmas story, right?

It’s the iconic Christmas image: one infant, snugly wrapped, slightly glowing, asleep in an animal’s feed box. 

The other characters vary from image to image: cattle, angels, shepherds, donkey, sheep, stars, Mary & Joseph, a little modern child… But the infant in a manger rests in the center of the iconic image of biblical Christmas.

(In fact, this is the image of Jesus that I’ve carried on the back of my worship binder for months, ever since one of the kids of our church drew me a picture this summer, when Christmas still seemed miles and ages away.)

 

The story we retell tonight is rich with images and symbols, with details of politics and government, social realities, divine messengers and common laborers, carefully chosen to give Luke’s discerning reader a clear picture of just what world Jesus is born in, for what purpose, and how irregular it all is.

 

And the manger must be particularly important. 

Luke mentions it three separate times. 

Once when Jesus is laid there by his mother. 

A second time when a powerful angel tells the shepherds how to recognize the Savior born for them in Bethlehem.

A third time when the shepherds actually see the child lying there.

 

In 2025, it might feel familiar to you and me to hear that the Savior born for us, God’s own self with us, is lying in a manger. 

A common animals’ feed trough. 

It’s endearing and it resonates with sweet tunes of Christmas carols and hymns.

 

Luke certainly emphasizes it for its original shock value, though.

God coming with enough power to save us all – the long-awaited savior of God’s people – should not fit in a manger. God should appear in places of power to be most effective at saving the world. Not in insignificant, undignified places, easy to overlook. 

But here’s God, now. An insignificant infant in a makeshift crib, basically housed with the working animals.

 

It's God thumbing God’s nose at expectations. God ridiculing the powers that be.

God deliberately messing with our minds.

(Gee, thanks, God)

 

And I suspect that Luke didn’t just emphasize the manger to shake our socioeconomic and theological assumptions, but also to prickle up our sense of the ordinary.

 

Because a manger is so profoundly utilitarian.

Nobody would gild a manger. 

No social media influencers want to show you their brand new, special, improved animal feeding trough.

It’s an animals’ food tray. Its only function is to be practical. To fuel up the working animals on whom daily life depends.

 

Translated into the 21^st century, it’s the gas station, or the battery drawer, or the recurring payment to PSEG so that you can run your computer, keep food in your refrigerator, get your other daily tasks done at home or at work.

It’s the obligation you take care of when you are thinking about other things. So that you can do the other things.

The manger is exactly the kind of thing or place you would overlook while you are using it. 

 

Unless you were in so much distress you don’t have the ability to fill the manger for your working animals. Or unless someone specifically stopped you, and made you look at, and think about, where you are and what you are doing.

 

And that’s where Jesus showed up, all those years ago.

In the functional and ordinary. 

In the discounted and ignorable.

 

In just the place and way we could so very, very easily miss noticing God with us.

 

The God who wants to be with us not only on special occasions, not only in desperation, grief, or joy, but also in the most forgettable, ordinary moments, turns up in the physical manifestation of ordinary tasks.

The mighty savior of humanity and lovable infant God turns up in any or every dreaded phone call, every dollar spent or dish washed, every time you remember to use your right turn signal.  God breathes in every small act of kindness, every passing conversation, every tiny forgettable or resisted attempt to repair relationships or our world.

The God who wants to be with us in all things lays claim, at Jesus’ birth, to the places and the actions in which we would never be looking for God.

 

And that – that profound, practical, ordinariness of Jesus’ birth – is absolutely extraordinary.

Because this is how we know that there is no detail of our life, no action or need or hope, too routine or mundane for God to bother with.

No time, no condition, when we are out of the reach of God’s love.

No place where God is not glad to spend time with us.

 

Which, when I think about it seriously, blows my mind.

(My mind, which is so often filled to forgetful overflowing with tedious details, small tasks, little needs and chores and facts and why did I walk into this sentence…this room… whatever.

Imagine: God born into those details)

 

And if your heart glows a little bit, thinking about this tonight,

or if the classic image of that infant in a manger stirs warmth, or hope, or peace, or longing in your soul,

then it is good news – very good news – that God’s manger is everywhere in our lives. In all the ordinariness of our days. 

(good news) That the love of God might actually be making a place to show up in your grocery cart, as you steer through crowded aisles, not even actually looking at the cart as you fill it with weekly necessities.

That the power of God might be at work in one bland email in the flood we’re trying to wade through, day after day – even if you skimmed that particular email without really looking.

 

That the power of God to change and renew human hearts is able to turn up at the wall outlet as you plug in Christmas lights between one chore and another, and they start to twinkle in the darkness.

 

Where else might you find the birth of God in your everyday life? 

What daily drudgery – what ordinary task, or place, or experience – do you need to have filled with the power and love of God? 

What boring, practical thing that you do, to care for others or for yourself, needs a deep infusion of the peace and presence of God?

 

 

Tonight – with candles, and carols, and a sense of occasion – we pause to look deliberately at the holy in the ordinary.
We stop, and look, and think about what we are experiencing in the forgettable. 

Look at the gently glowing baby in the practical, utilitarian manger, to feel the love and power of God tugging deep down at the base of our hearts. Sitting in the overlooked corners of our souls, just waiting for us to notice a space of peace in the ordinariness. A little spurt of holy joy and delight in the small practical tasks of life. A little pool of heart-melting love, felt or practiced in the routine work of getting through the day.

 

For behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day – this day, any ordinary day – a Savior, who is Christ, our God.

Christ, our God who wants so much to be with us in all things, that God shows up in a manger to claim every ordinary moment and task and thing, 

every ordinary you and me, 

as the center of love, and holy peace, and divine joy. 

 

God's Got You

Haggai 2:1-9

Have you ever started a project – maybe home improvement, or setting up a budget, or planning for the future – and find there’s a piece of information you’re going to need to chase down?

And looking up that information reminds you of another task that’s due soon, so you complete that task quickly, which reminds you to get a different piece of information…

until you find yourself googling plumbing supplies for a whole different project you are not yet sure you’re even going to do at all, or browsing the internet to find exactly the rug you’ll need after your next home improvement project is done?

 

And then you look back at your original plan or budget and it looks hopeless to balance or solve or complete, and you just leave it open in the background, haunting you?

 

Well, that’s the situation God’s people are in when we hear the prophet Haggai talking to them this morning.

They’ve been in exile in Babylon for a generation or two – most of them were born in exile – and now Cyrus of Persia has conquered Babylon and sent them back to their ancient homeland and told them that they should rebuild God’s Temple in Jerusalem. The enormous, splendid Temple that King Solomon built with the wealth of nations, long ago.

 

It’s important – even essential – to the present and future of God’s people that they rebuild the Temple. That they create this center for community, this anchor for identity. Restoring the Temple to the beauty and power it held before the Babylonians smashed it is about reclaiming, establishing, their sense of self and purpose and nationhood as the people of God.

 

And here they are, a small group sent back and commissioned to rebuild the Temple, and no doubt they started out with focus and enthusiasm, but now…

They don’t have everything they need.

They need to put their own homes together, and get their own business organized so they can eat.

They have other stuff to do to get resettled after a generational exile disrupted them.

 

And they’ve gotten stuck on the Temple project. Maybe they’ve gotten as far as a half-restored wall, and rebuilt foundations, but it’s a massive project. Most of them don’t have any memory of – and no vision for – the splendor and solidity they are trying to build. And they don’t know where the time and materials are all coming from.

 

Have you ever been at that place in your life?

At work, or school, or in some community you’re part of? Or your family or personal life?

 

Just thinking about it, my shoulders feel heavy and I would like to go back to bed.

 

Enter Haggai, the prophet, speaking for God.

“Oh, hey there, look at that one row of stones you’ve laid. Doesn’t look like much, does it?

Yeah, I know.

Take courage!

Be strong, Zerubbabel and Joshua, you leaders!

Take courage, all you people!

Work because I am with you.”

 

I got you, God says to the people.

I promised I’d take care of you and set you up, I’m living among you now so that you have nothing to fear.

Count on me.

You do not have to pull this off alone.

 

And I’ll take care of providing the stuff you don’t have. The treasure of all nations and silver and gold and all the splendor that you aren’t going to find in poor, occupied, slowly recovering Jerusalem.

Phew!

My shoulders are relaxing again, a bit.

 

How many of us need to hear someone say that to us, now?

Need to hear God say, “I got you. Count on me. You do not have to pull this off alone.”

 

Maybe you’re managing a health or financial crisis in your family.

Maybe you’re looking at career change, or retirement, or some other life transition or celebration, and the road ahead just looks too steep, too rocky, to believe you can get to the end of it (so why try now?).

Maybe you really need to taste an old family recipe at Thanksgiving this year, but no one is selling one of the essential ingredients.

Maybe you want to figure out how to do something to help folks who are going hungry and working unpaid through the federal shutdown, and you keep running into dead ends of impenetrable and inadequate systems of support.

Maybe you’re trying to balance a budget that just won’t balance.

Maybe you just needed to get on a plane this weekend and you saw an hour-long security line and heard a voice in your head moaning “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here”.

 

And you just need to hear God say, “I got you. Count on me. You do not have to pull this off alone.”

 

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

Listen.

 

God’s got us.

The obstacles, and the tedium, and the friction of gritty daily evils and selfishness and greed are real, but God’s got us.

We aren’t doing this alone.

We’re not alone in any work of healing, community building, hope.

Any work of building practical supports for faith and trust and identity and mutual support. Not alone in any work of sharing vision, reaching toward God; any work of love.

 

Listen again, and hear God say, “I got you. Count on me.”

 

So let’s refocus. Let’s get back to work on this essential, core-community project.

 

I’ve got you, God says, so let’s quit distracting yourselves. Take heart, take courage, and get back to work on what matters.

Count on me. I’ve got what you need, even if you can’t see where or how. I’ll help you complete this work.

You’re not alone in this. God is with us. And you’ve got God’s people to support you, and God’s people looking to you, to support others; be part of the work.

 

God’s got us, friends.

Not so we can give up, and wait for God to just appear and change the world.

God’s got us so that we can do the work of building and restoration, whatever that work may be for us. So that we can care for one another. So that we can build hope, and share love, and grow, and make our community and our world a better, more healing, more awe-inspired, more joy-filled place. So that we can sense the presence of God, and share the love of God with the folks right around us who need it, too.

 

Today, God is calling us – as well as those ancient rebuilders of Jerusalem – calling you and me to take a deep breath, know that God is here among us, and refocus our hearts and our daily work.

 

Because we can do what God invites us to do.

With God among us, we can unknot the things we don’t know how to solve.

We can rebuild what was once destroyed.

We can overcome the challenges to make a home for God’s people in a broken world.

We can create beauty, and wonder, and hope and trust.

We can relieve our exhaustion, cut loose from despair, outlast our impatience, be braver than our fears.

 

Not instantly, but consistently.

Breathing in the presence of God with us,

leaning into God’s invitation to “Count on me,”

and taking courage, taking heart to work with God in the daily, ongoing, enormous and splendid, project of building hope, and healing, and love.

Dishonest Wealth

Luke 16:1-13

Why??

Why would a business owner, a landowner, praise the employee who cheated them?

 

Is this guy in Jesus’ story crazy? Corrupt himself? Just…weird?

 

And then, because this is a Jesus story, a parable, you and I might be wondering whether, and how, we are supposed to imagine God praising a cheater, a thief.

 

Eww.

 

And “eew” is, apparently, the reaction that generation after generation of disciples and scripture scholars have had to this story. No one has an explanation that they are satisfied with.

In fact, it’s probable that Luke himself, writing this story down for us, was confused about what point Jesus is trying to make by telling this story. He piles on a bunch of other things he remembers Jesus saying about dishonesty and wealth and trustworthiness, maybe hoping that something in those quotes will make sense of a story that…just doesn’t make sense.

 

So, when we’re stuck with an uncomfortable story about praising a cheater, it’s probably worth noting that Jesus has been telling us all along that our assumptions about who is closest to God, and who is not, are often wrong.
For early hearers of Jesus’ stories, it might not be that much more shocking to hear a dishonest manager praised than to hear that the tax collectors – graft-ridden collaborators that they are – are going to be among the first in God’s kingdom. And Jesus himself, as we heard last week, tends to eat with and celebrate people who the religious establishment thinks of as uncorrected “sinners”.

 

In fact, if you look back at the whole history of God’s people, there are a bunch of times when God picks out a shady or weaselly character and turns them into a “hero”.
That might be comforting when we reflect on our own imperfections, and the limited qualifications for heroism that many of us have. Though it’s still itchy and uncomfortable to consider God praising and congratulating a cheater right in front of us, when many of us also know very well exactly how it feels to be cheated.

 

So it’s helpful to me to remember that one thing I have learned about parables, about these stories Jesus tells, is that however easy it might be to label one character in the story “God”, or “us”, there’s never actually a one-to-one correlation.
It’s not that the “rich man” – the landowner or business owner – in the story is God.
(In fact, more often than not “rich men” are the losers or bad guys in Jesus’ teachings.)
Nor is the manager, nor the people who got their debts reduced, a direct equivalent to God. Or to us.

 

So maybe our best clue in the story is Jesus’ comment about “dishonest wealth”, and that other comment about how you cannot serve both God and money (or really any other idol).

 

Maybe all the money in this story is dishonest already. Not just after the manager cheats the owner, or after he makes all those unauthorized discounts and debt reductions. Maybe all the wealth is “dishonest” even before the rich man gets it and starts trying to use money to make more money, creating debts and obligations.

 

Oof, that’s messy.

Because humans being what we are, we can’t be fully honest and innocent and pure when we’re fully immersed in a dishonest system.

Maybe that’s why the dishonest manager gets praised – because he uses the dishonest resources of the system he’s in to try to build something else: relationships that will matter when he doesn’t have those already messy resources to spend.

 

I’m speculating there, and I’m not entirely happy with it.

But this story came to us because other people, over the centuries, have trusted that there must be some useful wisdom in it, so we all keep trying to find it.

 

And I am curious whether Jesus is trying to tell us about what it means to follow Jesus while we live and work in a world of “dishonest wealth”.
Because the all money that you and I handle – however much or however little we have, hold, or distribute – is money that is the currency of an imperfect system that has been corrupted, broken, accommodated to injustice, and exploited for self-interest as long as humans have had currency.

 

It's not that dollars haven’t also served justice, bought healing, or been used for holy purposes, but any system in which wealth makes one person more powerful than another attracts self-interest and dishonesty.

 

So maybe Jesus is telling us something about how to live in the world we actually live in.

To “make friends” in the world of dishonest wealth. Build relationships. Spend, or “squander” money and wealth in ways that build for eternity.

 

I’m pretty sure Jesus is not trying to encourage us to dishonesty and cheating. But I suspect Jesus does want to stir up our discomfort about money. To provoke an awkward consciousness that the money you and I have or manage – cash, or credit, or digital bits in some banking software – is already tied up in all the dishonest and honest acts that brought it to us. The acts of our employers and clients; of our ancestors, our government, our families and friends and a lot of people we don’t actually know. That we live with money in a messy, sticky, system, and we have to reckon with that.

 

Jesus also might want us to notice that money doesn’t give us – or buy us – peace of heart. Or love, or eternity, or the wonder and glory of the presence of God. Or any of the things our souls long for. So we can – should – look to something other than money to place our trust in.

God, for example.

 

So that maybe instead of “serving wealth” – letting money steer us – we’ll have opportunities to serve God with “dishonest wealth”. Maybe “squander” money – ours, our employer’s, the government’s, our families’ and friends’ – on things that do help make love, and peace, and eternity, and the presence of God more real in the messy ordinary world.
To spend money we can’t trust to be honest on the things that God would spend love and resources and power on.

 

I don’t know if that’s what Jesus meant the first time he told this story, two long millennia ago. But I believe it’s one thing Jesus might want us to consider; to try.

 

And I think the same principle applies, in slightly different ways, to a lot more than money. To success, influence, rank in the office or school or any organization, political power – anything else that gives us power in the messy, often dishonest, world we live in today.
And perhaps to prayer – which gives us power in God’s care for us – and still has to work in the messy world we live in.

 

Pray for the king, we hear Paul advise Timothy today. Pray for the people in power, the government. (Which, by the way, we often do in the prayers of the Episcopal Church, including in our service today.)

 

For some of us, some of the time, praying for political officials, or for people with unchecked power, feels just as uncomfortable as watching a cheater get praised by someone we were hoping we could trust.

 

So – since we have to deal with the powers that be, just as we have to deal with money – we can “squander” our other resources on the things God would love, that God would do.

We can pray, should pray, lavishly for the “king”: for our own government officials, and the politicians we dislike or despise, and for our employers and for media monopolists and far distant corporate officials – all those powers that be.

Pray, so that we so that we are focused on the will of God for those in power – and for all who are subject to, affected by, that power – instead of being caught up in whether the government or boss or whatever is dishonest or honest or evil or righteous.
Pray that by God’s work in and around the powers of this world, more and more of God’s people are brought into the gifts of peace of heart, the wonder and glory of God; into love and eternity and wholeness.
Pray so that our souls and hearts are tuned to the mind and heart of God when we consider the powers of this world, instead of being steered by the will of those worldly powers.

 

And even as we pray and spend our resources as close to God’s heart as we can, we may still be asking, “Why?”

Why, God, do things go so wrong?
Why do the cheaters seem to have your favor?

 

And we may never get the answers that make sense, but at least we will have our hearts and actions immersed in the love of God, working in us and through us, always, to heal our selves, and all the world.