Tonight is a night of great wonder. A baby is wrapped in swaddling clothes; our Christian faith is wrapped in mystery. Tonight, inside this building, we come to hear the story about a baby who is outside in a manger. We have come like the shepherds, with a curiosity about the news of a messiah. We have come like the shepherds, with a desire to discover the truth. But before we can discover the truth, we have to sit in wonder.
Tonight I wonder why God bothered. Why did God bother to give us a baby when nothing else worked? When we humans continued to mess things up, when we humans continued to get it wrong, why did He give us another human, a tiny human? If we flip back to the Old Testament, we find a God of compassion. We ate the fruit. The flood did not eradicate sin. We wanted our own kings. Prophets were neither understood nor listened to. But amidst all of that, God extended His hand in concern and tried repeatedly to help us. God would not give up on us. He continued to bother with us. I wonder why He bothered.
Tonight I wonder why we do not bother and cannot be bothered. God bothered to make the universe and our world within it, and He continued to bother with creation despite how things were going and are going, but here we are, defying all logic, unable to be bothered. We have a whole world to us and for us. We have a playground of sights, sounds, and delights. We have time and we have space to grow, learn, and discover about anything we want. We live in beauty that has infinite value and we have hearts with no limits of love. And to top it all off, we have been given a story that explains all of it, a story that illustrates where we fit into this wonder, a story that promises a place at God’s table forever. But we cannot be bothered. We open our gifts and are upset when we do not receive exactly what we asked for. Someone asks us what is wrong and we do not know how to answer. We cannot be bothered to enter into creation, we cannot be bothered to delight in the beauty, we cannot be bothered to explore and discover the palace of unending peace, we cannot be bothered to receive all that we need in all that He offers. And He offers us all, everything. I wonder why we cannot be bothered.
In the middle of those wonders, we come to the wonder of Christmas. God came to an earth that He created to be with humans that He created, even though we humans live in a disordered state. He set aside majesty and fame. He allowed himself to be wrapped in rags not robes, to be laid in a manger not a palace. The wonder of Christmas is why God came to earth to live among us in a way of little bother, a way of humble beginnings.
These three wonders – why He bothered, why we cannot be bothered, why He came in little bother – underscore the story of Christmas and the greater truth behind this holiday. God bothered. God still bothers.
The Christmas story is one of familiarity – donkeys, dirt roads, no room at the inn, a tired innkeeper, a woman due any second. In Luke, though, we do not find any of those key components to the story we can recite from memory. What is in Luke? What does Luke consider to be key components to the story of Jesus’ birth? “She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger.” Something Luke finds so key that he tells us twice.
The manger is easier to understand than the cloth – it represents Jesus’ humble beginnings, Him being born outside in the cold. His first visitors were social outcasts – shepherds. The manger tells us that Jesus came in humility for even the lowly, but what does the cloth tell us?
At the most vulnerable moment of His life, Jesus comes to us disarmed. God sent Himself to us disarmed, His love disarmed. The answer to why God bothered and continues to bother must be because He wanted to join us, both as fully human and as fully divine, to be and become one of us, to enter into relationship with us, to be our friend in Jesus.
He continues to bother because He refuses to quit, to give up, to say all of creation is just a job gone bad. God wants to transform the mess we have made in sin into the beauty of His incarnation. He could not reveal Himself to us fully through creation alone; He had to transform His love into one of us, bring us literally Himself so that we can see how much He continues to care for us.
He came in little bother to turn our lives upside down. The God we know as Father has come to us as child. He steps down from His place as Father to become our child, exalting us and making us not just His children but also His parents.
The one who set the stars in the sky has now been set in our arms, asking us to care for Him. The one we pray to every day is now with us, wrapped in cloth, unable to move. The Old Testament gives us a God of compassion who extends His hand for us, but tonight we receive Him flipping the script, needing us to extend a hand to Him. Our world has been changed by a baby, a tiny human. Our world has been transformed by a God who disarmed Himself to give us love incarnate.
And here we are, unable to be bothered.
The innkeeper turned away Mary and Joseph, and ultimately Jesus, because there was no room. We turn away Jesus because… why? Because there is no room?
So God comes to us in a manger, outside, in humble beginnings, with His first visitors being the social outcasts. If we say there is no room, He says that is okay; He will take what He can get. So His response to us is not one of force, but one of passivity. He does not force us to love Him, but He wants into our hearts and our lives. So He comes to us as a tiny human, needy, helpless, wrapped in cloth to make it clear that He has no trick, no catch, no trap. He comes to us innocent, disarmed. Tonight is the time, our time, to light our hearts vacancy sign, make room for the love of God incarnate, and disarm ourselves. Tonight is the time, our time, to take the bundle of joy that Mary is holding out to us and hold Him close. Tonight is the time, our time, to take Him, hold Him, embrace Him, love Him back. Tonight is the time, our time, to accept the present of God’s presence living among us.
