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The Rev. Mark Byers
Episcopal Church of the Apostles
La Quinta, CA

December 23, 2007

 

A New Old Story

When I was growing up, every Christmas Eve the oldest male present wherever we were gathered would read what we called the “Christmas Story,” meaning the Nativity story from Luke chapter 2, which we just read. My mom, who was very much a feminist in some ways, still insisted until pretty recently that it had to be the oldest male present. Perhaps this was because her father read it to her growing up, which he did. I’ve heard my grandfather, father, and uncle read it. I’ve read it now myself to the family before. And tomorrow night, we’ll read it again.

Mary, we’re told, “kept these things and pondered them in her heart,” the old King James bible said. Now it reads, “Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.” I used to wonder, as a boy and a young man, what that meant. I suppose I thought she was just amazed at having seen angels and at all the people who came to see her baby, and at the fact that she had a baby under truly strange, wondrous circumstances when she hadn’t even quite been ready.

Now I think she was beginning to see how the story she was in the midst of related to the story of her people, going back centuries, and even further. Because I’m sure she, like all of us, knew more than one story. And maybe the story she heard when her people gathered together and told tales didn’t sound quite as powerful as it must have back in the earliest days of her people. Maybe for us, now, it doesn’t sound so powerful, either. What does it matter that Jesus was born and wrapped in swaddling clothes, and laid in a manger? Does it simply mean, “Hey, take some time to appreciate the beauty of a new child in the midst of all the confusing and sometimes noisy turmoil around us”?

Or is this something else?

This is the first of many times that Christian people will gather for worship in this room, and I want to say at the outset that this story means more than that. It is not an incident that takes place in isolation from other parts of God’s story, but rather, it is God yet again declaring to His people that He has good news for us. “To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.”

God’s people had been waiting, sometimes in slavery, sometimes in exile, sometimes under the rule of one or another of the empires of this world, for God to set them free. People who had been impatient had sometimes taken matters into their own hands, by rebelling and using weapons to try and overthrow their masters. But they had never been entirely successful. Sometimes they bought moments of freedom. Sometimes they were simply put down again, brutally.

Here is God, then, taking a very different path, fulfilling the ancient prophecies in a completely different way than the stories anticipated. Stories so often take a different direction than we anticipate, don’t they? And most often, we simply try to adjust: we adjust to a different life path than we thought we’d take, or to what we call bad luck, or to diminished expectations.

My daughter, Fiona, has recently learned the Lord’s Prayer. She does it really well. At first, though, she did something very typical of kids, and of adults, too. She would simply say the words in a way that made sense to her mind. So she would say, at first, “By kingdom come, I will be done.”

And that’s a little bit like a lot of Christians think, really, as funny as it sounds. By the time I go to heaven, God will accomplish my salvation and I’ll be finished. Then I suggested gently, again, the actual words.

And this time, she was a little closer. “By kingdom come, thy will be done.” Maybe that’s the way a lot of other Christians think. When I get to heaven, it’ll be just like you promised. But again, I keep suggesting those other words, the ones that Jesus taught us.

“Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

Christmas is the first day of the new Creation that comes to us as an utterly unexpected turn in the story we were living. It is new life, it is transformation, it is the knowledge that God will do through a baby, and then through the ones who follow him, that which he has promised since he first made his covenant with Abraham.

God told Abraham that he would be blessed, and that through him, all nations would be blessed. “On earth as it is in heaven.” “I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people,” of every nation. This day, in the city of La Quinta, God has brought into being a new church, and I promise you that if we believe in Jesus Christ, that we will be blessed and transformed, and that through us, others will be blessed and transformed. Now those are some words to treasure and think about. How will God change our stories to bring them into his story? Who will we find who will change us? Who will be changed through us?

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