Come to the Manger: See Jesus by Cheri Holdridge (with an assist by Kurt Young)

I think it might be presumptuous for me to say that I know God’s heart. I think I know something about God’s heart. I cannot say I know the fullness of God’s heart. But I do definitely believe this. God knows my heart, and God knows your heart.   Don’t you think God knows your heart?

And I believe in the time before Jesus was born, God’s heart was sad. God saw the suffering of God’s people. God saw that because God has given us the freedom to make our own choices that we were making bad choices. 

Human beings, for some reason, choose to hurt one another. We make selfish choices. We resort to violence, we’ve seen quite a bit too much of that lately. We are envious. We draw lines of separation. We could choose compassion, and we could choose to build relationships and form strong communities, and sometimes we do. But sometimes we don’t. And those are the times when God grieves. 

When God created the world, I believe God had a vision of a world of love and perfect harmony. But with human choice, sin came into the picture and things went down from there. 

If you study the Old Testament, we see in human history, before Jesus, a pattern of the people being in relationship with God for awhile.  They worship God and love God, and then they make big mistakes and fall away from God. Then they repent and God forgives them and things get better for awhile. And then the whole cycle repeats over, and over, and over again. 

Finally, God decides to do something dramatic. God opens up God’s heart to us. If you think of God like a mother, the most loving sacrifice a mother can give is her own child. Think about it. When a mother opens up her heart and soul, her most precious gift would be a child of her own flesh and blood.   So God said, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll send my own child, my flesh and blood to Earth, to be one of us.  Our Father-Mother God asks Mary and Joseph to be the surrogate parents of Jesus – so that God’s own child can be born in the world. 

That’s how we got to Christmas, the first Christmas: because God’s own heart was breaking for the world. God wanted to make things better.

We human beings, then and now, don’t know how to love one another, and so God sends Jesus to show us how. And we tell the story every year, because in telling the story, we begin to live into God’s way. So we tell the story tonight, again.  There are three scenes in the story. 

In the First Scene, Mary and Joseph travel to Bethlehem. They are forced to travel because of a census. Remember that their country is under control of the Roman government. The Romans have little concern of whether or not a census which demands everyone go to the town of their family’s origin is convenient for the locals. This kind of social-political tension might be unfamiliar to most of us. However there are many people in our world who live under threat from the political leaders in their own country every day.  Imagine what it would be like to live in the Middle East of today.  Of course, we know of the unending political tension in the Middle East which was the birthplace of Jesus. But even in our own country there are immigrant children, born in this country, living in fear of deportation because the government has the right to send them away. Though Mary and Joseph lived with the honor of being the parents of the child of God, they suffered the degradation of living under the rule of Rome. 

In the second scene, when they get to Bethlehem, they have no home of their own. There is no guestroom for them. By the way, here is a side note, for those kids and adults out there who have discovered that sometimes history has to be relearned. Those Christmas pageant’s that show the innkeepers slamming the doors and sending Mary and Joseph out to a barn? Those are dramatic versions, which sort of took some liberty with the text. It’s more likely that their relatives’ guest rooms were full. The guests would then stay in the living room.  The living rooms in those days had space for the animals to come in at night. There was sometimes a large living area with a step or two between the people area and the animal area, and the manger was actually between the two. It’s possible that Mary and Joseph were sleeping the in living room of their relatives, with the animals. That’s why the manger was a handy place for the baby. 

But clearly, they are not wealthy. They are possibly doubling up with family and crowding in with the animals. It was not comfortable.

In the third scene, shepherds come to visit. Shepherds are NOT the elite class of society.  They are not the light, fluffy, clean cut ones you’ve seen in Christmas pageants.   Hmmm, now WHY would God choose shepherds as the ones to whom the angel would visit? Wow! That is a great question. You see, shepherds were smelly, uneducated, and the outcast. 

You got it. Got loves the people on the margins! God love us. God wanted to be sure that the people know Jesus was coming for everyone. So, what better way to get that message out, than to have the angels go tell some smelly group of outcasts that no one liked and let them be the first to visit Jesus!

I suppose if Jesus were coming today, God would probably send the angel to a group of drunks in recovery at an AA meeting. Or maybe God would send the angel to the Transgender support group that The Village helped to start. Or maybe down the street to The Village Idiot on a summer day when a bunch of the bikers stop by for a drink on one of their poker runs? That’s not where YOU would expect the angels would go.  The list of people living on the edge is really endless isn’t it?

Well here is what happened (from Luke 2 for those following along from afar). You see the angel had said to the shepherds: I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: ¹¹to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. ¹²This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.”

 

And so they went to see Jesus. And when they saw him lying in the manger they told everyone what the angels had said, “and all who heard it were amazed.”¹⁹But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.  ²⁰The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them. 

          They were all changed.  And we are changed too. Every year, when we hear this story again.  It changes us.  It gives us hope.  

Our children want to be changed. And they have been changed. I started out this message by saying, that God knows our hearts.  God knows our hearts because God lives in our hearts, and when we open our hearts to Jesus, then he can use us to change the world. 

Two little girls at The Village learned that their parents were giving money to our Christmas offering to give Hope for Children Near and Far and those two children each gave $5 each, from their own money. Another10 year old boy from The Village, for the first time, isn’t so concerned about what gifts he is getting this year. He asked his parents for money so he could donate to his school’s project provide food for hungry families. He said he’s beginning to see that Christmas is more about giving than getting. 

Our small congregation is going to raise $5000 with our Christmas offering. We are going to help send young people who have grown up in an orphanage in Zimbabwe to get job training so that when they turn 18 they will be able to go to work and contribute to their communities.  That’s a lot of money for a congregation our size to raise in a few weeks.  

We tell the same simple story of Jesus’ birth every year, because we want to be changed by God every year. God knows our hearts. Our hearts are broken for people who live in fear, for people who are homeless and for people who live on the margins.  Because we are some of those people, we live next to some of those people, and we are in relationships with some of those people.  God sent Jesus to change our hearts and to change the world. 

This is the Christmas miracle. God does the impossible through us. We come to the manger to see Jesus. Because Jesus lives in us. As the offering basket is passed a little later I want you to take a tiny mirror out of it, and take it with you as a reminder that you are a reflection of Jesus.  We reflect Jesus out into the world.

So, have a Merry Christmas everyone. Let it be a Merry Christmas for you as you remember that God sent God’s light, the love of Jesus into the world and that light shines through you. Amen.

COME TO THE MANGER: SEE MARY AND JOSEPH by Cheri Holdridge (with an assist by Kurt Young)

Since the first Christmas, more than 2000 years ago, people have reacted to the story of Jesus’ birth in a variety of ways. Some with joy, some with skepticism, disbelief, awe, thanksgiving, fear and hope. Today we are going to look at the two central characters in this story, his earthly parents: Joseph and Mary. I wonder if you can relate to either of them. As approach Christmas Day, Do we find ourselves a little more like Joseph or Mary? 

Let’s start with Joseph (if you are reading along on the net Matthew 1:18-25 from the Message). We might call Joseph the first official step-parent. It’s hard to be a step parent.  As an angel came to him and told him that God would miraculously be the father of his fiancé Mary’s child. The angel, ever so politely, and in the way that only an angel of God asks, (and really allows no way for a person to say “no,”) said to Joseph:”God wants you to be the child’s father on earth.” 

You see, Joseph had heard that his fiancé was pregnant. He knew that he had not had relations with Mary. So he was. . . how did our scripture reading put it? Chagrined! I had to look that word up as it is not in my day to day vocabulary. The word means: upset, bothered, and embarrassed. That puts it mildly!  If your fiancé, got pregnant, not by you, you would be a bit of all of that. 

Scripture does not report a single word spoken by Joseph.We have woefully little information about him. We can only surmise what kind of man he was. 

But the scripture says that he was not only chagrined, (upset), but he was noble.  That tells us something doesn’t it?   He wanted to do the right thing. So when he found out his fiancé was pregnant, he was determined to take care of things quietly so she would not be disgraced.    That tells us a lot, doesn’t it?  God chose the right man.  

When and angel came to him with this extraordinary message, that he and Mary were chosen to bring God’s child into the world, he listened intently, I hope we would too. Then, this is the most amazing part of the story to me. It says: “Joseph woke up. He did exactly what God’s angel commanded in the dream: He married Mary and he named the baby Jesus.”

            Not a single word spoken by Joseph is recorded in scripture. But we know one thing about Joseph, he was obedient to God. He did exactly what God’s angel commanded him to do. 

Obedience is not something we talk about much in our church. It’s not really a feel good word. We like to talk about freedom and grace.  Obedience is not a feel good word, is it?  We like to talk about forgiveness and the choice to make mistakes and how God loves us anyway. But I think there is an important message for us today from Joseph. 

Sometimes is very clear what God wants us to do. Not always. Sometimes it is a little cloudy and we have some difficulty discerning. But there are times in our life, when God is crystal clear. We KNOW what God wants us to do, and we have only to choose whether we are going to be obedient or not. 

Joseph chose to be obedient. And the world was never the same.  Joseph was willing to listen to God’s message through that angel. He was willing to see Mary’s pregnancy from another perspective. He was willing to take another look. He was willing to see this was God’s work, not that of another man. That was huge.

He was also willing to humble himself. We can only imagine what it was like for him to marry a girl who everyone knew was already pregnant. That kind of secret is never kept a secret. Of course, he was the object of ridicule. But Joseph was noble & obedient.  So he endured the ridicule. Because he held onto the vision he got from the angel.

This is the lesson we get from Joseph. When we are following God’s desire for our lives, are we willing to suffer ridicule from the world? Are we willing to be obedient to God, no matter what others may say? This is the question, can we center ourselves in our relationship with God, and remain steady, like Joseph? Do you feel like you are that kind of Christian? And if not,  do you feel this is the time to grow and deepen your faith so that you could be obedient and be able to be steady and strong like Joseph? 

Let those questions just linger for a few minutes, and let’s turn to Mary (switch over to Luke 1:46-55  from The Message). Mary is unique, but she is another example for us of someone who responds to the miracle of the birth of Jesus. Mary gets much more attention than Joseph in the story.  You hear a lot more messages about Mary.   We hear many words from Mary. If Joseph is the silent partner, Mary is the one who sings songs and writes poetry and talks ‘til she’s blue in the face as a way to process how she feels. 

Mary, after she is visited by an angel who tells her that she is to be the mother of God’s child, goes to visit her wise and much older cousin Elizabeth. Elizabeth is also pregnant, so it makes sense that Mary might want to go spend some time with a cousin who is pregnant.

When Mary enters Elizabeth’s house, Elizabeth says that the baby in her own womb leaps at the sight of Mary. It is as if there is a connect between the babies, and there is as this is John the Baptist meeting Jesus.  Elizabeth sings a song celebrating the baby, and the visit.

And then we get to the passage that I read for you today. Mary starts singing about her joy.  It’s one of our two scriptures for today:

”I’m bursting with God-news;
    I’m dancing the song of my Savior God.
God took one good look at me, and look what happened—
    I’m the most fortunate woman on earth!”

She is exuberant! 

She starts talking about a vision of what the world will be like once the Savior has already come.   A vision of our world transformed:

God knocked tyrants off their high horses,
    pulled victims out of the mud.
The starving poor sat down to a banquet;
    the callous rich were left out in the cold

For Mary, God’s plans have already been fulfilled.

The baby is not even born, and for her, she can already see the world as perfect. When I read this, I love Mary.  She is so full of hope.

Some cynics might read this, and say she is naïve. But she is the mother of God. She is bringing God right into the mess and muck of our world – and she has so much hope, she believes with all her heart that he can change everything.

And why not? The angel told her that God can take our impossible dreams and make them possible.  Remember, we wrote out impossible dreams and put them here in our manager.  God has made her pregnant in a miraculous way! Why not be filled with hope?

Mary is why we love Christmas. Mary is why we are generous at Christmas time. An attitude like Mary’s is why we open up our wallets and give to the poor at Christmas time. A friend of mine told me she was standing in line at the store this week. A woman told the cashier she was buying gifts for teachers but did not have money to buy gifts for her own children. My friend opened up her wallet and gave the woman money to buy something for her kids.

Of course she did. I read about a man from North Carolina who drove to Newtown, CT with rose bushes to bring hope and beauty to a town that is suffering. We want to be generous . We want to bring hope to this world in pain and chaos.

When Mary sings her song about tyrants being knocked off their high horses and the poor sitting down to a banquet, she is telling us, this is why Jesus is coming: to use us to make these things happen.  That is why Jodi and her family gave to our offering, so we can bring this to children in Africa and here in Ohio.

Mary is full of hope. When we join her at the manger, we are wonderfully naïve in our hope. And why not? Hope, generosity and love can change the world.

Mary and Joseph are two different people. They are both good people. I wonder, do you identify more with one or the other. Do you feel like God is calling you to be Joseph? To be obedient to God’s leading in your life? Is God asking you to follow God more closely in the choices you make?  To humble yourself, and to put God’s ways ahead of your own pride? Or this Christmas, do you feel more like Mary? Do you want to give into the hope? Do you need to just give in to the miracle? Do you need to let God use you to bring joy and hope to the downtrodden and love to the lonely? Do you need to trust that God is working for good and that God’s love will prevail?

I want to invite us into a time of silent prayer. I want to ask you to focus on either Joseph or Mary, and ask God to use one of their stories to work in you.  Ask to prepare your heart from Christmas.  Invite God to prepare your heart for Christmas.

COME TO THE MANGER: SEE GOD by Cheri Holdridge (with an assist by Kurt Young)

Where is God?  Have you asked yourself this question lately?  That is the question I get asked when 20 children and 6 adults get gunned down in an elementary school in Newtown CT on a Friday in December. I am, after all, a pastor. 

People come to me for answers in the midst of grief and chaos. Why did this happen? Why does it keep happening?  Just a few days before we had 2 more victims in a shopping mall in Oregon. In August there was the Sikh Temple in Wisconsin. In July the movie theater in Aurora Colorado. 

What is going on here?  There is a pattern. Pretty much every time, a hurting, broken person, often with some sort of mental illness, buys guns, again, often legally, and they kill people. 

And when this happens, we want to know where God is.  Where is God? I am here to tell you, that God is weeping right alongside of us. God is holding the grieving mothers and fathers, the sisters and the brothers of those children & adults. God is sitting with them in their homes, in that empty space once filled by the one who has died. Most of us have been there in that shock and grief of losing someone we loved.  God is there in the shock and horror as they grief. 

God was surely with that brave father of Emilie Parker who went on the news last night and expressed compassion for the shooter. God is with us in our shock and horror, trying to comfort us and give us the strength to get out of bed and face our fears. For those children and teachers, who will eventually have to go back to school at Sandy Hook Elementary School, God will walk with them. It will be scary, but counselors and teachers, parents, pastors & rabbis,  and grandparents will help them. And God will be with them. As we have already seen, we pull together as communities when these unthinkable tragedies strike. 

We are already hearing the stories of amazing courage: the teacher who hid her children and told the shooter her students were at gym class, and saved their lives. Another teacher, who locked herself in a tiny room with her kids and kept telling them that she loved them because if they died she wanted the last thing they heard to be her voice reassuring them that they were loved. Those children were saved. As far as I am concerned, that teacher was the presence of God for those children.  She was the voice of God. 

You see, God does not abandon us. God walks right here with us through these tragedies. I cannot explain why some people die young and some people live to be 100 years old. It appears that these 20 children and 6 adults died because of one of man’s horrible choices. The systems to protect him from himself, and to protect those 26 other people from his choices, broke down. We live in an imperfect world. 

We are in the season of Advent. We are preparing our hearts to receive Jesus, God’s love made real in the world. When Jesus came into the world, some people where threatened by the power of his love. Isn’t that weird? They saw the power of God’s love as a bad thing. You see love causes people to do crazy things. King Herod was really threatened.  He knew that there were prophecies that this baby would be a new King. He did not want a King because he was the King. Herod was crazy with power.

 By our standards, looking back, we would probably call Herod mentally ill. This is what he did. After Jesus was born, Herod wanted to destroy Jesus. So in order to try to get rid of Jesus, Herod ordered that all the boy babies in Bethlehem under the age of 2 be murdered. So his soldiers went through town. They went house to house and killed every little baby boy.  Sounds too much like Newtown, CT.  

Now Mary and Joseph had been warned in a dream about this, and they fled to Egypt just in the nick of time. Jesus was saved. But all those other mother’s babies were killed. Why? Why would Herod do this? Why did the soldiers follow those orders? Why would God let this happen? We are not puppets. God gives us free will to make our own choices. And Herod made a terrible choice. 

In Matthew (Matthew 1:18-24 for those following along on the web) we read these haunting words:

A sound was heard in Ramah,
    weeping and much lament.
Rachel weeping for her children,
    Rachel refusing all solace,
Her children gone,
    dead and buried.

Rachel is weeping for her children in Connecticut today. Our President said it well when he said, “Our hearts our broken.” The collective hearts of our country are broken today. “There is not a parent in this country who did not hug their children a little tighter on Friday night when we put them to bed.” 

          So the people closest to this tragedy need to grieve. They need to care for one another. Parents need to bury the dead. Another town in America will never be the same. A school full of children will have to go back to school at some point. The post traumatic stress will go with them. They will be wrapped in the arms of God. Pastors and rabbis, counselors and others will care for them and they will care for one another. Over time, life will move on.  They will see joy again some day.

We are shocked. Those of us, who are parents, will be a bit shaken for a few days, but soon, we will forget. Life will return to normalcy. We will get busy with our Christmas plans. The news cycle will return to the fiscal cliff, or who will be the next Secretary of State, and the next thing, and for the most part, a school shooting in Newtown, CT will fade into the background.

Unless, we decide to change the world.  Because, you see, Christmas is coming, and we are followers of Jesus.

          You see, as followers of Jesus, we are called to respond to tragedies in the world with a two-fold response: acts of mercy and acts of justice. We are called to short terms solutions (caring for hurting, hungry, damaged people) and long terms solutions (what can we do to prevent this from happening again). We are called to offer care in the midst of a crisis, but we are also to look at the underlying systems that led to this crisis and ask ourselves: what can we do to prevent this crisis from happening again? 

With any problem in the world, a movement of change can be born when people are so passionate about something that they finally decide to DO SOMETHING. 

Have you heard of Amnesty International? They began with one man’s outrage and his courage to do something about it. After learning of two Portuguese students being imprisoned for raising a toast to freedom in 1961, British lawyer Peter Benenson published a newspaper article. That article launched the “Appeal for Amnesty 1961”, a worldwide campaign that provoked a huge response. This was the genesis of Amnesty International. They now have 1,800 staff members and hundreds of volunteers fighting for human rights  around the world. (http://www.amnesty.org/en/who-we-are/about-amnesty-international).

You just never know how a movement will be born.  As a result of the shooting in CT, someone, or a team, from The Village could decide to say enough, we’ve got to stop this.  We could really research the ins and outs of gun violence and give strength to a movement to do something about it. 

Gail Collins wrote in the New York Times “America needs to tackle gun violence because we need to redefine who we are. . . . We have to make ourselves better. Otherwise, the story from Connecticut is too unspeakable to bear.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/15/opinion/collins-looking-for-america.html?_r=0)

I agree with her. Someone has got to do something about the violence in our country. A movement could start right here today. You just don’t know. Actually there are already movements across the country. There is one right here in Toledo called the Ohio Coalition Against Gun Violence. We could join one of them and give our energy to them. We might help form the tipping point that would make the difference this time in this critical issue of our day.

You see, the power of God is just that amazing. When God works in us, God can take the most horrific tragedy and turn it into a power to change the world. That is the miracle we are waiting for this Christmas.

Remember, those of us that were here last week, wrote down something impossible in our lives that we want God to make possible, and we put it in the manger. Those notes are still there. I think we could certainly add the impossible problem of gun violence in our country. 

We need to take all those concerns to the manger as we wait for Christmas. We need to pray. We need to pray like we have never prayed. Our country is a mess.   Change this God, fix this, do something that lets us do something.

We have some really broken people around us as evidenced by the events of this week. And today we need some time to grieve with our brothers and sisters in CT and in other parts of the world where there is suffering.

But you know, we have some brokenness right in our own homes and families. And it is into our world, that God sends Jesus.   Jesus is coming into our brokenness to bring us new life.

God loves us and God’s love has the power to lift up the brokenhearted and soften the hearts of those who are filled with evil intentions. God has the power to change us. And God has the power to change the world through us. That’s why we come to this manger to see God.

So I invite you to the manager. Come to the manager.  Bring your grief, bring your brokenness and your hopes for the future. Come to the manager, ready to see God.