December 24, 2007
Grace Church
Rev. Robert E. Hensley

      Let us pray.  As Mary, Joseph and Jesus settled in Nazareth, help us, O God, to let you take up residence in each one of our hearts.  Forgive us our failures, our weaknesses, our fears and our doubts.  In the name of the newly born babe of Bethlehem, Emmanuel, God with us the Prince of Peace, we are now made new and whole.  Amen.

      This is one night when Miss Manners would hang her head in shame at the regrettable hospitality and gift-giving that appears in the Christmas story.

      The place is Bethlehem, late at night, December 24th, the Year “0”.  Joseph returns to his old hometown.  What takes him there is not a relaxing holiday trip, but a government census designed to increase the income from taxation for Imperial Rome.  I suspect that this young carpenter still has several relatives in his old hometown: at the very least there would have been shirt-tail cousins who recognize his name and remember him from when he was a kid.  But this fine young fellow and his obviously pregnant wife turn up one night unexpectedly and what happens?  The entire clan is at a loss for where they can stay.  There is not a spare bedroom to be had.

      So Mary and Joseph are sent down the street to a cheap motel, and not one of the uncles offers to pick up their tab.  When the young couple gets there, they don't notice that the NO VACANCY sign is lighted, and they end up out back in the barn.  So much for the strength of family ties, and hospitality in the old hometown, not to mention the prevailing culture of a wandering, desert people.

      Then there are those shepherds.  Prompted by an angel, awestruck by choirs singing from heaven, these country people quit their hillside posts, leave their flocks to fend for themselves against the night’s unknowns, and run to town to see the sight: the mighty messiah is a newborn baby.

      But do they bring a gift?  Nope!  Granted, there was no warning, and the stores are all closed at that hour of the night, but you would think that the least they could have done was to have passed the hat (burnoose?), and with a smile one of them could have quietly stuck a wad of bills in Joseph's hand and told him to buy something nice for the little guy and his mom.  But there is no evidence of this, or of any gift sent later with a small card enclosed.  What happens is that the shepherd folk go back where they came from, glorifying and praising God for the most momentous event of their lives.  Yet when it comes to a baby gift, the whole crowd of them strikes out.

      The wise men do little better than the shepherds when they arrive on the scene 12 days later.  A traveling star leads them to the baby, but it takes a good while for them to get there.  The little one has probably outgrown a couple of sizes of diapers before they arrive from their distant country.  They bring gifts, to be sure, but odd gifts, not the usual nursery stuff.  There's gold fit for a king, the sort of incense, frankincense, burnt in temples, and myrrh, which primary use is to preserve a corpse.

      All this appears deeply symbolic, and points to Jesus as king and God and sacrifice.  Yet as baby showers go, these are not the most appropriate gifts for a young family on a tight budget.  The wise men seem more familiar with the stars than they are with stuffed animals.  Maybe these are the first baby gifts they have ever picked out.  

      So in our story, what we are left with as examples are:  No hometown hospitality; Empty-handed shepherds; Magi that arrive with oddball presents. Yes, enough to drive Miss Manners to distraction so that she would hang her head with shame!

      Today it is almost as though for some 2,000-odd years Christians have tried to make up for these lapses.  Consider what we do around this baby's birthday.  We put up bright lights, both outside and in.  Wreaths and roping of Christmas greens show up here and there on just about anything that does not move.  Cheerfully wrapped packages are clustered under decorated trees.  We give gifts to the church, the Rector’s Discretionary Fund and Red Stocking: money, food, and clothing.  We welcome one another to parties, dinners, cozy, snug evenings in front of the fire.  The music of Christmas sounds forth in countless versions from radio and television and compact discs, in elevators and shopping malls.  We sing hymns of the season walking through the cold night or gathered in a warm church.

      We may do these things for ourselves, our children, our friends, everybody around us, but there is in fact a real sense that we do them because of Jesus.  Every Christmas we realize again – no matter how faintly – that we need to give some gift, make some gesture, in his honor.  

      Yet Christmas puts us in a quandary!  We are doomed before we begin.  Our great God in heaven gives us the perfect gift in Jesus.  For this Jesus is Emmanuel, God-with-us, the very brightness of God's glory, and just like God in every way.  Jesus is the gift, not of something external to God, but the gift of God's own self, the divine truth told in the form of a human life.

      How can we possibly respond to that?  Let us not fail to find room for him, as Joseph's relatives did in Bethlehem.  Perhaps it is best to come as the shepherds did, with open, empty hands, for no gift at all appears to be gift enough.  But most of us follow the example of the Magi.  We will do something-even if it's "a day late and a dollar short," even if it's aimed not so much at the baby, but at someone for whom he was born.

      And so we string up the lights at the risk of breaking our necks.  We stir up the wassail, and throw in a bit of this and a dash of that, and a lot of rum.  We wrap up the presents, even if sometimes the paper is cut too short.  We sing the carols with happy hearts and off-key gusto.  We decide to do something.  We welcome the perfect gift of Jesus with our own less-than-perfect gifts.  And that’s perfectly acceptable; it is enough.

      Among these gifts that we offer in honor of the child are many that cannot be put in a box and wrapped with paper and a bow.  These unwrappable gifts are not so practical as a new tie or a pair of gloves.  They are gifts that seem useless, pointless: the beauty of our music and our ritual, our acts of devotion, our struggles in prayer.  Among these gifts are every cathedral ever built, and the soaring music of Handel's Messiah; a frail old lady's determination to get to church on Christmas Eve, and a young child's handmade tree ornament, glittering and yet splendidly naïve.

      These gifts include the checks we write to church or charity, though we think that the amount is too small for a need so vast.  Included also are deeds of kindness that we perform for people near at hand: running an errand for a sick neighbor, bolstering the spirits of the downhearted, bearing cheerfully with someone who causes trouble or the young person that makes noise in church.  All these may seem painfully little, especially in the light of the great gift of Jesus himself, but although we are made uneasy by the littleness of what we do, God welcomes the gift we give, for God became in Jesus a little gift at Bethlehem: eternity wrapped in a blanket, the divine mystery nestled safely in his mother's arms.  

      Jesus receives our gifts, small and simple and fragile though they are.  He knows these are the only kind we have to give.  In the Second Shepherds' Play, a 15th century English work, the shepherds appear as rough-and-ready fellows, each with some gift in hand for the newborn: a bunch of cherries, a pet bird, a tennis ball.  These are not gifts rich and rare, but were available in the town square on any market day, the medieval equivalent of K Mart.  Yet Jesus welcomes these gifts as special and precious, which in fact, they are.

      And He welcomes ours as well: whatever small thing we do for him.  The love of God made flesh in the Bethlehem baby is a gift beyond all reason, and leaves us fumbling; but our fumbling responses – a bunch of cherries, a pet bird, a tennis ball, a centuries-old cathedral, the singing of "Silent Night," cans of food for the poor – these fumbling responses of ours are more than good enough. The man who was once the child of Bethlehem raises his arms in greeting to welcome us.

      Jesus accepts our small gifts because he finds beauty in them, and rejoices in that beauty.  He welcomes our little gifts and gestures because he recognizes them as signs – signs that his joy has touched us.

      And right there we have the purpose of his birth.  Jesus is born this night that the whole earth may come alive once again with the joy known only to God.  Amen.