Incarnation

For me, Christmas Eve sermons are some of the hardest sermons to write. Every year, I find myself thinking that there’s nothing new to say. Baby. Manger. Angels. Shepherds. Been there, done that. Everyone’s heard the story so many times. Even people who aren’t regular church goers know it from songs and the movies. I love the Christmas story, but I know it almost too well.

But Christmas is a season. Not just a day. It’s the celebration not just of Jesus’s birth, but of his humanity. I don’t know whether your tree is still up, but it’s still Christmas today. The 12th Day of Christmas. Tell all the kids in your life that we did, in fact, get a white Christmas.

If the story of the baby and the manager is too familiar, today we have an embarrassment of riches. We actually had several Gospel passages to choose from this morning.

The first is the wise men, anticipating the Feast of the Epiphany tomorrow. Wise men from the east come to Jerusalem seeking a newborn king. King Herod sends the travelers to Bethlehem and tells them, “when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage.” Spoiler alert: Herod’s not being entirely honest here. The wise men follow a star to the place where Jesus and his mother are staying. They kneel at Jesus’s feet and give him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And then, “having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod,” they go home by another road.

The second Christmas story we had to choose from is the one we just heard. An angel appears to Joseph in a dream and tells him to flee to Egypt. And so Joseph and Mary take the child. They become refugees, on a difficult and uncertain journey. This past spring, I had a chance to visit the place in Cairo that tradition says the Holy Family lived. Egypt would surely have seemed foreign to them—a land full of images of pharaohs and strange gods, pyramids and temples inscribed with a strange alphabet, people who spoke a language they didn’t understand.

You might have noticed some verses missing in our reading from the Gospel of Matthew. That’s because there’s a third Christmas story that our lectionary leaves out. “When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the magi, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the magi. Then what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled: ‘A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.”

And then there’s the young Jesus’s return to Nazareth after Herod’s death, which we also heard this morning. A journey that followed the path of Moses and the Exodus from Egypt.

And then finally there’s the one story we have of Jesus’s youth. It’s the Gospel’s version of the old movie Home Alone. Jesus travels to Jerusalem with his parents for the Passover festival. But when the large group of family and neighbors leaves to go home, Jesus isn’t among them, and it takes his parents a day to notice. After a frantic search, they find Jesus in the temple “sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions.” When Mary and Joseph ask him why he’s worried them so, he replies, ‘Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?’”

Maybe the young Jesus was making a point about the work he’d come to do, but he was also twelve years old. A novel I once read imagines Mary’s response: “Don’t you pull that ‘my father’ stuff on me. The command says honor thy father and thy mother. I’m not feeling honored right now young man. You could have sent a message.”

Any one of the options for today’s Gospel includes enough material for a dozen sermons. But the lesson I take from all of them right now is this: Jesus’s incarnation is about more than his birth. It’s about the whole of his life. Jesus was a refugee and an exile. He lived in a time of violence and tragedy. He was a child—a real, human child. He worried and sometimes angered his parents.

It also strikes me that the Gospel stories leave out so much. What did Jesus learn and do in all those years before his public ministry began? The Gospel of Luke tells us that “Jesus increased in wisdom and in years and in divine and human favor.” But that’s all we know of the story of decades of his life.

All the stories of Jesus’s human life are part of the meaning of Christmas, of the feast of the Incarnation. This last day of the Christmas season is a good day to spend some time thinking about what those stories might mean to you. On this snowy day, I have a suggestion for you: pick one of the stories of Jesus’s early life and imagine the scene, picture yourself within in. What do you hear and see and smell and taste? Let your imagination fill in the gaps, make the sparse details we know come alive.

And on this last day of the Christmas season as on the first, may you have a blessed and merry Christmas.