Abiding in the Fields

Here is my message for Christmas Eve. The scripture was Luke 2:1-20: 

They say that familiarity breed contempt. But what familiarity also breeds is comfortableness, as people are attracted to things that are familiar, and when things are familiar to us, and comfortable for us, we also tend to think we know them really well, so much so that we might stop paying attention to the details in the story. I think the same is true for the Christmas story. Most of us have probably heard that passage from Luke about the birth of Jesus for what seems like hundreds of times. I mean even if we only heard it every year in the Charlie Brown Christmas Special, as it’s what Linus quotes from when he wants everyone to know the meaning of Christmas, we could have heard it at least 56 times since it’s debut in 1965. And when we stop paying attention because we know it, we can overlook things or even add things to it because it just has to be there, because we know it’s there. So, for example, we talk about Mary riding into Bethlehem on a donkey, but there are no donkey’s in the story, and definitely not Dominic the donkey. We have other barnyard animals in our nativity set. No mention of them in the story. We have three wise men arriving, and some of you may remember their names as Melchior, Gaspar and Balthazar, but not only are they not named, but we don’t even know how many there were. We say three because there were three gifts, but let’s be honest that men are not always the best at getting social etiquette correct, and so it’s entirely possible that some of them went in together on gifts, or maybe even had the temerity to show up without a gift at all. And then there are the parts of the story we just want to skip over all together.

To A Maid Engaged To Joseph

Here is my sermon for Christmas Eve. The text was Luke 1:26-38:

If you’ve been alive long enough then you have regrets.  There are things you regret that you did and there are probably things you regret that you did not do. Robert Frost famously said “two roads diverged in the woods and I, I took the one less traveled and that has made all the difference.” Perhaps you regret not taking the less traveled path, or perhaps you didn’t even take either of those paths but instead turned around and went the other way. We regret the times we said yes instead of saying no, and we regret the times we said no when, in fact, we should have said yes, and perhaps we wonder what would have happened if we had made a different choice. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if people in scripture had done something different. What if Mary’s response to the angel about her bearing Jesus had been different? What if Mary had said no?

We really don’t know very much about Mary. Most of what people think they know about Mary are stories that develop much later in the history of the church. Luke, who we just heard from, mentions her the most.  She is named 12 times in Luke, but all of these are in his infancy narrative.  She appears in two other stories in Luke, but is not named in those.  In Matthew, she is named 5 times.  Four of those times are in his infancy narrative, and then she is talked about two other times, being named once, although it’s a reference to her, not something directly involving her.  In Mark, she is named only once, and like in Matthew it is simple a reference of a crowd saying that Mary is Jesus’ mother, and then there is one story in which she is not named.  In John she is not named at all, but there are two stories make reference to her.  And that is all that we have in the gospels.  Not really a lot to go on, but when we compare Mary against other characters in scripture, especially women, the fact that we know as much about her as we do, and that she is referenced in all four gospels, is quite extraordinary.

Gabriel's Message

Here is my Christmas Eve sermon.  The text was Luke 2:1-20:

I had a really hard time coming up with what I was going to say for this message.  Normally I have something roughly planned out for Christmas Eve by the time we hit Halloween, but this year nothing was coming to me and as we got closer and closer I finally did the smart thing and asked my wife what she thought I should preach on.  She asked what I had covered the past two years, see she’s not paying attention either, and I said two years ago I had talked about Joseph and the importance that people play in each other’s lives, and last year I had talked about the shepherds and the fact that they didn’t come up with excuses about why they couldn’t go see the baby, but instead followed God’s commands.  She said that it seemed like I had a little theme going, even if I hadn’t planned it, of covering the characters in the Christmas story and so she thought I should preach on Mary.  So following her advice, I decided to preach on the angels.  I don’t think I’m going to get a very good present this year.

Angels are a familiar part of the Christmas story.  There is the archangel Gabriel who makes first makes the announcement to Zechariah and Elizabeth about the coming birth of John the Baptist, and then makes the announcement to Mary that she will bear a child.  There are the angels who make the announcement to the shepherds in the fields, and we cannot forget angel second class, Clarence Odbody, in Frank Capra’s classic It’s a Wonderful Life.  I think my favorite portrayal of an angel is not in a Christmas story, but instead was done by John Travolta who portrayed that archangel Michael, in the movie of the same name.  A smoking, hard drinking, hard living, slob, with a rather colorful vocabulary.  Someone no one would ever believe was an angel if it weren’t for the two wings growing out of his back.  And you know that John Travolta is a really good actor when he, a scientologist, can play the leading messenger for God.

We actually don’t know very much about angels from the Bible.  Most of what people think about them, or think they know about them, comes from extra-biblical sources, some of them quite modern, and we could talk about them but then we’d have to end up talking about how many angels can dance on the head of a pine.  But that is not to say that angels aren’t found in scripture because they are.  The first time we hear of an angel is after Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden of Eden, the entrance is guarded by cherubim who has a flaming sword, think of it as the world’s first light saber.  The cherubim are winged creatures who act sort of as guardians, and if you remember Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark correctly, they are the images formed onto the top of the ark of the covenant.  Later we will also hear about seraphim, who are winged creatures said to be found guarding God’s seat inside the Temple in the Holy of Holies.  If I remember correctly, it’s the cherubim that hang from the ceiling and the seraphim that come up from the floor, or maybe it’s reversed, I often get it wrong.  But while they are angelic like creatures, outside of the wings, these are not really angels as we typically understand them or think of them, or as they are found in the rest of scripture.