“What
Christmas Tells Us About History”
The Reverend Tom Steffen
3 January 2010
Matthew
2:1-12
At
the beginning of the last sermon in a series of five sermons, it is best to
summarize, I suspect. In this series
about what Christmas tells us, I have suggested that Christmas tells us
something about ourselves, that there is a dimension beyond, what Hermann Hesse
referred to as a dimension too many: “All we who ask too much and have a dimension
too many,” he writes, “and could not contrive to live at all if there were not
another air to breathe outside the air of this world….If there were not
eternity at the back of time.” (from Steppenwolf) In the second sermon, I suggested that
Christmas tells us that the Bible is indispensible and that it points beyond
itself to a great mystery, that the Word, the logos of God, came to dwell among us. In the third sermon, I suggested that
Christmas tells us that God keeps on trying, that God never gives up on God’s
love affair with the human family. And
last Sunday, I suggested that Christmas tells us something about Jesus. At the very least, it tells us that He had a
face. Jesus came to us as one of us, heavy
with a history, family, and religion and a unique way of understanding the
reality of God. In the words of
Today,
we turn our attention to what Christmas tells us about history. Throughout Advent we turned to St. Luke’s narrative
and heard over and over again that God’s revealing of the Christ takes place in
history, which is the unfolding of God’s way with us. Christmas tells us that we spatial-temporal
people matter. We matter because the
stuff of history matters.
Preparing
for a trip to Palestine several years ago, I came across the writings of a
journalist who suggested the following about history: We produce more history than we can consume
locally; history is made more by mistakes than by conspiracies; and that none
of us is innocent. This is true of all
historical accounts, perhaps, but it seems very relevant to the history of what
many call the “
St.
Luke reveals to us the historical setting of Christmas. He begins his Gospel narrative: “In as much as many have undertaken to compile
an account of the things accomplished among us, it seemed fitting for me as
well…having investigated everything carefully from the beginning to write it
out for you in consecutive order, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may
know the exact truth about the things you have been taught.” (Luke 1:1-4)
Unlike the Spanish poet who suggested that history is a drunken peasant
riding through narrow streets on a blind burrow, St. Luke saw history as
significant and literally the unfolding of God’s way with us. And of all the narratives attributed to St.
Luke, the one that gives us greatest pause is the one that contains the words
we find on the lips of Mary, the mother of Jesus.
A
couple of weeks ago when her words were the lectionary reading for the day, I
drew our attention to the odd verb tenses employed in Mary’s song. When Mary responds to the angelic visitation,
her prophetic speech about her soon to be born son employs verbs in the past
tense: “He has done mighty deeds, He has scattered the proud, He has brought
down rulers from their thrones, He has exalted those who are humble, He
has filled the hungry with good things, and has sent away the rich empty handed.” (1:46ff)
Mary’s song is not made up of gentle words that go easily on a cheery
Christmas greeting. Her understanding of
how history will be read is so subversive that during the 1980’s the government
of
We are living the early days of 2010. And we have reason to be a little anxious, unsettled, and excited. And I’m not thinking of the difficult economy. Frederick Buechner, in his book The Hungering Dark, puts it this way:
“Those who believe in God can never
in a way be sure of God again. Once they
have seen God in a stable, they can never be sure where God will appear or to
what lengths God will go or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation God
will descend in God’s wild pursuit of us....If holiness and the power and
majesty of God were present in this least auspicious of all events, this birth
of a peasant’s child, then there is no place or time so lowly and earthbound
but that holiness can be present there too....And this means that we are never
safe, that there is no place where we can hide from God, no place where we are
safe from God’s power to break in two and recreate the human heart,…because it
is just where God seems most helpless that God is most strong, and just where
we least expect God that God comes most fully.” (Pages 13, 14)
Let these moving
words lead us into a time of prayer as we enter a new year that will reveal the
continual unfolding of God’s way with us.
I am grateful to
Reva Allington, friend and member of St. Peter’s UMC, who edits my sermons.