December 24, 2023

“Love Waits for Us”

Luke 2:1-20

David A. Shirey

Broadway Christian Church

            Is it fair to say the passage just read is one of the most familiar and beloved passages in the Bible?  If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a hundred times and yet this week one verse caught my attention to the point I put down my Bible, sat back in my chair, and said out loud to nobody in particular, "Hmm. What’s that all about?” The angels say to the shepherds, “Be not afraid, for behold, I bring you good news of a great joy which will come to all the people; for to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior who is Christ the Lord."  Then follows the line that caught me up short: "And this will be a sign for you: you will find a babe wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger" (Luke 2:10-12).          

            I thought to myself, “What kind of sign is that?” The angels’ announcement is of the birth of a Savior who is Christ the Lord.  And what is the sign that accompanies an event of such earth-shaking, world-changing, life-transforming magnitude? (Drum roll, please) … a baby in a layette in a feed trough. I ask you: is that kind of sign proportional to that kind of announcement? 

            I looked up the word "sign" in a Bible dictionary and found this definition: “Sign. A significant event or act that betokens God's presence or intention.” Is a baby in a wooden manger wrapped in strips of cloth “a significant act that betokens God’s presence?” Before you answer that, let me put things in perspective. Do you recall some of the other signs in the Bible? 

• For instance, rain for forty days and forty nights (Genesis 7:12).  Now that's a significant sign of God's displeasure with human waywardness if I say so myself.  Followed by a significant sign of God's merciful promise never to destroy again:  a rainbow painted from horizon to horizon (Genesis 9:13). There’s two signs for you: forty-day flood and technicolor rainbow. How does a baby in a feed trough compare?

• Or how about when Moses was facing off with Pharoah and trying to convince His Stubborn Highness to let God’s people go?  Think of the signs Moses did to try and convince Pharoah that God meant business (Exodus 7:8-11:10) – frogs, flies, cattle plague, boils and locusts, thick darkness. Those are some signs!  

• Gideon was recruited by God to deliver his people. He respectfully asked for a sign. 

      “I will place a wool fleece on the threshing floor. If there is dew only on the fleece and all            the ground is dry, then I will know that you will save Israel by my hand, as you said."    And that’s what happened. Gideon rose early the next day; he squeezed the fleece and       wrung out the dew—a bowlful of water.  (Judges 6:36-38)  Good one! 

We're talking signs here. God-sized signs to accompany God-sized actions. But when the angels announce the climactic event of all time – the birth of the Son of God – what is the sign that accompanies it?  Baby.  Diaper.  Feed trough.  Is that all?

            I've been thinking about what it might mean to ask Is that all? in response to the angels telling the shepherds that the sign of God with us is a peasant’s firstborn wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger. I’ve concluded it indicates a faulty assumption about how God reveals himself to us. What I mean is this – if when we go looking for signs of God at work in our world we look only for the grand and glorious, the major league miraculous, the jaw-dropping spectacular, our God sightings will be rare because while we’re waiting for super-duper stuff we’ll never look in everyday ordinary places like mangers where God tells us to look and where God can be found. The angels are whispering a hint. Want to see God at work in this world?  Don’t look up.  Look down and out!  Love waits for us in the ordinary – in ordinary people in ordinary places.  Among nameless shepherds: blue collar workers on the night shift.   In little towns like Bethlehem. God’s extraordinary love waits for us in ordinary people like the one you look at in the mirror. Like the person sitting down the row from you this morning.  Or the ones across the table at a meeting or a meal. Does God appear at The Crystal Cathedral in LA?  St. Patrick’s in New York City?  The Westminster Cathedral in London and all the other multi-thousand seat palaces of stained-glass splendor around the world?  Well, sure. There, too. But most often God’s love waits for us and shows up to us in ordinary places like 2601 W. Broadway, Columbia MO, among a couple hundred cotton and denim cloth, unvarnished wood sorts of people like you.

            One of my favorite cartoons shows a couple shepherds standing in a field, leaning on their staffs, sheep grazing in the distance. Overhead there’s a star-lit sky. One shepherd says to the other, "Nothing exciting ever happens on this job."  I wonder how many people go through life leaning on their staffs, sighing that nothing exciting ever happens in their lives, oblivious to the fact that right before their eyes in the ordinariness of their days wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a feed trough, there God is. Bottom line: you can spend your whole life looking for God in all the wrong places and interpret the absence of metaphysical fireworks as a sign of God’s absence or non-existence when all along God shows up every day in every sort of way in plain old ordinary places like mangers among ordinary people like you and me. 

            Do you remember in the Charlie Brown Christmas special how Charlie Brown is commissioned to find a Christmas tree and comes back with what we now call “a Charlie Brown Christmas tree?” Do you remember the dialogue that follows?

            “Boy, are you stupid, Charlie Brown!”

            “What kind of a tree is that?  You were supposed to get a good tree!”

            “Can’t you even tell a good tree from a poor one?”

            “I told you he’d goof up!”

            “He’s not the kind you can depend on to do anything right.”

            You’re hopeless, Charlie Brown.  Completely hopeless!”

The Peanuts gang was not pleased. Why? Because they had their minds on “a great, big, shiny aluminum Christmas tree.” Lucy said, “Get the biggest aluminum tree you can find, maybe painted pink.” And Charlie Brown came back with the Christmas tree equivalent of a manger. 

Might part of the meaning of Christmas be that God chooses and uses plain old ordinary people like you and me to accomplish God’s purposes in this world? Pardon me if I offended you by calling you ordinary. You may be a great big shiny aluminum Christmas tree sort of person. A legend in your own mind.  If so, I beg your pardon for calling you ordinary. It’s just that 6 months ago I didn’t know you. So, you’re not that famous. I’m sure not. We’re rather ordinary. But this is the good news of the gospel: “Born this day in the city of David is a Savior who is Christ the Lord. And this is a sign for you: you’ll find him wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in manger.” 

If I’m reading the Bible correctly, it would be just like God to choose ordinary folks like us at an average-sized church in the middle of the country to reveal God’s extraordinary love. 

May it be so!

Let all of us through whom God’s Love waits to reveal itself, say AMEN