Stable Instability

Luke 1:26-38

December 21, 2008

Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.

We are now on the threshold of Christmas. Our Advent wait is nearly over. Nearly all of the candles on the Advent wreath have been lit. We have had our Christmas Craft Faire. Last Sunday, we baptized and welcomed four new members into our church symbolizing that in Christ Jesus, we are born anew. It is now time at last to go back to Bethlehem. We love this yearly celebration of Christmas, when all of us get to go back to Bethlehem, back to the memories from our childhood of warm thoughts of hearth and home.

The weeks before Christmas can be hectic. Our college students are finishing up term papers and exams. Some make long journeys on the freeways to come home. Some of us have worked even harder these past few weeks because our jobs are affected by the Christmas holiday. Then at last the day arrives. The presents have all been selected and wrapped. And we can relax. We can settle down with Mary and Joseph at the stable in Bethlehem.

In coming to this yearly observance of the Christ child born in the stable at Bethlehem, we are not only going back to the stable, but we are getting back to its origin. We know that even people who know very little about the story of Jesus, know that he was born, as Luke said, out back of the inn in a stable. Even if you don’t know anything about the Christian faith, you know the Christmas story. That’s why we have Easter and Christmas Christians! Every year, as we read this story of the annunciation to Mary, and the glad tidings to the shepherds, then as we follow the shepherds to the Christ Child in the stable in Bethlehem, we have the feeling that we are getting back to the center of our faith, back to the heart of it all. We have this dearly loved and deeply cherished memory of the birth of Christ in the stable.

Wishing for Stability

It is wonderful to be able to count on this yearly observance that brings us back to the stable; especially when change is swirling all around us. The morning newspaper reports to us how familiar retail stores are closing their doors, long-trusted banks are changing names, tens of thousands of people are losing their jobs, there may only be two instead of the big 3 in Detroit, the stock markets are going up and mostly down, and in less than a month, there’s a new family in the White House. We look forward to Christmas to go back to the stable in Bethlehem where we have dearly loved and cherish memories that lie still.

Do you notice that Christmas cards rarely show scenes of slick new automobiles of this year’s latest models skidding up through the snow, going through the woods to grandma’s house for some figgin’ pudding? Christmas cards show a horse pulling a tree on a sled, trudging through the snow back to a little cottage where smoke comes out of a chimney (only on good air days). The scene is from a hundred years ago. But that’s the way we like our Christmas. It is a time to get back to the originals, a time to touch base with enduring sentiments and stable values.

Notice that we are singing traditional Christmas carols today. And on Christmas Eve this Wednesday night, we’ll be singing all of the rest of our favorite Christmas songs. Nobody wants anything new on Christmas. We love it for the way it was and always has been. Imagine what would happen, if we didn’t sing, “Joy to the World” today! You might write me a letter grumbling that I spoiled Christmas for you!

Thirty years ago, we were given a manger set made by Palestinian Christians. Our children only knew of this manger set with figures clothed in Middle-eastern fabrics. It was always Lauren’s job to take them out of the shoebox and place them on our coffee table. She would rearrange the animals and the people before the manger a number of times before Christmas comes. Last summer when I was in Bethlehem and visited the Peace Center that has a permanent exhibit of manger/nativity sets from all over the world, I found the set that we have own for 30 years. After some research done by our travel agent, we were able to locate a non-profit cooperative that had these manger sets so that I can buy one manger set for our son and one for Lauren. It wouldn’t be Christmas without that manger scene. Now they each have a manger set that reminds them of the stable in Bethlehem just like the way they remembered it growing up!

To hear the joys of coming back to the stable, and to the stability that is Christmas, this is what we love about Christmas. Yet these sentiments are all stranger when we more carefully consider the story that the Bible has to tell about the first Christmas. There was little that was sweet, nostalgic, or sentimental about that first Christmas in the stable.

Born as a Baby

For one thing, out back in the stable was a baby being born. Those of you who have actually given birth could testify that in a world without anesthesia or antiseptics, birth was more painful and risky than sweet and sentimental.

And if Christmas in our mind is going back to a stable, predictable, remembered past, then the first thing that might be said is that God comes among us as a baby. When God chose to come in the flesh he did not appear among us as a wise older person, full of homely wisdom that comes from years of experience. God came as a baby. No human being changes any faster than a baby. We all marvel how much change a baby can make from day to day. In a baby’s life, life is on fast forward.

Another thing about God coming among us as a baby is that when a baby arrives, everything changes. Those of you who have welcomed babies into your homes know that nothing so quickly or greatly disrupts your stable, secure, predictable existence than a baby. We can’t believe how something so small, and so vulnerable as this baby could so jerk around our lives!

For God to come into the world as a baby in a stable does nothing to help Mary and Joseph have a stable home. Before Jesus was born, his parents left Nazareth to travel to Bethlehem to register because Joseph is from the house of David and Bethlehem is the city of David. After Jesus was born, under the threat of the cruel Herod, the holy family fled to Egypt. Even in Jesus’ birth, it was not a settled matter by any means. Things were on the move, especially in Bethlehem.

Disruptions

Our lesson for today is a story about a disrupted, shocking divine intervention coming into a young woman’s life in the form of an unexpected baby. An angel shows up in a little town in Galilee called Nazareth and the angel goes to a young woman whose name was Mary. Even after the friendly greeting by this angel, Mary welcomed the angel with less than open arms at first. She was “much perplexed by his words” (Luke 1:29).

The first thing that the angel said to her was “do not be afraid.” Why would the angel have said that to her—because the angel was bringing radical change and disruption into her life.

The angel told her that she had “found favor with God.” But some favoritism this is! She will bear a child, out of wedlock. She will be told what name to call this child. The angel said, “For nothing will be impossible with God.” And Mary says, “let it be to me according to your word.” What Mary was saying was something like, “I have no idea what all of these changes in my life will mean, but I am willing to serve God in the midst of all of this change.”

And you and I know the rest of the story. That dramatic, miraculous birth was only the beginning of some spectacular transformations. As that baby grew up into adulthood, that baby was always on the move, intruding into the world, calling ordinary people to follow him, follow him where? Follow him into God’s unknown and unpredictable future. To follow him was to put our future in his hands and relinquish it to him, to take our tomorrow out of our hands. And that’s risky and fearful. And it was anything but stable.

Faithful Instability

Many of you are here home for the holidays. Before you came, you probably had images of what you’ll see—the Advent candles, the poinsettias, the warmth and welcome of our church family eager to welcome you home and ask how you’ve been. You are here this morning seeking for the rich traditions and customs that remind you that wherever life or work or school might have taken you far away from this place that you can still come home and become reassured that at Christmas when we remember Bethlehem is where Jesus is born in a stable that life is stable. We sit in rows of pews that are bolted down in an orderly way so that there will be no surprise, shock or disorder. But today’s Gospel reminds us all that when we are following a Savior who is Christ the Lord whose tendency is to disorder our lives, to demand great things from us, to expect great deeds from us, life is not stable. To follow Jesus, we must have faithful stable instability.

If you are really in love with stability, if you have got to have your life always stable based on what happened in the stable in Bethlehem, then you may not be too happy with the sort of Savior we are receiving into our world at this time of the year.

There are plenty of people in this congregation who could testify this morning to ways in which following this God has made them less secure, their lives less predictable and less stable than ever before. We call this life based on the miracle that happened in Bethlehem, “Stable Instability.”

For some of you who know the baby in the stable have now committed your life to raising resources for missions especially in Thailand because you can’t erase those faces of hill tribe children with AIDS or are HIV infected from your hearts. You have stable instability.

Some of you who know the baby in the stable thank God that it’s Friday not because you are looking forward to starting a fun-filled weekend but that you are committed to reaching out to our new neighbors who want to learn English and become citizens of our country. You have stable instability.

Some of you who know the baby in the stable have perform acts of service and serve as ambassadors of goodwill when you have worked in soup kitchens, volunteered at food banks, made ditty bags for seafarers who come to Oakland, put together Christmas shoeboxes for children everywhere. You would not have done these things if you didn’t have stable instability.

Some of you who know the baby in the stable have totally changed your way of life when Sunday mornings were once a time to sleep in and watch football games and now you regularly disrupt your desire to stay home to come and cook breakfast to feed the homeless or teach Sunday school so that we will have more young people to be baptized like last Sunday or sing in the choir to make beautiful music to God’s ears. You have stable instability.

On Christmas Eve, there will be few cars on the freeways, only a few of the restaurants in Chinatown will remain open. The streets will be empty of shoppers. And on Christmas Day, it will again feel like the whole world is calm and still. The stable in Bethlehem is stabilizing all the flux and change and keeping still the whole world as we welcome the baby who will be named Jesus, the Son of the Most High, Lord God. 

But if we follow Jesus, we will have to go where he is going. So today, on the threshold of the incarnation, let us go to the stable. Let us welcome the one who is born among us, the one who intends to take us where we have never been, teach us to do things that we never thought we could do, and to make us people we could not be on our own. Forsaking our desire for stability, let us go to the stable, let us worship him, and then let us follow him.

Let us pray.

O God, we asked for a Savior, and then were surprised by the “one” we received. We asked for deliverance, but were afraid of the form our “deliverer” assumed. We prayed for healing, only to be shocked by the prescription of the “healer.” We wanted a word, and then were offended by the words spoken by the “word.” We longed for a powerful, impressive god, and what we got was the “babe in the stable.”

Help us, dear Jesus, to receive you as you are, in the form you take, as the word you speak, not as we would have you, but as you are. Amen.