Fire the Boss and Follow the Friend

Sermon for Dec. 24, 2023 (Christmas Eve)
Luke 2:1-14

Where do your heart and mind go when you hear that Christmas story?  For me, it’s the family room at the house in Springfield where I grew up.  I’m maybe 8 years old, sitting on the hearth, under the stockings, with the Christmas tree twinkling just to my right.  It’s Christmas Eve, and every seat is taken … which is why I’m sitting on the hearth, the littlest kid.  I’m watching my mother at the other end of the room sitting on a barstool, taller than the rest of us, elevated physically to match the place she occupied spiritually in the family.  We’ve had dinner, and the grownups are enjoying a glass of Christmas cheer as they await the time to leave for Midnight Mass at Christ Episcopal Church.  And as they wait and celebrate, my mother suggests we read the Christmas story aloud. 

Now, this wasn’t a tradition in my family.  In fact, I’m not sure we’d ever read Scripture together.  Doing that was not in my family’s spiritual DNA.  Now, we went to church every Sunday; and my mother and we kids all sang in the choir; and Sunday school was every bit as much an expectation as regular school Monday through Friday.  But sharing faith our loud wasn’t our groove.  We were very comfortable with God being in our heads and in our understanding.  But it felt much too intimate, maybe even risky, to say anything about how God might be in our hearts or might direct our lives.  In my family, that would have sounded too much like those evangelical Christians we didn’t understand. 

So, when we sat in our family room that Christmas Eve, good Episcopalians waiting for Midnight Mass, my mother broke the rules by inviting Jesus to come sit in the circle with us.  She opened her King James Bible and read the Christmas story with an eloquence befitting her vocation as an English and speech teacher – even beating Linus in the Charlie Brown Christmas special.  And that moment was important enough to me that, 50 years later, I can see myself right back in the story.

Putting yourself into the story – that’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.  And I mean that in two ways.  Not only is Christmas about us putting ourselves into God’s story; it’s about God putting Godself into ours.

Let’s think about that for a minute – because, even though my family overemphasized the intellectual aspect of faith, it does matter that God be in our head and in our understanding.  That’s what our class at Trailside through Advent was all about:  When we sing our favorite Advent hymns and Christmas carols, what are we actually proclaiming about the coming of Christ – who was he, and what was he doing?  Well, in that class, we looked at four roles Jesus came to play in the story of our salvation – and they all start with the letter “R” to make them easier to remember.¹  The first is “release”: that in Jesus, God releases the power of divinity, emptying Godself to show us the way of humility and self-giving love.  The second “R” is “rescue”: that in Jesus, God rescues us from the power of evil and death, liberating us to choose eternal life instead.  The third “R” is “reconcile”: that in Jesus, God heals the divide caused by our brokenness and self-interest, bringing us and God back into the relationship that began in the Garden.  And the fourth “R” is actually two, “reign” and “return”: that Jesus reveals what God’s reign and rule looks like “on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10) and that he’ll return to bring life back into alignment with the paradise God created “in the beginning” (Genesis 1:1).

So, what unites these roles Jesus plays in the story of our salvation?  To me, it’s this: that God isn’t just willing to save us; God goes to the extreme to save us.  I mean, we’d expect God to act a certain way, right?  If the sovereign of the universe is coming to do battle with Satan, and heal us of our sin, and give us a new way of relating to each other – you’d think that would be a pretty stunning display, right?  You’d think the anointed King would come … well, the way God’s people 2,000 years ago were expecting, with war horses and chariots and cosmic power.  After all, the “heavenly host” (Luke 2:13) in the reading tonight was the army of the Most High God.  Those legions were supposed to be toppling the legions of Rome, not serenading shepherds on a dark, lonely night.  

But instead, God enters into our story as us.  The cosmic King is born in a cave on a quiet hillside in the middle of nowhere, welcomed by people on the margin of the margins, a couple of unmarried peasants under orders to report for imperial taxation.  First on the road and then on the run, the young parents Mary and Joseph emigrate as refugees to get away from a ruler who wants to see them dead, taking the newborn King to a more welcoming country where they start over, homeless. 

This is not your standard story of divine conquest.  So, if we’re looking for what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown, here’s one way to see it: God wants so badly to defeat sin and death, to heal our broken places, to show us how to live – God wants so badly to set the world to rights that God will rebuild it, at great personal cost, from the bottom up.

It matters, on this holy night, that we know that.  But it also matters that we feel it.  And in our culture, experiencing a relationship with God often gets expressed in terms of “being saved.”  Growing up in Springfield, Missouri, at least outside the friendly confines of my head-oriented family and church, I heard a lot about having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.  It was all over the bumper stickers and billboards and other churches’ signs.  It was on the lips of the people who came knocking on your door.  And it made me nervous because, although we shared a common faith, we did not share a common language.  I had no idea what they were talking about when they asked, “Do you know Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?  Have you been washed in the blood of the Lamb?”  I had no answer to give them.  I didn’t even know what it meant to have Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior or to be washed in the blood of the Lamb.  I was much more comfortable with a reasonable God, a God who only needed to make sense.

Over time, my conceptual God gave way to a different one, a slightly more relatable deity – God the supervisor, God the boss.  It may be an occupational hazard for people in my line of work, but it came to define my “relationship” with Jesus Christ:  He was the one who gave me assignments.  Now, you can have a good relationship with your boss, but it’s not exactly a “relationship” in an emotional sense, the kind that might change your life.  So, for years, Jesus has sat across the desk from me in a constant state of performance evaluation.  Whoopee.

Well, recently, I was talking with my spiritual director about how I see God, who God is for me; and this image of God the Boss came up.  It may not be a surprise that the way I spoke when I described this kind of God wasn’t exactly filled with joy.  So, my spiritual director said, “What would happen if you fired that God?  What would it be like to look away from God behind the desk?  Who would you see instead?”  And, in my mind’s eye, I looked in the other direction, away from the great big desk; and what I saw was a friend.  For me, it was a woman, because most of my best friends have been women.  She wasn’t sitting behind a desk, critiquing my job performance.  She was on her feet, smiling, even laughing, heading somewhere – and inviting me to come along.

So what does this have to do with the birth of Jesus as our Savior and King?  I think it’s this: that just as God went to the extreme to save us, entering into our experience to remake humanity from the bottom up, so God goes to the extreme to save me, and you, entering directly into our experience to lead us into new life from the inside out. 

So, this Christmas, I invite you to experience God as tangibly and relationally as your spiritual wiring will allow.  If you’re in your family room, enjoying a glass of Christmas cheer by the tree, pour one for Jesus.  If you’re opening presents and you get some awful Christmas sweater, imagine Jesus there giving it a belly laugh. 

And by the same token … if you’re reeling this Christmas, if you’ve lost someone you love, if your life is on fire, if the world is frightening, if everything’s hard … then remember the best hug you’ve ever had, and imagine it coming from Jesus himself – because it is.  If there’s a wall between you and someone you love, let Jesus take down the first brick and then follow his lead.  If you’re knocked down by something you just can’t beat, feel the strength of his hand lifting you up and his arm around your shoulders as, day by day, you take the next right step – together.

The crazy truth is this: The King who came to save all humanity also comes to save you.  It’s got nothing to do with you earning it, but it’s got everything to do with you inviting it.  Jesus is a gentleman, after all, and he won’t break down the door.  Instead, he’s standing on your doorstep, waiting to be let in.  For, as I heard my mother read out loud in our family room half a century ago, the most stunning words in this stunning Christmas story are these: “to you” (Luke 2:11).  To you is born a Savior, and to you that Savior’s still aching to come.

1.     Framework taken from Urban Skye’s Gloria in Excelsis Deo: The Deep Theology of Christmas Carols. Available at: https://www.urbanskye.org/urban-skye-publishing/the-seven-deadly-virtues-tax3l-hlwmz-5eclw-79bx3. Accessed Dec. 21, 2023.