Strange Power
Luke 2:1-20
The Rev. Sara Fischer
Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace.
Divine mystery enters the world in the way of Jesus: visible and invisible, knowable and unknowable, earthly and heavenly. In the words of St. Irenaeus, “God becomes human, that we might become divine.”
Last spring during Lent several of us read a book by Evelyn Underhill, the British laywoman who wrote prolifically on Anglican spirituality in the first part of the 20th century. Underhill has a lot to say about the Incarnation, the Nativity. She writes about “the extremes of mystery and homeliness.” I think these words perfectly articulate what the “big deal” is about Christmas, for Christians.
Nowhere is this co-existence of human and divine, mystery and homeliness, more evident than in the shepherds’ experience on Christmas Eve. And nowhere are the implications of this co-existence of human and divine more needed than in our lives today.
In ancient Palestine, shepherds were about as homely as you get. Utterly mundane in the literal sense—of the world—because they lived close to the earth. They lived outside most of the time, among dirty, smelly animals. They had few loyalties other than to their animals and their own most human needs. With the exception of a few notable, storybook shepherds like the young David, most people in polite society did not trust them. And yet, it is into this earthy, sketchy world of sheep and shepherds that the heavenly host appears, announcing the birth of the Savior, the Messiah, the Lord. The mysterious enters the mundane.
It is as if you were at Costco or the dentist’s office and a fantastical being appeared, walking through walls and glowing, maybe waving a light saber, and saying: “The Messiah has been born! Go see him!” Better yet, it is as if this divine appearance happened not to you but to someone on the periphery of your everyday life. The dry cleaner. Your dental hygienist.
The Christmas story is as much about the very human nature of those who heard the first Christmas message as it is about the message itself. The fact that the announcement went to poor shepherds tells us a lot about God. The shepherds heard and saw something out in those dark fields that made them go to Bethlehem to find the baby Jesus. And finding him in such an earthy, homely place made them go forth from there to proclaim Good News of great joy.
God’s coming among us as a baby in such an ordinary way is an act of love for ordinary humanity. In response, we get to celebrate our humanity and we get to love as God loves. “Only thus,” Evelyn Underhill writes, “can humanity use to the full its strange power of…uniting the extremes of mystery and homeliness.”
What will our response be? How will we use what Underhill calls our “strange power”?
It promises to be a bleak midwinter. It has been getting colder. It is dark. There’s flooding everywhere, from the Clackamas River to our friends’ tents. The news is full of stories of war, poverty, desperation, and greed. Some of you may think there is more bad news this year than usual, and others of you may feel that there’s good news all around us, a new day. You’re both right. The message from the angels that the shepherds carried out into their dark and cold world invites us to respond with Good News of our own.
The shepherds proclaimed Good News with new voices and with strange power. How will we do the same?
Sometimes our Good News is “Yes.” Yes, I will, with God’s help. I will find a life-affirming community where I can break bread with friends and strangers, with people I agree with and people with whom I disagree. Yes, I will not just respect but protect the dignity of every human being. I will not just seek and serve Christ in all persons, with God’s help, but yes, I will strive to love all persons as God loves. The God who gave voice to shepherds gives us the voice, the strange power, to say yes in Jesus’ name.
In the hymn, “In the bleak midwinter,” we sing What can I give Him, poor as I am? The response is What I can I give Him: give my heart.
Our response to the glorious news of incarnation is to give our hearts, to set our hearts on Jesus. Kind of like the old marriage vows, we plight our troth. In other words, we pledge all the truth of who we are to the truth of God in Christ. We pledge to love.
Giving our hearts the way the shepherds do means witnessing to the presence in the world of everything the shepherds saw, heard and gave their hearts to: Good News. Peace on earth. Witnessing, as we shy Episcopalians always need reminding, takes many forms. Tonight of all nights I am here to remind us of the obvious: the greatest witness, the witness most faithful to this marriage of mystery and homeliness, is love. And love is one of the ways that Christians have always practiced resistance.
Our God is a God who emboldens and empowers the poor and marginalized. When we feel poor in spirit, marginalized by our own feelings of anxiety, anger, or powerlessness, our strange power, given long ago, is simply to love.
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The big deal about Christmas means that because God chose humans to bear the Christmas message, we can use our humanity, our homeliness, to fight prejudice, fear, hatred, misogyny, xenophobia, and poverty. These may sound particularly relevant to our time but they are what Jesus preached about, signs of human brokenness and human need that are relevant to every time in history, signs that open us to God’s intervention and to the service of love to which God calls us in every generation. When we love, we become divine.
Joy to the world, the Lord is come. Let every heart prepare.
