Homily for the First Sunday after Christmas
27 December 2020
Isaiah 61:10-62:3
Galatians 3:23; 4:4-7
John 1:1-18
Psalm 147
A comic film of 1987, “Three Men and a Baby” centers around three young bachelors who share an apartment in New York City. A baby, with an attached note naming one of the three as the father, appears on their doorstep. But the father is out of the country. The other two have no idea how to care for a baby and desperately turn for advice to their landlady, Mrs. Hathaway. Mrs. Hathaway, who obviously wants to be helpful but avoid a situation she rapidly assesses as unlikely to end well, confronts the two: “So watcha gonna do with the baby?”
Good question!
Good question for two swinging bachelors confronted with an uncomfortable reality.
Maybe it’s also a good question for us!
Christmas Day is over.
We’ve sung all the traditional songs. We’ve heard all the traditional scriptures. We’ve decorated our trees and strung lights on our eaves. We’ve opened gifts and done our best to make Christmas Day feel as much like “normal” as possible in spite of a raging pandemic, an exhausting political situation, and the likelihood that there is more to come.
Maybe we’re feeling just a little like we’re just glad it’s over?
But is isn’t, is it?
We can get ourselves “up” for New Year knowing the NFL will somehow manage to keep us entertained, and we’re just as glad not to have to go to the obligatory party and might even go to bed early! Enough already!
Then we can get on with whatever 2021 will bring hoping fervently that things will be better than 2020.
We can bury it in activity and celebration……..but the question still just seems to hang out there in the air: “Whatcha gonna do with the baby?”
If we really think about it, our 21st century empirical minds immediately click in and we realize that any story of an unmarried 15 year old virgin having a baby is pretty hard to swallow. That the story claims that that baby is GOD is even more counterintuitive!
Yet that’s what’s been claimed for generations and generations of people who have have become convinced that that baby was, in fact, God!
The claim is that the baby was God, the Creator, the “Ultimate Ultimate”, “Wisdom” with a capital W”, the “WORD”, the “Logos”, the Basic Principal that hangs the whole of everything together and makes it all make sense, logical!
And the story persists that this is the way God chose to “show up” in our world in a way we could understand… in the person of that baby.
His parents named him “Jesus”.
So “Whatycha gonna do with THAT baby?”
If we’re honest, I suspect many of us have another question too:
Can God still show up (in ANY form) in the midst of all this mess that is our world?
There’s no “Mrs. Hathaway” for us to call upon.
I remember when we brought our firstborn home from the hospital on a cold November day. “OK, she’s ours. We can take her home! She has a name but we’ve only just met her. What do we do now?” And we learned! It was her mother’s love and common sense and her father’s love and willingness to stand around and learn things! And the more time we spent with her, the more we learned to love her and understand her and get the “feel” of having her as part of our family.
So it is with this Jesus baby!
John tells us “The Word became flesh…”
Like us!
We need to spend time getting to know him, to understand him, and to make him a real part of our lives!
Archbishop William Temple as written, “The Word did not merely indwell a human being. Absolute identity is asserted. The Word is Jesus; Jesus is the Word. And it is said that the Word became flesh, because “flesh” is that part of human nature commonly associated with frailty…… The whole of him, flesh included, is the Word, the self-utterance, of God.”[1]
He continues, “He pitched His fleshly tent among us. The suggestion of a brief sojourn, but all thought of a momentary apparition is excluded.”[2]
So God “showed up” in the person of Jesus!
And Jesus is the “baby” we have to figure out what to do with.
What a strange way for God to “show up”!
But is it really so strange when we think of all the ways God has shown up for people in the past for people who looked for him, even when things seemed impossible and dangerous?
A wise clergy colleague recently reminded me that the best way to discern how God might “show up” in the future is to look back to see where and when God has “shown up” in the past.
The circumstances of Jesus’ birth certainly weren’t the best. In fact, they were downright dangerous. Roman occupiers were all over the place. The roads were clogged with refugees. A first baby for a teenager far from home and in a cowshed without experienced assistance was a perilous endeavor. But God “showed up”.
As we face the uncertainties of the future, there is much to concern us.
We’re in the midst of a global pandemic with no early end in sight. We face political uncertainties. Millions of our fellow citizens are hungry, homeless, and destitute. Can we be confident that God will somehow “show up”?
Let’s look back and remember a few times God showed up when things seemed really bleak and awful:
In the colosseum at Rome, God was there.
At Dachau and Auschwitz,
At Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
At Antietam and Gettysburg,
On the Edmund Pettus Bridge and at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston,
At Standing Rock and at Refugee Detainment Centers on the Southern border.
God showed up at Manzanar and aboard La Amistad and at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
God was right there at Omaha Beach and Iwo Jima and the World Trade Center.
Is there any reason to suspect God won’t, or can’t show up in the future?
No matter what?
Is there any reason why Jesus, that baby in that Bethlehem manger was anything other than God God’s Self come to us as the ultimate way to “show up”?
So back to where we started:
“Whatcha gonna do with the baby?”
Amen!
[1] Temple, William, Readings in St. John’s Gospel, Macmillan, London, 1959 p13
[2] Ibid, p14
