Grace and Peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
In 1762, war broke out between the Cherokee nation and the British government. There was no United States in those days, we were still British territories. The Cherokees had been our allies in a war against the French but some North Carolinian had accidentally killed some Cherokees and they had retaliated against some totally uninvolved Virginians. To them, all whites were the same so it did not matter about whom you took revenge upon. An all out war threatened and the Cherokees, realizing their vulnerability, sued for peace, and asked the British Admiral for some British person to come and live among them so that they could learn about the British mindset and culture. Lt. Henry Timberlake, born in Virginia volunteered and spent the best part of a year with them.
Tonight we celebrate Christmas and the arrival of God’s Ambassador to all human flesh. In Jesus, God knows us and we get to know God. Heaven and earth meet in the incarnation. God gets to know cold, hunger and danger. We get to know how deep and wide God’s love is.
What actually happens is far beyond our ability to understand. God and humanity become one in the person of Jesus. The infinite becomes finite – limited. God’s being
is cosmic – it encompasses all space and time. We humans are the very definition of limitation. We are born, we grow up, we age, and we die. Our bodies are flesh, they grow old, and they waste away. In Christ though, opposites co-exist.
More complexly, we do not have two God’s - God the Father, and Jesus, God the Son. We have only one. This means, of course, who is running the universe for the 33 years or so that Jesus enters time and space to get to know us. Jesus is not just an ambassador from heaven, he is heaven’s King. Jesus is God. If you have trouble understanding that, you are in very good company. Every mortal since the resurrection is mystified by it. We do not understand it – we simply stand in awe of it.
Lt. Henry Timberlake the army officer who goes to live with the Cherokee spends an incredible year with them. Though they have no written language, and their technology is very simple. Timberlake learns that they love their children deeply and have very stable marriages. They relate to God and have a complex religion which teaches them how to respect each other and ultimate things. They are aware of their history and even have a story to explain how the earth came into existence.
He finds that they are keen observers of the earth. They are sophisticated about herbal remedies and cures for diseases and they live in harmony with their environment. In short, he finds much to admire about them especially their collectively defined identity. They are not greedy. They only take what they need from the earth and they value their relationships with each other more than the British do who are always fighting and squabbling for status and power. He comes to love them and wants to advance their cause. At his own expense, he takes their chief and a delegation to London to meet the King. He feels that if the King could understand their goodness and appreciate their nobility the King might have compassion on them. The trip bankrupts him and he ultimately dies in a London debtor’s person. His love and compassion cost him everything.
In the same manner, God comes to us in compassion. Yet far greater than Henry Timberlake, God in Christ knows us from “day 1” actually from the 9 months before that while he was being carried in Mary's womb.
The Christians and infancy stories of Jesus are so filled with the images of the union of heaven and earth in Christ. Mary and Joseph were poor. Like 90% of all the Galileans and Jews of their day – they eked out a subsistence living. They were clothes but they were hand made and Mary gave birth to Jesus in humiliation – in the stench and filth of a barn. We romanticize the stable just as we do the cross but both are sign of rejection. The heavenly messengers come not to the nobility to announce Jesus’ birth; they come to the shepherds who are the commonest of men. Think of them as truck drivers or migrant workers at the lowest rung
of the social ladder. In order to have all of the human experience, God had to embrace the experience of those at the bottom. True, Kings do come to visit, but they worship and go. Jesus’ earthly King, King Herod right away makes plans to assassinate the young, stable born Monarch, and Jesus becomes a refugee and flees for his life.
I’ve only been in a refugee camp once in my life. In Kenya, when I was working in Africa, I visited a camp for Ethiopian refugees. There were about 50,000 of them. They fled from their home country with nothing but their clothes and what they could carry. They quickly used up their money and had to survive by begging or being day laborers. They were completely and totally vulnerable.
Perhaps that is why Jesus reminds us in the gospels that we are to see his face in the face of all who are suffering deprivation of any kind. Because he was a refugee, he identifies with refugees and bids us to address them and treat them as we would him. Because he was a prisoner and died as a criminal, he wants us to examine how we treat those behind bars and focus on their reformation and redemption and not on mere punishment. He says plainly “Even as you have done it to the least of these, my bothers and sister, you do it to me.” Because Jesus, God in the flesh, has been there and done that, we are free.
Tonight, Christmas has its own special mystery and magic. It says above all, whether you are at the lowest or the
highest rung of the social ladder – I love you. I understand your pain, your fears, your worries, your anger, your passions, and your love for one another. Martin Luther used to say, “What God has not assumed, God has not redeemed.” By this be meant, God experiences everything in Christ, extracts the sin from it and us, and becomes our death and punishment.
At the turn of the century, orphanages were all over America. Children whose parents could not provide for them or who had died gave them up in the hope that someone would make their children their own. There is a very moving story about a young girl, eight years old. She was pretty and sweet tempered but she was born with a club foot – a foot that turned outward. She could not run like other kids. Potential parents were attracted to her but when they saw her club foot, she was overlooked.
Now, in order to have this story speak gospel to you, you will have to get in touch with your own “club footedness”. You will have to feel and to hover over the places where you are broken, infirm or misshapen. We all have them you know. Creation is filled with brokenness some of it is our sin, some simply mystery.
As it so happens, a couple came in looking for a little girl. This club footed one was approached but because she had been disappointed so many times when the matron came for her she said, “I do not want to go; I do not want to be rejected again”. The Matron responded, “Have faith, this time may be different.” She got dressed, prettied herself up and hobbled in. She could not hide her club foot. She walked toward the young woman who was there with her husband and noticed that the woman’s foot was malformed too. The woman rose up and hobbled to her on her club foot and reached out her hands and arms to enfold her. “You are coming home with us”.
Tonight is our homecoming too. No matter how broken we are, the Divine Christ Child comes as God’s ambassador, to love, to save and ultimately to usher us home – as his adopted daughters and sons.
In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Who We Are