From Generation to Generation:
We Tell This Story
Luke 2: 1-20
Emmanuel Baptist Church; December 24, 2022
Image: How God Shows Up by Rev. Lisle Gwynn Garrity, sanctifiedart.org
Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://youtu.be/D6k-mDP0BG0
When Mary learned that she was going to give birth to the Son of God, she sang the song we call the Magnificat. “My soul magnifies the Lord,” she sang. “For the Mighty One has done great things . . . God’s mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.” For the last month, we have immersed ourselves in this theme, recalling the ways our lives and histories, actions and faith are interconnected and woven together from one generation to the next to the next.
As the youth have reminded us, this story, of a baby born to redeem the world, speaks to the deepest parts of us. Humans have been telling and re-telling this story in all kinds of places, across cultures and contexts, in times of plenty and hardship, in war zones and peace time, in hospital rooms and in front of family Christmas trees, for centuries. I invite you to settle in for a few minutes as we remember some of those contexts together.
A thousand years ago, the world was a very different place. Since the vast majority of people did not read or write, Biblical stories were often told in pictures which were preserved in stained glass windows. According to legend, in 1223, Francis of Assisi told the story of Jesus’ birth by creating the first nativity scene with hay and an ox and donkey and a manger in a cave in an Italian village. He invited villagers to gaze on the scene while he preached about the babe in Bethlehem.
Skipping ahead to the early 1800’s, the twelve years of the Napoleonic wars had decimated the political and social infrastructures across Europe. 1816 was an especially cold year with widespread crop failure and famine. Pastor Joseph Mohr was serving a congregation in Austria that was poverty-stricken, hungry and traumatized. So he wrote the story in song, to convey the hope that there was still a God who cared. The next year, he transferred to St. Nicholas Church in Oberndorf. Just before Christmas, he asked his friend Franz Gruber to set his verses to music. On Christmas Eve, 1818, the two friends sang Silent Night together for the first time in public, accompanied on guitar.
Another hundred years passed. Another war was underway. People had thought it would be over quickly, but six months into World War I, the winter had set in and the Western Front stretched hundreds of miles. Countless soldiers were living in misery in the trenches and tens of thousands had already died.
On Christmas, they remembered this story in a profound way. At various places along the 400-mile front, soldiers crossed into the No Man’s Land between trenches and met their enemies, unarmed. They exchanged food and gifts, sang carols and played soccer together.
German Lieutenant Zehmisch of the 134 Saxons Infantry, described a pick-up soccer game in his diary, “Eventually the English brought a soccer ball from their trenches, and pretty soon a lively game ensued,” he wrote. “How marvelously wonderful, yet how strange it was. The English officers felt the same way about it. Thus Christmas, the celebration of Love, managed to bring mortal enemies together as friends for a time.”[1]
The Great Depression was another time when the story of Emmanuel, God with us, was told by people who especially needed to remember it. On Christmas Eve, 1931, construction workers building the Rockefeller Center Complex in New York City were grateful to be employed at that time when jobs were scarce. They decided to pool their money to buy a Christmas tree to lift their own spirits and others. They decorated a 20-foot-balsam fir with handmade garland and strings of cranberries and a few tin cans. The foreman set up a table near the tree where the workers lined up to receive their paychecks.
You might remember with me that in 2016 a ceasefire allowed Christians in Syria to gather on Christmas Eve for the first time in 5 years. With great joy, they met in a bombed out church to tell the story of the baby born to bring peace. Tonight, they tell the story again, although the conflict continues and many face intolerable hardships.
Two years ago, a pandemic changed the world and Christmas Eve was different from anything any of us had ever known. But still, we gathered. Worshipping from our homes, but connected by Zoom, we could see each other in the gallery screen. Each little box represented a household with its own stories. There were the faithful who never miss a worship service and the newcomers who had only recently discovered this church. In one window, maybe, was the ninety-year-old who had quit using her computer 5 years earlier but who had taught herself how to get on Zoom in order to gather with her faith community. Maybe there were some families who had cleaned out every closet and drawer and repainted every possible room in the preceding months and were now pretty tired of being in the house together all the time. There were grandparents separated from grandchildren and people who lived alone keenly bearing the weight of isolation. Family members and friends showed up from different time zones and different weather zones.
Each of us, in our spaces lit a candle and sang Silent Night, reminding ourselves and each other of the light of Christ that shines in the darkness. In one household, maybe, two young siblings turned on the LED candles that the church had distributed and they held them where they could see the world through them, a kind of science experiment. In another place, maybe, a child held a candle flame in one hand and a page of Silent Night lyrics in the other and tried to see how close the two could get to each other before the paper caught fire.
We gathered, in the midst of real-life, to hear the story again and to tell it for the next generation. And we are here again tonight, for the same reason. We are aware that we are not the same people who gathered two years ago. We have changed in many ways. We are mourning loved ones who have died. We celebrate the babies who have been born among us. From generation to generation, we tell this story which speaks to the deepest parts of us.
And we are not alone, all over the world tonight, Christians are telling this story. In Myanmar, Karen and Karenni and other ethnic-minority Christians are remembering it in the jungles and refugee camps where they have fled to escape bombings, mortars, and drones.
At the US/Mexico border, the story is being told by Pastor Abraham Barberi and Team Brownsville as they distribute rice and beans and blankets to cold migrants in Matamoros and Reynosa, Mexico.
And in Ukraine, where the destruction is incomprehensible, and thousands are without heat, electricity and water. One Ukrainian woman said, “the essence of this holiday [is] when we celebrate the birth of Hope that humanity received through Jesus Christ. Hope is what Ukrainians need as air during these dark times. Light will overcome Darkness.”[2]
The Rev. Meredith Miller is a pastor who has celebrated Christmas for decades. She says this “Christmas is not here to offer a four-week escape from the pain of the world with a paper-thin layer of twinkle lights. . . . Christmas is not offering us the chance to escape the ache of life through piles of presents. Christmas is God saying “Yes this pain is too much. Yes it is too sad. Yes, the ache is too great. Hang on. I’ll come carry it with you.”[3]
We tell this story of a extraordinary baby born to ordinary people. A baby who would grow up to to bring love close, because “this is how God shows up – in a child who cries, in hands that hold, in human flesh, in life and death. Each year, we tell this story because it is raw with joy, pain and all the complexities of being human.”[4]
This is how God chooses to be known by us, in the messiness and pain of life, as one who is right there with us, sharing it all -- flesh and blood, joy and suffering, boredom and excitement, courage and fear. This, beloved ones, is the good news, for all of us and for everyone, that God’s great love has been born among us. No matter how your story is unfolding, may you find that this truth holds space for you. Thanks be to God.
[1] https://www.history.com/news/christmas-truce-1914-world-war-i-soldier-accounts
[2] https://www.facebook.com/maia.mikhaluk
[3] https://www.instagram.com/p/CW3GLAVlcLY/?hl=en
[4] Lisle Gwynn Garrity, artisti’s statement about How God Comes, sanctifiedart.org