December 19, 2010 4th Sunday of Advent Isaiah

7:10-16 Matthew 1:18-25

“An Imperfect Christmas” Dr. Ted H. Sandberg

Some of you know that my desk and office aren’t as neat as some people’s. This is partly because
when I work I tend not to put things away as soon as I’ve used them as I know the efficiency experts
tell me I’m supposed to do. It’s also partly because I’m not good at filing, so things stack up on my
desk. Also, I don’t have enough space to store things. Finally, I’ve got stuff in my office that really
belongs in a janitor’s closet, but because I’m the one who makes some of the minor repairs around the
church, I like to have those things handy. So they add to the clutter in my office. I don’t apologize for
this, but I do know that some of you are mortified by the state of my office.
From time to time, I did feel a bit guilty about not having things perfect in the office. That is until I
happened upon an Advent Meditation by John R. Wimmer entitled, “Messy Christmas.”1 Wimmer
writes essentially that we’ve cleaned up our understanding of how God works too much. We’ve taken
away God’s willingness to work in a messy world, and made God too sterile. I’d like to share a part
of Wimmer’s meditation with you this morning, not because it helps rid me of my guilt over my
office, but because he has something very good to say about how God works in the world today. Here
is a part of what Wimmer says in ‘Messy Christmas’.
“Overzealous giving,” Wimmer writes, “is not the greatest danger threatening to destroy the meaning
of Christmas. What’s more treacherous is what I would call the over cleanliness of Christmas.
“It struck me last year when several women from our church gave birth during the Advent season. As
one who remains a tad squeamish when making certain types of hospital visits, I felt myself becoming
tense as one mother, recently out of the delivery room, described her labor to me. She and her
husband own a horse-breeding operation, regularly observing firsthand the miracle surrounding birth.
(As her ever-jovial husband raced out the door to meet her at the hospital, he told his colleagues at
work that his wife was ‘foaling.’) While I was flattered by her comfortable candor in relating such a
beautiful and personal matter, my weak stomach was reacting to the absolute messiness of the whole
affair. Yet upon reflection, it becomes clear that there is something quite moving about human birth’s
intermingled beauty and messiness – a curious mixture of pain and joy.”
Wimmer’s queasy pastoral encounter made him wonder about the contrast between real birth and our
yearly Advent images. At his church, they were busily preparing the annual children’s Christmas
show, complete with the usual bath-robed wiseboys, aluminum foil-winged angels and golden-fresh
straw for the manger of a Cabbage-Patch-doll-Jesus. And their Mary? A sweet little girl who was a
good 10 years from childbearing. It was designed to be so very beautiful.
Yet being in the hospital with the real mothers and babies sidetracked Wimmer’s sterile holiday,
reminding him that being human can be exceedingly messy. While it’s the most noble human
experience, birth is also one of the untidiest. Rhythmically discomforting contractions, pain, panting,
placenta, sweating, blood, mucus, labor.
So why is our image of Mary and the baby Jesus so “clean? Of course, the Lukan narrative says Mary
wrapped her son in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger. But even if the birth was as
immaculate as the conception, Jesus was still born in a barn. Most of us are familiar enough with
1 1. Unfortunately, I have lost the reference. I think it came from The Christian
Century, 1987 or so.
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farms to know, or at least remember, what barns can be like. They can be rather squalid: manure,
urine, rodents, other smelly animals, mud, dirty straw. But our romantic artistic expressions and
carols about the manger scene are serene and sterile – even the animals appear to have showered. We
don’t smell that stale wool odor, or hear the ratty-tailed donkeys wailing snotty whinnies. We have
clean, pleasant images.
Of course, art only represents reality in the pursuit of truth. And probably most of us couldn’t
stomach anything close to the reality of the true manger scene. A few years ago, the Advent cover of
a mainline denominational publication tastefully portrayed Mary about eight and a half months
pregnant. The uproar was so great over the indignity of showing Mary “with child” that the
magazine’s editors considered apologizing in print. Even Mary’s humanity mustn’t be messy.
“A passage in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Stride Toward Freedom; The Montgomery Story reveals clean
Christmas’s more extreme implications. In December 1955, the first month of the Montgomery,
Alabama bus boycott, the mayor had called a meeting which included King and other officials of the
Montgomery Improvement Association, a few prominent white pastors, and representatives from the
bus line. After King and others had eloquently argued their position, a white segregationist Methodist
pastor responded. King recalled his speech: ‘He made it clear that he felt the Negroes were wrong in
boycotting the buses; and the even greater wrong, he contended, lay in the fact that the protest was
being led by ministers of the gospel. The job of the minister, he averred, is to lead the souls of men to
God, not bring about confusion by getting tangled up in transitory social problems. He moved on to a
brief discussion of the Christmas story. In evocative terms he talked of ‘God’s unspeakable gift.’ He
ended by saying as we moved into the Christmas season, our minds and hearts should be turned
toward the Babe of Bethlehem; and he urged the Negro ministers to leave the meeting determined to
bring this boycott to a close and lead their people instead ‘to a glorious experience of the Christian
faith.’” Following up the urging, the town leaders encouraged the blacks to give up the boycott until
after Christmas; the action was going to mess up the season of good cheer. Apparently, it wasn’t only
supposed to be a clean Christmas, but a “white” Christmas also.
Wimmer then asks, “Our wistful attempts to clean up Christmas often reveal our inability to stomach a
central question posed by our faith: should our theology and Christology, reflected in our seasonal
practices, suggest that Jesus’ birth was any less than messy?” In other words, will Jesus have anything
to do with a mess?
The question you may be asking is, “What’s this got to do with me? What does a clean Christmas
have to do with my life? What difference does it make if we like to show a nice, clean, beautiful
nativity scene, such as the one we have here in the front of the church? Who’d want to show the scene
as it probably was? Isn’t it much nicer to have things clean?” The answer from an artistic point of
view is, “Of course. Of course it’s much nicer to have this beautiful scene before us, rather than a
smelly, drab, more accurate representation of what may have happened.” From an artistic point of
view, this scene is wonderful.
But from a theological point of view, from a view which looks to understand how God works in the
world and in our lives, this beautiful nativity scene can become a danger if we let it. Just as my office
here in the church isn’t always as neat as it could be, the world isn’t always as neat and clean as we’d
like it. In fact, as we know, the world is often as dirty and smelly as the worst of barns. The problem
is that if “cleanliness is next to godliness,” what hope do we the “unclean” have on Christmas morn?
It’s easy for us to forget that Jesus didn’t come to the neat and tidy, to the clean, but to the tax
collectors and the prostitutes, and the unclean. There’s a real danger that we can get so caught up in
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the beauty of Christmas that we forget that Jesus was just as human as any other baby, and therefore as
messy as any of us. But because of that, we can come to him with our messes and he’ll understand
and help us.
Frankly, I’m glad to be reminded of the messiness of Christmas because messiness perhaps best
describes our lives – yours and mine. While things usually go along well for a time, even for years,
there comes a time when the road becomes rocky, a time when our neat, clean lives are disrupted and
we find ourselves confronted by the messiness, even the dirtiness of the world. If we had to be clean
before God would come to us, what hope would any of us ever have to receive God?
Our world, even our lives at times, are messy and dirty. How else do we describe a family struggling
with alcoholism; a family where lying and cheating and abuse are standard, where “normal” is really
“abnormal?” Or how else can we describe that which confronts the homeless – living in a shelter with
no privacy, no security, and little chance for escape? Or how better could we describe the hungry –
those who sort through trash cans, or who wait for a cupful of rice, or who must pathetically watch as
their children’s stomachs become bloated and their eyes sink into their skulls from malnutrition? Much
of the world is terribly messy and dirty. Even our own lives can accurately be described as messy and
dirty at times, not just because we’re sinners, not just because of the things we’ve done, and do; but
because we’re also victims. Sometimes it’s as if we too are living in a messy, dirty stable. Our lives,
too, are anything but neat. We’re confronted by decisions which are complex and difficult. Changes,
even for the better, create stress which makes life anything but smooth. We’re faced with disease and
injuries which cause restrictions in our lives, and uncertainty about our future. Often our pasts reach
out to upset the routine with which we’re comfortable and create tension and pain for us once again.
Finally, we’re all growing older which in itself forces us to acknowledge our limitations and our
ultimate frailty.
Despite our tidy Advent conspiracies to sweep unpleasant human affairs under a carpet of oppression,
repression and denial, into our world has come the One who has made an important distinction:
human messiness is not ugliness, and cleanliness is not a precondition of grace or justice. For amid
the disorder of being human come faith’s severest hardships – but also its greatest meaning and joy.
This Christmas story in its queasy details outlines what really happened: Jesus was born Immanuel,
God with us in all our earthly glory, and in all our earthly mess.
The greatest meaning of Christmas is that our God is one who loves us enough to enter our lack of
order, our humanity and our untidy human affairs. And by becoming human, humanity finds
redemption, not by being clean and neat, not by perfectly obeying the law, or by solving all our own
problems. No, we find redemption through Jesus Christ, the one who was willing to enter into our
messy, sometimes even dirty lives, and offer us release from our sin, freedom from our guilt, and hope
for life everlasting. Perhaps as we continue to look at the beautiful nativity scene we have here, and
where ever else you may see this wonderful scene, you’ll be reminded of the pain and smells of the
first Christmas, and know that Jesus is just as happy to come into the stables of our lives as well.