The Manger Moment

A sermon preached with the people of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Oakland, California.

We made it. We made it to the manger. Last night, in Luke’s Gospel, the heavenly host made contact with the shepherds. And the shepherds were told how to navigate to this child, who is also savior. But that’s as far as we got.

But this morning we hearty few have made it here, finally. Have walked with the shepherds, to be with them as they arrive. To see it for themselves and tell all those assembled — human and animal — what they have heard about this child. And to see their faces react. Amazed.

This moment. This pause. After the pain and fear and wonder of human birth. After the hymnody of the heavenly host. After the shepherds’ journey. And before the brief childhood accounts. Before John and the baptism, and the winding earthly ministry. Before Jerusalem.

We have not quite an ending, and not quite a beginning. It’s a moment suspended in time. This manger moment.

This scene. That we’ve painted and reenacted, and sung about. This scene that has inspired poetry, and theatre. This scene we have created mythology around; talking animals and children with drums. It’s no wonder we have done all these things. Tried to capture it. Tried to really see it. To hear it. To know it. To make it familiar.

These are, I think, our mathematics to work at understanding, framing, taming, a moment so great and so glorious as to be potentially destabilizing. Even frightening. The moment when God bent the space-time of established creation, and stepped inside.

Stepped inside the ordinary, splintery, unsanitary, manger. The manger that is the world.[i]

And lay in that manger as a newborn human being — precious, yes. And, so delicate and breakable and exposed, each new life makes some part of us think, “how?” 

The sweetness of baby cheeks peeking out of tightly-wrapped blankets. The hilarity of an ill-timed cow’s moo or a young goat’s clumsy antics. The tenderness and exhaustion of a new mother. The majesty of mid-winter sky and its bright stars. The loveliness. The coziness. The comfort. These things are all true. And worthy of celebrating each year.

And, so is the wildness and the wonder, and fearful enormity of the manger moment. The shift in reality itself in knowing that the “Word became Flesh and lived among us,” as John’s Gospel describes it.

So this morning. In our own moment of pause after the frenetic season of preparation and waiting, and before the wrapping up and putting away of boxes, and lights and sugary sweets, I think we have an opportunity to bask in that larger, weirder, wilder side of the manger moment. The side that tells us nothing will ever be the same. That this child will live all of the breathtaking beauty and deep distress of the human experience. And that he will promise us a coming reign of God when all will be made new and, once again, nothing will ever be the same.

A promise not of the cozy and the familiar, but the new and the unknown, which God and God’s messengers remind us over and over, need not be frightening. “Do not be afraid,” the angel tells us this morning. The world has changed. And the world will change.

And this is good news. The weird, wild, destabilizing, good news of the manger moment.

[i] All credit, thanks and praise for the idea of the manger as the world to the late Frederick Buechner in Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABCs of Faith, page 90.