God became a child, so that we might become children of God.

12/24/02 Crestwood United Church of Christ

Pastor: Marcia Sietstra

I am so pleased to have a real baby in our nativity scene tonight, and I must admit, I was half hoping little Olivia would cry and fuss a little. Because I think it’s important for us to realize that Jesus was a real, live, helpless little baby. Imagine for a minute this peasant baby’Mary’s milk on his breath, a bit of straw clinging to his blanket, a fleck of cow manure on his manger bed. Imagine Jesus fussing, squirming and wailing when he’s hungry, and doing all the things a tiny baby does. Can you imagine it—the all powerful God of the universe in the form of a baby, totally dependent on a teenage mother!

So often on Christmas cards the nativity scene shows a perfectly serene and reverent baby, surrounded by a heavenly glow. Well, I doubt that what Mary and Joseph got was a Hallmark card baby. No, what Mary and Joseph got was a belching, squalling infant that likely kept them up nights for weeks!

Why would God do such a thing? I mean really, haven’t you wondered why the creator of the universe, the one who formed living cells and set the planets spinning in their course, why this all-powerful God chose to come among us as a baby?

The most satisfying explanation I have ever heard came to me from a children’s musical many years ago, when it reduced the theological analyses to this: God became a child so that we might feel close to God. You see, on this night, we dare to believe that in Jesus, God experienced the same vulnerabilities, pain, and heartaches of human life that we experience.

Let me tell you a silly story to illustrate. Picture a grandfather who hears his grandson wailing from another room in the house, and finds him jumping up and down in his playpen, crying at the top of his lungs. When the toddler sees his grandfather, he reaches up his little arms to be picked up, and says, ‘Out, bampa, out!’ It is only natural for the grandfather to reach down to lift him out of his predicament, but as he begins to do so, the mother of the child steps into the room and says, ‘No, he needs to stay there. He’s having a little time out for not obeying. He must stay in.’

The grandfather is at a loss to know what to do. The child’s tears and arms reach right into his heart, but the mother’s firmness in correcting her son must not be taken lightly. And so the grandfather does the only thing he can’he climbs in with the little boy.

Perhaps that is what God in Jesus Christ did for us at Christmas—climbed into human life with us, showing us just how far God will go to be close to us, and forever blurring the distinction between what is holy and what is human.

And here is the rest of the good news tonight: God enters each one of us, and we are capable of cradling what is holy by living the way Jesus taught us to live. Indeed, I believe God became a child so that we might become children of God!

We discover who we are intended to be when we honor what the Christ Child grew up to teach us’to care for our neighbor, to work for peace and justice for all God’s children, ALL of them loved by God. Christmas tells us as much about what we are to become as it tells us about what God became for us. As we listen to the angels sing ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace, goodwill to all’ may we give birth to that peace and goodwill God intends for us.

For God became a child so that we might become children of God! And that is good news for all the world this Christmas Eve. Amen.