2024-01-02
Brooke Strong
Sermon Text...
Christmas Eve, 2023 Hamilton Coe Throckmorton
Luke 2:1-20 The Federated Church, UCC
On a morning walk the other day, I saw a young woman park her car and then get out. As I passed her parked car, I noticed a bumper sticker on the back bumper. It said, clearly referring to herself, “Not fragile like a flower. Fragile like a bomb.” I thought that was an interesting word play. At the same time, though, I thought, “Maybe it’s best for me to keep my distance.”
The cleverness exhibited on bumper stickers and t-shirts is endlessly imaginative and something I regularly appreciate. One of my favorites is, “‘That’s too much bacon,’ said no one ever.” Or one I saw on a dark-colored SUV the other day: “I’m the black Jeep of the family.” Or “I want someone who will look at me the way I look at chocolate.”
And one that I’ve loved for years: “Commas save lives,” followed by this: Either, “Let’s eat Grandma,” which would be atrociously bad for Grandma’s health, or “Let’s eat (comma), Grandma,” which kindly invites her to share a meal with you. The comma makes a world of difference. Commas not only save lives, they also convey crucial information. Not “Let’s eat Grandma.” But “Let’s eat, Grandma.”
I have to say I’ve long been troubled by a phrase in Luke’s story of the birth of Jesus. If you’ve been coming to Christmas Eve services all your life, you will likely remember it. The Savior Jesus has just been born and an angel comes to tell the shepherds this astounding news as they tend their sheep. The heavenly host then joins the angel and bursts into song. “Glory to God in the highest heaven,” they sing. And it’s the next phrase that may grate on the nerves: “and on earth peace among those with whom God is pleased” (Luke 2:14; Inclusive Version).
And the trouble with that phrase is that it makes God’s favor totally conditional. Yes, there will be peace, but only for those whom God favors. You’d better be on God’s good side, in other words, or peace will be totally elusive. You’d better toe the line, or the gifts of God will skip right over you and go to the ones who pass God’s litmus test. I checked sixty-four English translations of that phrase, and forty-six of them say that or something similar—that God will give peace to those whom God favors, to those who please God, to those who are people of good will. That frankly doesn’t strike me as particularly good news, to hear that God embraces us as long as we pass the test. Because that’s what our life is like every day, and it’s part of what makes things challenging. We’re acceptable as long as we do what’s expected of us—as long as we do our chores or finish the work project or ace the test. When that’s the way the world is, why would I ever see that sort of demanding standard as good news from God? ‘I’ll love you if . . .’
And then a scholar named Fred Craddock helped me to see that phrase in an entirely different way. The Greek language has no commas—in fact it has no punctuation at all. Which means when we translate, we always have to do some interpreting—figuring out where the commas go, where the periods go, whether what we’re reading is a question or a statement. There’s a huge difference, isn’t there, between my saying to you, “You’re beautiful” and my saying, “Are you beautiful?” Without any punctuation, the way the Greek language is, we have to decide which it is.
So instead of reading the song of the heavenly host this way, “God gives peace to people with whom God is pleased”—what if we simply, as Fred Craddock suggests, add a comma: “God gives peace to people (comma), with whom God is pleased.” That one comma changes everything. It’s not that God loves only the people God finds acceptable. It’s that God loves people, all of whom God adores. This may seem a small thing, and maybe odd to feature grammatical questions on Christmas Eve. But it makes all the difference. It’s the difference between a God who loves us only if we pass the test, and a God who loves us extravagantly regardless of whether we have met any standard at all. It’s this God, the God who loves with open arms no matter how well we do, that is born this night in the precious baby Jesus (cf., Fred Craddock, Luke: Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Preaching and Teaching, p. 36).
It may be that the single most difficult challenge of faith is to trust that God loves us just as we are. If there’s one thing you remember from this evening, I hope it’s this: God is not sitting in the heavens with arms folded and a frown on the divine forehead waiting for you to do the right thing, waiting until you finally get your stuff together, waiting for you to get off drugs or alcohol, waiting for you to succeed in your business, waiting for you to develop the right personality, waiting for you to lose five or fifty pounds, waiting for you to get perfect grades, waiting for you to be a starter on the basketball team, waiting until you become the child your parents thought they wanted. It is not as though God took one look at you when you were born and smacked a divine hand against the forehead and said, ‘Oh, my Self—what was I thinking!’ No, you are, in this very moment, the person God had in mind when God made you. Before you do or say or think anything, God adores you, just as you are. That is the good news of Christ’s birth. It’s the good news we celebrate here tonight. “God gives peace to people (comma), with whom God is pleased.”
Father Gregory Boyle says, “For the Tender One, it’s simply never about worthiness.” And he says, “All the mystics have come to see this. . .. We still can’t shake the narrative of the God who seeks our measuring up and demands some high level of performance. We don’t [need to] measure up to this God; we just show up. We allow this Tender One to fill us extravagantly . . .. Behold the One beholding you and smiling” (The Whole Language, p. 11). That’s it. That is the central spiritual task that faces us—to take in that smiling God beholding us. God gives us peace because that’s just who God is. This is what’s at the heart of the Christmas story. Remember the comma: God gives peace to all people (comma), with whom God is pleased. God is beholding you and me and smiling, and there’s nothing you or I can do about it.
And of course what that means is that, if God loves you and me that way, without any regard for how accomplished we are, without any consideration for our intelligence or our moral purity or our successes or failures—if that’s the way God is with you and me, that also means God loves everybody else with precisely the same passion and affection. Yes, even the irritating sister and the embarrassing uncle and the exasperating neighbor. Yes, even the exhausting aunt and the ungrateful child and the snarky parent. Yes, even the politician who makes us mad as a hornet and the colleague who makes us think we’re going to have a stroke and the person we pass on the street who rubs us totally the wrong way.
When Jesus is born as a baby, when God takes human shape, what the Creator of all that is is saying is: ‘I adore every single one of you, I cherish every atom, every star, every giraffe, every idiosyncratic tic. I revel in all of this. I quite simply treasure each one of you, as you are. And in my heart, I ache to have you treat each other that way.’ I suspect the deep truth of the matter is that God looks at you and me the way I look at chocolate, and the way you may look at coffee or ice cream or the deepest violet sunset or the surf crashing to the shore at your favorite beach.
It’s that love received, and that love given, that shines God’s luminous comma into the world. A few weeks ago, a young Federated girl saw a notice in our Sunday worship bulletin that an older church member, a man in his 90s, a man she didn’t know, had been hospitalized. Without any prompting from anyone, this girl took it upon herself to write him a note. She told the man simply that she was thinking about him and that she hoped he would feel better soon. He showed me that note with tears in his eyes. For him, her words were a shimmering grace, a blessing of the highest order. They radiated love and remade his world. We are invited to gaze at each other with hearts melting in tender care. Because that’s what it is for Jesus to be born in a manger, as an adorable and precious infant.
Remember the comma that makes all the difference, that indeed saves lives—your life and mine. God gives peace to all the people (comma), with whom God is pleased. So may God be praised. And may we be God’s vessels to each other of that sweet and tender love, this night and always.