All Saints by the Lake
December 24, 2023
Amanda Seebeck as the Donkey in the Christmas Pageant, with her children Jack D’Entremont (shepherd) and Sarah D’Entremont (baby Jesus), December 17.
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And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.
At our Christmas pageant last Sunday, we were lucky enough to have Baby Jesus played by an actual baby, two-month-old Sarah D’Entremont. Our “manger” was made as comfortable as possible with a clean linen cloth laid over the rough burlap that was standing in for straw, but when Sarah was laid down in it, she was still Not Happy. Almost immediately, her mother Amanda, who had been strategically cast as the donkey so she could be right by the manger, scooped Sarah up to comfort her, and then she got to have some delightful snuggles with 13-year-old Maëlle Jacobs, who was playing Mary. I’m not sure she ever made it back into the manger.
Sarah is still little enough that she did that delightful “newborn scrunch” as she was picked up, and by the end of the pageant she was bonelessly asleep on her mother’s shoulder. And it made me think about the Incarnation – about God coming among us in flesh at Christmas – in a way that I’m not sure I ever had before.
The baby Jesuses in Christmas pageants and manger scenes and Renaissance paintings frequently look like six-month-olds, or even toddlers. But what changes about our understanding of the Christmas story if we remind ourselves that tonight, we recall the very moment that God came into the world as a newborn?
And not (pace the beloved old carols) a miracle newborn who didn’t cry. But one who would have yelled, like Sarah wanted to, about the scratchy hay in the manger, and needed to eat every hour or two because his stomach was the size of a walnut. Mary may have swaddled Jesus and laid him down, but I suspect that like most newborns, he was happiest in someone’s arms.
Think about that for a second. God – the maker of the cosmos, the Alpha and the Omega, was happiest in someone’s arms.
I frequently talk, at Christmas, about how God shows God’s love for us by coming among us as one of us, as a human being, one who started out – as all of us do – as a helpless baby. After we had rejected God and turned away, when we were desperately in need of God’s help and care, God went so far to save us and bring us back that God “humbled himself to share our humanity,” as the collect for Christmas Day puts it. We needed God (we still do), and God loved us extravagantly (and still does).
But in the newborn Jesus, God needed us. Without Mary’s milk and the warmth of her body, without Joseph caring for them both, without the love of adult humans willing to devote themselves to the 24-hour-a-day job of keeping a newborn alive, the Christmas story would have ended before it began.
In the tiny, floppy, needy person of the infant Jesus, God gives us the extraordinary gift of being able to return the love that God pours out on us every moment of every day.
Of course, we don’t have an actual live baby Son of God laid in a manger in the animals’ quarters of a peasant house in Palestine two thousand years ago. So how do we express this love to the newborn Christ?
The same way we always express love to God: by loving and caring for those whom God sends across our path.
If you’ve ever held a newborn, you know that sense of awe and wonder at the tiny person cuddled in your arms, the enormous potential and mystery of a brand-new human freshly arrived in the world. Now imagine all that newness and mystery and potential, but the baby you hold is literally God.
It would be easy to use this example to exhort us all to love and appreciate our families, especially the babies, at the holidays. But not everyone has the family they want. Not everyone who longs to cuddle a newborn child has been able to fulfill that longing. Even Jesus’ own family at the first Christmas didn’t look like what Mary had expected, or what was socially approved: a firstborn child appearing before the wedding, a full guestroom so the travelers had to bed down with the livestock.
The family that God gives us at Christmas is a family as big – and as messy, and dysfunctional, and sometimes infuriating – as the world. To quote the activist Glennon Doyle, “There is no such thing as other people’s children.”
Every other human being that we encounter – from our next-door neighbour to a starving child in Gaza – is a chance for us to love God as we would love the newborn Jesus, to meet someone’s needs as we would meet those of a tiny helpless baby who also happened to be the creator of the world.
Of course, none of us can meet the needs of the world and everyone in it all by ourselves. And for some of us, it may be that the first fragile new human soul that we need to embrace, and body that we need to nourish, is our own; that we need to love ourselves as we would love the infant Christ, before we can share that love with the world.
God will help us to discern, through prayer, when we are being called to offer this love to God in the person of our fellow humans. And this is why we are called together into community in the church: so we are not alone in the work of loving the newborn Jesus even as God loves us.
In the dark and cold of December, may we come to the manger in deep wonder at the vulnerability of a God who would dare to depend on human beings to fill his belly and change his swaddling clothes. And may we love, and let ourselves be loved, as simply and wholly as a brand-new baby in the warmth of his mother’s arms.
Amen.
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