December 24, 2023
Good News of Great Joy
Luke 2:10, John 1:14
I would like to call your attention back to a verse that was read in our hearing. Luke 2:10, “But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid, for see, I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people.” Let us pray.
I want to think with you this evening about the sound of Christmas. Christmas has a sound that is unmistakable, a sound we can enjoy for 4-6 weeks, but after that we are ready to put away. Manheim Steamroller and Carol of the Bells, the Temptations and Rudolf the Red-nose Reindeer, Alvin and the Chipmunks and the Christmas Song, and of course Bing Crosby and White Christmas. When the singer Cher was asked a month ago how she chose the songs for her first and only Christmas album, which was released this year, she said she just wanted songs that “sounded like Christmas.” The interviewer asked what that means, and she said it just “sounds like Christmas,” and we know what she means. Christmas has a sound. (Don’t look up her album now – do that later – but when you do, you’ll recognize the sound.)
This also sounds like Christmas: “Do not be afraid, for I bring you good news of great joy which will be for all people.” When these words of the angels to the shepherds are read with candlelight and choir and a Christmas tree, it sounds just like Christmas. At least, wrapped up in the sounds we’ve come to expect.
A few weeks ago, the Economist magazine began releasing their end-of-year “best of’s” – best movies, best video games, best books, and they had the best things to read about Christmas. It was a good list, but what caught my attention was the withering opening lines. They wrote: “Christmas can be a trying subject for writers. The saccharine favorites, rampant materialism, and regimented cheerfulness do not naturally lead to the creation of great works of art.” Ouch.
Now, that’s catty, I know – but the reviewer does have a point. The cultural sounds of Christmas can be tinny – like too much sound put through speakers that are far too small, like listening to a symphony on your cell phone, far too shallow for the good news of great joy. When I first read that review, I began to wonder if that’s the trouble with trying to sound like Christmas, for writers and singers, and maybe even preachers.
Our need, you see, is to hear the good news of great joy in surround sound. The Christmas proclamation itself is not saccharine or materialistic or shallow, but we must listen in its full symphonic sweep, and to do that we must see through to the situation into which this news arrived. We must think our way into the context in which we must hear it, in which we need to hear it.
The clues are there in the readings of scripture.
“For unto us a child is born,” that sounds like Christmas. But just before those words in the prophet Isaiah, the prophet says this: for all the boots of the tramping warriors and all the garments rolled in blood will be burned as fuel as for the fire… for a child has been born for us.” The promise of the child comes into a war-wracked world. The birth of the child arrives as a promise to a people who are undone by violence, who huddle in the dark hoping for light. The sound of the child born for us only makes sense with the drums of war in the mix.
“A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse.” That sounds like Christmas – hopeful, promising, a green shoot, until you cast your attention on the stump. We have a large stump on the hillside in front of our house, and nothing grows from it, no green shoots, nothing except the mushrooms that sprout in the decaying wood of the tree that used to be. The stump is the symbol of a family and nation whose future are cutoff; the stump is a symbol of hopelessness, of the judgment and abandonment of God. The green shoot is only significant because it emerges from a lifeless stump.
And in the story from Luke, with Mary and Joseph and the shepherds and angels, if we listen carefully, we will hear the same discordant notes. “In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered.” Julius Gaius Caesar Augustus, the first emperor of the Roman Empire, who brought the crumbling republic to peace at the point at a sword, who imposed a crushing rule on all those who were not citizens of Rome, whose word was law; and whose distant decree put the wheels of empire in motion to send this young teenage boy and young teenage girl, who was pregnant nearly to full term, walking on a road to fulfill a bureaucratic demand to be counted.
If we see our way through, and think our way back into the noisy world in which Christmas arrives, we will find there something that may not sound like Christmas to us at all. Rather, it sounds very much like real life. It is into real life that good news of great joy comes. It is into real life, when “life is lifing,” that good news of great joy arrives. Real life, with bloody boots, and littered with the stumps of hopes that have died, with long roads to walk and powers that be –good news of great joy comes into real life. God comes to us, is born for us, in the flesh.
You have probably seen by now the images from the Lutheran church in Bethlehem – the real Bethlehem, which is in the West Bank Palestinian territory – the images the of creche that the church created for this Christmas. They canceled their usual Christmas celebrations, which draw tourists from all over the world, because it is too dangerous to gather with the war in nearby Gaza. Instead, in that war-wracked place, they made a creche that preaches Christmas. They gathered rubble from bombed buildings, blocks of concrete, and piled them up to make a rough manger, and into the rubble they placed the figure of the Christ child.
“This is what Christmas looks like in Palestine,” said the Rev. Dr. Munther Ishaq, the pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church. Here is how he explained it in his sermon when they announced the cancellation of services for Christmas:
“Christmas is the solidarity of God with those who are oppressed, with those who are suffering, and if Jesus is to be born again, this time this year he will be born in Gaza under the rubble… “Our hope is in our faith. Our hope is in our resilience. So, while Christmas celebrations are canceled, Christmas prayers are not canceled. And maybe when we look at the image of Jesus under the rubble, we see a light of hope and life coming out of destruction, life coming out of death.”1
A shoot coming up from the stump of Jesse. The boots of the tramping warriors and the garments rolled in blood burned as fuel for the fire: for a child has been born for us. God in human flesh to be with us and for us in our rubble.
This is the central claim of the Christian faith: that the living God is born a true human, born for us and with us, in solidarity and in hope. The good news of great joy is that God joins us in our history, and in our stories. God is not content, not even able as far as we know, to stay at a distance from us. God is not able to say, as we might say of someone in trouble, “that’s more than I want to get involved with. I can send thoughts and prayers, I can even send some money, but I can’t get involved.”
The good news of great joy is that God chooses to get involved, God is determined to get involved, decided before the world was ever made to get involved in just this way, to take our suffering on as his suffering, to take our hopelessness as his hopelessness, our estrangement as his estrangement, our heart-break as his heart-break, to dive into our life – down to the very depths – so that he can raise us to share his life.
God is determined to break through to us. God is determined to break through and pull us through to him.
The movie, A Man Called Otto, which is on Netflix, offers a parable of God’s determination to break through to us. It’s not a movie that “sounds like Christmas” at all, it won’t ever make it to a list of best movies for Christmas, the soundtrack won’t play during holiday shopping. But it is the Christmas story in theological depth.
Otto Anderson, who is played wonderfully by Tom Hanks, is a 63-year-old widower, living in a row house in suburban Pittsburgh. Six months after losing his wife Sonya, a schoolteacher, Otto has become a cynical, fastidious curmudgeon. He was pushed into retirement from his job at a steel plant, and now is alone and isolated and hopeless, he cancels his utilities and plans to kill himself, to join his late wife.
But as he is preparing to hang himself, he is interrupted by new neighbors: Marisol, who is pregnant, her husband Tommy, and their daughters Abby and Luna, all who try to make friends with him.
As the movie unfolds, these people keep interrupting Otto and stalling his efforts at suicide. In one attempt, sitting in his car in the garage waiting to die from carbon monoxide poisoning, he is interrupted by Marisol, whose husband Tommy broke his leg borrowing Otto’s ladder, and now wants Otto to drive Marisol and the children to the hospital. How fortuitous, she thinks, that here he is sitting in the car and ready to go.
Step by step, knock by knock, need by need, invitation by invitation, Otto Anderson’s neighbors chop their way through the walls of his bitterness, wade through his self-imposed isolation to blow warm breath onto his cold heart and call him back to life. Near the end of the film, when Otto collapses of a heart attack – because, ironically, his heart is enlarged – he is taken to the hospital, and they ask for his next of kin. He tells them that his neighbor, Marisol, is the closest family.
Now that sounds like Christmas in surround sound. When the gospel writer John described the incarnation of God in the birth of Jesus, he put it in terms that Otto Anderson would have understood: the Word became flesh and moved into the neighborhood.
For to us a child is born… I bring you good news of great joy…. To you is born a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.
The message of Christmas is God’s choice to be with us, and for us, to share our story, to move into our neighborhood, to stand in solidarity with our suffering, and to pull us into God’s abundant life.
As a sentimental tale, as a track on the Christmas album, the story of a baby in a manger is good as far it goes but it doesn’t go very far. Saccharine sentimentality does not go into depths of life, regimented cheerfulness cannot stand up to the heat of life’s day or the cold of life’s night.
The astonishing good news of great joy is that God, almighty and all good, has been born in human flesh, to share our real life so that we can share his divine life. This is news of joy and hope that that sounds through to the deep place where we are tender, that meets us in vulnerability, that stands beside us when life gets real, and comes with the power to raise us, even from our graves. God is with us.
God has come to live in on our block, in our house, in your life, God who brings his possibility to our impossibility, who brings his hope to our hopelessness, who brings his friendship to our loneliness, who brings his grace-filled future to the past we cannot change, who brings his infinite value to our meaninglessness, who brings his eternity to our decay, who brings his light to our darkness.
Good news of great joy for all the people. This is the sound of Christmas.
Rev. Patrick W. T. Johnson, Ph.D.
First Presbyterian Church
Asheville, North Carolina