Good morning, friends — and merry Christmas. I’m glad to be with you all again this morning. This is the second year in a row where I’ve gotten to lead services on Christmas morning, and while I know that I get the job because all of the priests who usually lead our services would rather be at home resting and enjoying time with their families, it still feels like a gift to me. There’s something special about getting to preach on one of the Big Days in the Church Year; there’s a sort of challenge to it. Days like Christmas are the ones that we feel like we know. They’re big and important and most of us have heard the Christmas story a thousand times even if we don’t go to church very often. It’s familiar, and cozy; we feel like we ‘get it’. Christmas gets enveloped in this warm, fuzzy cloud of family traditions and twinkle lights and greenery and hot cocoa and pleasant images of Jesus in a manger and his parents and visitors standing happily by while smiling animals look on — and none of this stu is necessarily bad — but because of all this, it can become especially hard to actually attend, hear what God might be saying to us this Christmas morning. We can become so familiar with the story, with the word ‘incarnation’, with all the nice Christmas, holiday stu that it can be hard to keep an eye on what it all means for us. I have the privilege of trying to help us (myself included) see Christmas a little more clearly this morning. Thankfully, the Gospel this morning helps, because there’s a lot about this story that is strange. The reading begins with bureaucracy. The most powerful man in the world, the Emperor of Rome, has decided to take a census of his whole empire. He wants to know how much money he’s going to be raking in through taxes and how many soldiers he can expect to conscript into his armies, and so, on the Emperor’s whim, people like Mary and Joseph are forced to interrupt their lives and livelihoods to take a weeks-long journey, mostly on foot, just to ll out some paperwork at the right census location. And it is then, after centuries of prophecy and waiting and longing and hoping, God appears — at the worst possible time. Mary goes into labor, far from home and family, in the middle of an exhausting and arduous journey. The promised Messiah is born, but he is born to the ‘wrong’ people, from the ‘wrong’ part of town, in the ‘wrong’ place. Christ is born to a pregnant, unwed teen from the poor, backwater village of Nazareth, in the midst of a people living under the thumb of Roman occupation. Mary and Joseph are in such a bad position that they are forced to take shelter in a stable with an animal’s feeding trough in place of a cradle. There’s nothing romantic about this; this is not a nice, plastic nativity scene. This is the brutality of childbirth and the sweat of hard days of travel and the stink of animals and no friends or family there to help. This is not where anyone expected God to appear; this Jesus is not what anyone expected the Messiah to look like. Things get stranger from there. Abruptly, the narrator tells us about a group of shepherds in the hills around Bethlehem, working the night shift, keeping watch over their ocks. This is dull, exhausting work — there is nothing idyllic or prestigious about being a shepherd in 1st century Judea — but to these shepherds, the Glory of God appears, and the birth of the Lord is announced by a choir of terrifying angels. In Luke’s version of the Christmas story there are no Wise Men, no rich Magi from the East. When the birth of Christ is announced, in Luke, it’s announced to a group of poor shepherds in the dead of night with no one else around to see. Why? Bethlehem sits in the shadow of Jerusalem, only a couple of miles from the most important city in Judea; home of the Temple — where God supposedly dwelled among his people — and home to all of the religious leaders and priests and ‘holy,’ powerful folks who spoke on behalf of God to the people. But when God appeared among his people, none of these folks knew a thing about it. Luke is trying very hard to get us to see that things are not happening the way they are ‘supposed’ to happen, to get us to ask ‘why would Christ appear like this?’ I think that it’s when we start to answer this question that we get to the heart of the Christmas story, to the real meaning of the Incarnation. When God shows up among us, when he enters in and takes on humanity in the person of Jesus (that’s what we mean when we say, ‘Incarnation’), he does it in this way that Luke describes. God doesn’t take on some sort of idealized version of humanity — some sort of general ‘human-ness’ that we all relate to equally — and he doesn’t become some kind of holy, super-man. God becomes a particular person: Jesus, Mary’s son, a Jewish baby born in 1st century Palestine. And he isn’t born as the kind of person you might imagine that God’s promised Messiah/King would be born as: Jesus is born out of wedlock in a culture where that was a big no-no, in poverty, to a people living under the oppression of the Roman Empire. Matthew tells us that shortly after his birth, he became a refugee, eeing to Egypt to escape political violence. Being from Nazareth, Jesus would have grown up on the bottom rungs of Jewish society, and his habit of associating with ‘unclean’ people as he grew up only put him further and further from being socially or religiously acceptable. This is how God is born, this is how he chooses to reveal himself, to make his debut and show the world what he is about. And who is the glory of God in Jesus rst revealed to? Who does the angel say this is ‘good news’ for? A bunch of poor and tired shepherds, outside the halls of wealth and power and holiness. For many of us who have spent a lot of time in church, it can be easy to slip into thinking that God is like me, that if Jesus was born today, he would look like me, t in with me, that he would be on my side. When we read the Scriptures, we slip into imagining ourselves as the ‘good guys’, the ones who are like Jesus; we imagine that we would have ‘gotten it’ if we were there in the story with Jesus. And for some of us, that might be true, but when I read our gospel passage today, I am struck by how un-like me Jesus is. The birth of Jesus shows me that God identies with the poor, the vulnerable, the oppressed — that God is all of those things in Jesus. And I am none of those things. I am privileged, comfortable, and secure. I have far more in common with the religious leaders who rejected Jesus. I, like them, have grown up with resources and security, with a good religious education. As a straight, white man in the Church, I have never had to wonder if people think of me as ‘less than’ when I walk into a room. I have grown up in a society that has taught me that being a ‘good’ person — a ‘good’ Christian — means that I just have to be respectful and successful, and that if I just work hard and do the right things, God will make me comfortable and secure. These are not the values reected in the incarnation. God doesn’t come into the world privileged and powerful; the good news of God’s favor is not proclaimed to the comfortable and secure on the night of Jesus’ birth. The incarnation shows me that I cannot take it for granted that I am on God’s side, that though Jesus is Emmanuel, ‘God with us’ — I may not always be the ‘us’ implied in his name. In the chapter before today’s gospel, the Holy Spirit speaks through Mary — she sings the prophetic song that we often call the ‘Magnicat’ — in which she talks about how God is about the business of casting down the mighty and lifting up the lowly; of lling the hungry with good things and sending the rich away empty. I am afraid that I may be on the wrong side of that equation. So what am I to do? If the Christmas story shows us that Jesus is one with the marginalized and outcast, that he has come to lift up those who our world considers ‘lowly’, what is the ‘good news’ of the incarnation for those of us who are comfortable and secure this Christmas morning? Remember the parable: “‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me.’” The good news of the incarnation — of Christmas — for someone like me, is that Jesus invites us to be with him where he is. God is there, in the places of humility and pain, asking us to let go of our comfort and security, to make ourselves vulnerable, to lift our voices and use the resources we have inherited in order to join him in being with and lifting up those in need. The incarnation means that we are invited to be with Jesus, but only if we are willing to be transformed — to follow Jesus onto the path of humility and self-giving love — only if we are willing to meet him in the faces of those whom our world has overlooked or oppressed and to receive him there. May we be willing to receive him there. Amen.