Micah 5:2-5a  
Luke 1:39-45

When one little boy was told about his new baby sister, he was not impressed. When he went to school the following day, his teacher remarked, "I hear you have a new member of your family." "Oh, yeah," he replied. "What's the matter?" his teacher asked. "Aren't you happy to have a new sister?" He answered, "Yes, I guess. But there were a lot of things we needed more."

This sounds like our grandson.  His parents told him he was going to have a baby sister.  They asked him where he thought they should keep her and he said, “Outside.”

This was the reaction of nearly everyone years ago when Elizabeth and Mary were pregnant.  In various ways people said, “There are a lot of things we need more than another baby or two.”  Elizabeth and Mary saw it differently.  Not only were they pregnant with children; they also were pregnant with expectation.  That’s true of most people expecting a baby; they are pregnant with expectation.  Hopes and dreams are wrapped up in the baby that is born.  I hear this from parents when I have the wonderful privilege of planning their baby’s baptism.  They are pregnant with expectations of who their child will become, what their child will do, with hopes and dreams they have for their child.  But beyond the small circle of family and friends that surround them, most of us continue our lives as usual, as if nothing extraordinary happens when a baby is born.  Without saying it, we often act as if there are a lot of things we need more than another baby in the world. 

If you wanted to change the world, how would you do it?  Would you gather the best and brightest military people together and take control of strategic places and equipment around the world?  Would you get control of a nuclear weapon and threaten to destroy the world unless world leaders did as you demanded?  Would you get a scientist to develop a deadly virus that you would threaten to turn loose in the world with you having the only antidote?  Would you buy out Microsoft, control all of the computer equipment being made and then control all communications on the internet?  If we think of changing the world, we often think big, brute strength, power, force, control.  If we want to change the world, we really need to think small.

How often do the most precious things in life come in the most ordinary, often small, packages?  Just consider for a moment the most important thing that has ever happened to you in your life.  What is it?  Do you have it clearly in mind?  Now think about how that event happened to you?  Did it come with fanfare and ticker tape parade?  Or did it sneak in on cats' paws?      

I suspect that one of the places where familiarity breeds contempt for us is with the story of Jesus’ birth.  We are so familiar with the story, we have heard it so many times and repeated in so many ways that we take it for granted.  It is all kind of ho hum to us. 

I suspect that when people hear the Christmas story for the first time, their initial reaction is like the boy with the new baby sister.  Another baby is okay but the world needs a lot of things a lot more that it needs another baby. How wrong they are!  Someone has said that when God wants something done in this world God has a baby born.    

Being born in poverty to peasant parents was not a promising beginning. And yet, when the baby we call Jesus was born in those humble surroundings the greatest peace movement that the world has ever known was born as well. That's how God accomplishes things.

God's arrival is a surprise, not because God is attempting to trick or confuse us, but because we have preconceived ideas of how God will arrive and to whom God will appear.  Who would ever have dreamed that God would come through a baby?  Who would have thought that God would seek to communicate with the world through the natural development of a human being? Who would expect anything out of a baby except crying and demands?  Generally, only parents, grandparents, and a few of their very close friends see any significance at all in the birth of a child.  As far as the things that really make a difference in the world, there are space flights, stock markets, political campaigns, wars, and a few inventions.  Babies make no impact on world conditions or world affairs.

Babies make an impact on the homes they enter.  Just recall, those of you who have children, all the changes that came about in your home when your baby was born.  Suddenly everyone’s schedule and plans were changed to accommodate this little one.  And what about those grandparents who seem to lose every semblance of rationality and will do just about anything to spend some time with a tiny infant and will talk to an infant in the strangest tones and inflections and words.  I’ve just returned from the birth of our granddaughter, Lydia Noel, and seen Peggy and me exhibiting some of this strange behavior. It is amazing what an impact a baby can have on those around the child.

            Are you familiar with the short story by Brett Hart, “The Luck of Roaring Camp”?
In a rough, lawless mining camp out west, in the late 1880s a miner discovers a little baby who has been abandoned by his parents.  The baby is brought back into camp.  Here are a group of rough and tumble miners who have, of all things, a baby.  As soon as the baby is brought into camp, the transformation begins.  One by one, each of the miners becomes a different person.  There are clothes to be made, meals to be prepared, washing and tending to be done, all for the little foundling of Roaring Camp.  Not only are the individual miners transformed, but the whole camp as well.  Swearing and cursing, fighting and feuding, once typical of Roaring Camp, now cease.  Each man tries to be on his best behavior because of the baby.  Perhaps this story is a parable of the “invasion” that happens among us at Christmas when we reflect on the birth of Jesus and the impact and expectation that his birth creates. 

Two centuries ago people were following the march of Napoleon and waiting for news of the wars.  And all the while in their homes, babies were being born.  But who could think about babies?  Everybody was thinking about battles.

In one year, midway between Trafalgar and Waterloo, there stole into the world a host of heroes.  Gladstone was born in Liverpool, Tennyson at the Somerset Rectory, and Oliver Wendell Holmes in Massachusetts; and the same day of that same year, Charles Darwin made his debut at Shrewsbury, and Abraham Lincoln drew his first breath in Kentucky.  Music was enriched by the advent of Felix Mendelssohn in Hamburg. 

But nobody thought of babies; everybody was thinking of battles.  Yet, which of the battles of 1809 mattered more than the babies of 1809?  We fancy that God can only manage the world with big battalions, when all the while it is being done by babies.  When a wrong needs righting, a truth needs preaching, a continent needs opening, justice needs doing, or mercy needs sharing, God sends a baby to do it.  If you want to change the world, start with a baby.
           
William Willimon tells about a conversation he had with a student while he was Dean of the Chapel at Duke University.  The student went in to talk with Willimon because he was distressed that he was “losing his faith.”  When Willimon inquired what the faith was that he was losing, he replied, “I have problems with the virgin birth of Jesus.  Don’t I have to believe in the miraculous birth of Jesus in order to believe in Jesus?” he asked.
           
“In one sense, no,” Willimon replied, “Yet in another sense, yes.  We ask you to believe in the virginal conception of Jesus and, if we can get you to swallow that without choking, then there’s no telling what someone can get you to believe.  Come back next week and we’ll try to convince you that the poor are royalty and the rich are in big trouble, that God, not nations, rules the world, and on and on.  We start you out with something fairly small, like the virginal conception of Jesus, then work you up to even more outrageous assertions.”
           
The main truth to keep before us, in regard to Incarnation, is not simply that “God is with us,” but that God came to us as Jesus.  Of all the ways for God to dwell in a human being, God came as a Jewish peasant from Nazareth who was murdered by the authorities, not because of the peculiarity of his birth, but for the revolutionary quality of his life.  Jesus was violently tortured to death not because he was a baby conceived out of wedlock, but because of what he said and what he did once he grew up.  His advent provokes a crisis in our settled intellectual and political arrangements, unmasking the relationship between our cherished notions of what can and can’t be and our governmental sanctions about who is and who is not in charge.
           
Luke portrays the political significance of Jesus’ advent in such subtle but powerful ways, putting upon the herald lips the very phrasing that had been previously used to praise Caesar.  And Luke wrote these words more than thirty years after Jesus’ death, thus more than 60 years after Jesus’ birth.  But to snatch phrases from one who considered himself the power of the world and give those phrases to describe some infant born in the lowly town of Bethlehem and grew up in the backwater town of Nazareth was revolutionary and pregnant with expectation.  Using these phrases in this way is to expect undeniable uproar from those in power and unbelievable excitement and anticipation from those who are powerless.  We are now in the most politically charged season of the church year.  Things are getting heated, politically, not simply because God came to us in the flesh but because God came to us in Jesus. 
           
What is remarkable about the God we worship is not the claim of a birth that defies or contradicts biology and how human beings are conceived.  There were similar claims made about other figures in antiquity.  Belief in the virgin birth of Jesus is not required in order to have a relationship with God, to be loved by God, to have a relationship with fellow human beings, or to love the world for God’s sake, or to identify oneself as a Christian.  What is remarkable is that we worship a God who continually is present in the world and in our lives and is constantly available to us.  The God portrayed in the Bible is not a God who is apart and separate from the world and from our lives who occasionally, as in some sentimental season like Christmas, intervenes.  God doesn’t come to the world “from the outside” or from outside the world because the world and its workings and functioning, inside and out, is God’s world.  Wherever there is hope, love, peace, and joy, there is God.  That is God’s presence engaged in the world.  As Christians, we don’t believe in miracles; rather, we believe in things like Communion, the ordinary food of the church, sign of the real presence of God where two or three are gathered in God’s name.  Such experiences of God’s presence occur because the Scriptures tell us that the God of Israel and the church is passionately engaged in creation and intends to flood the world with presence.  Many of those experiences at times seem miraculous not because they are so extraordinary, but because we tend not to pay attention.  When we pay attention, what would at times seem extraordinary becomes ordinary, natural, real, and believable.  I’m convinced that no one tries harder to be believable than God and the reason God is so unbelievable to many of us is because we are not paying attention.  It is mystery more than miracle.

Carl Braaten spoke about this mystery in a sermon several years ago. 
           
“Jesus gave us a new and paradoxical definition of God, a definition of the humility of God.  Many people were offended. They wanted a God of glory, not entering the world at the bottom, not from a despised place like Nazareth in Galilee, but God must come from the top.  God must be properly introduced, by the right people and with the appropriate protocol.  But instead the people got the man from Nazareth, and he was only prepared to give them a message of the humility of God, of the identification of God with the people and things that don’t count for very much in this world.  Jesus carried his message of God to the extreme, driving the humility of God all the way to the cross.” (Carl E. Braaten, Stewards of the Mysteries, Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1983, pp. 27-28).

So here we are approaching another Christmas pregnant with expectation.  What will be the impact of Christmas on our lives this year?  What does it mean for God to be coming to us again in a new and fresh season?  Are we as a congregation pregnant with expectation of what God is about to do in our lives?  Does the world need to be changed?  Absolutely.  The world needs to change from war to peace.  The world needs to change from people being hungry to everyone having enough.  The world needs to change from responding out of fear to responding out of compassion.  But how can it be done?  Our inclination is that such change can only come with some type of huge fanfare, some mighty force, some tremendous international collaboration.  We think big but history shows that if we want to change the course of the world’s journey, we need to think small. 
           
Whatever our expectations and no matter how wild our dreams are, I’m convinced they are not half wild enough.  If God could change the course of life for generations through the birth of a baby in a tiny village, there is no end to what God can do in your life and mine and thus in the world if we recognize God in our lives, giving birth to hope, love, peace, and joy. We may think there are a lot of things we need more, but God seems to think what we need most is to allow God to be born in us. But the question is, “Will we?”  Will we allow God to be born in us?