2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16
Luke 1:26-38

The story of Jesus’ birth has become so familiar to us, so much a part of our religious landscape that there is nothing amazing or incredulous about it to us.  The statement, “Familiarity breeds contempt,” is certainly true about this story.  Some parts of the story are just incredible but we are so familiar with the story that we never raise a question about any of it. 
           
Here is the growing edge for many of us.  Our minds have become trapped by the traditional way of telling this important story so that we hear nothing new in the story and much of the time we miss the message entirely.  The words of Howard Thurman are solid instruction for us as we consider this ancient story and seek to hear a new message from it this year.  Thurman said, “Look well to the growing edge.  All around us worlds are dying and new worlds are being born; all around us life is dying and life is being born.  The fruit ripens on the tree, the roots are silently at work in the darkness of the earth against a time when there shall be new leaves, fresh blossoms, green fruit.  Such is the growing edge.  It is the extra breath from the exhausted lung, the one more thing to try when all else has failed, the upward reach of life when weariness closes in upon all endeavor.  This is the basis of hope in moments of despair, the incentive to carry on when times are out of joint and men and women have lost their reason, the source of confidence when worlds crash and dreams whiten into ash.  Such is the growing edge incarnate.  Look well to the growing edge.” 
           
Occasionally, I step back from the story of Jesus’ birth and try to hear it again as if for the first time.  It’s a strange, disturbing, troubling story.  What makes it strange and troubling to me is the premise that God wants us, wants to connect with us.  God wants to get on our level.  That is so contrary to our way of thinking.  We think we should be trying to get in touch with God.  Even if we allow ourselves to think of God getting in touch with us, we imagine God coming with power, fanfare, pomp and circumstance.  How else would God ever be able to get out attention!  We think big.  But the story of God reaching out to us in the birth of Jesus says, “Think small.” 
A powerful illustration that I have used before comes to mind almost every year at this time.  One night a young boy was startled by a loud clap of thunder.  He burst into tears and his mother rushed to his room to calm him.  After several minutes, the boy began to settle down and the sobbing ceased.  As he began to settle back toward sleep, his mother got up to leave the room.  He begged her to stay because he was afraid.  She reassured him there was nothing to fear because the thunder storm had passed and besides God would be with him.  The boy replied, “I know God is with me but I need somebody with a skin face.” The birth story of Jesus is about God having a skin face.
           
J. B. Philips told the following story he called “The Visited Planet.” 
           
Once upon a time a very young angel was being shown round the splendor and glories of the universes by a senior and experienced angel.  To tell the truth, the little angel was beginning to be tired and a little bored.  He had been shown whirling galaxies and blazing suns, infinite distances in the deathly cold of inter-stellar space, and to his mind there seemed to be an awful lot of it all.  Finally he was shown the galaxy of which our planetary system is but a small part.  As the two of them drew near to the star that we call our sun and to its circling planets, the senior angel pointed to a small and rather insignificant sphere turning very slowly on its axis.  It looked as dull as a dirty tennis ball to the little angel, whose mind was filled with the size and glory of what he had seen.  “I want you to watch that one particularly,” said the senior angel, pointing with his finger.  “Well, it looks very small and rather dirty to me,” said the little angel.  “What’s special about that one?” “That,” replied his senior solemnly, “is the Visited Planet.”  “Visited?”said the little one.  “You don’t mean visited by . . .?” “Indeed I do.  That ball, which I have no doubt looks to you small and insignificant and not perhaps over-clean, has been visited by our young Prince of Glory.” And at these words he bowed his head reverently. “But how?”queried the younger one.  “Do you mean that our great and glorious Prince, with all these wonders and splendors of Creation, and millions more that I’m sure I haven’t seen yet, went down in Person to this fifth-rate little ball?  Why should he do a thing like that?” “It isn’t for us,” said his senior a little stiffly, “to question his why’s, except that I must point out to you that he is not impressed by size and numbers, as you seem to be.  But that he really went I know, and all of us in Heaven who know anything know that. As to why he became one of them – how else do you suppose he could visit them?” The little angel’s face wrinkled in disgust, “Do you mean to tell me,” he said, “that he stooped so low as to become one of those creeping, crawling, creatures of that floating ball?” “I do, and I don’t think he would like you to call them ‘creeping, crawling creatures’ in that tone of voice.  For strange as it may seem to us, God loves them.  God went down to visit them to lift them up to become like God.” The little angel looked blank.  Such a thought was almost beyond his comprehension.
           
Henri Nouwen, Catholic priest and theologian, wrote about the powerless of the Christ-child in this way:
           
Jesus is God-with-us, Emmanuel.  The great mystery of God becoming human is God’s desire to be loved by us.  By becoming a vulnerable child, completely dependent on human care, God wants to take away all distance between the human and the divine.
           
Who can be afraid of a little child who needs to be fed, to be cared for, to be taught, to be guided?  We usually talk about God as the all-powerful, almighty God on whom we depend completely.  But God wanted to become the all-powerless, all-vulnerable God who completely depends on us.  How can we be afraid of a God who wants to be “God-with-us” and who wants us to become “Us-with-God”? (Henri J. M. Nouwen, Bread for the Journey: A daybook of Wisdom and Faith, New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 1977.)
           
The key for understanding incarnation is to think small.  How ironic, in a culture that prides itself on thinking big, bold, and brash, especially at this time of year, we have to retrain ourselves to look for God in the small and unexpected. 
           
The ways of the world are once again turned upside down this Christmas.  In a world consumed by never-ending violence and life shattering warfare, the soft cries of Mary’s child are more deafening than any bomb; a sacred reminder that power is not displayed in the weapons of war, but belongs to the vulnerability of a newborn baby.  No longer are those who the world considers powerful and influential.  What once was considered essential for ladder climbing is laid aside with little meaning or success.
           
Most of our days are spent competing with ourselves and one another, climbing the ladder of success and trying to prove our worth in various arenas of life.  We strive to be successful at work, at home, in the classroom, and even in the amount of time we give back to the community.  Deep down in our theological DNA, the worn out heresy of works righteousness still dictates much of our living.  If we only try hard enough, we’ll earn the love and approval of family and friends.  If we only study long enough we’ll make the grade and validate our sense of self-worth.  If we only pray long enough we’ll earn God’s love and blessing.  In the face of this earning and competing mentality the child whose birth we anticipate and celebrate in this season puts the brakes on our efforts to some way, some how garner our own salvation.  Because we cannot work our way up to God, God becomes small for us, a living, breathing, tangible means of grace bundled and wrapped in a baby. 
           
The gift of Christmas is God’s love for the world and the package is a human being, the most powerful force the world has ever known.  We, who have been hardened by the tenacity of our lives, bruised and scarred by shattered dreams and broken hopes, have become steeled to the brutal stories of the world around us.  We are saddened by the dark places in our own lives and exhausted by our efforts to earn approval; we need this gift of God becoming small, the gift of tenderness and mercy delivered as a baby. 
           
We are like shepherds in the dark night, scanning the horizon for any signs of hope, for the promise that this world is not all there is, that the darkness will give way to a light that shall not be overcome.
           
More often than not, despite our best intentions, we resemble the old miser Silas Marner from George Elliot’s book.  Elliot tells of this reclusive hardened man who blocks out the world around him and gives himself only to a spinning loom and to the accumulation of gold, which he hides under his bed.  One day he comes home to find that his gold is gone, some thief has stolen the treasure of his life and he is left distraught.  Every day he returns home, hoping beyond hope that the gold had reappeared.  One day he came home and saw a glint of light on the floor, his heart leapt for joy – his gold had been returned.  But when he stretched out his hand he found, instead of hard coin, soft curls on his floor –a sleeping child.  Elliot narrates the scene like this:
           
He had a dreamy feeling that this child was somehow a message come to him from a far off life.  It stirred old quiverings of tenderness – old impressions of awe of some power presiding over his life. . . .  We older human beings with our inward turmoil, feel certain awe in the presence of a little child, such as we feel before some quiet majesty or beauty in the earth or sky.
           
Silas Marner took the little girl in his lap, “trembling with an emotion mysterious to himself, at something unknown dawning on his life.  He could only say that the child had come instead of the gold – that the gold had turned into the child.”
           
The child that comes is truth and grace.  He comes to a world overcome with darkness to be the light that will forever shine.  He comes to a world overrun by senseless noise to sing the melody of peace.  He comes as a testament to the small and quiet ways God goes about redeeming creation in a world consumed by the big and the powerful.  He comes to your life and my life as a priceless gift – the only gift that really matters. 
             
God's arrival is a surprise, not because God is trying to trick or confuse us, but because we have preconceived ideas of what it means for God to be present in our lives and in the world.  We have preconceived ideas of how God will arrive and to whom God will appear.  Who would ever have dreamed that God would come as a baby?  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-definitely political campaigns at least this year, and stock markets at least this year, and wars at least this year, and a few inventions.  Babies make no impact on world conditions or world affairs.

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.  It sounds so contemporary, doesn’t it?
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 beautiful babies are doing it.  When a wrong needs righting, a truth needs preaching, a continent needs opening, justice needs doing, or mercy needs sharing, God appears as a baby to do it.  I wonder what baby will do it this year.  I wonder what person will be the incarnation of God this year.  I wonder how you will be the incarnation of God in the world this year.  When it comes to God’s presence and work in the world, think small. 
           
The gifts of hope, peace, joy, and love were wrapped together in a unique form named Jesus.  It seems like such a small thing.  Because of the unique way that Jesus lived and embodied the gifts of hope, love, peace, and joy we gather to celebrate his birth as a time when light began to shine in the world like never before.  Every time that we give the gifts of hope, peace, joy, and love we are adding light to the world.  You are a skin face for somebody.  It seems like such a small thing.  You are adding light to the world for somebody.  Nothing shines brighter, nothing shines clearer than the hope, peace, joy and love of God seen in a skin face, seen in your face.  When it comes to the meaning and message of Christmas, think small.