Oak Chapel United Methodist Church

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Today's scripture, dearly beloved, tells a most incredible story. Actually, it tells part (and only a small part) of a larger and even more incredible story: the beginning of the unfolding of God's design for saving his lost and suffering world. (That's a mouthful, but it's no less than that.)
Luke starts his momentous tale in a rather incredible place, when you think about it: with the story of an obscure old Temple priest, Zechariah, and his elderly, childless wife, Elizabeth, who live in stony, hilly Judea, outside Jerusalem. One day, as Luke tells it, Zechariah was offering incense to God in the sanctuary of the Temple, as priests do, and an angel appeared to say that Elizabeth would soon bear him a son, and they should name the child, "John," (We know, of course, that this baby would become "John the Baptist.") He will "make ready a people prepared for the Lord," the angel says. Zechariah asks, "How can I be sure of this? I'm old, and so's Elizabeth." "Listen, I'm Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I've been sent to tell you." But, for his incredulity (his questioning what any normal man would have questioned) Zechariah is rendered mute until the baby comes.

Now Luke's story fast-forwards six months and switches locations, to Nazareth, up north in green Galilee. (We know this part of the story better.) It's Gabriel again, this time talking to a "nobody" young girl named Mary, and telling her that she will become the mother of the Son of God. She should call the baby "Jesus," Gabriel tells her, "and of his kingdom there shall be no end." "And, by the way," Mary, "your older relative, Elizabeth, is pregnant - six months along."

Mary visits Elizabeth, and as Mary enters the house and greets her relative, Elizabeth's baby leaps in her womb. The baby knows who's come to visit, and now Elizabeth knows. She blurts out part of the "Hail Mary:" "Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb." And then asks, humbly, "How is it that the mother of my Lord should visit the likes of me?"
John is born. Zechariah can speak again. Jesus is born, the shepherds come, and we're off.
We all remember the old poem, "God works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform." "Mysterious," yes. "Unexpected," might be another possible word to describe how God works. All through the Bible Yahweh is the god of the unexpected. God kidnapped Saul, for example, on the road to Damascus that day so unexpectedly, and yanked him off his murderous course against the church, that it took Christians months (if not years) to trust him, to believe it wasn't a trick, Saul faking conversion to go under cover and spy on Christians. If there were a single man on the face of the earth that day who we would not have expected to become a Christian, it would have been Saul of Tarsus. The great St. Paul. Incredible!

And these Christmas stories are the same way. What happens is utterly unexpected - unexpectable (if there is such a word). We're so familiar with the stories, we don't see the shock and the scandal. Look at the players and the sets: a disillusioned old priest and his wife, a young peasant girl, shepherds, stable, manger, swaddling clothes. The Jews expected Messiah to come, but no one in a thousand years would have expected him to come this way! The god of the unexpected. Gabriel tells Mary she's "favored of God," and because of that she's going to get an illegitimate baby who will be executed as a criminal. Not exactly what she might have expected.. Nobody would have written the story that way. Only God could have dreamed that up.

Walker Percy defines a sacrament as when we confer the highest significance upon the most ordinary things: water, bread, wine, touch, breath, words. In the world of faith, quite ordinary things and events sometimes get raised to a higher power. But here's the catch: the more ordinary an object or event, the more faith it takes to perceive its sacred potential - its miraculous qualities. We don't expect commonplace things to be anything more than they are. Paul Harvey, this week, told the story of a large, dark-colored rock which one family had used as a doorstop for generations. Recently it was discovered to be the largest emerald in the world. St. Thomas Aquinas told of a man who heard there was a perfect ox, somewhere, and spent his entire life and his fortune, searching for it - only to discover, at the end of his quest, that he had been riding that perfect ox all along. We perceive things to be ordinary: bread, wine, a rock by the door, the ox we ride. But God says otherwise.
The miracle of Christmas - in the story of which so many ordinary people and things became extraordinary in God's hands - the miracle of Christmas, I must warn you, has no outer boundaries. The pious wish that the spirit of Christmas might last all year long, is more than a platitude. If fact, if you catch the miracle of Christmas it will become part of you always and everywhere. If you believe that a special star led the magi, or that angels sang to those shepherds, or that a poor, virgin girl became the mother of God, you're caught. It will be hard, now, to stop believing. Now you know, what Gabriel knew, and what he told Mary, that all things are possible for God. And now, by faith, the world is a different and far better place. Nothing, no one is ever ordinary again. This world, and everything that is of this world, has been touched by God. Let's not talk about the world's depravity, and violence and corruption. Not now. In Christmas the world shines…every little thing. God was here. And God still is. "And you shall find (him) wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger."