Glory to God in the Lowest (Luke 2:19)

• Christmas is a time of surprises
• there was a lady who was preparing her Christmas cookies
• suddenly, there was a knock at the door
• she went to find a man, his clothes poor, obviously looking for some Christmas odd jobs
• he asked her if there was anything he could do
• and she said, “Can you paint?”
• “Yes,” he said, “I’m a rather good painter”
• “Well,” she said, “there are two gallons of green paint there and a brush, and there’s a porch out back that needs to be painted. Please do a good job. I’ll pay you whatever the job is worth”
• “Fine,” he said. “I’ll be done quickly”
• she went back to her cookie making and didn’t think much more about it until there was a knock at the door
• she went, and it was obvious he had been painting: he had it on his clothes
• “Did you finish the job,” she asked
• he said, “Yes”
• “Did you do a good job,” she asked
• he said, “Yes. But lady, there’s one thing I’d like to point out to you. That’s not a Porsche back there. That’s a Mercedes”
• well, Christmas is a time of surprises
• I think that’s a good thing, because life at its best is not really measured by the breaths you take, but by the breaths you miss
• it’s those times of amazement and astonishment when suddenly your attention is carried away and your breath is as well
• it’s times like Christmas, fantastic times, when there’s a song in the sky and a baby in the feedbox, and everything is gloriously topsy turvy, when the things that can’t be are
• have you ever realized that in the whole narrative of Christmas in Luke 2, Mary couldn’t speak?
• in all of Luke 2, there’s not one word of Mary recorded
• it’s as if what happened to here was too deep to be expressed in syllables
• (Luke 2:19) But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.
• she was caught up in her mind, and her thoughts were centered upon the miracle that God was performing right in front of her
• this sort of experience is uncommon today
• in our busyness, we are too busy to stop and think and ponder
• we spend much more time doing than being
• our faith has become a very exterior thing with much more commotion than devotion
• I remember the first time I bought a hollow chocolate egg
• I could not believe the size of the egg for the price I was paying
• but there was one problem: I didn’t understand what “hollow” meant
• so I bit into the egg and quickly found out that the egg was impressive from the outside, but it had no core or inner substance
• many of us are like this: we’re impressive Christians on the outside, but there’s no inward substance
• we’re not like Mary, who silently pondered these things in her heart
• but friends, eternity is silent
• we are noisy, and the speed and noise of our life signal weakness
• especially around Christmas, but for some of us all year long, the pace of our lives make us deaf to God
• but Christmas is a time when we can sit back and follow Mary’s example
• she held her son to her breast, and leaned against the warm damp earth, and pondered everything that had happened in her heart
• I THINK SHE PONDERED, FIRST OF ALL, THE QUIETNESS OF GOD’S ARRIVAL
• he did not come with noise and clamor
• there was no Bethlehem spectacular
• while the angels sang, there were only some shepherd boys to witness it
• it’s interesting that nowhere in Scripture does God knock anyone’s door down
• instead, it says:
• (Revelation 3:20) Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me.
• there’s a painting of that by Holman Hunt in the British National Gallery in London
• Jesus stands there, gently rapping at a door, the door unopened
• a little boy was standing in front of that painting with his father
• “Daddy,” he said, “why don’t they answer the door?”
• the father replied, “I don’t know why”
• after a moment’s pause, the little boy said, “Maybe they’re making too much noise to hear him knocking”
• that little boy was probably right
• you see, the infinite power of God always moves in silence
• God moves in quietness
• that’s why we best think of him when we look at flowers, or walk in woods at evening, or listen to soft poems or the gentle breezes that blow about high mountains
• God is often where the least noise is
• that’s how God often speaks to us, isn’t it?
• he nudges us in our experiences
• he whispers to us in the sweetness of common sense
• he appears to us through the gentleness of some new idea
• God talks in the gentle things of life, not in the big moments, but in the quiet Spirit-filled times
• and so it was with Mary
• that’s what Christmas should ideally be like
• take away the trees and cake and Elmo’s
• and what you have is a time when the whole world holds its breath and tries to hear once again the soft cry of a baby
• God comes quietly, then and now
• I THINK SHE ALSO PONDERED THE LOWLINESS OF HIS ARRIVAL
• Jesus was born in what was probably a cave, one of many in that area
• we usually think of the clean smell of fresh hay, but probably a truer Christmas smell would be the smell of layers of animal dung as the floor
• a short distance away, within sight, was Herod’s great palace built on top of a mountain, a huge structure with a pool twice the Olympic size
• but Christ was not born there, we was born among the smell of cattle dung in a dark and damp cave
• there was a European monarch who, a couple of times each year, would take off his royal garb and, dressed as a peasant, would go out amongst his people
• his advisors worried about this, but the king said, “I cannot rule my people unless I know how they live”
• God came as a baby in a cave
• I read of a Hindu, who could not believe in Christianity because he could not contemplate a God who would so humble himself
• then one day the he came across an anthill
• he tried to get close enough to study it, but every time he bent low, his shadow caused all the ants to scurry away
• he recognized to himself that the only way in which he could ever come to know that colony of ants would be if he could somehow become an ant himself
• and that was the moment in which his conversion began
• what is amazing is that Jesus looked down, and saw it all – becoming a little baby, living as a man, dying on a cross, and the shame
• and yet he tumbled into our midst, taking all of our wars right into the midst of heaven’s peace
• when Mary thought about this, she just might have prayed, “Oh God, I do not want heaven if you are here on earth”
• AND I ALSO THINK THAT MARY PONDERED THE LOWLINESS OF HIS AUDIENCE
• the first ones to learn of Jesus’ birth were the shepherds
• if Jesus had been born in his hometown of Nazareth, after the custom of that day, there would have been musicians to serenade the birth
• but it was not so there in Bethlehem
• only shepherds
• the Pharisees of that time said there were six professions that were unworthy
• one of those was being a shepherd
• a shepherd was not permitted to give testimony in a court of law
• a shepherd was not permitted to enter a synagogue, because his activities were considered ritually unclean
• people did not have dealings with shepherds
• shepherds in that time were usually very young, just as David in the Old Testament was only a boy
• the shepherds, of course, could not have grasped what happened
• you can’t capture Niagara in a teacup, or the ocean in a single straw
• but they were the first to know of it
• and you know, this reminds us that at the center of the gospel is the truth that the knowledge of God is not essentially an intellectual exercise
• it’s not something that God only gives to the powerful or the intelligent
• it’s to the shepherds
• it’s to the ungood
• some children wrote to Santa
• one child wrote, “Dear Santa, you did not bring me anything good last year. You did not bring me anything good the year before that. This is your last chance. Signed, Alfred”
• another one said:
• “Dear Santa, there are three little boys who live at our house. There is Jeffrey; he is 2. There is David; he is 4. And there is Norman; he is 7. Jeffrey is good some of the time. David is good some of the time. But Norman is good all of the time. I am Norman”
• but we’re not Normans
• we’re shepherds
• we need to learn humility
• when we read about the immensities of space and realize that our lives are only the flaring of a match against eternity’s darkness, we are humbled
• I have no political significance
• I have no distinguished vocational accomplishments
• I look at my inner life and I see weakness and ugliness and sin
• but Christmas speaks to all that
• Christmas says that God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise
• that he chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong
• that he chose that in the world that is low and despised, even the things that are not, to shame the things that are
• Christmas is the announcement that we are worth enough to God for him to come
• we are sending out space probes to remote areas of our solar system
• as they go behind the moon and see parts of the universe that we’ve never seen before, we find that it is black and barren and broken and cold, containing nothing but death
• these vehicles we send off carrying sophisticated, exotic equipment send back signals that tell us that other atmospheres are acrid and heated, and that there are volcanoes that spew forth noxious fumes, and there’s nothing in these places but fog and ash and ice
• then we look at world, where we see friends and fields and forests and fruits and seas and mountains, and musicians that write songs, and painters that paint pictures, and philosophers that think thoughts that haven’t been thought before
• we have dreamers who dream, visionaries who build castles in the air, and engineers who go out and put foundations under them
• and suddenly we realize that we are the visited planet
• this Christmas, I urge you to ponder like Mary – gentle Mary, who is ready for anything because she put her trust in God, who didn’t hesitate to say that she needed the help of others because she knew that the greatest waste of life is to try to go through it all alone
• strong Mary, who sang the victory song of the human spirit, which announced that the proud will be put down, and the righteousness and the justice of God will prevail
• and, at the end on that night itself, loving Mary, who kept all those things and pondered them in her heart
• if I could give each of you a Christmas gift this week, it would be the pondering heart of Mary, who lay there silent on the damp straw and suckled her child and thought of the quietness of God’s arrival, the lowliness of his arrival, and the lowliness of his audience
• glory to God in the lowest!
• I want to wish all of you a Mary Christmas – a M-A-R-Y Christmas

adapted from a sermon preached by Bruce W. Thielemann