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December 24, 2015Christmas EveSermonsfrom The Church of the Covenant“Chaos at Christmas”The Reverend Amy Starr RedwineThe Church of the CovenantPresbyterian Church (USA)11205 Euclid AvenueCleveland, Ohio 44106CovenantWeb.org

Chaos at ChristmasFor many of us, Christmas Eve just isn’t Christmas Eveuntil we sing Silent Night by candlelight.Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright.Although this hymn was written in 1816 by an Austrian minister,Joseph Mohr, it wasn’t put to music until Christmas Eve 1818,when the organ at Mohr’s church broke at the worst possible time:Christmas Eve.Can you imagine?Like most churches, the music had been carefully planned and rehearsed,and a broken organ was the last thing anyone had anticipated.In a panic, Mohr took the text he had written two years beforeand gave it to his organist, Franz Gruber,who quickly composed a simple tunewhich he played that night on a guitar.1Thanks to the fiasco of a broken organ on Christmas Eve,the world has this beloved Christmas hymn which — let’s face it — perpetuates a lie.Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright.What happened on that night is what has happenedmultiple times every day since: a woman had a baby.And unless there are some serious drugs involved —and sometimes even when there are —childbirth is far from silent.Newborn babies aren’t so quiet, either —in fact, doctors and nurses start to get really worriedwhen a baby emerges from the dark quiet comfort of the womband doesn’t start making some noise.1Robert Morgan, Then Sings My Soul, Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2003, p. 93.

But even beyond the birthing mother and the newborn baby, Luke’s description ofthe first Christmas is, simply put, noisy.The shepherds are in the fieldswhen a whole host of angels appear, singing.There couldn’t have been anything silent about that.And what about the town of Bethlehem,the one we often sing about this time of year:O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie.Above thy deep and dreamless sleep, the silent stars go by.According to gospel of Luke,Mary and Joseph ended up in Bethlehem on that fateful nightbecause the emperor had declared thateveryone under his rule had to be registered.This was a census of sorts,to make sure that all citizens were paying their taxes,but instead of having government workers go door to doorto survey the population,everyone was commanded to go to a certain town to be counted.All those of the house and lineage of David were to go to Bethlehem.Bethlehem was no booming metropolis. On most nights, the words of that hymnwould have been quite accurate.But all of that changed when the emperor announced the registration.People from all over streamed into this sleepy little town,and unlike Cleveland preparing for the upcoming RNC,the town’s leaders had little time to prepare.Hotels and inns were quickly overrun,restaurants — what restaurants there were — were packed to the gills,running out of food.Babies and children — adults too — made their discomfort loudly known.

The locals were on edge,the visitors were frustrated by the lack of amenities,and interactions among strangers were charged with tension.It was sheer chaos, a tiny town bursting at the seams,full of the restless energy of too many people.Imagine a quarter of the population of Cleveland and its suburbsrelocating en masse to Orrville for a few days,hundreds of thousands of people trying to find food and shelterin a town of eight thousand.Kind of makes you rethink the deep and dreamless sleep, doesn’t it?Our Christmas hymns reveal how deeply we cherish the ideaof the first Christmas night as one of silence and peace,but the reality is, Christ’s entrance into the world was anything butsilent or peaceful.But we cling to this idea because we so desperately wantto come to church on this night and escape the chaos of this season —the lines, the traffic, the planning, the gathering,the cooking and cleaning and preparing and anticipating.We want to come and hear beautiful musicand light candles and forget, for just a moment,all that isn’t right in our lives and in the world.Just for one, quiet, peaceful night we’d like to forgetabout the absurdity of the presidential primary season,the despair of Syria and its refugees,the endless division in our own country between people of differentraces and religions and orientations and political persuasions.Regardless of whether that first Christmas night was silent,silence and peace are what we long for tonight.

The problem is, if we come here tonight looking onlyfor a sliver of peace and quiet in the midst of life’s chaos,we risk forgetting that we are here to celebrate the incarnation,God in human flesh,God with us in the midst of it all.The incarnation has always been a controversial idea.In the days of the early church, there were heated argumentsabout just exactly how Jesus was both human and divine.One of these arguments was between the theologians Marcion and Tertullian.Marcion fervently believedthat God was perfect, immortal, and entirely good.Because of this, he really struggled with the idea that God,good and perfect God,would actually become part of our sinful, fallen creation.That seemed to him to be beneath God.So he argued that Jesus wasn’t really human,that he was more like a fully divine beingwho put on humanity kind of like a Halloween costume;it was never what he really was.On the other side of this debate was Tertullian,who argued vehemently against Marcion.In one paper, Tertullian urges Marcion to imagine Jesus growing in the womb.He employs vivid descriptions of a baby born on straw and hay,followed by a messy afterbirth.After this graphic description, he gets personal.“I know you reject this whole idea,” he writes,“But how were you born?”22David Lose, Making Sense of the Christian Faith.

In other words,if we believe that the reality of conception, development, and childbirthare too messy, too pedestrian for God,then we are likely to think that we ourselves are too messy for God.And when we believe that we are not good enough for God to get involved with,we come to church thinking that we can only meet God here,where everything is neat and clean,where we wear our best clothes and use our best manners,where the music and the lights and the decorationsinspire us with God’s beauty and goodness.And from here, we’ll go home,back to the messiness of our lives,back to the brokenness of the world,and most of us will leave God here,a clean, silent, sweet, baby boy sleeping in heavenly peace.Every Christmas for years,John and Joan Leising put a lighted manger scene in front of their home.But on Dec. 23, 2005, they looked outside only to discoverthat the 18-inch tall plastic statue of the baby Jesushad been stolen from the manger.In its place was a note,that the statue was needed and would be returned in three days.But three days passed, then three weeks, months, and half a year.Finally, one morning in late August,John opened the front door to find the statue with another noteand a photo album full of pictures taken all over New York statein front of Thruway signs,on bridges,at rest stops,even at a psychiatric center.

This night is first and foremost a celebration of God’s incredible love for us,a love so deep that God chose to enter the world as one of us,fully and completely and utterly human,not as a great king or ruler,but as the child of poor peasants who grew up to be a peasant himselfand who reveals to us the true nature of God.But if we leave all that knowledge here at church,if we leave Jesus here sleeping peacefully in the manger,we have missed the point.We should all be stealing Jesus,taking him out of the relative peace and safety of this sanctuary,taking him with us into all the messiness of our lives —the chaos of the holidays with too many presents and too much food,the challenges of our relationships with the arguments and uncertaintiesand old wounds,the fears that — for all of us — lurk just beneath the surface of thepolished appearance we show the world.We need Jesus, who has promised us true peace —not the peace of a baby sleeping quietly,but peace in the midst of all of life’s problems and conflicts and sorrows.Because if Jesus isn’t there, in the messiness of human lifeand the complexity of the world’s problems —then Christmas really doesn’t matter at all.Without a broken organ, we wouldn’t have our beloved Silent Night.Without a broken, messy world, and a first Christmas nightthat was anything but silent,we would not know that God that stands with us, as one of us,that God loves us not just at our Christmas Eve bestbut in all the messiness of our lives.So whether you come here once a year on Christmas Eveor faithfully every Sunday, please:don’t leave Jesus here when you go tonight.

Take him with you.You need God with you.We need God with us.And our world desperately needs the deep peace Jesus offers,not just the peace of a newborn baby sleeping soundly,but the peace of a grown man who has knownfirsthand joy and sorrow, ecstasy and despair,life and death.So after you sing Silent Night and marvel and the beauty and the mystery,after you extinguish your candle and exchange Merry Christmases with yourneighbors and walk out those doors, please:take Jesus with you.After all, being with you, being with this whole messy world,is precisely why he came.Amen.

which he played that night on a guitar.1 Thanks to the fiasco of a broken organ on Christmas Eve, the world has this beloved Christmas hymn which — let’s face it — perpetuates a lie. Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright. What happened on that night is what has happened multiple times every day since: a woman had a baby.