Sermon Dec 26, 2004

“The King in the Stable”

Originally I had decided to speak today about “Sacred People.” But as I thought about it more, I decided that on this day, the day after Christmas, I should do something a little more related to the holiday. So I’ve decided to speak on “The King in the Stable.” Refunds are available after the service if you are terribly disappointed.

I am not interested today in getting into some doctrinal dispute over the nature of Jesus. I am simply interested in the notion that a royal figure was born in a stable, and what the implications of that are for us.

We can argue some other time about who Jesus was. The writers of the four gospels didn’t agree on that. In fact the whole history of early Christianity is the story of various attempts to come to grips with exactly who and what Jesus was.

Even the title, “Christ”, can be a little misleading. It is from the Greek word, “Christos” and it means “anointed one.” It’s a royal designation, one that would have applied to every king in Israel’s history, who were all anointed as part of their coronation. It implies nothing about Jesus’ nature. It says nothing about a pre-existent being. It has nothing to do with divinity. It has to do with function. It has to do with kingship, and in Jesus’ case, spiritual leadership.

It takes some time before Jesus is transformed into a divine figure. It takes even longer before there is any kind of consensus about exactly what kind of being Jesus is. And not everyone agreed then nor do they now.

But today I want to focus on the idea that royalty would be born in a barn. I want to focus on this because it says something about wealth and power, about the place of wealth and power in the world, and in our hearts.

But first I have to tell you the truth. Despite the myriads of manger scenes scatter across the world, Jesus probably wasn’t born in a barn.

In those days, and even today in poor Palestinian villages, farm houses were two storied affairs. The first floor served as a barn. This is where the animals were kept in the winter months. Above this area, were balconies where the peasants slept and cooked and ate and would have watched MTV, if it had been invented at the time. The center of the house was open, to allow the heat from the animals to rise and help keep the human inhabitants warm.

It is likely that when Mary and Joseph could find no place to stay, some kind family took them in and allowed them to stay in the area reserved for the farm animals. Not quite as romantic perhaps as being born in a drafty shed, but still a rather humble and uncomfortable situation.

Jesus was also probably not born in the winter. If the story is true about the shepherds being in the fields with their sheep at night, it was at least springtime when Jesus was born, since in the winter, shepherds and their flocks would not have been out in the fields overnight. The sheep would have been in the house, keeping themselves and everyone else warm.

In fact, most scholars place Jesus’ birth in early spring, sometime in March or April. I’ve can’t say exactly how they arrive at those dates, but that is the general consensus among Biblical researchers.

Still, despite the differences between what probably happened and how we imagine Jesus’ birth, there is something to the idea that a royal figure is born in such humble circumstances. It is a repudiation of the world’s ideas about what is important and about what constitutes nobility.

The circumstances of Jesus’ birth reflect a theme found in the gospels and remarkably unobserved by much of modern Christianity with its emphasis on blessing and wealth. In fact, for a lot of Christians, wealth is a sign of blessing. And poverty is a sign of sin.

In our culture in general, there is the idea that rich people are somehow better, and sometimes there is the idea that they are blessed by God. There is also the corresponding idea that people are poor because they are lazy or made poor choices in their lives or are sinners.

Even in the Old Testament, you find such passages as “I have never seen the children of the righteous go hungry.” Naturally, if your children are hungry, you must not be righteous. There is also the assumption that wealth is a sign of God’s favor.

It’s true that there are some passages that run contrary to this idea, but somehow they don’t get noticed in our free market society where the goals of life are power, position, and prestige; and any failure to obtain them is a sign of some personal shortcoming.

In the Gospels, however, this formula, that the rich are blessed and the poor are cursed, gets turned upside down. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says “Blessed are the poor, for they shall inherit the earth; Blessed are you that hunger now, for you will be satisfied; Blessed are you that weep now, for you shall laugh.”

This may not be the version of the Sermon you know. It’s from Luke’s gospel. We usually quote from Matthew’s gospel, where the radical economic message has been spiritualized. Its no longer “Blessed are the poor,” but becomes, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” And it’s no longer, “Blessed are the hungry,” but rather, “Blessed are those who hunger for righteousness.” I guess people even from the beginning of Christianity people were pretty uncomfortable with the idea that God is on the side of the economically disadvantaged, so they spiritualized the message.

But what Jesus was proclaiming was the imminent overturning of the world order, a complete reversal of fortunes, where the poor end up in control; where the last are first and the first last.

As for the importance of position, there is a similar overturning of the normal expectation. Jesus says things like, “He who would be greatest of all, must be the servant of all.”

And as for those the world sees as blessed, the wealthy, Jesus says, “It is harder for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.” Doesn’t sound to good for the wealthy, does it?

Do they have any hope? Certainly. They just need to take Jesus’ advice: “Sell all that you have, give it to the poor, and come follow me.”

Now there are some things that Jesus missed. He expected God to break into reality, overthrow the existing political and economic order, and establish a reign of justice on the earth. And he expected God to do that soon. So he says, “Repent, because God’s kingdom is at hand.”

Of course, God didn’t break into reality and overthrow the existing order. God didn’t suddenly establish a world economic system like Jesus apparently thought God would. But Jesus was a person of his times and those were times filled with apocalyptic expectations. Those were times when people had grown so weary of the world and so full of despair, that all they could do was cling to a hope that God would somehow enter directly into human history and set things right.

When people don’t have a hope in the world, they sometimes start having hope for the next world.

At the same time, while Jesus did buy into some of the religious ideas current in his age, he did give expression to what was important to God, of what counted as valuable in the mind of the divine. And it wasn’t how much wealth we accumulate or how much power we accrue. The birth of a king in a stable is a metaphor for that truth. The story tells us that real nobility is not found in wealth or the trappings of power.

A number of years ago I did social work and ran into a truly heart-rending situation. I went to visit an elderly gentleman named Fred. He was caring for his wife, who was unable to walk or and suffered from some form of dementia. They lived in a tiny cramped apartment, with a black and white TV that could only get one channel.

Fred couldn’t afford diapers for his wife, so he spent much of his day changing her and doing laundry in the laundry room of the apartment complex. He also couldn’t leave her for more than a few minutes at a time, because she would try to get out of bed and might fall, so for food he would run across the street to the local deli. The high prices there devoured their meager income.

When I asked Fred what he needed from me, he told me that all he wanted was for someone to come and stay with his wife one hour a week, so he could go down again to the local senior center and have a cup of coffee with his friends.

Then he promised me he wouldn’t stay for the movie or to play cards, he just wanted that brief time to see his friends again and share a single cup of coffee.

It was a truly heart-breaking and miserable situation and I was horrified by their circumstances. Fred was a complete prisoner in this tiny apartment, unable to enjoy the simple pleasure of seeing a friend or even getting out for a short walk.

Then I asked Fred how long he had been living like this. He told me, “Twelve years.”

One more note about Fred. Despite the miserable surroundings and circumstances, when I looked at his wife, she was radiant with joy. It was obvious that somehow she knew how much she was loved and how blessed she was because of that love.

In graduate school, as I listened to the often rather pompous professors and the sometimes even more pompous students, I often thought about Fred. I often wondered who might rank higher in the mind of God; my fellow academics, with their education and careers, their books and their prestige; or Fred, a poor retired mill worker with a sixth grade education, who had given the last twelve years of his life to care for the woman he loved.

If there are levels in heaven, I think Fred, who was a nobody in this life, is way up there somewhere. I think that if I have ever seen nobility, Fred had it. And I think if there is spiritual royalty, Fred was a member.

We live in a culture that worships pride of place; that idolizes celebrity and wealth and power. We live in a culture that tempts us to measure ourselves by such standards.

The story of the king in the stable reminds us that those are not the things that really count. It reminds us that true nobility is found in unseen kindnesses, and true royalty shows itself in everyday acts of care.

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