Christmas Eve :: Dec 24, 2012 :: Luke 2:1-14

In the name of Jesus. Amen.

As much as we’d like them to be, beginnings are rarely marked with the kind of lavish extravagance we imagine and hope for.

Think about it, that first day of school when we were gearing up all summer for a new year begins with the bell ringing, attendance taken, and homework sent home. Hardly the kind of lavish beginning we expected all summer.

Or how about when we begin a new job. In anticipation of the new beginning we go and buy a new set of cloths, we get up and ready extra early, and we show up about 15 minutes before we are supposed to. And then when it is time to clock out for the day, the flourish is gone, the work to do has piled up on the desk, the phone calls have been endless, and the sense of accomplishment is no where to be found.

Or how about the first snow fall. With anticipation we look forward to the moisture, the pristinely white cover of all that is brown and dead, the feeling of a white Christmas soon. And then there is the shoveling, and the cold, and the slippery ice.

Beginnings are strange. With all of the anxiety and anticipation we put into them, they rarely are marked with the lavish extravagance we imagine they should have.

Our story this evening is a beginning, too. So much history, so many stories have built up this moment that we’d expect a grand, lavish extravagance would mark its occasion as well. The story of this beginning, the birth of Christ, should be marked with lavish extravagance, too.

And yet this story is like every other story of beginning that we know. Just like the first day of school or the first day of a new job, or the first snowfall, the story begins with humility and ordinary occasion. In fact, this story begins with the complete opposite of lavish extravagance. A young child, born in a stable, the animal bedding pushed aside for the young mother, a feeding trough for a crib, a dark night lit only by a single, bright star in the sky.

This is an ordinary beginning for the birth of God in Jesus Christ. As far as beginnings go, this one is about as plain as it can get; maybe even downright crude given the barn, the feeding trough, and the cold, darkness.

As much as we celebrate this birth and build it up in our Christmas Eve worship; as much as we like wearing our best to church, doing our hair so it looks just right, singing louder than we normally do, lighting candles, putting on an impressive display of devotion and honor for the birth of this little baby, this beginning is quite ordinary, quite crude even.

A young woman, her terrified fiancé, a few animals, some straw, a feeding trough, and a dark, cold night; hardly an extravagant beginning for the birth of Christ our king.

As if that all weren’t enough, we are told even more about the beginning; a group of shepherds, living in the fields, keeping watch at night, show up at the stable, there to witness this ordinary beginning. If you can’t quite imagine the scene, thinking about the children in our Christmas program should help. Imagine our kids after they’ve been with the sheep for weeks at a time, no shower or change of clothes, wandering into the stable that dark, cold night to see the baby boy lying in the manger.

Shepherds themselves were not quite known for their reputations, often crass and dirty folk, unfit to even testify in court because of their lowly existence in the fields. And here they are, unable to witness in court, but the first to witness Jesus, the Messiah, a small baby in the arms of his mother.

An ordinary, humble beginning for the Son of God. And yet, we have a God who wouldn’t have it any other way. This God of ours is renowned in the world for this kind of humility. For caring for the widow and the orphan, for feeding the hungry and healing the sick, even raising the dead to life. We have a God whose favorite material to work with is nothing. In the beginning, out of a dark and formless void came all of creation, out of dirt and wind came the life and breath of man. Our God, the one, true God of heaven and earth, likes to begin with nothing. Fallow, unworked soil is the blank canvas of a God who takes the lowliest, most humble beginnings and does something remarkable in the end.

Tonight is a celebration of humble beginnings; so humble that God can actually begin the kind of work God prefers to do: forgiving and welcoming home God’s children. God’s favorite material is a humble and contrite heart, ready for planting and tending and reaping; God’s favorite material is you. Your life, whether it is full of sorrow and pain, full of pride and prejudice, full of sickness and sadness, or full of joy and hope, your life is a good beginning for a God who likes to take nothing and make it something.

This incredible God we have begins incarnated life as a young baby, born to an unwed mother, in a dark, cold stable, on a bed of straw, lay in a feeding trough, and visited by lowly shepherds straight from the field. He lives and does his work in all the wrong places, eating with tax collectors and sinners, healing the sick on the Sabbath, touching the untouchable, and raising the dead to life.

And not only that, this incredible God we have begins life anew in life’s most humble and lowly point of death. In this dark and formless void of death on a cross Christ is resurrected for your sake, to take your life and make something completely new.

This Christmas, celebrate humble and lowly beginnings. Celebrate ordinary. Celebrate the dark and the formless. From these things God brings the grand, the extravagant, the extraordinary, the light and the well-formed life of his new kingdom. In Christ, the baby born in the dark, the light of God shines in all the world and we see that humble and lowly are, in the end, grand and extravagant.

May God bless all your ordinary, your humble, and your lowly beginnings and may God do something as grand as he did in the birth of Christ for you.

In the name of Jesus. Amen.