Advent Lutheran Church

"The Manger: Empty No More (Christmas Eve)"

            Grace and peace to you from God the Creator and the Lord Jesus.  Amen.

            There is excitement in the air tonight!  It started several weeks ago, somewhere in the midst of the turkey and dressing and pumpkin pie, and it’s been building ever since.  Here at Advent we’ve marked each Sunday in the four-week season of Advent by lighting an additional candle on the Advent wreath; and all of the Scripture lessons, hymns and sermons have been pointing us forward.  In our culture, the retailers have been marketing Christmas since the middle of summer, and the malls are filled with Christmas music.  All the buzz has been leading up to tonight.

Yes, there is excitement in the air.  Your excitement, to be sure, but your excitement is at least matched by God’s excitement that you are here, to hear the story one more time and to receive God’s personal gift to you.

If we didn’t have the benefit of a wide-angle lens on history, we might make the mistake of thinking that this is just a quiet, ordinary story.  A husband and wife have to travel from one town to another in order to participate in a census, a head-count ordered by the king so that he can know how many people he controls and how much he can expect in tax revenue.  She’s pregnant, about to give birth, Motel 6 is all booked up, so she gives birth in a stable out back.  Ordinary couple living out an ordinary story.  But the Bible tells us that this particular ordinary story changed everything.

This doesn’t come as welcome news to most people, but the truth is that for most of us, life is pretty ordinary too.  Oh, there are mountaintop experiences along the way – marriage, birth of children, promotions at work – and there are the inevitable times that we spend in the valley of despair; but for most of us most of the time, life is lived out on the level plain where we do our best to raise our kids, do our best to love our parents, go to school, go to work, pay our bills, do the laundry.  Ordinary lives.  In fact, if we are intentional about our living and not simply sleep-walking through life, we’re grateful to have family and home and work.  We are, in a way, grateful for the ordinariness of life.

But at Christmas we yearn for something more.  At Christmas we reach out for what only God can give us.  You might be here tonight for any number of your own reasons – family tradition, curiosity – but underneath all the other reasons is the real reason that you’re here: God has brought you here to receive his gift of joy.

Note that God does not offer us happiness.  The angel did not surprise the shepherds in the hills that night with the announcement, “Behold I bring you good news of great happiness.”  Nothing wrong with happiness; it’s a great experience that we generate for ourselves and each other.  But happiness has to do with circumstances.  Chances are, there won’t be a lot of students who will be happy about returning to school the day after Christmas break; probably the same number of folks who will be happy about going back to work on Monday morning.

Joy is different.  Joy doesn’t depend on circumstances, on how things are going.  Joy depends only on our willingness to receive a divine gift of joy.

 Many of us have manger scenes in our homes during the Christmas season because they help illustrate the story of that morning.  Those manger scenes can range from elaborate, with sleek figures of ivory and marble; to simple, with the characters rough-cut out of pieces of wood.  Years ago, living manger scenes were popular; you usually found those in the front yards of churches.

A colleague recalls a unique experience at one of those living mangers.  Each evening, members of the church would volunteer to portray the various characters.  A newly retired man became Joseph.  Some high-schoolers dressed up as shepherds.  A young girl slipped into some white wings and was perched atop the wooden structure that sheltered the manger.  And then there was Mary, a perfectly made-up, fresh-faced maiden whose job was to sit and look adoringly into the manger.   Actually, that was everybody’s job, to look adoringly into the manger, which meant that there wasn’t much activity in that live nativity scene.  So they brought in a few sheep to lend an air of authenticity, and to provide a little movement.

They even brought in a cow, which, on one memorable evening, provided some great entertainment.  On that particular night, the cow ambled slowly through the little crowd of shepherds and sheep until she was standing right next to Mary, looking adoringly into the manger.  So the cow also looked down into the manger, and there beheld the only non-living figure in the entire living manger scene.  It was the baby Jesus, represented by a plastic doll.  The cow slowly lowered her head into the manger, plucked up the plastic baby Jesus in her teeth, and slung it out into the crowd of onlookers!

The crowd erupted in laughter, but that cow made a wonderful theological point.  There is only one essence that can legitimately fill the empty manger, and that is the salvation of God.  Listen again to what the real angel said that night to the shepherds: “I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.”  The salvation brought by this Messiah can’t be earned; it can only be received as gift.

The angel goes on: “This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.”  How many mangers, feeding troughs, do you imagine these shepherds encountered in the course of their careers?  Countless, I would think.  Common, ordinary mangers.  But tonight the ordinary becomes extraordinary, because the ordinary – an ordinary empty manger – holds the gift of salvation.

Each one of us has an empty manger in our life.  For you, that empty manger might involve the love that you have so desperately wanted and searched for, but has so far been so elusive.  Your empty manger might be meaningful work that uses all of your gifts and abilities and leaves you feeling excited about life, but instead you find yourself in one dead-end job after another.  Perhaps your empty manger involves good physical health, or the affirmation of your peers.  The empty manger – you can name yours better than I.  Perhaps you have lived with that empty manger for so long that you’ve adjusted, accommodated to its emptiness.  And so life goes on, but with an uneasy space.

It is precisely into that space that the Savior, born this night, fits perfectly.  The divine surprise is that the Savior comes to fill that manger not with the things that you lack but with God.  And the surprise is that the more we make our relationship with God the centerpiece of our lives, the more we discover a joy that allows us to live whole, fulfilled, significant lives either with or without everything else.

Success, failure, gladness, disappointment all will come and go, but their presence or their absence will not dominate our living if we are willing to simply embrace the holy joy that we can never lose.

That joy is born this night.  That joy is born for you.  Through faith, that joy is born in you.

Amen.