University Presbyterian Church - Chapel Hill, NC

THE MANGER AND THE CROSS

Luke 2:22-40

A Sermon by Robert E. Dunham

University Presbyterian Church

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

First Sunday after Christmas                  December 31, 2006

This sermon draws its title and a portion of its content from a sermon I preached at University Church on December 30, 2003.

            I believe children are often quite perceptive and sensitive to the darker currents and tides of life, currents and tides which we may think are too difficult or subtle for their young minds to grasp. A friend e-mailed me last week to describe a moment just before Christmas when she came across her four-year-old son standing before a nativity set someone had made for him.  My friend said he seemed transfixed by the scene.  She was about to speak when she saw him pick up the figure of Mary and make her lean down to the manger and kiss the baby Jesus. It was the kind of heartwarming scene that makes tears well up in a parent’s eyes, but before she could even savor the moment, he then took the figure of Mary and had her attack the wise men – completely knocking them off the table, before dive-bombing and strafing them again on the floor.

            My friend said she couldn’t resist interrupting, so she asked him why Mary had gone berserk all of a sudden. “They’re bad guys,” her son said of the three kings. She assured him they weren’t at all and reminded him that the magi had brought gifts to the Christ child, but he wasn’t impressed. “She didn’t like the gifts,” he said… and then was off to something else.

            It seems an odd take on the familiar crèche. But as I think about it, he was probably right. I suspect Mary didn’t like the gifts much at all. Oh, maybe the gold – a suitable gift for her newborn king. But what about the frankincense and myrrh? Lovely and fragrant spices, but most often used at funerals, gifts that portended death, to be sure.

            Christmas… even the first… has always been about much more than tinsel and light. Even from the beginning, it has been laced with a sadness and a heaviness that all the presents and turkey dinners in the world could never mask.  In Matthew’s Gospel we learn of these funeral gifts for the king… and later in the same chapter, we hear that the Holy Family is forced to flee for their lives in the wake of Herod’s vengeful and furious anger, which turned Bethlehem’s streets into killing fields for baby boys. The angels’ “good news of great joy” had been transformed into terrifying news of a great horror.

            Something of the same admixture of joy and sorrow, of fulfillment and foreboding can be found in the portion of Luke's Gospel we read this morning as well.  On the heels of the wonderful story of the shepherds running from the manger to tell all that they had seen and heard, Luke appends his account of Joseph and Mary bringing Jesus to the temple in Jerusalem to present him to the Lord, an act of purification.  There the family encounters an old man named Simeon.  Frederick Buechner once described their encounter this way:

Years before, [Simeon had] been told he wouldn't die till he'd seen the Messiah with his own two eyes, and time was running out.  When the moment finally came, one look through his cataract lenses was all it took.  He asked if it would be all right to hold the baby in his arms, and they told him to go ahead but be careful not to drop him.

"Lord, now let thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation," he said (Luke 2:29), the baby playing with the fringes of his beard.  The parents were pleased as punch, so he blessed them too for good measure.  Then something about the mother stopped him, and his expression changed.

What he saw in her face was a long way off, but it was there so plainly he couldn't pretend.  "[This child is destined for the falling and rising of many in Israel... and a] sword will pierce through your soul," he said (Luke 2:35).

He would have rather bitten off his tongue than said it, but in that holy place he felt he had no choice.  Then he handed her back the baby and departed in something less than the perfect peace he'd dreamed of all the long years of his waiting.[1]

            There is an unmistakable romanticism grows up around Christmas.  The symbols and songs and candles work their magic, and our hearts are warmed and our spirits lifted a bit, and we find ourselves beginning to hope that maybe things will work out all right after all.  And so much of that romanticism centers on the child asleep in the hay, on the hope, the wonder, and the love connected with the birth of this child.  In that sense, these words of Simeon may startle us into an unwanted realism.[2]  But what his words do more than anything else is demonstrate with inescapable clarity the intimate connection between the manger and the cross.

            This child of Christmas, this babe of Bethlehem, was born into a world of tragedy and pain and evil.  The flight into Egypt and the massacre of the innocents in Bethlehem are part of that realism. And not far down the road from the little town of Bethlehem Jesus met the hopes and fears of all the years again on a hill called Golgotha.  Pain, grief, sadness, loss, evil, injustice, apathy and pride... Jesus experienced them all.  He suffered them all.  He bore our pain and died our death and was buried with the weight of the world's sin. 

            I wonder if Simeon and Anna could see all that coming. I wonder if Mary and Joseph saw it coming.  I believe at least one artist thought Mary had some sense of it all.  The ushers gave you this morning a reproduction of a painting by the seventeenth century Spanish artist Francisco de Zurbarán, a haunting portrait of Mary and her adolescent Jesus in Nazareth.[3]  Artists sometimes simply see things that others of us do not.  Zurbarán’s painting, “Christ and the Virgin in the House at Nazareth,” shows Mary as no other portrait I’ve seen, sitting heavily in her seat, her sad and worried face turned toward her son, who is picking at a thorn in his finger, a whole crown of thorns resting on his lap.  Observing this painting, contemporary poet Deborah Burnham considered the thoughts that might have been on Mary’s mind in a poem entitled “What will become of him?”

            When Gabriel told Mary she was so highly

favored among women, how her son

would not be hers alone but shared with God,

she must have wondered how to raise a King,

how to wash and feed one who, the angel said,

would rule the House of Jacob evermore.

While keeping his small fingers safe from spikes

and hammers, she must have guessed what had to come;

while his busy father split a length of tree,

she must have thought about the price of kingship,

wondered if he’d stare across the drying hills

and weep as he began to understand.

Zurburan knew this; he alone dared paint

the Virgin slumped in a low chair, her robe

disheveled, staring with a sadness beyond

tears as her son, a prickly circlet

in his lap, dug thorns from his callused hands –

hands made older than his beardless face

by cutting wood and driving spikes,

his gorgeous, placid face suffused by light

from a source invisible to Mary

that leaves her dark conjecture in the shadow

of her son’s brief future; she only knows

that something terrible will happen

as she sits, helpless inside her dark,

perpetual, unknowing grief.[4]

Grief… it seems so out of place in this joyful season, seems such an intruder into the carols of light.  But Zurbarán knew, as did Simeon, that this child would travel from manger to cross.  I would also wager that both Simeon and Zurbarán understood that neither the manger nor the cross contained the final word about Jesus.  The final word about Jesus was not his remarkable birth in Bethlehem; nor was that final word spoken at the cross of Golgotha.  The final word was one spoken by the angel at the empty tomb on Easter morning, the “fear not!” that is powerful enough to dispel all the grief and all the darkness.  Indeed, one might surmise that it was not a star, but the first, faint hints of the sunrise of Easter that shone down on that Bethlehem stable.

            The light shines in the darkness, said John, and the darkness has not overcome it. There is still darkness, of course, and many people have known it and experienced it in these days.  Our world has certainly experienced it. And some of us here have as well. But the darkness is not the final word.  With resurrection eyes one can see through the darkness, can see the manger and the cross in different light.  With resurrection eyes, even if you are having a difficult time making sense of this Christmas season, perhaps you can see beyond the manger to the cross, and recognize that that cross represented the ultimate bearing of all the burdens of our human experience.  If not from all the hoopla of the season, then perhaps from such a vision we can pull together a measure of genuine joy – a joy that has little to do with parties and presents, a joy that does not ask us to "pack up all our cares and woes," a joy rather that begs us to come just as we are, laden with every kind of pain and sorrow and emptiness we feel... to come and celebrate the only kind of joy that can sustain us in a time such as this... the joy of Simeon, whose eyes have beheld the promise of God despite the darkness.

            And then, buoyed by such a vision and confidence, perhaps we can be about offering a belated Christmas gift to others in their distress and their need... a gift suggested in a newspaper article I read thirty years ago this week.  In a wonderful column in that grand old newspaper, The National Observer, Ed Roberts suggested that the only authentic gift we could bring to those beset by tragedy and sadness in the Christmas season was the gift of love: “The unexpected word, affectionate and simply given -- that may be the only perfect gift -- altogether fitting for Christmas and blessedly fortifying on any wintry day.”[5]

The unexpected word... a word we might speak to one another... a word already spoken to us.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us...  Immanuel, God with us.

            God with us at the manger…God with us at the cross.

            Even here, even now, God with us.

            So, fear not.  Fear not.