The Rev. Frank Logue
King of Peace Episcopal Church
Kingsland, Georgia
December 24, 2002

Have Yourself a Materialistic Christmas
Luke 2:1-14 

Our Gospel reading for this evening gives us afresh the Christmas story at bare essentials. While in Bethlehem for the tax census, Mary delivers the baby Jesus in a stable and lays him in a manger, for there was no room in the inn. Meanwhile, on a hillside outside town, shepherds watching over their flocks by night see an angel who proclaims the birth of the Messiah. The baby Messiah is to be found in, of all places, a feed box in a stable. Just then a multitude of angels appear praising God and sending the shepherds on their way to find the newly born Son of God. That was Christmas, Year Zero. 

I want to show you a movie clip about what Christmas looks like today. 

[Show a minute and a half clip from the movie Jingle All the Way. The scene begins with a toy store opening its doors and a stampede ensuing. Parents scurry about sending store shelves tumbling. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a dad in a desperate last minute search for a Turbo Man doll, the toy of the Christmas season. Finding nothing but sold out signs in the store’s Turbo Man display, he asks where he can find the coveted toy. The toy store employees laugh hysterically and are soon joined by everyone in the store. The desperate dad grabs up two clerks by the fronts of their shirts and asks, “Where’s your Christmas spirit?” End of clip.] 

Where is your Christmas spirit? Is it caught up in a mad dash to get just the right gifts? It is easy to look at the movie scene we just watched and conclude that Christmas is too materialistic. Christmas has become merely about stuff. Christmas isn’t spiritual enough. I think that is looking at the problem from the wrong angle. I am convinced that the danger we now face with Christmas is that the Christmas story is not materialistic enough. If we had a more materialistic Christmas, we wouldn’t be ignoring the babe in the manger as we dash about for gifts. 

The first Christmas was all about stuff, all about matter. Christianity has been called the most materialistic religion in the world and that is very deserved. The three great monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam teach that God created everything that is and called it very good. The Christmas story pushes the envelope as God sees creation not merely as good, but God enters the creation to redeem the broken parts of our world. The great creator is entering the creation. The Holy One is entering the world to redeem the world. This may not seem like such a surprising idea anymore, but it was unprecedented at the time.  

Ancient religions talked about gods who sounded a lot more human in some ways, but who were more distantly divine for the most part. The ancient stories of the Egyptian, Roman, and Greek gods told of how the groups of divine beings carried on in the heavens and even took part in the affairs of earth. The gods were a fickle lot, sometimes showing interest in the affairs of humanity but more often they were merely interested in gaining power for themselves. For example, the stories of the Trojan War show how the tide of war changed with the whims of the gods, reflecting the domestic troubles among the deities. 

Hebrew scripture tells instead of an ongoing love story between the creator and the creation, humans included, but God’s care is not confined to humanity. The Bible tells us that God has had an ongoing relationship with us and planned all along to enter the creation through the second person of the Trinity becoming human. The same God who made all creation and declared it very good showed how good the stuff of this world can be by being born as one of us and living among us. 

The matter, the plain old stuff of this world was redeemed by the very presence of our creator in our midst. The ordinary strips of cloth used to wrap any infant now wrapped God incarnate. An ordinary feed box became his crib. God intended to show the essential goodness of all creation. God did not cheat, becoming human in a palace full of the finer things nor did Jesus wait to be born in the sanitary whiteness of a modern obstetrics ward. 

At a time when even the baby of a poor couple could be expected to be born at home, Jesus was born in a stable. An angel may have announced God’s intentions to Mary some months earlier, but now on the night of the birth, there are no angels in the stable. The angels are off on the hillside as God opts for yet another surprising reversal of fortune. The angels appear over the hills outside town, making the announcement of the savior’s birth to a group of shepherds. The announcement to shepherds outside Bethlehem was probably God’s sentimental side showing through. God had had a special relationship with David, Israel’s great king, who had himself once been a shepherd on these very hills. 

But the choice of revealing God’s plan to a group of shepherds made no sense in human terms. Shepherds were regarded, along with tax collectors and some other occupations, as little better than thieves. Due to the dry conditions of the land, shepherds had to range widely with the flocks entrusted to them. Well away from the owners of the herd, who could know how many lambs were born in a given year? It was not uncommon for shepherds to sell off some lambs and pocket the money.  

The ancient Jewish rabbis considered shepherding a thieving occupation and deprived shepherds of some civil rights. For example, shepherds were not permitted to appear in court as a witness as they were considered so unreliable. Shepherds were assumed to be such liars that their testimony would not hold up in court no matter how many shepherds told the story. That’s the exact group God chose to give the news that a Savior, the Messiah, the Lord would be found in a feed box in Bethlehem. 

It was pure foolishness to give the good news to end all good news to a group that everyone would consider suspect. As Paul would later write to the Corinthians, “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength” (1 Corinthians 1:25). The very commonness, lowliness really, of Jesus birth is confirmed when the angels appear neither at the stable with Mary, Joseph and Jesus, nor in the palace of Caesar or even Herod. Jesus’ birth was announced to shepherds. The very people no one would believe were given the news everyone should hear.  

God was already showing how Jesus’ presence in the world was to redeem the world. A common stable and feed box were redeemed, becoming great symbols of God’s presence among us. Shepherds were redeemed by being entrusted with God’s message.  

The stuff of this world matters to God who lovingly created all there is. But we have so spiritualized the baby in the manger, so remade him into an image of perfection that we can’t imagine Mary ever having to change a diaper. When we overly spiritualize Jesus’ birth, we really are taming the shock of the incarnation. We end up with a greeting-card faith that can’t stand up to the challenges of real life. 

We need a more materialistic view of Christmas. Grab hold of the reality of what it meant for God to be made man. God became a real human baby, fully human with all that means, even as he remained fully divine. Mary and Joseph got no divine assurance that night. Only a grubby group of shepherds with oddly glowing faces as they told of a multitude of angels seen somewhere in the night. The three wise men were still off in the distance somewhere. There were no gifts great or small in sight. There was only the common stuff of this world. Plain old ordinary stuff. That’s the materialism of Christmas. Plain old ordinary stuff made holy by God’s presence. 

A more materialistic Christmas does not look like a mad, frantic dash to get just the right stuff to give someone. It’s a fallen, flawed view of matter to amass more stuff as if it is the stuff you own that matters. Having a more materialistic Christmas means coming to terms with the fact that Jesus was human and his swaddling cloth did need cleaning. Having a more materialistic Christmas means that we stop looking at the halos long enough to realize that Mary and Joseph were common folk. Having a more materialistic Christmas means recognizing shepherds, not as noble people performing a job everyone admired, but as men who others looked down on as little better than thieves.  

God decided that becoming human meant siding with the oppressed and the outcasts and showed it by coming first to poor, lowly, and even despised people. That’s not how people always thought a god should act. God broke all the rules to fulfill a love story centuries in the making.  

The idea of God becoming human in lowly circumstances is wondrous, for it means that God knows you and loves you even as you are. God wants to encounter you in the common stuff of life, ordinary stuff like bread and wine made holy by God’s presence. For you are part of the plain old matter of this world which God sent his son to redeem. Yourself, your soul, your body are part of what God looked at and called very good, and that is Good News of great joy for all the people. 

Amen.