1About that time Caesar Augustus ordered a census to be taken throughout the Empire. 2This was the first census when Quirinius was governor of Syria. 3Everyone had to travel to his own ancestral hometown to be accounted for. 4So Joseph went from the Galilean town of Nazareth up to Bethlehem in Judah, David’s town, for the census. As a descendant of David, he had to go there. 5He went with Mary, his fiancée, who was pregnant.
6While they were there, the time came for her to give birth. 7She gave birth to a son, her firstborn. She wrapped him in a blanket and laid him in a manger, because there was no room in the hostel.Luke 2;1-7 The Message
I don’t know about you but I like my home comforts. It is good to know where things are, it is good to be in your own home with your own things around you. It is familiar, it is comfortable and in the middle of winter it is especially welcome. Dark and cold nights, people are out and about but tend to be glad to be back home.
Unless of course home is an uncomfortable place. Family disagreements, the weight of expectations, relationships struggling to communicate effectively, misunderstandings, external pressures. Maybe home is about failure and disappointments, wishing things had turned out differently, wishing that you had not said and done what you have. Maybe home is too quiet and you wish for the noise and hustle and bustle of how things used to be, if only those days would come back.
I think Mary and Joseph must have known exactly how you felt. They would have liked home, the familiar, the known, to be surrounded by their friends. But they also knew what it was to be uncomfortable at home.
Mary was pregnant, they were not married, she could hide it no longer. People laughed and sniggered as she went down the street, she could feel the staring eyes on her back. The net curtains twitched at the windows and heaven knows what they were saying on Facebook and MSN. She didn’t go there is was too uncomfortable.
Joseph had tried. At one stage it didn’t look like the relationship would make it. He was unsure, he tried to do his best but somehow it never quite seemed to be enough.
And, now, now we have to go to Bethlehem for a silly census. The Romans are never happy unless they are making life uncomfortable for us. It is all about the money and taxes. They had talked about her not going, she didn’t need to go but, but,..she did want to stay at home on her own – it was simply too painful, too hard, maybe getting away for a while would be good.
It was an Angel that had visited her, a messenger from God and now look at what was happening. It wasn’t what God had done it was the consequences of what he had done. It was other people.
Mary and Joseph were visitors. They knew what it was to have to make plans for the journey, to make sure they had everything, to check that everything was in order. They knew what it was to have to be on the road. They knew what it was to live out of suitcase. They knew what it was to have the inconvenience of the a 3 day journey at the beck and call of someone else. All for the sake of the taxes.
But more than that they knew the pain of home being an uncomfortable place, family disagreements, relationships strained, disappointments,
And into all of that, being visitors, strange places, and circumstances, being unsure and nervous about what will happen. In all of that stuff of life, God himself visits. Despite the mess and such inconvenience God visits.
Watch out this Christmas as you visit others, that God might be visiting you. In the suitcase packing, in the making plans, in the journeying, have eyes and hearts to see and respond. Despite the circumstances,
Meditation
She was thirteen or thereabouts,
pregnant,
still a child herself.
No vote, no rights, no husband,
no education,
in a small village in an occupied land.
So why would you,
the Great God of the Universe,
pick this peasant girl?
Why not some queen
dressed in blue and gold
like those statued madonnas?
I think we’ve had it wrong all along.
It’s not that she was so saintly,
so pure,
so serene, so special,
but that she wasn’t special at all.
Maybe she even had zits.
It was God picking someone mundane,
to show that we are all special,
God choosing what is simple
to confound the wise,
the banal
to shock the glitterati,
the castdown
to shame the exalted.
Mary understood,
Why has God chosen me, a handservant?
To pull the mighty down from their thrones,
and raise up the lowly,
to fill the hungry with good things
while the rich walk away empty-handed.
She could have been any downtrodden woman,
broken,
child of oppression.
In fact,
that is who she always is,
always has been,
and those peasant children of hers
have been messiahs,
but we were too busy
with our census, our mutual funds
our wars
to notice.
Silence
We can scarcely believe it, God,
this story of love’s birth in the world.
We rationalise and reason,
we read the headlines and we doubt
and yet, oddly, we hope, desperately,
that it just might be true.
If we’ve come here disbelieving, God
unwrap our doubt to make a space for love
If we’ve come here despairing
unwrap our grief to make a space for joy
If we’ve come here angry
unwrap our resentment to make a space for peace
If we’ve come here nostalgic
unwrap our sentimentality to make a space for life
If we’ve come here cynical,
unwrap our scepticism to make a space for hope
Let your story be real in this space tonight.
Amen.