December 24 Christmas Eve
As the engine of my pea green 1975 Chevy LUV pickup truck dangled from a logging chain that had been wrapped around the tine of a forklift, it was clear that my education in the ways of automotive mechanics was well underway. I was standing before the small miracle with Lester, the yard foreman at Lumbermart Building Center where I worked summers in high school.
Lester and I were an unlikely couple, to say the least. I was a clean cut honor student and member of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Lester, on the other hand, probably finished high school just barely, if at all. And “clean cut” wouldn’t be the first description that came to mind for most. Especially during the period in which he slept in his truck, back near the Portland cement shed when he was on the outs with his second or third or fourth wife. After a few weeks Lester was so ripe he was physically forced to bathe by the other yard hands. And remember that standards for personal hygiene aren’t oppressively high at a lumber yard.
But there we were. Lester and me in front of my truck. The master and his apprentice.
Sights, sounds, and smells provided the opportunity for what we now call experiential learning. I did learn some new words, most of which I can’t use in a Christmas sermon. But also terms like “timing chain” and “tensioner” were a little less mysterious (even if their objects were no less infuriating) at the end of the job.
But the real learning was experienced. The real learning that Lester passed on was about everything that wasn’t in the greasy Chilton’s repair manual that guided us. No, some learning comes in at the hands and elbows. It’s less spoken aloud or written down than bumped into and scraped against. The real learning was incarnate learning about life in a world of limitation and necessity.
Because it’s only in doing and doing and doing again that you find that the spot behind a water pump that’s too tight for a socket is just wide enough for a box wrench. But only if you hold it just so. And it’s only in closing your eyes and emptying every last bit of your attention into the tips of your thumb and forefinger for twenty minutes that you discover that the nut can be started onto the threads you can’t quite see back behind the engine block.
If the world tells a reasonably upright and responsible high school kid that he can do almost anything in life, working on an old car with Lester will teach him about a world in which most answers are wrong and doing anything you want will never get an engine to run.
I’m pretty sure that Lester has never been the subject of a Christmas sermon. And if he has, he probably wasn’t compared to Jesus. But it’s not just because Lester mentioned Jesus’ name regularly through the course of our project that I’ll risk the comparison tonight. It’s because Lester knew a thing or two about life in a world of limitation and necessity. And he learned what he knew less in books than by doing. Less in theory than by incarnation, we might say.
And Jesus was born into Lester’s world.
The world of the second chapter of Luke is a world of necessity and limitation. Mary and Joseph travel to Jerusalem because the emperor said they had to. And the emperor told people to go back to the home towns of their families probably because he didn’t know how else to count this herd of cats he was supposed to govern.
Mary was pregnant, because… well that detail does seem to be a little more complicated than usual. But her body now told her that the child was coming whether she was ready or not. Even if she found herself in Bethlehem, a town with only so many rooms to rent on a given night.
And when her baby was born, even if he was the second person of the Trinity, the Incarnate Word, the Prince of Peace, he still needed to be wrapped up in whatever strips of cloth could be found, because the world outside his mother was too cold and too wide for him to survive.
To be incarnate, whether for God or for ordinary humans, it seems, is to live in a world of necessity. A world in which our lives are impacted by the whims of politicians and the forces of nature—those forces within our own bodies and those without.
As you know well enough, life in this world of necessity can be frustrating. Even at Christmas. In fact, it’s possible that a few of you are here tonight because you have to be. The emperor may not have told you to return to your home town, but your mother might have. And a grandfather’s insistence that the family be in church Christmas Eve can be every bit as effective as any multitude of heavenly hosts.
It makes some sense that when our lives seem to be driven by necessity and obligation, we like to imagine God as entirely free of these limitations. When we’re dragged to church or made to clean up and sit up straight at Christmas dinner, it’s natural to imagine a God who doesn’t have to do anything at all. We hope for a God who is what we’re not.
But the story of the Incarnation begins with the fact that Jesus was pushed into this world by the body of his mother. And his mother would probably like you to know that he wasn’t kept warm or fed that first night by any band of angels. Jesus was alive in a world in which carburetors don’t work if the air mixture isn’t right, and office parties and family dinners don’t work if the personality mixture isn’t right, and newborn bodies don’t work if they don’t get food and warmth. And if Jesus was alive in the same world of necessity and limitation that we are, could it be that the redemption God has worked in our lives happens through, not in spite of all the constraints of necessity?
Let’s face it. If you aren’t made to do something against your will this Christmas, you haven’t really had a holiday at all. Wasn’t it Erma Bombeck who described the family ties that bind, and gag? And did you really buy every last gift on your list as a spontaneous expression of affection for that impossible friend or grumpy coworker? We can imagine a certain relief that would come if we were free of these obligations. But would we really want to live in a world without them?
We now know the rest of the story of Jesus’ life. And we know that the people who were looking for a messiah were looking for someone to free them from things like emperors who tell them what to do and whom to worship, someone to free them from hunger and weakness and to meet their every need. But that’s not the messiah they got. In almost every way the world kept on being the world even as God’s redeeming love was being made incarnate within it.
But the Christian faith was born because people found that God was redeeming their lives anyway and all the while. Redeeming their lives in that same old world of necessity. And we might remember that Jesus would grow up to tell us that it’s not when we each of us gets free of all those distracting and confining relationships that God comes to us. Jesus said it’s when two or three of us gather that he’s in our midst. And even a world of two or three is a lot more complicated than a world of one.
Christ did come to set us free, but not free from one another. Christ did come to set us free, but not free from this world of necessity. The Incarnation is a greater miracle yet. For it teaches us that grace and redemption can come to us even in the parts of life we can’t get away from, even in the world as it is.
Maybe one of the Lesters in your life will be sitting at Christmas dinner this year. A friend, a spouse, a child, a boss. And maybe you’ll be given the grace to say thanks for that strange other person who showed you the world that is instead of distracting you with a world that might be. And for all the bloodied knuckles and bruised egos that can come from life in this world of necessity, God made a world in which we can’t make it through alone.
I’ve never been visited by a band of angels. But if they were to come, I wonder if as good a moment as any would have been as Lester and his understudy stood in front of that homely old truck, its engine swaying precariously from the forklift. It’s an image of joy and fear and hope in a world full of risk and uncertainty. The story was far from over. There were countless reasons why the truck would never run, and the slimmest of possibilities that it would. But by the grin on the teenager’s face, it looks like these two wouldn’t have it any other way.
Might Mary and Joseph understand that look? To see these two trembling parents, in a town away from home to register for a census they didn’t ask to have taken, looking at their beautiful, vulnerable, cold, helpless child, to see these two happy people is to see life in the wonderful unforgiving world that we know. And the good news of Christmas is that this is precisely the world that God loves.
The angels arrive right on cue. But the angels don’t change that world at all.
The angels just sing, “Glory!” They just point us toward the child, and say, “Look at that! God is here!” Amen.