Text — Luke 2:1-14

Every year when Christmas rolls around, I ask myself again: What is Jesus’ birth all about?  What difference is it supposed to make in our lives and how we see the world?  My sermon title, as you see, is “The unforeseen will happen.”  Life isn’t predictable.  Things happen that we never imagine. 

Early in life we figure this out.  This unpredictability can feel like a curse, or it can feel like a blessing.  It can hurt.  It can heal.  It can be painful or joyful. 

One of the most common pressures of the Christmas season is to try to make everything feel not only predictable, but perfect.  People feel this especially in their social life or family life.  We can’t make our family life perfect, so let’s at least pretend it’s perfect just for one day, or part of a day. Let’s have just one meal, one half hour, when nobody yells, cries, or screams, or sulks, or puts anyone down, or feels bored, or bossed around, or picked on.

Let’s make it the way it’s supposed to be. We’re all supposed to be happily partnered up, part of a loving couple with perfect children, who have perfect parents, who all mind their own business and are thrilled to be together.

Now, there may be someone here tonight who can honestly say, “I have that.” If that’s you, you’re a very special person. Not even Jesus had a family like that. The truth is, our lives, our social lives, our family lives, aren’t perfect.  No one’s parents are as understanding and supportive as we’d like them to be.  No one’s kids listen to us and are as appreciative as we’d like them to be. 

All our lives have struggles, breakdowns, emotional wounds, addictions, out of control emotions, affairs, abuse, that have hurt us and that we’re not exactly proud of.  These have touched all of us in one way or another, and they’re all represented in the Christmas story by the barren stable: the poor, cold, empty, unsanitary, unlikely place where nothing good or hopeful could ever happen.  It’s no place for a child to be born.  

Taking this symbolism farther, this stable is located in a larger setting, the empire of Caesar Augustus whose whims and policies like the tax census push poor people around and make their lives even more difficult.

Sitting here on Christmas Eve we look pretty happy and healthy.  At least we’re not arguing and criticizing each other right now.  People often tell me that’s the great thing about going to church on Christmas Eve.  It gets you out of the house which, after being invaded by relatives, can start to feel a little crowded and pressurized at this time of year. Sometimes it’s easier to be with 100 strangers than with half a dozen blood relatives.

Jesus was laid in a feeding trough because the inn was too crowded.  There was too much going on there, not all of it pleasant, I’m sure.  Still, I suspect that Mary and Joseph weren’t proud of having to spend the night in a barn.  Today, they would be under investigation for being unfit parents. This is the darker side of life’s unpredictability. 

But there’s also hope that comes with this unpredictability. And this is represented by the angels who visit the shepherds. It’s represented by the fact that while Mary and Joseph may have been ashamed to sleep in a barn, their child was not only born but he changed the world.

God is working some purpose out. We can’t see where it’s going.  We can’t always see what the purpose is. We never see fully what the purpose is. It’s beyond us.  It’s beyond our lifetimes. This is good to remember when we wonder if there is a purpose.

We never know how our lives affect other people’s lives.  We never really know what we add to the long story of creation that will follow our short life spans. We never see the whole story that we’re all a part of. But there is a longer story.  And sometimes we get a glimpse of its beauty. 

A couple summers ago, I was pulling into the parking garage of Hartford Hospital. When you pull into this garage, you drive in 100 feet or so, make a left turn, drive up a ramp another 100 feet and there is one of those machines with a button you push; the machine spits out a ticket, the gate opens, and let’s you in so you can drive around in upward spiraling circles, hoping to find a vacant space. 

Just after I pulled in, the gate got stuck in the down position.  No one could move.  There might have been room at the inn, but no one could get in the door.   Cars kept pulling in behind me.  They backed up.  This was late afternoon; the shift was changing; a lot of people were coming and going — employees, visitors, and so on.

In front of me and behind me, drivers were showing their frustration by leaning out their windows, waving their hands.  Soon they were honking their horns and expressing their feelings in other ways they apparently felt would improve the affliction we were faced with. 

I was close enough to the front of this line to see what the problem was, so my way of dealing with it was to get out of my car and walk down to the ticket attendant to explain what the problem was.  She knew what the problem was; help was on the way.

So here were all these cars stopped, engines running, spewing exhaust into this enclosed space.  You could feel the frustration building in that tunnel.  No one’s life depended on getting that gate up in the next minute, or five minutes, or half hour, or ever, but this wasn’t a place full of people happy to have a few moments of relaxation.

I was almost back to my car when an Asian woman in the car ahead of me saw me coming, opened her car door, got out and came to me with a desperate look on her face, holding out her phone, and repeating what may have been the only English word she knew: “Please please please ” as if her life did depend on letting whoever was on the other end of the connection know what was going on.  

I got the message.  I don’t know if she had a medical appointment, or a job interview, or her child was in the hospital, or what was going on.

I took the phone and I explained to the person on the other end I was with a woman who was very worried about being late for something, but we were stuck in the garage, and so on.

The person on the other end apparently knew who I was with. I handed the phone back to the woman, said “It’s okay” and she looked at me as if I had just saved her life. In a few minutes, the gate was opened, and we all went on our ways.

It’s not an extraordinary story.  It’s not a very Christmas-y story in one sense, but it’s one of those fleeting glimpses of how Christ is born. 

Something went wrong in the world.  It’s not a perfect world, after all.  But I felt blessed by this chance to help another person just get through a couple of difficult moments.

She would have survived without me.  I wasn’t a hero or even a good Samaritan. What I did cost me nothing.  I just happened to be there, and I smiled for the rest of the day because of that little human interaction.

Life gives us many opportunities to help someone get through a difficult moment. We don’t have to make the world a perfect place, which is good because we can’t make it a perfect place.

Sometimes in life the gate will be temporarily stuck shut.  Sometimes people boil over.  Sometime people worry that all is lost. Sometimes it feels as if God is against us. 

But life, the totality of life, isn’t just about us.  There’s more going on.  We don’t have to be the stars of the show.  We’re blessed just to have a minor part. 

Christmas is about seeing that there is a longer story, filled with many little miracles than run through it. Our job is to embrace that story, to look for a glimpse of its miraculous quality wherever we can, and to trust that God has given us a very small, but important and beautiful part to play.