The Empty Cradle
December 29th, 2009
St. David’s United Church
Rev. Dan Chambers
December 24, 2008
Christmas Eve
Luke 2:1-7
The Empty Cradle
And she gave birth to her firstborn son,
and wrapped him in bands of cloth,
and laid him in a manger…
Luke 2:7
Ahhh. The Christmas story. When we hear it year after year, it can become as soothing as a lullaby. The visit from the angel Gabriel; the manger; the visit from the shepherds. There they are, every year, just on time they show up – Mary and Joseph and the darling little baby Jesus wrapped in swaddling clothes, “no crying he makes.” Every year we dust off the Bible, hear the familiar passage, sing about it with “glorias” and “hallelujahs,” joyful and triumphant.
But of course that wasn’t the way it was.
When in Jr. High School, every once in a while we’d watch educational videos with, if you can believe it, Walter Cronkite as a journalist who would time travel and return to a place of historical significance and interview the bystanders and the people
at the center of the scene. At the end of each episode, he’d look directly at you through the camera and close with, “And that’s they way it was except…you were there.”
Well, I suspect if Peter Mansbridge stepped into Walter’s shoes and took us back to the scene at the manger, it would not be a soothing sight. Just think about it: A young girl had just given birth to her first child in a barn, with a bunch of hey for a bed. I don’t know about you, but that’s not where I’d want my wife or daughter giving birth to a child. Then there’s Joseph: even if people in 1st century Palestine didn’t have the advantage of sterilized hospitals and professional medical staff, I can imagine Joseph was none too happy about either the location of his son’s birth or needing to all of a sudden play mid-wife. Where was the manual? How was he supposed to know how to do this?
Not to mention young Mary. I imagine there would have been plenty of tension in that barn, plenty of fear pulsing through the veins of mother and father alike, as well as the usual tidal waves of labour pain that sweep everything with it. I can imagine even one as smooth and professional as Peter Mansbridge unable to completely hide his apprehension as he cleared his throat to close, “And that’s the way it was, except you were there.”
We lose the messy drama of it all when we reduce the birth of Jesus to a lovely crèche in our living room. Every year we carefully unwrap the figurines and, like a good director of a play, we make sure everyone is in their correct position; the baby Jesus, wrapped in a manger, assumes center stage of course. It’s nice. It’s neat. It’s predictable. Everyone stays in their place. The sheep, no baaaing they make…and no mess. But of course, that’s not the way it was. It was a little more complicated then, as Christmas is a little more complicated now.
We can count on the author John Irving to mess things up a bit. In his challenging book, A Prayer of Owen Meany, Irving complicates the typical manger scene. His description of the crèche in the living room of Owen Meany is startling, a bit unnerving, as if the Gospel of Luke met Stephen King or the writers of South Park. This real but weird description of an old crèche in a family home grabs my attention, because, if we think through it, I believe it offers a profound hope.
Irving writes:
‘…on the mantel, there’s a crèche with cheaply painted wooden figures. The cow was three-legged, propped against a rather menacing chicken almost half the cow’s size; a gouge through the flesh toned paint of the Holy Mother’s face had rendered her obviously blind and so ghastly to behold that someone in the family had thoughtfully turned her face away from the Christ Child’s crib. Joseph had lost a hand… One angel’s harp was mangled and from another angel’s O-shaped mouth it was easier to imagine the wail of a mourner than the sweetness of singing. But the creche’s most ominous message was that the little Lord Jesus himself was missing. The crib was empty – that was why the Virgin Mary had turned her mutilated face away; why one angel dashed its harp and another screamed with anguish; why Joseph had lost a hand and the cow a leg. The Christ Child was gone – kidnapped or run away. The very object of worship was absent….’ (p.168).
With a certain glee, John Irving ruffles our warm, cozy image of the manger scene.
The atheists, of course, would love this description. “Yes!” I can hear Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins yelp. “Of course the crib’s empty because there was no miraculous birth because there is no Messiah because there is no God!”
In every atheist crèche, the crib is empty, Mary is turned away, and an angel howls instead of sings.
As I was working on this sermon, my daughter, Colleen, who’s 11, came into the room and asked what I was doing. “Writing the sermon for Christmas Eve,” I replied.
“The empty crib?” she read the title, then asked, suspiciously. “What does that mean?”
“Well,” I began, carefully, “I refer to an image of the manger scene without the baby Jesus; the crib is empty.”
She looked horrified, as if I’d finally lost it.
So I went on to explain what this image meant to me, and she smiled, nodded and said, “That’s right,” turned and bounced out of the room.
I’m not sure whether it should matter or not, but I did feel reassured by my daughter’s affirmation.
Here’s why I’m caught by this image:
I think the crib is empty because that’s not where we find the birth of Christ. If we keep Jesus there, safely tucked away in the manger, then he remains distant, apart from us, separate from our lives. Perhaps John Irving is reminding us, in a quirky kind of way, that we too quickly, too easily objectify Christ as “the one over there,” in his place on the stage, playing his role year after year like a well-rehearsed pageant that we come to watch as spectators sitting in the audience.
The danger is that if we always leave Christ in the manger, we lose the sense of God right here, with us, in us.
Maybe the crib is empty because Jesus is so very present.
Here’s what I mean. About fifteen years ago, my wife lost her father to cancer. But he’s still very much part of our conversation as we share family stories around the table. I’ve mentioned to some of you before that when my daughters were very young, they once asked, “Where is Grandpa Irv?”
Janet answered, very astutely, “Well, when someone dies, you can’t see or touch them anymore. But their love is still with you. Now, your Grandpa Irv is so close to you, you can’t even see him.”
So close, you can’t even see him.
I wonder if the crib is empty in John Irving’s strange crèche as a symbol that the Christ is so close, we can’t even see him. You’ve heard of the empty tomb. Now we have the empty crib.
This Christmas, Jesus has run away. The little child has torn off the bands of cloth and made a mad dash into the world, into each and every heart. The crib is empty because now the Spirit of Christ is so close, we can’t even see him. Thank God for the empty crib!
It reminds us that we carry that light and love in us. The One who was lying in the manger jumped out of the crib and ran into our arms, straight into our heart. And now our job is to carry this Word made flesh, this incarnation of the divine, into the world. We are to bear the light of Christmas into this beautiful and broken world and let free again this wild and untamed Christ.
Giving birth to the light of Christ may not be as easily predictable as the stationary figurines in our crèche. It may be harder to move from spectator to participant, from one who observes to one who lives the birth of Christ in the world. But that, I believe, is the essential gift of Christmas.
That, it seems to me, is what Christmas is all about, in the end.
Amen.
