Sermon Illustrations on the Nativity
Background
Embracing the Call
So what did it mean for Joseph and Mary to accept the Word of the Lord, to say, “We embrace the call to receive this child. We will accept whatever comes with it”? What did it take for them to literally have “God with us” in their midst (Matthew 1:23)? What does it take to be with him? This text’s answer is courage. And a willingness to do his will, no matter what.
When the angel said to Joseph, “Marry her,” he was saying, “If Jesus comes into your life, you are going to be rejected. You will have to kiss your stellar reputation good-bye.” And he married her. Surely some of Joseph’s friends said, “Why in the world did you marry her? Either you did that or she was unfaithful to you.” Can you imagine Joseph trying to tell them the truth? “Oh, I can explain. She is pregnant through the Holy Spirit. We learned all about it from the angels.” The truth wasn’t something his friends would understand, and therefore he knew they would always think ill of him.
The Master of the Universe Born a Baby
The promised Messiah, whose voice sounds like rushing waters, who holds the key to death and Hades, also grew in secret in Mary’s womb. He kicked and elbowed as all babies do, and came at the appointed time, though I’m sure it didn’t seem right to Mary and Joseph. Jesus welcomed small—he welcomed limits—as the pathway to love. I imagine Mary breathed through the contractions, giving herself to the process of her own opening body, with the same acceptance that she had told the angel: “May it be to me as you say.”
May it be as you say. These are not the words of inaction or self-obliteration; they are words of acceptance; they are vows. They are words that create a place. So, Mary bore down, grabbing on to Joseph, wondering, even as she submitted herself to wave after wave of contraction: Is this how the Son of God comes? Here, now, like this?
The master of the universe submitted to become multiplying cells, submitted to the slow process of growth in a human womb. Before that, he orchestrated and waited, through generation upon generation of prophecy, babies born, and his people falling away. Finally he was born in the city of King David; he had the vernix scrubbed off him and his umbilical cord cut, and the air of the earth filled his lungs. All this shows us how Love flourishes by limits. He cried a cry to let everyone know he had arrived: I’m here. Finally. The rescue all humanity has been waiting for.
Taken from A Spacious Life: Trading Hustle and Hurry for the Goodness of Limits by Ashley Hales Copyright (c) 2021 by Ashley Hales. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
The Origin of the “J Shaped” Candy Cane
Legend has it that the choirmaster of Cologne Cathedral was the one who first bent straight white candy canes into their familiar inverted “J” shape. It wasn’t to represent the name Jesus, as is often thought, but to represent the crooks of the shepherds to whom the angel announced the first Nativity. August Imgard, a German immigrant, brought the tradition to Ohio. He is generally credited with being the first person in America to decorate a Christmas tree with candy canes.
Stories
The Christmas Gift
A preaching professor at Harvard University tells the story of the year his 5-year-old son was working on an art project in his kindergarten class. It was made of plaster, resembled nothing in particular, but with some paint, sparkle and time in a kiln, it was ready to be wrapped as a gift. He wrapped it himself, and was beside himself with excitement. It would be a gift for his father, one three months in the making.
Early in December, when the child could hardly contain the secret, the last day of school finally came. All the parents arrived for the big Christmas play, and when the students left for home, they were finally allowed to take their ceramic presents home. The professor’s son secured his gift, ran toward his parents, tripped, and fell to the floor. The gift went airborne, and when it landed on the cafeteria floor, the shattering sound stopped all conversations. It was perfectly quiet for a moment, as all involved considered the magnitude of the loss. For a 5-year-old, there had never been a more expensive gift. He crumpled down on the floor next to his broken gift and just started crying.
Both parents rushed to their son, but the father was uncomfortable with the moment. People were watching. His son was crying. He patted the boy on the head and said, “Son, it’s OK – it doesn’t matter.” His wife glared at the great professor. “Oh yes, it matters,” she said to both of her men, “Oh yes, it does matter.” She cradled her son in her arms, rocked him back and forth, and cried with him.
In a few minutes, the crying ceased. “Now,” said the mother, “let’s go home and see what can be made with what’s left.” And so with mother’s magic and a glue gun, they put together from the broken pieces a multi-colored butterfly. Amazingly, the artwork after the tragedy was actually much more beautiful than what it had been in a pre-broken state.
At Christmas, the gift was finally given, and as long as he taught at Harvard, the professor kept the butterfly on his desk. It was a constant reminder that grief is real, and that loss hurts. It was also a reminder that from great loss, great beauty can eventually emerge.
Gosh, Some Angels
My ten-year-old son Jim had to write a play for Christmas for his Sunday School class. He made it a dialogue between two animals at Bethlehem. It goes like this:
Donkey: It sure is cold, is it not?
Lamb: It sure is.
Donkey: Do you know what year it is?
Lamb: I think it is the year 1.
Donkey: Did you hear that Caesar Augustus sent out an order that everyone in the country should be taxed?
Lamb: That means that the people will be coming back, does it not?
Donkey: Right
Lamb: Here comes somebody now.
Donkey: Hey, there’s something in the sky.
Lamb: Is that not a star?
Donkey: Yes, there is something right by it. There are two of them.
Lamb: Who is that over the hills?
Donkey: It looks like some people coming to get their taxes in the books.
Lamb: But the inns are all full. Maybe they will come here, huh?
Donkey: Here they come.
Lamb: Be nice to them, huh?
Donkey: She looks like she is going to have a baby!
Lamb: Hey, look over the hills. It looks like some kings.
Donkey: She’s having a baby–look, some angels.
Lamb: Gosh, some angels.
Donkey: The shepherds see the angels.
He goes on…I don’t know how you say in Aramaic, “Gosh, some angels,” but I assume that the first shepherds said at least that.
Walter Breuggemann, The Collected Sermons of Walter Brueggemann, Westminster John Knox Press, 2011.
Jealous Juno
In the ancient world, a place where the veil between the earthly and spiritual was easily pierced, rumors and gossip about great leaders being born of the gods, especially amongst royals, was somewhat common.
Alexander the Great of Macedonia, for instance, was often claimed to be the son of Jupiter, rather than the son of King Phillip. Alexander’s mother Olympias, who was often not on the best of terms with her royal husband, preferred to leave the matter open. Eventually, Alexander’s hubris led to him embracing these rumors of his divine origins. When word came to Olympias, she was said to respond, “Please–I don’t want to get into any trouble with Juno.”
Stuart Strachan Jr.
Noticing Where You Find Yourself
One Christmas Eve in Vermont when my children were small, we did the things you do when your children are small on Christmas Eve. We stuffed and hung their stockings. We put out a draught of cider and a cookie on the mantelpiece for Santa Claus—who would be tired by the time he got there through all that snow—and we put them to bed and then went upstairs and got the presents out of the closet off the guest room, and we dragged them down and put them under the Christmas tree.
…we were just about to tumble exhausted into bed when I remembered that our neighbor just a short distance down the hill had gone off to Florida, I think, for a couple of weeks and had asked me if I would feed his sheep while he was gone. Late as it was, I knew I had to do it.
So my brother and I put on our boots and our coats, and we trudged down the hill through a lot of snow to the barn where we each picked up a couple of bales of hay and carried them out to the sheep shed in the back and pulled the string on the 40-watt bulb, and the sheep came bumbling around the way sheep do, and we split the strings of the bales and shook the dust out and put them in the rack.
And there was the smell of the hay and the bumbling of the sheep and the dim light and the snow falling outside and it was Christmas Eve, and only then did I realize where I was. Being a minister trained me to notice things, but it was only then that I noticed the manger, though I might have not noticed it at all. And it seems to me the world is a manger, the whole bloody mess of it, where God is being born again and again and again and again and again and again. You’ve got your mind on so many other things. You are so busy with this and that, you don’t see it. You don’t notice it.
Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life, Zondervan, 2017.
Analogies
The Great Exchange
The incarnation has often been described as “The Great Exchange,” whereupon God took on human form so that we might participate in God’s divine life (through the Holy Spirit). In a sermon on the nativity by John Chrysostom, this is how de describes the ineffable beauty of the incarnation:
The Ancient of Days has become an infant. He who sits upon the sublime and heavenly throne now lies in a manger. And he who cannot be touched, who is without complexity, incorporeal, now lies subject to human hands. He who has broken the bonds of sinners is now bound by an infant’s bands. But he has decreed that the ignominy shall become honor, infamy be clothed with glory, and abject humiliation the measure of his goodness. For this he assumed my body, that I may become capable of his word; taking my flesh, he gives me his spirit; and so he bestowing and I receiving, he prepares for me the treasure of life.
John Chrysostom, “The Joys of Christmas”, Quoted in Vassilios Papavassiliou, Meditations for Advent; Preparing for Christ’s Birth.
Managing the Big Battalions of Life
A century ago, men were following with bated breath the march of Napoleon and waiting feverishly for news of the war. And all the while in their own homes, babies were being born. But who could think about babies? Everybody was thinking about battles. In one year, there stole into a world a host of heroes. Gladstone was born in Liverpool, England, and Tennyson at Somersby. Oliver Wendell Holmes was born in Massachusetts.
The very same day of that same year, Charles Darwin made his debut at Shrewsbury. Abraham Lincoln drew his first breath in Old Kentucky, and music was enriched by the birth of Felix Mendelssohn in Hamburg. But nobody thought about babies. Everybody was thinking about battles.
Yet, which of the battles of 1809 mattered more than the babies that were born in 1809? We fancy that God can only manage His world through the big battalions of life, when all the while He is doing it through the beautiful babies that are being born into the world. When a wrong wants righting, or a truth wants preaching, or a continent wants opening, God sends a baby into the world to do it. And where do you find God on Christmas? In a manger. A baby was born at the heart of the Roman Empire, that when the Roman Empire would crumble and fall, that baby, who would become a man,
Frank W Boreham, Mountains in the Midst, 1909.
Humor
Gosh, Some Angels
My ten-year-old son Jim had to write a play for Christmas for his Sunday School class. He made it a dialogue between two animals at Bethlehem. It goes like this:
Donkey: It sure is cold, is it not?
Lamb: It sure is.
Donkey: Do you know what year it is?
Lamb: I think it is the year 1.
Donkey: Did you hear that Caesar Augustus sent out an order that everyone in the country should be taxed?
Lamb: That means that the people will be coming back, does it not?
Donkey: Right
Lamb: Here comes somebody now.
Donkey: Hey, there’s something in the sky.
Lamb: Is that not a star?
Donkey: Yes, there is something right by it. There are two of them.
Lamb: Who is that over the hills?
Donkey: It looks like some people coming to get their taxes in the books.
Lamb: But the inns are all full. Maybe they will come here, huh?
Donkey: Here they come.
Lamb: Be nice to them, huh?
Donkey: She looks like she is going to have a baby!
Lamb: Hey, look over the hills. It looks like some kings.
Donkey: She’s having a baby–look, some angels.
Lamb: Gosh, some angels.
Donkey: The shepherds see the angels.
He goes on…I don’t know how you say in Aramaic, “Gosh, some angels,” but I assume that the first shepherds said at least that.
Walter Breuggemann, The Collected Sermons of Walter Brueggemann, Westminster John Knox Press, 2011.
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