At the beginning of Advent, I asked folks who were here on the Sunday after Thanksgiving to write down the places in their lives and the world that are in need of redemption and healing. I asked us to think about situations or realities in us and around us that we feel powerless to change. People named everything from hard relationships, health challenges, to homelessness and war.

The season of Advent starts in these dark places, which just doesn’t jive at all with the Christmas explosions of all the shopping, parties, and Jingle Bell Rock on repeat. Advent is the one time a year when what happens in church can feel wildly out of step with what our culture is doing. Our culture takes off with all the holly-jolly stuff, and the church gets real about the darkness of our world in anticipation of the birth of the Light of the World, Jesus Christ.

After all, it is in these dark places that we need the light of Christ the most.

The joy of Christmas is the celebration and affirmation that our Holy God is here, abiding with us in every nook and cranny of our beautiful and complicated world, especially all the dark corners.

The joy of Christmas is that “the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness – on them light has shined,” as the prophet Isaiah tells us.

Celebrating the coming of Christ can be confusing though, since Jesus was born 2025 years ago. Makes you wonder what he’s been up to, if there’s still all this time if we still have all these dark places we can name. What does it mean to say that God is with us and that is indeed a great light?

Perhaps our gospel story has some insights for us. Today’s text sets the stage for Jesus’ birth in the darkness of the Roman Empire among the people oppressed by this empire. Ceasar Augustus and Quirinius are the Roman puppet masters at the beginning of the story, requiring a census in the winter to maximize taxation for the empire. The beginning of our story is all about Roman power and control.

And then in the text, we hear about the power of God. Now, in Roman propaganda of the time, the birthday of Caesar Augustus was declared to be the “beginning of the good news.”[i] Gospel is good news in ancient Greek. So, Caesar was the gospel, the good news according to Rome. He was also referred to as the savior of the world. So, the author of our gospel is making a big point when he says the birth of Jesus is good news and the baby is the Messiah. The political head of the Roman empire can call himself the gospel and the messiah all he wants, but that is not God’s story. That is not God’s good news. Jesus’ birth is.

Unlike Caesar, God’s story unfolds in quiet ways, in hidden ways. The lowly shepherds alone in their fields are the first to hear in this gospel, instead of powerful people in powerful places. And the sign was a baby wrapped like any other baby born to lowly parents in a lowly place.  

This is God’s messiah and his good news. Simple, humble, and vulnerable.

In the gospel, we get two competing stories of power and what real power is. Rome’s goal as an empire was to dominate all the world and bring about “peace” through domination. We humans still do this in big ways in the world. We have nations and multinational corporations and tech giants competing about who gets to set the parameters of what our lives are like and what “peace” is for the rest of us.

We also do this in small ways in our own lives. We have any number of ways to feel in control of life and construct what feels like safety and winning. There’s always some goal, some ideal that’s out there for us to chase that we think will make our worlds OK. We all tend to believe that if we get our worlds dialed in just right, get our worlds and our personal empires just right, then our lives will be OK. Our places of despair we named a month ago might just be redeemed and set right.

That’s how we tend to think, but quite possibly that’s not how God thinks.  

Christ was not born in a place of power or with any worldly authority. Neither did Christ come as one who could do anything other than be a baby and newborns don’t do a lot. And yet this child, this seemingly ordinary child born to ordinary people, is the good news and the savior of the world, as opposed to Ceasar Augustus.

This story tells us a lot about what God is like as well as humans. Almost all humans really love control and stability in one form or another. Perhaps this is why we tend to think God should be more into control, as well. For example, we may wonder why there are places of despair for us to name and write down, if God is already with us. How can God be so powerful and also not fix the pain that is here?

This is obviously an age-old question that I’m unlikely to solve for everyone tonight, but here is a thought to ponder.

I read an article this week called, “The Truth Physicists Can No Longer Deny” by Adam Frank.[ii] He talked about a shift in the field of physics from being purely reductionist in its thinking to acknowledging maybe something else is also at play. Reductionism means that everything in our world can be described in terms of simpler, more fundamental phenomena, like atoms and quarks, etc. This kind of science has been very useful to us, but less so for the physics of life.

Biophysicists are now recognizing that life has a mysterious and unpredictable characteristic they call “emergence,” meaning life emerges in directions that can’t be predicted based on the building blocks of that life. I think we all know this, that life is unpredictable and a bit wild. So it is interesting biophysicists are discovering that emergence has to be what it is (unpredictable) for life to be life. Life may just require freedom to be life. Which also means life inherently comes with opportunities for both happy accidents and not-so-happy mistakes.

So, we seem to have two competing ideas of how the world is. On one hand, we have this notion of reductionism and the belief that if we just knew enough, the world would make sense. Doesn’t this sound like an approach to physics that would be very satisfying to our control-loving hearts? However, this approach breaks down when we talk about the physics of life. Then we have this “mysterious” quality of emergence. And in the gospel, we have two competing ideas of what life should be like and perhaps what God is like; one model for God and life is Caesar Augustus and the other is Jesus, born humble and vulnerable.

It seems to me these tensions between how we understand our world and how we understand God are very analogous to one another.

God’s power in our lives tends to be a lot more like the unpredictable and mysterious emergent quality of life, noted by these biophysicists. God is with us, in this world, closer than our breath. God is in this holy life force emerging in us, through us, and around us.

That is the hope and the promise that Christ is born and emerges in us, in our world, and particularly in our places of despair. The joy is that Christ is ever being born into the world like the emergent flow of the goodness of life bringing wholeness and redemption to a world of radical freedom and our places of darkness.

The empires of the world, from the big ones to our small ones, will insist that their version of control and dominion are essential for peace and harmony. However, the good news of Jesus’ birth tells us a very different story; a story of the goodness of life that is forever emerging to heal our mistakes and redeem our sins.

Our altar cloth was woven for Christmas by Julie and Nancy from ribbon and scraps of cloth as a expression of the human-Divine relationship. The cross is made up of pieces of gold and silver paper on which we wrote the places of despair we named. These are all realities we have given to Christ in prayer. Christ who is, today and every day, born into the world and with every moment of emergence is making our places of despair new.

The promise of Christmas is that we are never alone or powerless in the darkness. We are never without Christ’s holy and good emergence, always remaking the world in us and for us in his glorious image. This is the hope of Christmas today and every day.

AMEN

[i] https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/christmas-eve-nativity-of-our-lord/commentary-on-luke-21-14-15-20-28

[ii] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/the-truth-physics-can-no-longer-ignore/ar-AA1SnSgH