Beneath Life's Crushing Load

December 24, 2020

Hope Lutheran Church

Rev. Mary Erickson

Luke 2:8-20

Beneath Life’s Crushing Load

Friends, may grace and peace be yours in abundance in the knowledge of God and Christ Jesus our Lord.

I extend a welcome to all of you who are worshipping with us this Christmas Eve. It’s an unusual Christmas for a very unusual year. Normally we would gather in our beautifully decorated sanctuary. We’d greet friends who have come home from faraway places. We would nestle in next to one another, in no way socially distanced! The sanctuary would warm up from our collective body heat. But not so this year.

And this year, Christmas in our homes may be marked by an empty seat at the dinner table. Perhaps you’ve experienced a death during the past year. Or you’re self isolating from an exposure to COVID-19. Maybe the empty chair would have been filled with a distant clan member who lives far away and isn’t travelling this year.

It’s an unusual year, indeed. There’s a somberness, a weariness to our Christmas celebration this year. After nine months of pandemic measures we’ve all grown more than a bit weary:

• weary of the isolation,

• tired from masks and constant hand washing

• haggard from unemployment

• eroded from lack of human touch and warm hugs

• health care workers are weary with filled hospital beds and caring for extremely sick patients

• teachers and students are worn out from Zoom calls

• small business owners are crushed by dramatic drops in customers

No doubt, we’re weary! We’re ready to hear the angels sing.

This year, the words from the hymn by Edmund Sears, “It Came upon a Midnight Clear,” have been ringing through my head. Verse two in particular: "And you beneath life’s crushing load, whose forms are bending low, who toil along the climbing way with painful steps and slow.”

This year, we’ve definitely been crushed under our load. After nine months of pandemic with still more to come, our forms are bending low! And something about approaching Christmas in this manner has opened us up to hearing the season’s gospel proclamation with a heightened poignancy. We hear the story of Jesus’ birth with new ears.

That first Christmas came to persons whose forms definitely were bending low. Israel was already crushed under the weight of Rome’s heavy hand. And then the Roman Empire flexed its muscles. They decreed that all the world should be enrolled. Joseph and his very pregnant bride had to make a 90-mile journey on foot to be counted in Bethlehem. They weren’t the only ones. By the time they arrived, Bethlehem was packed to the gills. There was no place for them to stay. At last, someone told Joseph they could bed down in their stable.

And that’s when Mary’s contractions began. Far from home, in a dirty barn, that’s where she gave birth. Necessity is the mother of invention, and that feeding trough looked like the perfect cradle for their young son.

And meanwhile, in the hills outside of Bethlehem, some local shepherds were watching their sheep. They were the working poor of their day. Fully employed but grossly underpaid. Scorned and looked down upon by all. But God had something in mind for them. They would hear the harps of gold. They would witness the angels singing. To them, the poorest of the poor, the heavens ruptured open and the glory of heaven shone around them. A whole host of heavenly angels broke into song. They sang to these lowly shepherds! It was a song of peace they sang. “Peace on earth,” the angels proclaimed. “Peace on earth.”

The angels told them that the Messiah had just been born in Bethlehem. If they travel there, they’ll find him in a stable, lying in a manger, of all places.

That first Christmas came to those bent beneath life’s crushing load. It didn’t come to the privileged. It didn’t present itself in splendor and luxury. No, it came to Mary’s form bending low. It appeared to shepherds toiling along the climbing way.

God’s kingdom entered our world in the form of a tiny baby. He was born to weary parents in an alley stable. The kingdom of God came in vulnerability. It didn’t come in lofty transcendence. It didn’t demand that we ascend, that we lift up to meet heaven’s perfection. No, divine love came down at Christmas. The Son of God entered our weary, worn and human realm to bring salvation to us.

Christ was born in vulnerability. And he would die vulnerably, too. This very susceptible, very human Messiah would be delivered to a cross. And it was only in this complete exposure, only through living and dying thoroughly vulnerable, that he could overcome all things.