[Sermon preached on 25 December 2017, Christmas Day]
Amal is a young man from Syria. He has come to Finland as an asylum seeker. Back in Syria, the authorities are after his life because he has offended the Prophet Muhamad. There is no way he could return and survive. Amal still considers himself a proper Muslim, but he is open-minded. Here in Finland, he has been outright overwhelmed by the love and care and help and compassion that Christians have shown him. Back in Syria, he was taught that Christians are the enemies of Islam, but his experience tells another story. So he decides that he wants to find out more about what Christians think about the Prophet Jesus.
On Christmas Eve 2016, he is invited to attend a Christmas Eve service in a church in downtown Helsinki. There he hears the Christmas gospel, read in a language he barely understands. A woman sitting next to him is aware of his problem and shows him the Bible passage that is being read. Amal digs out his smartphone and looks up the second chapter of Luke in Arabic, his mother tongue.
What he reads there touches him deeply. It comes to him as a great surprise that the Christmas story speaks about his fatherland Syria. A Roman governor, Quirinius, is ruling over the people. It doesn’t take much imagination to figure out what the people have to go through when ruled by a foreign ruler, whose primary interest is wealth, power and political career. Nothing new under the sun! Still today, in Syria it is a tyrant and a handful of foreign powers who decide over the fate of the people, not the people themselves.
When Joseph and Mary enter the story, Amal immediately identifies with them. These two young people are forced to leave their family and loved ones to make the trip to a region that is totally foreign to them. When they arrive to the town where they have been told to go, they don’t find proper accommodation. The census that the Roman emperor Augustus has decreed, has made many people travel to Bethlehem. Probably, the journey also coincides with one of the great festivals of the Jews. It would mean that perhaps 100,000 pilgrims would try to find accommodation near Jerusalem. Bethlehem is only a two-hour walk from the Holy City. Be what may, the youngsters find themselves homeless in Bethlehem when Mary is pregnant and due to give birth any time. Luckily, thanks to the hospitality for which the Middle East is renowned, they find a place to stay. But it is not an ideal place to spend the night. What they are offered is an animal shelter. Amal thinks of the reception center where he has spent his days ever since his arrival in Finland. Jesus, whom the Christians worship as a god, was even worse off than he. It is surprisingly easy for Amal to sympathize with this Jesus.
As he reads on in the Christmas story, the focus shifts to the fields around Bethlehem. There are shepherds there tending their flocks in the middle of the night. These people live in the margin of society. They do the dirty and dangerous work that most people can afford to refuse. Amal thinks of the many asylum seekers and other immigrants from the Middle East and Africa, whose only chance of earning an income is to do the dirty work that Finns refuse to accept. How come that it is exactly these marginalized and often humiliated people to whom the news about the newborn baby is told first? Why not to the owner of the animal shelter where Jesus is born? That would give him the chance to offer this special child a more honorable place to spend the first days and weeks of his life. Amal is getting really confused about what kind of God the Christians worship.
The shepherds are visited by an angel. After a while a large heavenly army joins the scene. When Amal reads these verses, to his mind do not come those blond girls with cute white dresses and with wings on their backs, singing with clear children’s voices: “Glory to God!” Amal sees nothing cute or endearing in the scene outside Bethlehem.
He thinks he recognizes the angel who addresses the shepherds. The Quran speaks about an archangel whose name is Jibrail. Jibrail is the commander of the heavenly army—just like the archangel Michael in the Bible, by the way. Amal does not hear a choir of angels singing. He hears an army of heavenly warriors uttering battle cries—or perhaps cries of victory. He has seen that so many times in Syria—sometimes the Syrian army, at other times the freedom fighters whom Syrian president Bashar al-Assad calls rebels, and sometimes even terrorist fighters from the camp of Daesh—what we call ISIS. Everything seems to communicate that there is a battle in the making. Is God planning a military intervention to deliver his people from the Roman occupation? Amal is confused. But at least one thing he knows: such a battle never materialized in history.
When Amal thinks of this army from heaven ready for battle, he is not surprised that the shepherds are scared to death. In his home town, whenever he spotted a single fighter with a gun, he would run for his life. And here is a whole army in the dark of the night!
The heavenly army comes and goes. After silence and darkness have returned to the fields around Bethlehem, the shepherds must be really perplexed. Perhaps the first thing to ask is: Was this real or was it just a dream? But with so many shepherds remembering the same event, there can be no doubt about it. And so they do the only sensible thing they can think of: “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see for ourselves!”
And then comes the anticlimax of the Christmas story. Focus shifts to the little town of Bethlehem again where the shepherds go to find out what the angel has been telling them. And there they find a helpless young couple with a helpless little babe lying in a feeding trough in an animal shelter. Amal wonders what God would be up to. Was Jesus actually supposed to deliver his people and then just was stopped by the Romans before he could stage an armed revolution?
Amal feels that he needs to get an answer. When he finishes the Christmas story, he reads further through the Gospel of Luke. It is so confusing to read how Jesus lives his life. Amal is deeply touched when he sees Jesus reach out in such a humble way to serve the people around him. Jesus heals the sick. He connects with people whom Jews should never connect to. His love and compassion do not recognize the rules and limits set by his society.
Jesus can be very tough and sharp when he faces his adversaries—the religious status quo, whom he accuses of hypocrisy. Amal thinks of some of the religious leaders in his own hometown who live a double life, but whom nobody dares to confront. Jesus never seems to fear anyone, even though the leaders whose hypocrisy he exposes are potentially dangerous.
But Amal also sees Jesus reach out to people who break the most important rules in society. Tax collectors who cheat on their people and are real traitors and collaborators with the Roman enemies. Prostitutes who by Jewish law—just as by Sharia law—should be stoned to death. But Jesus looks at them differently—not so much as criminals and evildoers, but as victims. Victims of their own greed, perhaps, but first of all simply victims of the system. He invites them to reconnect with God. That is the first step to lasting peace. He tells them that God loves them just as they are.
If Luke is correct, Jesus is full of power—supernatural power. He heals people from various illnesses and diseases, but more than that, he even raises people from the dead.
About halfway the gospel of Luke, things start to look more and more gloomy. Jesus faces ever stronger opposition. The stakes are getting higher and higher. People are after his life. They say that it is better, that one person dies for the whole people, than that because of one person the whole nation is in danger. But even when his life is threatened, and Jesus is arrested—in the middle of the night, like many arrests of dissidents in Syria happen under the cover of darkness—Jesus refuses to use his special powers. He refuses to call upon the heavenly armies that announced his birth to the shepherds some thirty years earlier.
And so, in the end Jesus sacrifices his own life. The word “self-sacrifice” is not in Amal’s vocabulary. Except perhaps for the suicide bombers that blow up themselves and innocent worshippers in mosques during the Friday prayers or innocent housewives and children on the crowded markets and bazaars. But little by little, he understands that—precisely by sacrificing himself for the whole world, even for his enemies, without using violence or hurting others—Jesus overcomes the power of evil and opens the door to world peace. And he calls everybody to follow him and his example.
Jesus is crucified. It is a public performance, and a strong warning to those who might want to oppose the Roman authorities. Amal knows all about crucifixions. He has witnessed the crucifixion of several Christians in his region. What has always stayed with him is the serenity—often even the joy—of those who were forced to undergo one of the most painful and humiliating executions imaginable. Instead, it seems they were grateful and proud that they could share the same humiliation and death that their Lord suffered.
Amal has heard different explanations from the Quran and from important teachers of Islam about the death of the prophet Jesus. But when he reads through the gospel, he can no longer doubt that the Bible story about the death and resurrection of Jesus is true.
When Amal has finished the reading of the Gospel, he is convinced that Jesus is more than a prophet. Jesus is the Son of God, and Amal wants to follow him, whatever the cost.
When I think of Amal’s experience in reading the Christmas story, I sometimes wish I could once again read the story for the first time—without the foreknowledge of what is going to happen next; without the bias created by Sunday school plays, nativity scenes, Christmas carols and paintings of the nativity made by famous painters who have never been to the Middle East. How to get rid of the image of choirs of pretty angels singing in beautiful harmony to the shepherds, while snow was falling down softly from the sky? How to get rid of the image of Jesus lying in a wooden stable and surrounded by oxen and asses, and simple shepherds with their sheep, and three kings with royal gifts? How to get through to the real story again?
Let’s face it: there is nothing romantic about the Christmas story. If we think there is, we have not grasped what really happened at Christmas. The Christmas story is a story of rejection, shame, humiliation, misunderstanding, but also of unimaginable love and ultimate self-sacrifice—God’s love and God’s self-sacrifice.
Amal read the Christmas story for the first time, the way it is actually given to us in the Bible. He recognized some of the characters and events from his own life in Syria and from his life as an asylum seeker in Finland. He identified with some of the characters and lived through the story with them. And what is most important: He came to the right conclusion—the conclusion that changed his life forever. He recognized Jesus for who he really is—not just a prophet, but the Son of God. He submitted his life to Jesus. And he pledged to follow Jesus, even if it could endanger his life as a former Muslim.
Where do you recognize yourself in the story of Christmas? How do the events in and around Bethlehem connect to your life and your experience? And last but not least: What is your response to the story? What does it teach you about following Jesus?
Amen.
