An Advent Baby

Bethany and Liz,
If you were here in person, I would just talk to you instead of writing a blog. But you're not here, so I'm processing my thoughts in writing (which is why I had to rope you into writing a blog in the first place!)

I'm trying to write a sermon for the fourth Sunday of Advent, but it's weird because I just had a baby. I can't seem to separate my own experience from how I read the biblical account.

For example, for the last month or so of my pregnancy, basically all I did was sit on the couch. Mary rode a DONKEY. To Bethlehem. And had the baby in a STABLE. On HAY.

When I got pregnant with Amos, I was married, finishing up grad school--basically as stable and normal as possible. Mary got pregnant before she was married, and she lived in a WAY less tolerant society. Even with my highly predictable life, I was terrified to have a baby. I can't imagine how scared Mary must have been. When she said, "I am the Lord's servant. May it be to me as you have said," I wonder how she said it. Was her voice small and quivering? Mine would have been!

If Herod went on a toddler-killing spree now, my sweet, beautiful Amos would be among the victims. I can't help but cry when I read the words in Matthew 2:

"A voice is heard in Ramah,
  weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children
  and refusing to be comforted,
  because they are no more."

All those precious little baby boys. Dead. Gone. No more. All that was left behind were the tears of their mothers, never ending.

What was God thinking, coming as a baby into this world?

One of the first few night's of Eva's life, she decided to try to pull an all-nighter. I was sitting up in bed around midnight, holding her, amazed at how healthy and perfect she was. It was all "Silent Night" in there until I heard a round of gunshots coming from somewhere in the neighborhood to the south of us. While I was holding my brand new baby, some other mother might very well have just lost hers in that same moment. An hour or so later, I heard sirens suddenly ring out from all around us, and I started thinking about women praying for their husbands and sons and daughters to come home from overnight police shifts in dangerous neighborhoods. Suddenly, I felt so small, and my healthy baby girl seemed so vulnerable. How could I possibly expect to keep her safe in such a big dangerous world?

How could the Son of God be born as a tiny baby into this violent and heartless world? A world where lives are suddenly cut short all the time? Where people shoot each other in the middle of the night?

I suddenly can't read about Mary without worrying! What was her health like? Was she able to carry a baby full-term? Would he arrive in good health? And how would she make out after the birth? Would she heal properly or would she have some sort of complication that cut her life short? And then to raise the Son of God in a world of paranoid kings and oppressive foreign governments, not to mention everyday risks like pneumonia and food poisoning.

As I held my baby in my arms, listening to gunshots and sirens, I wondered what Mary heard in the stable in Bethlehem. Nativity scenes never show the world beyond the walls of the stable. Did she hear Roman soldiers patrolling at night? Did she hear drunken fights and domestic violence? Did every sound make her jump as she carefully held the Son of God in her arms wondering what she was supposed to do next?

There is some comfort in all of this.

While I was in labor, I was kneeling on the floor of the hospital bathroom, moaning in agony, when suddenly the verse from Romans popped into my head (yes, I am definitely meant to be a pastor):

"We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time."

In my somewhat hazy brain, I thought, How many people really understand that verse? I mean, like, really understand it. Obviously men don't. (Sorry, guys.) And really, we women have these nice hormones that help us forget a lot of what happens during labor.

But in that moment, I KNEW. All of creation is in majorly intense pain. Groaning. Crying out. Praying for relief. The pains of childbirth are no joke!

And that's right where Jesus showed up.

Right in the middle of all of that. At the end of nine months of increasing discomfort and fear that culminated in the agony of labor and delivery. Into a world where innocent toddlers were murdered by a cruel king. A world where mothers wept and could not be comforted because their children were no more. A risky world. A heartless and violent world.

He walked right into the middle of it. So much so that it killed him. The manger scenes don't show that either. In the manger scenes, Mary and Joseph look so peaceful and angelic. Their hair isn't gray from worry. Their faces aren't lined with the wrinkles of age and hard lives. They don't have bags under their eyes from sleepless nights and long days. They don't have that haunted look from watching their son head towards certain death.

And Jesus is still fresh and squishy. He's wrapped in his swaddling cloths. He's all curled up in the manger. He doesn't yet have the weight of the world's pain and heartbreak weighing him down. Later, he will weep for the death of his friend Lazarus. Later, he will go head to head with the teachers he one time looked up to and learned from. Later, he will be betrayed by a kiss from one of his closest friends. Later, he will pray so fervently that his sweat will be drops of blood. But none of that shows up in the manger scene.

But the story didn't end at the manger.

The other words that have never been far from my mind now through two pregnancies are Jesus' own:

"This is my body, broken for you. This is my blood, shed for you."

Especially during my first pregnancy, I was terrified. There is no easy way to have a baby, even with all of our modern medicine. It's painful, messy, scary, risky. Having a baby means pretty literally allowing your body to be broken for the sake of another person.

In the weeks leading up to the inevitable end of my first pregnancy, I clung to those words. "The body of Christ, broken for you. The blood of Christ, shed for you." I knew that no matter what happened to me, Jesus was there beside me. He had allowed his body to be broken for me and his blood to be shed for me, and even if no one else could feel my fear or my pain, Jesus understood.

The theme of the fourth Sunday of Advent is love.

I'm pretty sure there's something about love in all of this. Something about a God who stepped right into the messiness and riskiness of humanity. Who allowed himself to experience the very worst of human cruelty. Who knew pain and heartbreak, who suffered.

And somehow that love changes everything. It means that when I allow my body to be broken for the sake of someone else, I'm not doing something new; I'm just following the path to the cross. When I see heartache and loss around me, I can remember Rachel's lament and know that sometimes there is no comfort. But, like Jesus, I can choose to be present anyway. I can know that in the midst of pain, I am not alone, but also, creation is still groaning, in agony, praying for relief, for the moment when all pain suddenly ceases because Jesus has been there, and he knows this isn't good enough. That all this pain and violence needs to end once and for all.

So yeah. Those are my thoughts. I'm not quite sure how to preach this. How much can you really talk about labor and childbirth from the pulpit? And yet, it just doesn't seem right to skip over all of that and move right to the sweet, squishy baby part. Because as both of you have so eloquently pointed out, that's not really where most of us live, most of the time.

Did Jesus ever look like this?