Praising the Ordinary and the Extraordinary

December 31, 2023 – Luke 2:22-40, Isaiah 61:10-62:3, Psalm 148, Gal 4:4-7

On Christmas Eve, I spoke about “Mystery, Miracles, and the Unexpected.” And while it’s true that all three of those were in abundance at the birth of Jesus, also present were the very mundane things of daily life, including working men dirty from the field, animals, stables, and feeding troughs. We can also only assume that the people in the Christmas story experienced all the normal human feelings, like happiness, hunger, and tiredness, especially for Mary and Joseph as they made their long journey to Bethlehem.

And then Mary gave birth, which we can also assume was marked by the typical pain of human childbirth. God didn’t come as a fully-grown warrior or king. God came as a vulnerable baby, which is very risky business when you think about it. Jesus couldn’t defend himself from any enemies, he couldn’t even feed himself or change his own diaper! He was completely dependent upon his family and community for the most basic needs of life, just like all of us are. What a beautiful interweaving of the ordinary and the extraordinary.

The Ordinary and the Extraordinary

We see that same interweaving of ordinary and extraordinary in our gospel text. After the miraculous birth, after the shepherds and wise men have gone back to their homes and their work, after the angels stopped singing in the sky, Mary and Joseph had to get about the regular business of life, didn’t they? They had to make a home, and they had to feed and dress themselves and Jesus. We know almost nothing about these daily demands of life for them, but Luke does tell us about some of the ritual aspects of their religious life.
The very first thing we’re told in Luke after the shepherds leave is that Jesus was circumcised and named. Then our reading begins with their trip to the Temple in Jerusalem where there were rituals of purification and sacrifice that had to be done. These are all very ordinary things in the lives of Jewish believers at the time.

Rev. Jordan Bishop, rector of Trinity Episcopal Church in Lander, WY, said in a Facebook post that on Christmas Day, “we not only remember that God chose to come into this world as a baby, but that God is continually coming into our world. May this day and days to come be full of the uncovering of God in the midst of our messy and ordinary lives.” We might recall that in the first creation story in the book of Genesis, God proclaims each thing as it is created to be “good” and then even “very good.” This earthy, messy, embodied life is “good.” There is goodness in the ordinary, and it is the ordinary that God loves. This is probably one of the major points of the incarnation of God in Christ – as the gospel of John tells us, “For God so loved the world that he gave the only begotten Son.” We should never hold the ordinary in low regard.

But that isn’t the whole story either. The words spoken in the temple by Simeon and Anna were anything but ordinary. Most infants are not greeted with such testimony! Simeon and Anna were extraordinary people who spoke extraordinary words. We’re told that the Holy Spirit rested on Simeon, and that Anna was a prophet. They recognized something in Jesus that told them that he was the one in whom God would do God’s saving work for Jerusalem and for the world. They knew immediately that there was something extraordinary about this baby Jesus, and when they saw him, they were immediately moved to praise God.

The Seed of Praise within All Things

And it’s not just our gospel text that mentions praise. Our reading from Isaiah begins with praise. “I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my whole being shall exult in my God” And later he writes, “as the earth brings forth its shoots, and as a garden causes what is sown to spring up, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations.” We might notice two things here: first, praise comes through Isaiah’s “whole being” and second, it’s God that causes praise to spring up in us.

What does Isaiah mean that his “whole being” praises or exults in God? I take this to mean his mind, soul, spirit, and body. What this tells us is that our entire being is in relationship with God, in touch with God, and capable of praising God, not just our spirits.

I said in one of our Advent Wednesday services that Christian theologian, Paul Tillich, who was much read in the 1960s by the general public, says that there is an “element of infinity” in humans. This is what our tradition calls the image of God, or imago dei. Tillich writes that “In the human spirit’s essential relation to the divine Spirit, there is no correlation, but, rather, mutual immanence…If God were not also in [humans] so that [humans] could ask for God, God’s speaking to [us] could not be perceived by [us].”] What he means is that there is a part of God implanted within us like a radio receiver, and it is through this receiver that we can even hear God’s word for us.

In a similar way, Father Richard Rohr talks about the longing that is within us. He says that “Longing for God and longing for our True Self are the same longing. And the mystics would say that it is God who is even doing the longing in us and through us (that is, through the divine indwelling, or the Holy Spirit). God implanted a natural affinity and allurement between God’s Self and all God’s creatures.”

This affinity is the cause of our praise. And as the reading from Isaiah goes on to show, our praise isn’t something that we generate! It’s something that is done by God within us. God plants the seed of praise – God’s image and God’s Spirit – within us, and then when we see something praiseworthy, praise naturally springs forth from us, just like water from a spring.

So I think it’s extraordinary that in Psalm 148, we see that it’s not just the human world that is called to praise, but that everything is called to praise God. The angels and the sun, moon, and stars in the heavens all praise God and the things of earth are also called to praise.

The fire, hail, snow, frost, and stormy wind are called to praise, as are the mountains, trees, and the animals. The creeping things, the flying birds, and even the sea monsters are all called to praise! Finally, all people, powerful and not, young and old, are invited to praise the Lord. It’s not just the human world that is called to praise. In fact, the human world is listed last! We might say that praise is a natural feature of the entire world because the presence of God is spread throughout the entire world as well. The world is the first incarnation of God.

The Good News of Incarnation

So, when we think of incarnation, we don’t need to limit God’s presence in the world to the person of Jesus. God has been coming into the world since the world began, and it is God’s presence within the world that sustains the world and its movement of continuous creation. What is unique about Christmas, is that it marks the incarnation of God in this particular human form of Jesus of Nazareth, with this particular role to play of being the Christ, or anointed One, who was sent to transform the world.

One of my favorite teachings from Richard Rohr is the way that he talks about Christ as God’s Plan A. The incarnation of God in Christ is not a Plan B that God had to come up with after God’s first plan for the world failed. No, God always planned to come into the world in the form of Christ. This is supported by our reading in Galatians, where Paul writes that “When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children. And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying ‘Abba! Father!’”

Paul is saying here that the world wasn’t ready for God’s incarnation in human form until the birth of Christ. In other words, there was a developmental process that needed to happen in the world before Christ could come. Up until his coming, we were still “minors, we were enslaved to the elemental spirits of the world.” But now that time had reached a certain fullness, God could come into the world in the human form of Jesus, because we could receive his coming and his message of truth. This convergence of the ordinary and the extraordinary within this moment of time is what God had been planning all along.

In the same Christmas Facebook post, Rev. Bishop also said, “The good news of the incarnation – the good news of Christmas – is this: We don’t have to become something other than ourselves or something other than human, we don’t have to escape this body, or this life, or this place, in order to find God.”

That, to me, is news that is both good and praiseworthy. Amen.