Christmas Jubilee (Christmas Eve 2014)

“Christmas Jubilee”

Luke 2:1-20

Christmas Eve, 2014

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

          It’s not just a familiar story. It’s a great story. But it’s a bit of a mess, too. For example, while scholars are not of one mind with regard to the precise details, they do agree – mostly – that Luke’s presentation of the historical context does not hold up to tests of accuracy. The records compiled by Josephus and other first-century historians do not support Luke’s particular confluence of imperial and local leaders around the time of Jesus’ birth. And yes, the Romans apparently had a fondness for census-taking, but we have no evidence to corroborate Luke’s account of a census requiring all everyone to return to their ancestral homes.¹

          We can let such things bother us. Or, we can remember that Luke, like all gospel-writers, is telling a story. And his story is situated within a much deeper and wider Story. Luke understands that this larger Story is, has been, and will always be populated with real people in real social and political contexts. He also understands that the Story and all of its surrounding reality exist because of the gracious and creative initiative of God.

          The Story is both eternal and unfolding. Hardly bound to 30-some years around the time that the Julian calendar began, God’s Grand Narrative is layered, deeply and all at once, throughout past, present, and future. Each of the four gospels, then, is more complex than one man’s research and recording of another man’s life. The gospel accounts are themselves creative acts of the Story and the Storyteller. So it makes sense to say that the account of Jesus’ nativity finds Luke. And when Luke finds his place within it, the Story tells itself through Luke’s openness to it, and his passion for it.

          Because of all this, Luke takes far more interest in the saturating and timeless truth of the Story than in historical precision. Now, Luke does not fabricate characters. He simply makes it clear that these folks come and go. They succeed and fail, live and die. But The Story is a different matter. The Story continues. And this Story says stunning things like: “And you shall hallow the fiftieth year and you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: you shall return, every one of you, to your property and every one of you to your family.” (Leviticus 25:10)

          I think that in Luke’s telling of the birth of Jesus, we hear God announce not just a year of jubilee as described in Leviticus. We hear God announce Universal Jubilee. Whether Luke intends it or not, he lets us know that Jesus is a kind of fulcrum in history. With the birth of Jesus, the time has come, the Kairos has come for everyone and everything to return to its “property” and its “family.” Jubilee is the “year of the Lord’s favor” to which Isaiah refers. And only in Luke’s story of Jesus do we hear those very words on Jesus’ lips. He speaks them when he reads them from the scroll of Isaiah, and he does this when he himself comes home to his family in Nazareth.

          Theologically speaking, to come home to ancestral lands is to return to an eternal identity, a foundational purpose. And this metaphorical return re-orients us toward a future. Jeremiah calls it a “future with hope.” (Jer. 29:11) When we come home to the Story, the Story comes home within us.

          Christmas Eve is one of my favorite days of the year. For my family, it remains a time when we all return home – or try to. We have treasured traditions that include a hike or some other outing, candlelight worship, and a fantastic meal that Marianne engineers but to which we all contribute. (My particular culinary skill set usually lands me at the sink with piles of dirty dishes.) And that meal always ends with homemade peppermint ice cream. For me, Christmas Eve has become a time of uncanny wholeness and belonging. The mystic at-home-ness of Christmas Eve reminds me of the lines spoken by Marcellus in Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet. Out on the cold parapet Hamlet’s friend says:

Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes

Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated,

The bird of dawning singeth all night long.

And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad.

The nights are wholesome. Then no planets strike,

No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,

So hallowed and so gracious is that time.²

          Now, Jonesborough is not “home” for us in the same way that some other town in Georgia or North Carolina might be. But that isn’t the point of home for Luke. When Joseph goes home, he doesn’t necessarily return to the town in which he was born and raised. He goes to Bethlehem, and he goes to Bethlehem because, according to the way Luke storys The Story, Joseph traces his roots back to David.

          Home, then, has less to do with some physical location than it does with our truest identity. Home has to do with belonging at the most ancient depths and the most unrealized heights of who we are in God. To return home for God’s Jubilee is to return to the eternal Self from which, finally, none of us can be completely alienated.

          John understands that kind of home, too. His version of the nativity of Jesus us very brief and dense, but I find it theologically consistent with Luke’s account. John writes: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him…[And] what has come into being in him [is] life… (John 1:1-3a, 3c-4a)

          The fundamental energy of life itself is home for the one whose birth into human existence we celebrate tonight. The lives we live are expressions of that same life. Being itself, Life itself is home for us – regardless of where we lay down our sweet heads. To me, this means that home, real and everlasting home, can always – potentially anyway – be found in the presence of anyone, or even anything, created by God.

          In many churches, the words spoken over the Lord’s Supper build a fence around Christ’s table. I used to speak those exclusive words, as well. I can no longer do that. I can no longer demand that any of you, no matter who you are, say or do something to secure a place at the table from which you have, ultimately, come. This is the table of Christmas Jubilee. Yes, this is the table of remembrance and redemption. And it is also the table, and the stable, of holy reunion.

          So all of you, come to this table. Welcome home.

          And Merry Christmas.

¹Lewis Donelson, Feasting on the Word, John Knox Press, 2008, pp,117-118.

²William Shakespeare, “Hamlet,” Act 1, Scene 1, lines 157-163. (Citation from: http://nfs.sparknotes.com/hamlet/page_16.html)