I'm not big on posting sermons before I give them. But, this one sort of wrote itself yesterday, which means I have time for some feedback before it gets preached next week. I'm not entirely happy with the ending, so there's very good chance it will get reworked. If you have ideas, please let me know!
As an introduction, I often think of Christmas-Easter-other-popular-text sermons more like midrash: a chance to illuminate some small part of the story or let the imagination flow. I'm not always concerned about strict textual adherence or historical accuracy. Yesterday, for example, I read a long article about how it's improbable that Mary and Joseph would have been required to travel the 90 miles to Bethlehem for the census: women wouldn't have gone for that, there's no way the Roman government would have wanted that much travel on the roads, they probably went to a more obscure Bethlehem only 12 miles away, etc. I didn't put that in the story. Sometimes a biblical imagination can overlook those things. I hope.
But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.
Mary had brought with her very few things to Bethlehem. They had left Nazareth, their hometown, in a hurry, trying their best to get to Bethlehem before Mary was too pregnant to travel. They brought only what they could carry with them: some food, a lamp, and warm blankets to sleep on. There was neither time nor space to bring any more.
They started from Nazareth with a group of families traveling for the census, but by the time they reached Bethlehem they were at the tail end of the crowd. Two other pregnant women and a group of elderly couples were the only ones left with them. They bid each other farewell at the gate of the city, each one hoping desperately that they would find safe lodging for the night.
After it was over, after Mary had groaned and cried and muttered a few things about the angel Gabriel showing up to announce the baby but not being anywhere around when the hard part came, after Joseph had washed the child in the animals’ water trough, Mary wrapped her son in one of the blankets they had brought along. Her mother had taught her how to do this: to wrap the child tightly, so that it would feel safe in the open, wide world. “Take it,” said her mother as they left for Bethlehem, pressing the blanket into her hands. “For the child.” Mary watched her son sleeping, swaddled in the cloth. He stirred and fussed as if he hated being cooped up in the manger she had placed him in, so she picked him up and held him until he slept. And she pondered this night in her heart.
In his childhood years, the blanket in which he was wrapped at his birth became the one he slept on and carried with him, the one Mary wrapped him in when he cried. Nothing else would stop his sobbing at times but that old, worn linen blanket, with a hold in the side from being dragged on the ground as he followed his carpenter father into the shop. He held it in his hands when some men from an eastern kingdom showed up at their door with strange and forboding gifts: gold, valuable and precious but of no use to a two-year old; frankincense, used in worship; and myrrh, the gift which made Mary’s heart stop for a moment. Myrrh was used only in burials. She thought a tear came to the eye of the eastern king as he handed it to her boy. Jesus let go of the blanket for just a moment to take the myrrh, but at one whiff of its smell he put it down immediately, grabbed the blanket again, and wandered off to find his father. Mary picked up the myrrh and placed it high on a shelf, hoping it was some sort of mistake. She put her son to bed that night with the smell of it still lingering on the air. And she pondered that night in her heart.
He never did give up the cloth, though it took on different tasks as he grew older. He wrapped it around his waist and, if people thought it was strange, it was often the least strange thing about him.
The cloth had gotten even more worn and dirty by the time he used it to wrap two loaves which fed five thousand people. A young man used it to wipe the mud off his eyes before he washed them in the pool of Siloam as Jesus had instructed him, and wept into it when he realized that he could see after a lifetime of blindness. People tugged on it when Jesus walked through crowds, hoping that a miracle would somehow rub off onto them, and sometimes it did. When he got to the city of Bethany two days after hearing his friend Lazarus was dying, Jesus wept into the cloth himself at the grief of Lazarus’ friends, before he called Lazarus out of the tomb. Mary was there that day. She watched as his two sisters unwrapped the burial cloths off their brother and clapped their hands and cried with joy. She watched her son, his own cloth wrapped around his waist, and she remembered the jar of myrrh, gathering dust on a high shelf in their home. It had been there for thirty years. She watched her son join in the celebration for Lazarus’ rebirth, but something in his face told of more than joy. He looked at Lazarus as if he knew that this resurrection would not last forever. She thought again of the myrrh, and the look in the eyes of the eastern king as he handed it to her. And she pondered that day in her heart.
The night before he died, Jesus took the cloth off his waist a last time. He filled a bowl with water and placed it on the dirt floor in front of his friends. One by one, he removed their shoes and washed them in the water, then dried them with the cloth. Only one objected, though that may have been because the other eleven were too surprised to say anything: “No, Lord,” said Peter, “this is the work of a servant; I should be washing your feet.” “If I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to do the same for one another,” he replied, “for you should do as I have done for you.” When he had finished, he wrapped the cloth around himself again and began to speak. He spoke for a long time, but Peter was not listening very carefully. You also should do as I have done for you: Peter heard the words over and over again in his mind. And Peter pondered that night in his heart.
The next day, when it was all over, Mary watched as the soldiers removed her son’s body from the cross. She watched as they wrapped him crudely in rough linen. She pushed her way through the crowd, so that she could slip something into the shroud. He had dropped the cloth the day before, as he carried the cross bar through the streets of Jerusalem. She remembered the day he used the cloth to carry loaves of bread to feed the hungry. She remembered the man born blind who wept into it and cleaned his face of mud with it. She remembered the day Lazarus unwrapped his own burial cloths and the way her son watched him, as if hoped the same for himself one day. She remembered him holding the cloth when the kings from the east brought their gifts. She had rubbed the myrrh in it that night while she waited for his trial to finish. She remembered how she tucked him tightly into the cloth on the day he was born, the first night he puzzled and bewildered and overjoyed her – the first night, but not the last. She remembered that he could never sleep without it when he was a child. As the soldiers passed by, she tucked the cloth into her son’s shroud. She could still smell the myrrh in the air.
The next morning, she and the other women found the cloth lying in an empty tomb. For the first time, the cloth was there but Jesus was nowhere to be found. Angels like the ones who announced his birth told them not to weep, that he was now the firstborn of the dead, and that he was already ahead of them, waiting. They ran. They ran so fast Mary forgot the cloth entirely, the swaddling cloth, the one that had held her son’s childhood tears and loaves of bread, had comforted the ill and washed feet and gone with him into death. It did not smell like myrrh anymore. The whole tomb smelled like something else, like joy and life and the cleanest air they had ever known, and as they breathed it in they ran to tell anyone they could find that the baby who refused to stay in the manger refused to stay in the tomb as well.
Christmas is not just the baby, but the man who died. Not just the virgin holding her son, but the mother who ran from the empty tomb. Not just the angels who sang to shepherds, but the ones who announced his resurrection. For the child whose birth we sing tonight gave birth himself to an entirely new way of life, a way where the last are first and the hungry are fed and the blind are given sight and the dead are raised. The child born for us, wrapped in swaddling cloths, left the cloth behind in the grave and he has gone ahead of us, and he is waiting. One of these days he will come back, and there will be no stopping the joy that bursts out of every corner of creation. For now, we treasure these things and ponder them in our hearts. Amen.
