Birth Stories
Sermon by Pr. Craig Mueller on Christmas Eve + December 24, 2024.
Kids: how many of you have this book, “On the Day You Were Born.” It connects the day of your birth with creation. “On the day you were born the round planet Earth turned toward your morning sky, whirling past darkness, spinning night into light.” And this version has places for parents to add photos from the day you were born.
Raise your hand if you know your birthday. Now raise your hand if you know any more about the day of your birth and your own birth story.
My mom often tells me that when I was born during the night, and they sent my dad home to sleep! That was before the time when spouses also were allowed in the birthing room. The other detail I remember is that my mom and dad were going to call me Michael but one of their friends called their son Michael, so they chose Craig for me.
The creation story in Genesis is a birth story and we read it each year at the Easter Vigil. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” And tonight’s gospel sounds similar. “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God.” Jesus is the Word made flesh. And that Word—that God-energy—was from there from the beginning of time.
The birth story of Jesus is perhaps the most famous birth story of all time. We will hear it read and acted out right after this homily.
Pristine manger scenes invite wonder. Mary gave birth to a son, we hear in the story. But consider the backstory, as one author put it. “Mary, the mother of Jesus, is a 14-year-old Middle Eastern girl about to become a political refugee. Shameful to her family and her betrothed. The kind of girl that gets put away quietly. We would ignore her at best. Maybe we would do much worse. It is this despised and oppressed body that becomes pregnant, very full indeed, with God. The logos, the Word, enters the chaos through her. Word made flesh, burrowing and borrowing and plunging into her womb. It was Mary’s flesh offered to Christ’s. Those plurry potent cells reduplicated, feeding off her humble body.1
Our bulletin cover connects the birth story of Jesus with today. It is a new icon, called “Christ in the Rubble.” As Pastor Munther Isaac of the Lutheran church in Bethlehem writes, in Palestine today, the Child is under the rubble. God is with us in our pain and suffering. In solidarity with the oppressed. The child of Bethlehem is our hope.
Some births are difficult. Some pregnancies are grueling or don’t come to fruition. There may be pain and heartache, and sometimes loss. In the famous line from T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Journey of the Magi,” “were we led all that way for Birth or Death?”
Birth is wondrous, but birth is also hard, as one writer describes. The laboring and sweating. Breathing deeply and crying out. Pushing hard while riven to the very core of one’s being with unimaginable bursts of pain. Until slowly the baby’s head appears. And finally the baby’s head pushes through the birth canal, with discharge and bleeding, and hormonal swings. A part of the birth story we don’t often hear.2
Yet even if you have not been a parent, there are painful births. Times when our hopes are dashed. When something we waited for, prayed for, yearned for, doesn’t come to be. Our country and our world know birth pangs as well. We try to wade through the endless news of war and occupation, political unrest, bizarre weather patterns. Are we on the verge of something new? Is something coming to birth we cannot yet see?
Birth stories are about beginnings. What is coming to birth in you this Christmas? As Mark Twain wrote, “the two most important days in your life are the day you were born, and the day you find out why.”
As you recall the day you were born. As you hear the story of the birth of Jesus, remember your other birth story. The story of your baptism. Your new birth as a child of God. Your birth into the church, into community of faith. Your birth into Jesus’ death and the resurrection. The birth story we celebrate every Sunday and festival at this table as we share bread and wine, and Christ comes again to be born in our hearts and in our very flesh.
Now let us hear again the blessed story of the day Jesus was born.
1 Evan Rosa, “Mary Theotokos,” podcast For the Life of the World, introduction, 12.18.21. Yale Center for Life and Culture.
2 Elizabeth Johnson, Truly Our Sister: A Theology of Mary in the Communion of Saints, p. 277.