The Nativity of our Lord
Christmas Day
She Laid Him in a Manger
Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior
Jesus Christ! Amen. In today’s Gospel, the blessed Virgin Mary laid her Son
Jesus in a manger. The manger allowed the shepherds to know that their Christ
was near, according to the angel’s Word to them: “You will find a baby wrapped
in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.”
Dear Christian friends:
Little children sometimes wish that every day could be Christmas, thus making
their parents feel even more exhausted. Popular songs drum into our heads that,
even if Christmas presents might not be feasible for every day, we should at
least commit each new year to the ideals of peace and love, happiness and
co-existence. Earth, Wind and Fire sing it well: “Every day is like Christmas
day when you’re with me.”
We humans have always cherished the idea of a perfect society—or at least, an
ideal life. We have been operating this way ever since our sin separated us
from the perfect world God had created in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3). This
is something the famous Communist Manifesto might have in common with each of
our retirement dreams: we all hope for a future that is somehow better than the
present. The problem is that we have no way of calculating all that we lost,
and therefore no clue how to rebuild it.
Martin Luther pointed to today’s Gospel as the way in which every day could
indeed be Christmas Day. Luther did this, not by focusing upon the giddiness
felt by the shepherds, or by Mary treasuring things in her heart, but by fixing
our attention upon these Words: “Mary gave birth to her firstborn Son and
wrapped Him in swaddling clothes and laid Him in a manger.” Then Luther used
the manger as an analogy for God’s Scriptures. The Child that the shepherds
looked upon in the manger is the same Child you look upon in the Scriptures.
“Here you will find the swaddling clothes and the manger in which Christ lies”
(AE 35, 236).
What does it mean for us, that the Scriptures are the manger that holds our
Christ for us? It means that every day actually is Christmas, even after the
presents have been unwrapped and the twinkle lights unplugged. Every day is
Christmas because Mary’s Son Jesus gets presented to us in the Scriptures, in
the same way that He was presented to the Shepherds. We should never allow
ourselves to stray too far from the manger! Every morning, when we open our
Bibles to read, we should think of ourselves as traveling to Bethlehem, to see
the baby Jesus. Every Sunday, when the Scriptures are proclaimed among us, we
should think of ourselves as gathering with barnyard animals to graze in the
manger that God has set in our midst. There Jesus is, swaddled in paper and
lying on the page. There at the manger we have:
• The pink and pudgy God in our midst, not towering over us, not
threatening us, not giving any reason to fear, holding our entire existence in
the closed fingers of His tiny hand.
• The embodied Peace of God, given “among those with whom God is
pleased.”
• The gift that keeps on giving: Forgiveness of sins and cleansed life is
yours every morning, delivered to you by Mary’s firstborn Son.
• Our truly perfect society, that is, the holy Christian church. Our
perfection is no utopian dream in which all the societal ills able to overcome.
Our perfection is the perfection of sins forgiven, holiness superimposed, and a
return to Eden guaranteed.
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