Meaning in the Mundane

Luke 2:1-20

In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. All went to their own towns to be registered. Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David. He went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.

In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, ‘Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is the Messiah,* the Lord. This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.’ And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host,* praising God and saying,
‘Glory to God in the highest heaven,
and on earth peace among those whom he favours!’*

When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, ‘Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.’ So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger. When they saw this, they made known what had been told them about this child; and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.

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Christmas has a way of feeling extraordinary. All the gathering, feasting, and laughing — it’s a day when memories are made and traditions are cherished. For many of us, it’s the kind of day that feels just right, filled with a sense of joy and meaning that lingers long after the wrapping paper is cleared away. And nearly every year, as the lights glow and the laughter fades, I find myself asking the same question the late great theologian Elvis Presley asked:  “Why can’t every day be like Christmas?”

And if not every day, what about most days, or even more days than not? Because in reality most of our days are not like Christmas. Most of them are quite ordinary, mundane even. Of course, there are valley and mountain-top moments, but the sum of those days pales in comparison to the days we would consider routine. Or at least that’s how my life has felt lately; not in a bad way, but if my days were put into a novel, you wouldn’t pick it up, or at least not twice. They aren’t quite boring, because I’m not sure life with a “near two-year-old” can ever be called such. 

But when I reflect on the best moments of my life—the memories I cherish most or the life I aspire to live—it doesn’t look like the majority of my days. Most days feel unimportant in comparison. Get up, help get everyone off to where they need to go, go to work, come home, make dinner, say I’ll clean or read but do neither, go to bed, and do it all over again. Does this sound familiar?

Yet, what if those ordinary days aren’t unimportant at all? What if those moments, mundane as they seem, are exactly where God chooses to meet us?

One of those nights while I was neither cleaning nor reading and the babe was asleep, this video stopped my scrolling. It made me question what I was seeing. Take a look:

Thomas Deininger is an artist who lives on a farm in Rhode Island. In his early twenties, he went on a surfing trip to some remote islands in the Pacific. While there, he was shocked to see all the trash and plastic washed up on the beaches. At the time, he was a painter, but when he returned home, he couldn’t get the image of all that garbage out of his head and wanted to do something about it. So he began scouring beaches, parks, and dumpsters, collecting trash, particularly pieces of nostalgia: toys, cassette tapes, old phones. And from this waste, he started creating beautiful, mind-altering sculptures of the creatures endangered from that same trash.

These works start with an illusion. At first, you see a brilliant, yet familiar sight: a parrot in all its colorful splendor. Then as you step to the side, the illusion shatters and you see something you never expected; what you once thought was the head of a beautiful bird becomes bottle caps, action figures, plastic netting, and a floppy disk. Step closer and the scene turns bizarre. The whole thing is made up of material you never expected, put together in ways that make no sense. 

“I am fascinated with perspective and illusion,” Thomas said in an interview. “I value finding potential in the mundane and the overlooked.”

Deininger’s work shows us that beauty can come from what’s overlooked, what’s forgotten, what seems like trash. This is the lens of Christmas: God’s ability to take what seems ordinary—even broken—and create something extraordinary.

Consider the nativity. At first glance, it’s serene and familiar: Mary cradles her sleeping, or at least content, baby, Joseph gazes with admiration. The shepherds gather to see what had been told them, and the animals crowd around too. It is a beautiful, picturesque scene.But step to the side, come closer, and see it differently. 

Mary, a young, unwed, lowly woman with no great characteristics or influence, travels with her not-yet-husband Joseph, a poor carpenter, to Bethlehem, a tiny, impoverished town in the hills of Judea, to give birth in a room where the animals stayed, and places her fragile, newborn baby in a feed trough, surrounded by animals and shady shepherds from the nearby fields. 

You see, when we step to the side just a bit, this pristine, beautiful image of the nativity transforms and we see Jesus' birth from a new perspective: God chose to come among us through ordinary, overlooked people in a forgotten, unimportant place.

And then if we look closer still, the whole thing becomes bizarre, because that baby lying in the manger, swaddled and helpless, is none other than God. The almighty, ever-powerful, Creator of the heavens and the earth, chose to give it all up to live with us as a poor peasant from Palestine. God in the manger doesn’t just show us humility; it shows us that no part of life is too small, no person too ordinary, for God to transform it into something sacred.

God takes unimportant people, an overlooked place, and weaves them together in ways we never expect to create something remarkable—Jesus Christ the Savior of the World.

The good news of Christmas is that God does the same with us. Like those sculptures made of discarded toys and plastic, God takes the scattered, seemingly insignificant pieces of our lives—our routines, our mistakes, even our struggles—and transforms them into something beautiful and life-giving. In the people we overlook, in the places we least expect, in the seemingly unimportant days after all the gatherings and festivities, the Christmas story tells us this is exactly where God chooses to come among us. 

In our rising and our resting, our labor and our leisure, there is more than what meets the eye. God is in the faces we love and the strangers we meet. There is hope in the children we care for, grace in the routines we endure, light even in the darkest places.

The Christmas message comes to tell us that how we see this life of ours is all wrong. What we take to be unimportant or worthless is really beautiful and purposeful because it comes from God. Our eyes are at fault, that is all. God is in the manger. Beauty in routine, strength in weakness, meaning in the mundane.

The gift I pray you receive this Christmas is a new perspective — to step to the side, to come closer and to find God’s grace in the routines and messiness of your life. Because the good news is this: God is already there, waiting to transform it all into something beautiful. Amen 

Advent and Ancestors

Luke 1:39-45

In those days, Mary set out with haste and went to a Judean town in the hill-country where she entered the home of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard the sound of her greeting, the child leaped in her womb. Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb! And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord has come to me? For when I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy! And blessed is she who believed there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”

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When David Brooks talks about what it means to see others deeply and to let ourselves be more deeply seen, he leans pretty heavily into acknowledging the significance of a person’s family tree, history, and culture, in order to do that. And he asks this really great question: How Do Your Ancestors Show Up in Your Life?

He quotes the novelist and poet, Robert Penn Warren, who said, “You live through time, that little piece of time that is yours, but that piece of time is not only your own life, it is the summing-up of all the other lives that are simultaneous with yours. …What you are is an expression of history.”

And we forget this, don’t we? …about ourselves, about each other, and about the strangers we meet and see in the world? When someone upsets or angers us on any given day – by cutting us off in traffic, or acting selfish or unkind at the grocery store, by talking behind our back in the church parking lot, or by not pulling their weight on that group assignment at school – it’s worth wondering what else might be going on in their life at the moment, don’t you think?

We’ve all seen that meme or heard the notion that “Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about, so be kind. Always.” Well, I think David Brooks takes this to another, more meaningful level, when it comes to really seeing and knowing a person.

We don’t just land here, showing up out of nowhere – so unique, individual, special, and in control of our own respective destinies. Like it or not, we are beholden to or influenced – in some way – by those who came before us; by all of the culture, history, and baggage – good, bad, and ugly – that come along with us. All of the good stuff we’d like to claim about ourselves and be most proud of – isn’t all or only of our own creation. And the hard stuff we work so hard or wish we could change about ourselves – isn’t … always … either.

And the same is true about our neighbor.

Which is to say – what we’ve been trying to show throughout these Advent days – is that seeing others deeply and being deeply seen takes time, work, effort, energy, and faith. And as Christmas draws ever nearer, my hope is that we see this work as ours, because it is and was God’s, in the coming of Jesus. God showed up to see us more fully, completely, deeply … And so that we might take the time and do the work to see Jesus – and each other, through him – more fully, completely, and deeply, too.

What child is this? What child is this? What child is this, and this, and this, and this?

And, perhaps the most human thing about Jesus, is that he had a family tree, ancestors, and a rich human history of his own. And the Gospel writers – heck the whole of the Scriptural narrative – reveals this for us.

I was tempted, but decided to spare you the reading of Jesus’ genealogy from the first chapter of Matthew’s gospel to prove this point. But you know – or I suspect you’ve heard about – all of those old-school “begats” – Abraham begat Isaac, and Isaac begat Jacob, and Jacob begat Judah and so on down the line – 77 times, until you get to Jesus. The point of that litany of names, speaks to the power of ancestry, the impact of a person’s family tree, and the meaning behind all that comes before us and that is poured into our identity and personhood.

Well, for generations, theologians and professors, pastors and preachers have used Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus for nothing more and nothing less than proving Jesus to be the fulfillment of God’s plan for salvation; to establish his credibility as the Messiah; to prove his promised, prophetic pedigree, if you will, as the offspring of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, King David, and so on.

And that’s not nothing. It may very well have been Matthew’s point. And it serves its purpose. But there’s more to it than that. It’s subtle, surprising, beautiful and impossible to miss once you see it – and I think it comes to a head in this morning’s meeting between Mary and Elizabeth, in Luke’s Gospel.

See, buried in Matthew’s account of Jesus’ genealogy … hidden almost among the names of all those men – the well-known patriarchs, the faithful fathers, and the powerful kings – are also listed the lesser-known names of five women: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, and Mary, the mother of Jesus, herself.

And because we know that women – generally – weren’t held in high regard in first-century Palestinian culture, if they were regarded at all, it is profoundly noteworthy to understand, just briefly, who these particular women were; to know their own history as part of this mix, and to acknowledge why their participation in the lineage of Jesus matters.

First, there’s Tamar, who saved her own life and livelihood by surreptitiously sleeping with her Father-in-Law, Judah, becoming pregnant, and thus preserving the family line that led to Jesus.

Rahab was likely an owner/operator of the best little brothel in Jericho, who used her wisdom, hospitality, faith, and bravery to save some Israelite spies once, insuring a victory for God’s chosen ones in battle, and securing for herself a worthy branch on the family tree of Jesus.

Ruth was a Moabite – an outsider of the highest order as far as God’s people were concerned at the time – but, by way of her steadfast faithfulness to her mother-in-law and some sexual self-preservation of her own, she ingratiated and grafted herself into Jesus’ genealogy, too.

Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, was the – likely unwilling – sexual conquest of King David. Though it’s rarely described as such, she survived a sexual assault by the most powerful man in the land people, who then had her husband killed to cover up the indiscretion, so that she could be kept, by the king, as his wife.

And then there’s Mary, who shows up to Elizabeth this morning with some insane news about a baby on the way.

And Mary and Elizabeth, good, faithful, Hebrew women that they were – would have known every bit of this history, tradition, and genealogy. Which is why it’s not hard to see or imagine how a.) Elizabeth could believe such a thing, and b.) why Mary breaks into song in the verses following what we just heard – that little ditty we call “The Magnificat.” And it’s a song that sounds strikingly similar to a song Hannah, a different ancestral sister from way back in the day – was known to have sung, as well.

And this song is one about a God who scatters the proud, remember; who brings down the powerful from their thrones, who lifts up the lowly, who fills the hungry with good things, who sends the rich away empty. This song, from a Hebrew woman, in the presence of another Hebrew woman, was an anthem of joy, rebellion, prophecy, and hope … that the world was about to turn, with the coming of this Jesus.

And do you think that was the last time Mary ever sang those words, or expressed those desires, or proclaimed that kind of hope? I find that hard to believe. I like to think she sang that song as a lullaby to a nursing baby Jesus. I bet she taught him well about the source of those sentiments from her sisters in the faith. I imagine Mary whispered that good news to her little boy every chance she got … over breakfast, on their way home from synagogue, when he walked out the door to go play with the neighbors, and certainly on his birthday, don’t you think?!

And I think that’s why Jesus knew how to see people more deeply. It’s why I think Jesus knew how to look beneath the surface of another’s suffering; to forgive the choices they made, when necessary; to love an enemy; to turn the other cheek; to treat others the way he would want to be treated; to love the God of his creation; and to love his neighbor, as himself, in every way.

Jesus knew about the battles people were fighting, he had compassion for them because of it, and he came to fight those battles with love, mercy, and grace. When we learn to see him more clearly and understand the source of his compassion and love for the least and most lowly among us … we might get better at seeing them, and each other more clearly, too.

And when we ask and wonder about “What Child this Is?” for whom we’re waiting, we might find him, more often, already in our midst – and live differently because of it.

Amen