A friend of mine has a nativity set which he displays each December in his home. Mary’s face is serene. Joseph’s is solemn. The sheep are meticulously shorn and mercifully silent. The wise men appear as if they stepped out of a first-world fashion shoot.
But one December the manger was mangled. My friend’s toddler grabbed some Sharpies in one hand, baby Jesus in the other and splashed lines of permanent color all over the scene. When his father stumbled upon the demolition he could hardly recognize the familiar display. Never had such saintly figures been so sadly soiled. A polished and perfect nativity became a mess in a matter of minutes.
In a way, that mangled manger is more true to life than most of our refined sets. Entering our world as an infant was risky for Jesus. It was no walk in the park. The manger was more mayhem than magnificence. More danger than delight. Nothing could be more perilous. Yet nothing created intimacy with us than Jesus’ infancy.
Luke’s is a perfect summary:
7 And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn. (Luke 2:7 ESV)
With three phrases, Luke alerts us to three perils Jesus endured in order to draw as close to us as possible:
- “she gave birth to her firstborn son” – Jesus endured hazardousness;
- “wrapped him in swaddling clothes” – Jesus endured helplessness;
- “and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn” – Jesus endured homelessness.
In the previous sermon we explored the first phrase and the peril of hazardousness. In this sermon we’ll take up the second and third perils.
The Peril of Helplessness
“…and wrapped him in swaddling clothes…”
In the first century, as in the twenty-first century, few beings were as helpless as infants. Few could do less for themselves than infants. Anyone who has spent much time around newborns is not surprised by this. There is no work like the work it takes to care for a newborn. Sleepless nights, aching backs, and splitting headaches are par for the course. It’s a labor of love. But it is labor, because infants are helpless.
Luke highlights this helplessness with his image of Jesus being wrapped in swaddling clothes. Swaddling consisted of wrapping strips of cloth tightly around a baby. One of the more famous depictions of the nativity that shows Jesus swaddled was painted by an artist named Giotto in the early 1300’s in a chapel in Padua, Italy, west of Venice.[1] Little Jesus is bundled, mummy style, in cloth strips, with only his neck and head free.
That the infant Jesus was swaddled may be news to many of us. Many contemporary nativity scenes do not depict a swaddled infant. (That’s just one of many errors in a typical nativity set.)[2] For example, the set we display at our home shows young Jesus, head full of hair, a slim cloth covering his privates, bare skin, with arms held confidently outward and up.[3] Baby Jesus seems to already be inviting us to place all our burdens in his outstretched hands. That’s how capable he is, even as a newborn. He’s ready to take on all our cares and concerns. He’s an infant, but he’s already got the power of a fully grown Jesus.
Luke, however, demolishes this myth. Mary, he writes, “wrapped him in swaddling cloths.” Jesus, like nearly all newborns in the ancient world, was swaddled. And this was no fashion statement. It was a means by which parents provided for their babies. Infants could not warm themselves. They could not comfort themselves. They could not care for themselves. Thus mothers swaddled them. The tight bands of cloth simulated the comforting pressure and warmth of the womb. It was one of the most basic forms of paternal care. Babies were swaddled because they were helpless.
Swaddling was such a common cultural symbol of care for the helpless that God used it to describe his own constant help. For example, God describes to Job how he swaddled creation:
8 “Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb, 9 when I made clouds its garment and thick darkness its swaddling band, 10 and prescribed limits for it and set bars and doors, 11 and said, ‘Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stayed’? (Job 38:8-11 ESV)
Swaddling symbolized how God provided creation what it could not provide for itself.
In addition, God used swaddling to portray the helplessness of his own people:
4 And as for your birth, on the day you were born your cord was not cut, nor were you washed with water to cleanse you, nor rubbed with salt, nor wrapped in swaddling cloths. 5 No eye pitied you, to do any of these things to you out of compassion for you, but you were cast out on the open field, for you were abhorred, on the day that you were born. (Ez. 16:4-5 ESV)
The lack of swaddling symbolized a people hopeless and helpless.
That’s what infants in the ancient world were: utterly helpless. Swaddling was a way of giving the most basic sustenance that the newborn could not provide himself/herself.
And Jesus chose to enter the world in this helpless state. He could have come as a spirit unrestrained and unfettered by the needs of the human body. He could have moved in among us as a fully grown adult, capable of providing for his every need. Instead, Jesus entered our world as a helpless infant–a being so powerless he had to be swaddled.
The Good News of Helplessness
Why did Jesus choose this path? Why choose helplessness? At the very least, Jesus selected the way of helplessness so that he might sympathize with us in our helplessness.
We are not always quick to admit that we are helpless. Rebecca Solnit is the author of A Field Guide to Getting Lost.[4] She writes of her friend Sallie who worked for a search and rescue team in the Colorado Rockies. Sallie describes a time when an eleven-year-old boy became lost in the mountains. He was deaf and was losing eyesight and was part of a group of children camping together. Their counselors had led them in a game of hide-and-seek. Apparently this boy hid too well. Darkness fell and no one could find him and he couldn’t find his way back. Once he realized he was lost, he sought shelter and began blowing a rescue whistle. Unfortunately the sound of a nearby waterfall, which he couldn’t hear, drowned out the sound of the whistle. But he stayed put and kept blowing. The next morning Sallie and her crew found him. She later told Solnit this:
“Children are good at getting lost. Because the key in survival is knowing you’re lost. They don’t stray far, they curl up in some sheltered place at night, they know they need help.”
Adults, on the other hand, aren’t as quick to acknowledge they are lost and they need help. As a result, they can die once they get lost.
But most of us have those moments when we finally realize one fundamental reality: “I need help!” We recognize we can’t do what’s being asked of us. We can’t untangle the knot restraining us. We can’t overcome the obstacle facing us.
And it’s in those moments when we curl up and start blowing our rescue whistle that the gospel of Christmas becomes clearest. Christmas declares that we worship a savior who knows exactly what helplessness is like. He entered our world as one so helpless he had to be swaddled. He couldn’t provide a thing for himself. He was wholly dependant upon others. He knows what you feel like when you feel helpless.
And in a world filled with helpless people, this becomes wonderful good news. Our message to the world is not that we have a savior so powerful he’s never known powerlessness. No. Our message is that when you find yourself facing foes so large you just don’t know what to do, Jesus knows just how you feel. When you can’t seem to lift even one finger to fend for yourself, Jesus knows just how you feel. He came to us as one who was swaddled.
The Church as a Swaddling Community
But there is another reason Jesus chose the path of helplessness. Jesus embraced helplessness so that the church would embrace the helpless. Because the church follows a savior who chose to be helpless and in need of swaddling we must now choose to become a community that swaddles all who are helpless. The church enacts the good news of Christmas when it becomes a swaddling community–a community who takes in and upholds the helpless.
The nativity challenges the church to be a community where it’s OK to say,“I need help. I need swaddling; I don’t have it all together; I’m cold and need warmth.” The church becomes good news when it is transformed from just another place for those who have it all together to the one place for those who are falling apart.
Rachel Held Evans writes this in her book Searching for Sunday:[5]
“I get a lot of e-mails from people…who fit right into the church until…the divorce. The diagnosis. The miscarriage. The depression…And what they find is when they bring their pain or their doubt or their uncomfortable truth to church, someone immediately grabs it out of their hands to try and fix it, to try and make it go away…Convinced the gospel is a product we’ve got to sell to an increasingly shrinking market, we like our people to function as walking advertisements: happy, put-together, finished—proof that this Jesus stuff WORKS!…’The world is watching,’ Christians like to say, ‘so let’s be on our best behavior and quickly hide the mess. Let’s throw up some before-and-after shots and roll that flashy footage of our miracle product blanching out every sign of dirt, hiding every sign of disease.’ But if the world is watching, we might as well tell the truth. And the truth is, the church doesn’t offer a cure. It doesn’t offer a quick fix…The church offers the messy, inconvenient, gut-wrenching, never-ending work of healing and reconciliation. The church offers grace. Anything else we try to peddle is snake oil.”
The church is not for people who are perfectly put-together. It’s for people who are falling apart. It’s for the helpless. It’s the one community where people can show up and say, “No, I’m not fine. And I can’t seem to do anything about it.” And instead of shushing them or trying to fix them as fast as possible, the church swaddles them. Wraps them with love and compassion. And holds them until the fear and the crisis pass. The church is a swaddling community.
The Peril of Homelessness
“…and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.”
In the nativity, Jesus not only faced hazardousness and helplessness. He faced homelessness. Newborn Jesus was homeless.
When our daughter Jordan was born, we laid her in a nursery in our home in Las Cruces, NM. When our son Jacob was born, we laid him in a nursery in our home in Bartlett, TN. But when Jesus was born, he was nowhere near his home in Nazareth. He was miles away in Bethlehem being born in a space owned by others and populated by animals.
Joseph didn’t pull the minivan around to the hospital drive-through where Mary strapped newborn Jesus into the spotless new car seat and together they drove to their freshly painted baby room with freshly purchased toys and crib. Mary laid Jesus down in a manger. It probably didn’t happen in a barn as is often portrayed. But it was nonetheless a far cry from a decent hotel or their own home. Jesus took his first nap in the space where some hospitable Bethlehem family tucked their animals in for the night. Mary gave birth to the Master and placed him in a manger. Not a sofa in a hotel room. Not a nursery at home. But a feeding trough for animals on property that didn’t belong to them. Jesus chose to enter our life in the context of homelessness.
Why?
At the very least, this experience enabled Jesus to sympathize with us when we face homelessness. On a single night in January 2014, more than 500,000 people in the United States were experiencing homelessness—meaning they were sleeping outside or in an emergency shelter or transitional housing program. In Tennessee, the figure included more than 9,000 people.[6] In Memphis the figure was more than 1,600.[7] What good news to know that Jesus chose a path to our lives that included an experience of homelessness so that he might sympathize with those who lack a home.
The Church as a Manger Community
Yet Jesus also chose this path so that he might urge the church to choose it as well. Jesus’ experience of homelessness challenges the church to become a community for the homeless. The one who was born in a manger calls his people to be a manger community–a home for those who seem to have none.
Political turmoil in recent times has opened the door for churches to engage in this work in significant ways. Churches which Highland partners with in Ukraine are providing homes for refugees displaced by the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. Churches in Europe and North America are providing homes for refugees displaced by the Syrian conflict. They are trying to be manger communities.
This is one of the reasons why several years ago Highland partnered with other churches and others to begin Families in Transition (FIT). We recognized that there was a woefully underserved subgroup of homeless in our area–women with children. Thus, we started a program which provided housing, education, job skills development, mentoring and spiritual community for homeless pregnant women. Today FIT serves more than 120 in the Memphis area. It’s one attempt to help the church live as a manger community.
This call is one of the reasons why Highland partners with children’s homes like Timothy Hill Children’s Ranch which we are helping to expand into the MidSouth and Children’s Home, Inc., in Arkansas where a small team of Highlanders just spent the day providing Christmas for two houses full of kids who once had no home. We’re trying to be a manger community. Because our Savior once had no home, we strive to provide a home for those without.
About the time of the tenth anniversary of the landfall of Katrina on the city of New Orleans, a news program called “This American Life” told of tour guides who showed the city to tourists in buses.[8] Shortly after Katrina, tour buses frequently travelled to the Lower 9th Ward so people could see the destruction. But in 2006 the City Council made these tours illegal because they were interfering with clean up. Despite this ban, the tours continued. Finally, in 2012, a group of residents from the Lower 9th Ward went to the City Council to demand an end to the tour buses.
Quinn Adams, one of the homeowners who approached the City Council, shared this:
“It really made me angry. I felt as if you were looking at me through an eye that says, ‘Oh look there’s another little animal in the zoo.”
Jamal Preston, another resident, shared this:
“Back when I was in school like every day I looked outside there’s like a tour bus coming through and there’s like 50 to 60 people on the bus. You know the big air conditioned super comfortable ones. You would never see who was on the bus because they wouldn’t get off, just come through and leave. Like they’re coming through just for the sake of ‘Oh look at how terrible. Sympathy. Oh.’ But your sympathy is because something bad happened to people. Your sympathy is not based on the people that you actually met in the neighborhood that actually had to deal with it.”
Jesus didn’t just drive by in a tour bus. He was born into our ward. He chose to enter into our lives in the most drastic and radical way. That’s what made him such good news. And when the church does the same, we become good news as well.
Let’s stand and pray this together: Thank you Jesus for knowing what it’s like to feel helpless and homeless. Help us to be a swaddling community–a place for those who are helpless. Help us to be a manger community–a place for those who are homeless. May we experience and express the good news of Christmas this week.
[1] http://www.cappelladegliscrovegni.it/index.php/en/ ; https://classconnection.s3.amazonaws.com/762/flashcards/4926762/jpg/nativity-144647D2938101F8BCE.jpg
[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/12/christmas-nativity-scene-flaws/419634/ ; Kenneth Bailey Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes (IVP, Academic), 25-37.
[4] Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost (Penguin Books, 2006), 9-11.
[5] Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday, 72-73, 228.
[8] http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/565/lower-9-10
