Too Quiet
The Problem With Christmas - Part 2
Sunday, December 5, 2021
Luke 1:5-25
"Know this: What I have spoken will come true at the proper time. But because you didn't believe, you will remain silent, unable to speak until the day when things happen."
Luke 1:20
Listen to this week’s sermon here:
"Silent night, holy night. All is calm, all is bright..."
While I have a hard time believing that baby Jesus didn't cry at all, or that giving birth among the livestock was a calm and peaceful experience, there is a very real sense in which God's grand entrance into our world was done in silence. Even the priest was unable to speak about the birth of his own son who would be the prophet proclaiming the coming of the Lord.
There are some babies everybody talks about. British Royalty, Hollywood Celebrities, For people in the spotlight there is no keeping a pregnancy quiet. And in a social media world, it is more and more common to scroll through our feeds to find that a lot more people we know are having babies than we thought. From pregnancy pictures to gender reveal parties to birth announcements, we love talking about babies. And then there are the obligatory streams of pictures from the first year... hospital pictures, sleeping pictures, eating pictures, crawling pictures, baby's first "selfie"... and the list goes on.
But nobody was talking about the birth of Jesus. Even in today's world, I imagine this would be the kind of pregnancy Mary would want to keep off of her Facebook or Twitter or Instagram. There would probably be several months of "Head only selfie's" to avoid revealing the famous "baby bump".
The birth of the Creator of the universe comes with no public announcements, no pomp and circumstance, and barely any celebration at all save a visit between Mary and her cousin Elizabeth.
In our culture, this is a serious problem because we don't do well with silence. When someone withholds information, we start to fill in the gaps with the rumor mills of our own imagination. We clutter the feeds with "fake news" just to have something to say about things we know nothing about.
What if the same is true of Jesus? What if we have spent too much time trying to fill the silence by screaming his birth to the world? What if we're trying too hard to "keep Christ in Christmas," as if anyone actually has the power to keep Christ out of anything?
Christmas may be a time to "Go Tell it on the Mountain that Jesus Christ is Born", but what if Advent is a time to be silent? What is God doing in the quiet places of our hearts and lives? What does God want to do in the places we work so hard not to talk about?
Take some time just to sit still this Advent Season...
... and about the time it starts to feel "too quiet" for you, bite your tongue... don't move a muscle... sit quietly a bit longer...
Because when things get too quiet for us, it may finally be starting to get quiet enough for God's still small voice to be heard.