The image of the baby in
a manger. It’s on a huge number of Christmas cards, it’s part of our nativity
set here in church that we blessed at the beginning of Mass, it’s popular among
artists, it’s just part of Christmas for us. Which maybe means that we never
stop to think about quite how odd it is. I think that maybe one thing
that obscures that is that we use the word “manger,” which we pretty much only
ever use in relation to Jesus, rather than a more prosaic, but equally
accurate, term like “feeding trough.” I mean, I’m not going to claim to be the
expert here on neonatal care, but I don’t know how many of you ever put your
babies in your dogs’ food dish.
Putting a
baby in a feeding trough, that’s probably not clean, that’s not designed to be
comfortable, is odd. It’s something that only really happens out of necessity,
pretty desperate necessity. Where we’d need to look for the closest parallels
today might be the huge number of babies that are born into homelessness each
year. Over a thousand last year, in the New York City shelter system alone.
These babies are twice as likely to be born underweight, and their mothers
substantially more likely to experience postpartum depression. The age at which
someone in America is most likely to experience homelessness is actually at one
year’s old, but 0 isn’t all that far behind. I read an
article recently on the interaction of homelessness and pregnancy, and
included an extended interview with Shimika Sanchez, who had recently given
birth to baby Antonio within the shelter system. She talked about the crib that
the shelter had provided her with, and said it looked like a shopping cart
without the wheels, and that it was so low to the ground that she was worried
the mice would get in. I think Shimika can teach us something about what might
lead a new mother to put her baby in a feeding trough.
Imagine
Mary, her tiredness, her soreness, her desire to keep holding on to her boy
overcome by the need to just put him down for a little while. Imagine her
unease at putting him in a rough feeding trough, overcome by her need to just
put him down for a while. This isn’t cute. It seems more tragic. Or rather, it
would be tragic, if it wasn’t for one thing. The only person in the entire
history of humanity who chose how and where he wanted to be born chose this.
God chose a feeding trough. The maker of heaven and earth left his throne on high
and chose a feeding trough. So that nobody need ever fear that they are too
lowly for God to be concerned about, God chose this.
This is the
God whose glory shone around the shepherds. This is the God who is Light, who
is undeniably shiny. This is the God who will shatter any darkness and light up
our world. He chose a feeding trough. There’s a reason that the church is full
of light tonight. That we have candles, that we have lights on our tree, that
our saints’ statues have shiny backgrounds, that people put lights on their
houses and sparkly wrapping on their gifts. We celebrate tonight that light came
to earth, illuminating the darkness, warming us, and delighting us, and
lighting up our way. The light doesn’t come to earth just to be shiny for shininess’s
sake. It comes to show us the way.
If life
feels dark, if you feel weighed down by darkness in our world, in our
neighborhoods, in our own hearts, the Christmas good news starts for us as it
did for the shepherds with the bright shininess of the glory of God, but then
that brightness shows us the way, bids us continue that journey. That journey
comes to a baby in a feeding trough. And there’s a question in that scene. The
babe in the feeding trough asks, “Are you hungry?” Deep down inside, is there a
hunger gnawing away? A hunger for love, for wholeness, for holiness? Then look,
look in the light of God’s glory and see, God is offering Himself as food in a
feeding trough. The Light of the World is for us the Bread of Life.
Come, come
encounter Christ in this Eucharist, present body, blood, soul, and divinity,
under form of bread and wine. Come, encounter Christ who is present too in the
poor served. Come, receive the gift who is the giver, who is God, and become
what you receive.
O come, let
us adore him. Let us be enlightened by him, let us be fed by him, and let us
dare take that light to the places that we fear are dark, let us take this good
news to the places that are hungry, and maybe we’ll find, in something as odd
or as tragic as a baby in a manger, that God is waiting for us there too.
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