My next-door neighbor loves decorating for Christmas. Last year, he was out in the middle of a snow storm in the dark, stringing up lights. This year, he began earlier, the weekend after Thanksgiving. But he didn’t stop then. He has continued to fill the trees and shrubs in front of his house with strands of light. Some of them are tasteful, like the wreath and garland bedecked with white lights over his garage door. Others are less so. Among the latter, a dozen or so red-lit candy canes that appeared last weekend. He is exuberant in his decoration. His joy for the season is on display for all to see, every night.

And that joy is contagious. At least the first time someone in a passing car notices his display, they might get a smile on their face, or have their spirits lifted to know someone in the neighborhood has a great time with holiday decoration, and celebration. We probably all know someone like this, someone who so enjoys Christmas that their exuberance is infectious. It might be someone who loves to throw Christmas parties, or bake cookies or make candy, or tries to find the perfect gift for everyone. Their Christmas spirit overtakes even the worst Scrooge.

I’ve been wondering about Christmas these past few weeks. I’ve been wondering about the power of the spirit of Christmas in these difficult times. Where is the spirit of Christmas in the midst of all that’s wrong in our society and world? We have a broken political system, a struggling economy, continuing war and violence in Afghanistan and Iraq, bloody protests in Syria and elsewhere.

I wrote that paragraph this morning, and then the reality of our broken world confronted me as I was leaving church this evening after the early service. Having ended one celebration and going home for a bowl of oyster stew, Corrie and I were met by churchgoers who had an encountered a homeless man lying on the sidewalk in front of our courtyard. The police had left him there after he had been released from the hospital a couple of hours earlier. He was lying in a fetal position, shaking so hard he could not move because of his Parkinson’s disease. He couldn’t make his own way to the shelter and shelter staff were not going to help him. We called 911 and the EMTs came. They took him to the ER, but told me as they left that he would probably be back on the street within an hour.

Here in the midst of our celebrations of Christmas, the brokenness of our world, the brokenness of our society, the brokenness of our medical system, the brokenness of our humanity confronts us. We see the brokenness of the world and grieve over our weakness to do anything about it. We encounter Christ, not in the babe in Bethlehem, but in the broken and suffering body of a homeless man, and in the care and concern of a few passersby.

And then I return to that familiar story we just heard again. I am reminded of its power and also of the world in which it took place. We hear it as comfortable, familiar words, brought to life in a beautiful crèche like the one in front of our altar or in the painting by Masaccio photocopied on our service bulletins tonight. It is a story of God becoming flesh, of the divine and earthly coming together, of heaven coming to earth. And rightly so, we are amazed, and wonder, and want to worship.

But there is more to the story. We have heard it so often, we know it so well, that the shock it must have been to people in first or second century Palestine, the shock it still ought to provide to readers is forgotten. It is a shocking, even revolutionary story. In Luke’s story, God comes to us in a baby, in a manger, in a stable, in a tiny town, in a provincial backwater, far from the centers of culture and power and wealth.

Such a story was a scandal and an offense to everyone. It offended thoughtful and traditional Jews because it proclaimed that the divine entered the mortal, the sacred came into the profane. It offended Greeks, because it mingled heavenly and earthly, spiritual and material in not very attractive ways. If offended Romans, because at its heart it is the story of an alternative to Roman power, Roman Empire. When the angels proclaim a savior has come to Bethlehem, they are usurping a title given the emperor, usurping his power.

We could go further and explore the ways this story ought to offend our sensibilities at Christmas. A young unwed mother and her fiancé, forced to travel a long distance, by the occupying power. When they arrived in Bethlehem, there was no shelter. They were refugees, in a way, and certainly homeless. In the end, she gave birth in a setting fit for animals but not humans, in the midst of the stench, manure, and cold of a stable.

We want to brush over all of that. We want to photo-shop the harsh realities out of Luke’s story and turn it into something sweet, sentimental, and cute. We want to strip it of its political element, we want to eliminate from it everything that embarrasses or offends us. We want to come to church on Christmas Eve, sing the familiar carols, hear the story, and go home to celebrate among family and friends, with all of our gifts, and the food, and the joy.

But the story breaks in on us, challenging our complacency, inviting us to encounter God, not in the commonplace or cute, but in the gritty and the offensive. The story breaks in on us in the grief and pain in the hearts around us, breaking through the false front to show what’s really going on, mourning a death, or suffering from illness, or unemployment, or sadness this Christmas. The story breaks in on us as we walk into church and encounter a homeless man lying on the sidewalk in front of the church.

The Christmas story breaks in on us. God breaks in on us through this story to redeem us and make us whole. For just as our celebrations at Christmas often try to hide the realities of our lives and our world, the incarnation of God comes into our world to make it new. All of our suffering and pain, all of our unhappiness, broken-ness, and disappointment is there, in that crude, uncomfortable stable, In that stable, we see God coming to us. We see the divine becoming human; We see heaven and earth unite.

In a way, everything we doing in Christmas time, our spending, and partying, our celebrating, and yes, our decorating, all of it is our attempt to experience that union of divine and human. We may not know it, we may not believe it; but behind the frenzy of Christmas lies our desire to encounter the divine. We want to see a world filled with heavenly light; we want to know a world filled with God’s love.

We come to church to see, and smell, taste, and hear a world suffused with God’s beauty. We hear and sing the carols, we hear once again that old familiar story, and we realize that nothing we have done, our struggle to celebrate Christmas, to make things perfect, none of it is necessary, for God has done the work. God comes to us at Christmas and throughout the year.

God comes to us through the material world, sanctifying the ordinary and earthly by God’s presence in a baby in a manger. The infinite comes to us through the finite, infinite things come to us through the finite, the stuff, the rituals we need to access the divine. God comes to us in the offense of a stable in Bethlehem. God comes to us, in a body broken on Calvary. God comes to us in the bread and wine of the Eucharist feast.

That is our faith. That is Christmas. To encounter Christ is why we are here, why we do all that we do. But to encounter Christ we need not do any of those other things, however much we may like it. To encounter Christ we need not worry and fret, shop till we drop, cook, and clean. To encounter Christ at Christmas, we need only open our hearts in faith and love, and “prepare him room.”