Swaddled.

Luke 2:1-20

Come winter, the common painted turtle will paddle her way to the bottom of of the pond. She has spent her summer and fall basking in the sun on a rotting log, soaking in all the warmth her body can handle because she knows that this day is coming. She has no brilliant plan for surviving the cold. She has no secret den, she’s stored no acorns nor accumulated reserves of fat or layers of thick, soft, fur. All she has is the murky bottom of a shallow pond and her stillness to get her through the winter. So she takes one last deep breath and swims deeper, sculling her way through roots and tangles, until she finds herself at the end, at the very bottom, and it is there that she buries herself. She pulls inside of herself, and, as author Gayle Boss describes, she “settles into a deep stillness.” It’s this stillness that will be key to her survival. She must be so still that breathing becomes unnecessary, and it’s a good thing, because soon this iced over pond will be out of oxygen. She has to still herself into a near death, and find a place in herself “beyond breath” as Gayle describes it, in order to survive. And there, as the winter rushes above her, she waits. Still. Silent. This is her work. Her one task. She loses oxygen, the stress breaks down her muscles, and to balance out the lactic acid collecting in her heart, she must leach calcium from her bones, her shell. To move would put too much strain on her body, and it would kill her. Gayle says, “It’s this radical simplicity that will save her. And deep within it, at the heart of her stillness, something she has no need to name, but something we might call trust: that one day, yes, the world will warm again, and with it, her life.” 

When both my sons were born, it took them about three months to fully unfold themselves. Once outside the confines of their ever-shrinking womb, they didn’t quite know what to do with all this space, with all these arms and legs flailing and kicking and reaching. Always happier wrapped up tight in a receiving blanket, the unpredictability of their bodies were tamed, held close, quieted. We swaddled our first far too long than was probably good for him. But we couldn’t get him to quiet down for rest, to settle in to a long sleep without wrapping him up like a burrito, arms tight to his chest, fingers curled near his chin, and a bright green binky in his mouth. We’d joke that we had to bind and gag him before he’d go to sleep. We tried, a couple of times, to get him to sleep without the swaddle, but every time the hypnic jerks - the sleep starts - would wake him, and we’d be back to square one, nursing, shushing, swaying all over again. At first, my boys wanted to be swaddled all the time. Eventually, as they discovered their arms and their legs, as they learned that they can be used to reach and grab and kick, they enjoyed exploring their space. But still, come bedtime, the safety of the swaddle would soothe them to sleep, and hopefully, keep them there, at least for a little while. In the morning, they both would babble and fuss until we came to get them. And both of them, after every waking, would smile when they saw our faces hovering over the crib, and then we’d undo the wrappings and both arms would shoot up and out, and they would give themselves the most glorious of stretches. 

Buried deep.

Wrapped tight.

There is comfort and safety in stillness.

There is also sacrifice. Maybe some fear. 

A waiting.

A deep trust. 

The winter will end.

Momma will come back. 

This warm embrace will get us through.

With the whole world swirling in a cacophonous chaos all around her, while the rulers are upending people’s lives, while the angels are shouting and singing, while the shepherds are staring in bewildered awe, while the animals are shifting and sighing in their stalls, after Mary’s one last anguished push, she takes her baby and brings him to her chest, where they help regulate each other’s breathing, both wide-eyed at the new world all around them. 

And then, Mary takes her baby and swaddles him. Wraps him up tight. She “esparganōsen"ed him, in the Greek. A unique verb with a very specific meaning, it literally means “to wrap a baby up in bands of cloth.” It’s a word used only to describe this action. It’s a verb that is only used twice in the whole of the Greek New Testament, and both of these uses are right here in our Luke narrative. This is Jesus, wrapped up tight in bands of cloth, a symbol of comfort and stillness when the world out there seems too strange, too big, too overwhelming for our new and flailing limbs. This is Jesus, wrapped up tight in bands of cloth when any number of terrors and heartbreak could come sneaking in around the bend. Does Luke mean to remind us of the bands of linen that Jesus will too soon be buried in, that he will leave behind in the tomb just a few short years later? Does he intend to - ever so subtly - draw the line between Jesus’s birth and death? Jesus comes to us wrapped in bands of cloth, and he is buried this same way. This is the first thing that happens to Jesus’s earthly body. And it’s the last. This is how the shepherds will know the miracle has happened: they’ll find a baby, “espargenosen”ed, and lying in a manger. And this is how Peter knows that the Lord has risen: he finds the cloths left behind, and the body, gone. So much will happen to Jesus in the thirty short years between. But it begins, and it ends, with a swaddle, with a burial, with a deep, deep stillness.

I just read an article that said that if your pastor isn’t preaching about how we must trust a girl’s word about her life, about how this narrative calls us to welcome the refugee, about the corrupt nature of oppressive political systems, about a child in need receiving support from the wealthy, about how God shows up for and identifies with the marginalized, then your pastor hasn’t preached the gospel on Christmas Eve. And I think this is absolutely true. Jesus is born in this specific place and this specific time to show us that God cares about specific times and specific places. Jesus is born in a world where the poor are oppressed and the rich benefit. Jesus is born a homeless refugee with peasants for parents, worshipped by a rag-tag bunch of dirty night-shift shepherds. And Jesus is found in all these places and people still. 

But first, he comes to us still. Wrapped up. 

And then at his death he bares it all in utter vulnerability, cloths torn from his body, naked and open to the pain and the sorrow and the corruption of this world.

And he leaves us, at least, for awhile, swaddled in those wrappings, back to where it all began.

And we cannot hear the call of the oppressed, we cannot hear the cries of the burdened, we cannot see the pain in the eyes of the refugee, or the addict, or the minimum wage factory worker, or the cancer patient who has used up her health insurance allowance and her life savings just to stay alive, if we don’t start where Jesus starts. Wrapped up. Buried deep. Centered into a deep, deep stillness.

It’s from that centered place of stillness, that focused place of trust, that place where our entire survival depends on the hope that we will be able to make it through these winters of injustice and horrors and corruption and greed. From this space of stillness we can survive. From this space of stillness, we can then be in a place to know how to fight for the abused, how to hear the cries of the broken, how to respond to the anger and frustration and staunch individualism - which are just responses to pain - all around us. 

Of course, this doesn’t mean passive inaction. This doesn’t mean burying our heads in the sand and just waiting for better days to come. It means that when we feel threatened by the world around us, we go deep, we go down, deep into our centered selves, where we slow our breathing, where we listen hard, where we wait and watch for the cracking of the ice. 

This is what Mary does, when all this chaos is happening around her. She’s just had a baby, she’s had very little time to recover. There’s no soothing nurse offering her those juice cups with the foil lids, there’s no retractable bed, no sitz bath, no discrete discarding of the stained hay and ruined sheets. She’s surrounded by smelly men and barn animals, and she takes all that has happened, all that has been said, and she “sumballo”s it. She gathers it up. She meets it. She encounters it. And then she “syneterei”s it. She ponders it all. She takes it in. Literally, she “keeps it all close together.” She wraps it all up tight, she goes deep, she finds a stillness, and holds it all there. The world goes on. The shepherds wander home raising the flasks, singing drunken songs, toasting and praising their God. The rulers keep signing their edicts and counting their money and executing the dissenters. Joseph starts making plans for the trip home. The men who will one day execute her son make backroom deals and shake hands with corruption and raise another glass to their emperor, or their bank accounts, or their god. Meanwhile, Mary, with all of her thoughts wrapped up tight, and Jesus, swaddled and safe, fall asleep, finding a still quiet in themselves that they will need in order to survive the days to come. 

Somewhere, a turtle is buried in the mud, using all her energy just to survive until the spring. 

We wrap ourselves in trust, we swaddle ourselves in the quiet, we wait and listen for the next step to take. This is the first experience of God after his birth. He will topple empires. He will heal the sick and mend the broken. He will teach and resist and embrace and delight. But first, he will be swaddled. He will be stilled. 

Let us do the same.

Thanks be to God.