Hebrews 1.1-12                                                                                  Christmas Eve, 2007

“BABY TALK”

Why is tonight the most enchanted night? That is easy. Tonight is when the God who fashioned Pleiades, Andromeda, and the Pistol Nebula out of nothing first spoke to us in baby talk. Pretty versatile God, wouldn’t you say? Ever since God gurgled through the murmurs of baby Jesus, this world has never been the same.

I had a friend named Chris who visited our home when my daughter Greta was tiny.  He tried valiantly to talk to her, but was painfully awkward bending over her bassinette, “Hey there, girlie, girlie, girlie!” It was like he was talking to a parrot.  Chris couldn’t speak baby talk.  In contrast, I was at Stop and Shop last week. I heard a mother interact with her baby and it was a thing of beauty. Oblivious to the rest of us, mom had a lovely, steady, gentle banter with the boy, a running commentary on life—its colors, sounds, and what their day held next. Caveman- like, the boy grunted, cooed, and soaked it all in.   Let’s face it, some know how to speak in baby talk, others don’t. Apparently, Almighty God does.  That puts the Lord in good stead with me.  Perhaps that is why some picture God as a woman.

Of course some dismiss baby talk as a foolish and silly waste. But be careful with that. Hasty harshness there could imperil your Christmas celebration. Besides, psychologist Erik Erikson claims that such verbal play in early infancy is how trust builds in human beings. Erikson believes that in all the little rituals of greeting that the parent and infant together share as their day together begins, this trust either happens or not during the child’s first few weeks of life.  So something profound is behind all the ridiculous cooing and tickling, grinning and chatter between baby and parent.  In fact, building this trust is foundational for the rest of our life. And even get this: the absence of baby talk can lead to serious character deficiency.

We could say the same about Jesus’ birth 2,000 years ago. It could all seem silly and even foolish. We all know cynical secular or hard-bitten scientific types who dismiss it as such. But, you see, at Christmas God built a new foundation of trust.

For until that point people had suspected that God was on our side, despite the vast distance between heaven and earth, despite how ungodly things can get here down below.  But as the star hung over the stable and that baby was born in Bethlehem, it dawned on us that God is completely with us, and even mira-culously one of us.  For God came all of the way down to dwell where we live like a mother comes all the way down to share the happiness and delight of her baby as well as reflect back the hurts, fears, and anxieties of her own.  Like the father utterly smitten with us, God bends way low, all of the way to our infirmity and joy.

God only tells us as much as we need to know at any given moment, as much as we can take at a given time.  Our Creator knows our needs and empathizes with our creaturely limits. God knows we can rarely endure the full weight of the truth. So God parcels it out bit by bit. Theologians call this revelation and it happens progressively. In no season is God’s essential goodness more fully revealed than at Christmas. We see his goodness in the face that the angel called Emmanuel, God-with-us, no, God-completely-at-one-with-us.  Our God is fluent in baby talk.

Let’s face it, some are willing to speak baby talk and others are not. In the 1600s, St. Vincent de Paul ran an orphanage in Paris. One winter day he opened the front gate to find an abandoned infant in the snow.  He brought the bundled baby into a warm room where he was meeting with wealthy matrons, benefactors of his orphanage.  What to do with the tiny, frail creature? One woman suggested maybe let it die as a punishment for the indiscretions of the mother. Appalled, St. Vincent retorted, “When God wants dying done for human sin he sends his own son for it.” That lady is an example of someone unwilling to speak in baby talk.

At the same time, some are divinely willing to speak in baby talk, like God. That brings to mind the backwoods couple gladdened at the news that their long wait to adopt a baby would soon end.  The adoption center called and told them that they had a wonderful Japanese baby. The couple gladly welcomed the news with no hesitation. But on the way home they made a stop at the local college to enroll in some night courses. The registrar looked at their form, and couldn’t help but in-quire about their choice, “Whatever on earth possessed you to study Japanese?” Beaming, the backwoodsman bragged, “In a year or so, our adopted son will start to talk.  And so we will want to be able to understand him.” You may have to think about that a while. But that is what willingness to speak baby talk looks like.

I recall Christmas ‘89 in Columbus, Ohio. Now a college junior, my youngest girl was a toddler. While she later became an elite athlete, she was awkward then, even stumbling. Combine this with her stubborn unwillingness to let others help, and you get a kid who took her share of lumps. Anyway, Lise was excitedly descending our stairs. She tripped and bounced down the steps, a tangle of arms and legs, before I could catch her.  Her pride was wounded but she was unhurt.

As she collected herself, I went to console her and asked what happened.  Have you had moments with children when they said something so funny that you could barely contain your mirth?  But you knew that if you did laugh, you would lose all credibility and effectiveness with them?  This was one of those moments. 

Rising, rubbing her head, Lise pointed up the stairs, and said, “Shimmy shimmy, go boom, bump head.”  Her description was so deliciously childlike, capturing her tumble in six words, I wanted to laugh aloud at her charm and take her in my arms.  But she was not at all charmed, she was angry.  So first, I had to repeat solemnly, like it was the worst thing ever, “Shimmy, shimmy, go boom, bump head. Hurts bad.”  At that she nodded and flew into my arms, having been under-stood right where she was hurting.  At Christmas God spoke much like this to us.

The German Reformer Martin Luther observed, when God speaks to humanity, it is always in baby talk. God does this, claims Luther, because God is love.  Therefore, no matter how old or how big we become, God still sees us as helpless, dependent, unknowing babes, so far as matters of faith are concerned.  I like how Tony Campolo phrases this to bring it home. “Did you know?” he asks, “that God carries a picture of you in his wallet?”  We surely are God’s children. And God not only speaks in ways we can grasp, God enters our human condition

I like the story about Karl Barth in the 1960s.  This professor, whom I consider the greatest theologian of the 20th century, was asked toward the end of his life, “If you were to sum up your 11 massive erudite tomes of theology into a phrase, what would you say?  Barth smiled a sly smile and muttered in his thick German accent, “Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” It says all the right things about his abstract, difficult but brilliant theology that he never lost his abili-ty to hear God saying cootchie, cootchie, coo as the toothless shepherds peered into the manger and as magi acted bowed formally. For in these humble faces, moments, and figures--not as lofty ideals or complex theory--the birth finds its meaning. As truth is wrapped in swaddling cloths God finally charms and wins us

The truth wrapped in swaddling cloths became a man speaking in stories, para-bles and assertions about how things are now that God has entered our situation. With a crisp, no-nonsense “Follow me” he invites all into God’s new order, where people this world counts as small will occupy a special place: the very young, the very old, the very oppressed, the very sick, the very forgotten, and the very poor. The rule of the order is one where to receive a child in his name is to receive him.

Later, as he entered the religious capital of the world, bouncing on the back of a fuzzy donkey, children laid down their palms before him.  They saw beneath the beard the child still very much alive within the man, recognizing one of their own.

This is what Hebrews meant when it opened, “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son.” Ours is a God who would speak to all of his children in baby talk. Are we prepared to listen? That’s what Christmas is all about. Amen.