When I was in high school I worked at a Texaco gas station. One summer day a friend came by the station and asked if I wanted to “make a little extra money fast.” It was a job occasionally cleaning out semi-trailers that hauled cattle. You can smell it already, can’t you? To check it out, I drove to a vacant lot, where I found my friend inside the cattle-hauling trailer using a high-power water sprayer. Wearing rubber boots, a long raincoat, rubber gloves and a straw cowboy hat, he stood in several of inches of water mixed with cow dung. As soon as I stepped out of my car, the stench was overwhelming.
When I stepped closer to the trailer I got soaked, and water was not the only thing flying through the air. I gagged, nearly vomited and said to my friend, “This is vulgar.” I immediately drove home and showered.
A few days ago I heard the word vulgar when someone referred to cheap trinkets people buy at Christmas. “It’s just so vulgar.” I looked up the etymology of vulgar and discovered it is from a Latin word vulgus that means “the common people.” It is the opposite of sophisticated or aristocratic. Today we normally say vulgar to mean something crass or gross.
I grew up in a church in northwestern Kansas that more or less described the original meaning of the Latin vulgus. Church members were hardworking, common people. Writer Annie Dillard observing the utter commonness of both the priest and parishioners of her Catholic parish, once referred to the church as “Our Lady of Perpetual Linoleum.” I could be one of its parishioners: a common church-going guy with plenty of fears and foibles.
Think of vulgar in its original meaning and consider the stable where Jesus was born. Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft says Jesus is the only person ever who could choose his place of birth, and he chose a barn full of manure. It was Job who met God face to face sitting on a dung heap (Job 2) and the Apostle Paul who used that word (skubala) to sum up his rather impressive worldly accomplishments, when compared to “the surpassing worth of Christ Jesus my Lord” (Philippians 3:8).
Jesus began his earthly sojourn in a borrowed stable; He ended in a borrowed tomb. Isaiah prophesied about him saying, “He had no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men” (Isaiah 53:2-3). Jesus was not a renowned teacher of mysticism, not a great political leader or conqueror and not a philosopher or scholar.
And yet, the Apostle Paul writes, “The foolishness of God is wiser than men and the weakness of God stronger than men” (I Corinthians 1:25). Apparently that is what was going on in that manure-filled stable in Bethlehem. Jesus, full of grace and truth, came and made his dwelling among us (John 1:14), giving up his divine privileges and taking the form of a slave (Philippians 2:7).
Last Sunday—the second Sunday of Advent—as I stood in line during the Eucharist, waiting for the Anglican priest to place the white little wafer into my right palm, I thought, “This is how Jesus comes to me today—even lower than a slave.” As the priest placed the wafer in my open hand, he said, “The body of Christ broken for you.” Taking a step to my left, I dipped that piece of bread into a cup of wine. “The blood of Christ, the cup of salvation,” said the woman holding the chalice.
Jesus came to me, and to all the faithful, in a tiny piece of bread dipped in wine. My wafer got mixed with my saliva and caught in my teeth. Later that day I saw a disheveled lady ringing the Salvation Army bell outside the grocery store and a Santa walking along a sidewalk wearing a cheap-looking white beard. I stood there thinking that the God who created the stars and the archangels also invented “Our Church of Perpetual Linoleum” and cow manure. He comes into both because of the wonder and the vulgarity of Christmas.
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