Luke 2:1-20
Christmas Eve 2019
There are many things that I, like most of you, enjoy about the Christmas season. I enjoy the music, something that commenced to be listened to in my house before Thanksgiving had drawn to a close. I love the Christmas specials, with the Charlie Brown Christmas being at the top of the list. I love Christmas movies with the classic National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation topping that list. There are whole swaths of that movie that have long since been an integral part of the shared lexicon between my brothers and I. I love gathering each week with my church family and journeying together to the manger as we have done this last month, lighting candles along the way to shine in the darkness and all these things have been a part of my life since childhood, a lifetime spent journeying with people through the Advent season. But more than any other one thing, one experience, one hymn, the thing that I look forward to the most, that I desire to experience each year, is the moment after the last note has played and the last candle extinguished, and last word uttered in this house of worship and I walk out by myself into the gathering darkness, the (sometimes) chilly air, and I think, I ponder, and try and cast my own mind back. Leaving church on Christmas Eve in the dark, in silence and in contemplation and looking up into the sky and seeing the stars and the moon and knowing that it is the same light that descended upon the earth some two thousand years ago. It is the same like that greeted the people who dwelt in darkness and confirmed to them that light did still shine and that darkness was never able to over come it. See that is when the journey gets real for me. More than movies, specials, songs, candles, the moment when it is me and God and silence and dark and stars and moon and the collective memory of the faithful for the past two-thousand years all brought together into a single spectacle of the immensity of the moment and like a switch, that is when I invariably find my Christmas Spirit, my joy, my peace, my hope, my love. When I feel like I am truly experiencing the Christmas season. Because it is then that I can imagine the shepherds tending their flocks by night. It is then that I can envision a couple sitting in a stable birthing a newborn baby, wrapping it in swaddling clothes and placing it in a manger. It is then that I can see the star rising over the place where the baby is born and calling the magi from the east to come and bring their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh before having a dream and returning home by another way. The passages of this story, so familiar to many of us that they could very well become the chorus that play in the midst of our lives, that we have heard read or read ourselves for 30, 40, 50, 90 years, shake off the dust that often cover the most familiar of passages and spring forth with new life, new meaning, a mystical union between word and creation that causes these scenes to jump of the pages of our bibles and our minds and become real all over again. In the silence and holiness of the night, we know and believe of the beauty of the messiah and the truth of the story that points to something greater than ourselves, greater than our families that gather together, greater than kith and ken, and encompass not just the faith, but the world, but creation. And in that moment, when the cold air spikes through my lungs, for that moment, it feels as if I am breathing the very breath of the Holy Spirit. Moving with her, abiding with her, loving her, as she brings the Christ into existence in the form of a baby in a stable in a nothing town in a nothing country in a part of the world forgotten by most on a pale blue dot, not wildly different than a billion other pale dots. It somehow seems appropriate that the Christ child slip into that moment that he might change the world and all of creation with it. That’s how Christmas has happened for me for more years than I can count and it is never late. It is always just in time.
For some, the Christmas moment does not come the routinely or easily. For many the loved ones who have returned to God over the past year are especially missed in their normal place at the family table. For some, the consumerism that has overwhelmed the season and the holiness of the holy day makes it almost impossible to retain the magical and the mystical moment of God and humanity coming together to form a child who would save the people from their sin, from themselves. For more, the near constant violence that infects our world and our land is simply too on display even in the midst of the arrival of the prince of peace to see him dwelling in our land. And the truth is, for many, it is work, and often too much work to find the magic of Christmas again and anew and it is enough to gather with family, to exchange gifts, to break bread, and then, in a week or so, return to our normal, non-holiday lives. And I don’t wish to decry that mentality, in the grand scheme of things, taking time to be with family, to break bread, to exchange gifts, to take some degree of sabbath from work and school is a good thing. Given the array of options that humanity can interact with one another, it is not difficult to simply celebrate love shared among family and friends. That’s good for the rest of the world. But here, in these walls, we know that we honor more than just time spent with kith and with kin, that we are moved by a greater force than just familial bonds, we are gathered here to greet the arrival of God into our midst again. To read the passages of old once again with new eyes, to hear them with new ears, and to have new life breathed into them as all of us find ourselves in a far different place today than we were a year ago, 5 years ago, a lifetime ago. We are here because we aren’t satisfied with the world as it is and we want to be led to better change it. We are here because we need to know that even in the midst of bleak midwinters where frosty winds do moan that a baby is still being born. A baby that represents all the wonder that all babies represent, but a baby that represents so much more. The unity of God and creation, found in a manger. And there is plenty in this world that can take away those deepest feelings of hope, of joy, of peace. We can all find ourselves lost in our own personal darkness. We can all find ourselves lost in the darkness that too often seems to amass over the world with the sounds warring nations, of starving children, of mothers crying the dark of night, of fathers gnashing of teeth, of many of us failing to find in this world even a measure of dignity that should be afforded all the children of God. We know those people. Sometimes we are those people. Sometimes the magic of Christmas seems illusory at best and leaves us staring up at a darkened sky and seeing not the little pinpricks of light, but rather the suffocating darkness and just like that we are the people who dwell darkness and just as suddenly, just as silently, just as miraculously, it happens. Christ is born in our midst again. And that light that seemed so hidden just the last moment is blinding in its brilliance, like we have all stepped out of the cave and into our new life and I am left to ask, once Christ is born in you, what is going to change about your life, about your faith, about the way that you interact and care for your fellow brother and sister—both the one seated next to you but also the one in a far off land who is also a beloved child of God. Because Christ wants nothing from you but your entire person. Christ desires nothing from you but to love him and love everyone you see because the one who doesn’t know love, doesn’t know God. Christ needs absolutely nothing but your courage to step out in faith just an inch and allow the holy spirit to dwell in you, and you in her, and let her blow where she will taking you for an amazing ride along the way. Christ wants you to be a conduit for the hope, the peace, the joy, and the love of God sent around the world. A gift from God for all of us to share.
We live in a time when it is easy to get discouraged. There is lots to get discouraged about. We live in a time when it is easy to despair, there is lots to despair over. We live in a time when, if you are like me, it is much easier to let the awful way that people, too often, treat each other bring you down than it is to have an ounce of hope in the future. And yet. And yet there are times when beauty interrupts what you expect out of the world. There are times when you can still be surprised by joy, surprised by hope, surprised by love. There are times when the Spirit still blows where she will and all we can do is go along for the ride. There are times when the world seems irredeemable and there are times when it is completely amazing and that is exactly why we need to we need to gather here, to mark that event from thousands of years ago but also the same event that happens in this moment, and this one, and this one. We need to be here that we might as a people and as a faith go out into the world and tell the mysterious and miraculous story of Christ’s birth to all who need to hear it. We need Jesus to be born now. And to live. And to reign. We need to know that out of the lowliest of circumstances in the midst of barn yard animals and a cold night. In the midst of the oppressive Roman empire and and in the midst of poverty in an otherwise unimportant town in Central Israel, God can quietly, So quietly so as to be missed by virtually everyone, slip into creation again. And because of that, we can feel hope, we can feel peace, we can feel joy, we can greet the Christ in our midst in this moment and this one and this one. And we can take our place with the angels whose appearance before lowly shepherds watching their flocks by night ushered in a dawn of redeeming grace. And we can all, with confide declare, Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace amongst all God’s peoples. Alleluia, Amen.
Image taken from: https://www.space.com/57-stars-formation-classification-and-constellations.html