Christmas Eve 2004

Christmas is an invitation to fall in love. God’s love is so intense that we are continually being wooed with divine word. God is seeking you out, trying to get your attention and speak to you—whether through scripture, worship, the created world of nature or other people. Listen to all these as love letters, as divine word fleshed out in Christ—that the word might become flesh in your own circles of love. For that is what Christmas is all about: Heaven and Earth kiss—the communion of divine and human, completing the circle of love. Christmas is the Winter Easter. Be still and know that God is present. Listen (do not worry, do not be afraid) and you will hear: “I love you; I am with you.”

Christmas expresses our hope and longing being fulfilled. The hope and longing is universally shared throughout humanity. All people hope and long for the same reality; and the hope and longing in all of us is God in us, drawing us closer, bringing us home (and not just for the holidays). We are all born with this Christ reality in us, which cannot be bounded or contained by ‘church’ or any faith’s tradition. What Christmas is is gift for all. Love comes, not because we are able to deserve God or because others pass a test of our devising. Love comes, just because of wondrous love.

Yes, along with the giving, there are the misgivings of Christmas—the soreness of heart: the world’s suffering, pain in families, your own disquietude. And we know yuletide cheer of its own is a short-lived distraction that loses its effect even before the credit card bill reaches you, which is why we reflect on this Christmas night.

The birth of a child, Jesus, over 2,000 years ago does not come at us from the past. Christmas is more than memory. Christmas does not come from an out of reach future. Christmas is more than hope. Christmas is present. The story of barren women bearing prophet sons and a young girl giving birth to messiah is our story, our life, in the present. You, justifiably, might ask, then, why we don’t get guiding stars or trumpeting angels leading us to the Christ. Oh, but we do! We just need to adjust our settings. For God is not trying to demonstrate awesome power but to instill enduring love. The birth in a manger is not proof, but an invitation. God is speaking to the people with divine life. The word becomes flesh, and we are invited to embark on a journey to where our flesh becomes God’s word, to where the manger is found anew.

Where have you found the manger anew? I find it here, amongst us tonight. Just five years ago, Matthew Santana was a neophyte acolyte and tonight it is his younger sister Rebecca who carries a torch of light for the first time. And other little ones, who had always been joyful, if not giddy, return tonight as women poised with promise for good things—BeBe and Lauren. We find the manger anew in the child grown Christ.

A week or two ago with a friend, I was on the front car of the Queens bound F train at the 57^th Street stop. As we were pulling out, both of us eyed a prone, homeless man, head and body covered by jacket. All we could see, as the subway sped on, were the bottoms of his feet. Friend and I exchanged not a word, but a troubling sense was palpable, at this new found manger—a barefoot Christ.

Where have you found the manger anew? I relate to you one more suggestive glimpse from a man reflecting on his own experience of life, and death, when he was a teenager:

“During the year of my brother’s illness, in that time before his death, in that time in which I hoped for a miracle for his healing and recovery, I nevertheless practiced being a vegetarian: a Buddhist practice of not killing anything, doing no violence, so that the ill person might be in an environment of tranquility and well-being. Not for the miracle of his healing, as you might think. But for his soul to be supported in an act of purging/purification, that when he dies he might more readily leave his carcass behind and go, be free. The manger anew, in that vegetarian Christ Child.

Yes, the sunshine and shadow complexity of “the holidays” are here. No longer have we shopping days, cards to send and food to prepare—busy schedules that act as floatation devices, keeping us on the surface of things deep. But we are now here, in the depths of this time, at the heart of living, and of dying. Truth is, the heart has no time. Christmas is present. You know how rich it is to have places in the heart that are still peopled, but with people you cannot touch any longer. You feel them within you; they go on teaching you more about what it means to be human, more than you often want to know. That place in the heart, that manger within, where Christ is born anew.

In a way, there is no such thing as a memory. For if in the present we are wrapping something of the now in what we select from what we call the past, then ‘the past’ is the future—for what we ‘remember’ is about to become how we will act now. Christmas is more than we often want to know.

“Silent Night, Holy Night” is not tranquil, but transitional—approaching, perhaps even crossing, a boundary. Christmas is an invitation, disorienting; even a bit frightening because, as T.S. Eliot writes, famously, in Little Gidding, there is ‘letting go’ of “what you thought you came for.”

“Silent Night, Holy Night”. Archbishop Rowan Williams writes, “What we call holy in the world—a person, a place, a set of words, or pictures—is so because it is a transitional place, a borderland, where the completely foreign is brought together with the familiar.” (Ponder These Things, Sheed and Ward, Singapore, 2002)

I point out to you, then, that foreign and familiar, divine and human, heaven and earth are not binary opposites. Rather, we talk about them and culturally categorize as if they were in order to organize and ‘normalize’ life. However, “silent Night, Holy Night”, Christmas, disrupts the social constructs and theological representations of past and future, near and far, reality and dream.

“Sleep in heavenly Peace”? Heavenly peace is quite disruptive. After all, the child Jesus grows up to act up (even though, in the context of tonight’s part of the sacred story, the holy infant is ‘tender and mild’).

Yet, while the baby sleeps, “there is a person who stands on the boundary, on the frontier between promise and fulfillment, between earth and heaven, between old and new—this person, a young woman: Mary. How deeply, albeit silently, she speaks to us about the world, about the holy—not in opposition, but in Christ).

Did you notice the icon of Mary and Jesus when you entered the church tonight? Did you see the way Mary’s eyes looked at you? How she makes strange what is familiar and how at home you could become with what is strange? The utter strangeness of God that waits in the heart of what is familiar—as if the world were always on the edge of some total revolution, pregnant with a different kind of life. Is this “what you thought you came for”? A Christmas Revolution—how God acts, Christlike, in us, that we might act, Christlike, with others. The Christmas Revolution to sleep in heavenly peace is our being awake to set foot on the path that takes us away from self-construction as we move towards loving attention with others. Fear not, the ‘revolution’ is not abrupt and upsetting. It is our going and growing along the pathway, a continuum, right setting.

“Silent Night, Holy Night”. This manger scene/seen. O Little Town of… Forest Hills. The boundary to be crossed is that of my picture of myself. Am I made secure by the affirmation of other people, reinforced by my sense of control over the environment I live in? Didn’t you see how Mary looked at you when you came in? Reminding you that sense is made not by your success in the world or survival over/against it; that sense is made in Christ’s compassionate love and forgiving attention to the world that somehow brought Christ to birth.

The boundary being crossed is mapped by loving a love that does not depend on success and control. The love that affirms me has no need of my anxious performance. There is no shame. God is not ashamed to be my God. I am not ashamed to show my face. Thus, Mary’s eyes look out at me directly, inviting me likewise to show my face to others.

Look at how she looks at you. Mary appears on the verge of handing the baby over to us: “Here, would you like to hold him?” This is precisely the invitation that moves us to the heart of the Christmas celebration.

“You can hold him if you like.” Of course, we are not so sure we’d like to! Couldn’t we just look? “Let me hand him over to you.”

God makes it easy. Why do we find it hard to take Jesus into our arms?

Us?

The Son of God? In flesh and blood?

A cooing, sleeping, drooling, crying baby?

We have in this—God? In our arms? But what about the all-powerful, mighty Lord, the judge?

“Shhh”, Mary gently chides. “You cannot hold onto your dread of God and still hold the baby Emmanuel in your arms.”

We are so attached to our fear of God’s power. We might protest and say no, it is not fear. But consider it: we put us here and God somewhere else. That’s the propriety in which we dress/mask/try to control our fear. Even baby Jesus we keep in his crib. Mary and Joseph can take care of him. But, we continue, we do love this lovely baby God.

“Then hold him,” Mary says. “It’s alright. You won’t drop him. You can do it. You have it in you.”

Hold God in your arms, complete the circle of love.

At the start of this baby’s life, the angels say to the shepherds: “Do not be afraid.” The Angel says to the women at the tomb, at the man’s end, “Do not be afraid.”

So, in our celebration here, tonight, now: take the babe into your hands and hearts. Hold the child, embrace the growing person of God, see the barefoot, homeless Jesus; be the compassionate Christ with your dying brother and sister. Do not be afraid. Complete the circle of love.

Holy Christmas.

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