THE NAVITIY OF OUR LORD
Christmas Eve
2009
Isaiah 9: 2-4, 6-7
Titus 2: 11-14
Luke 2: 1-14 (15-20)
(Year C)
The past few years I’ve
noticed that Christmas cards have turned more into ‘holiday’ cards, with
perfect winter scenes, giant polar bears resting on their backs; even mice with
Santa Claus hats on. Angels are still popular, but they don’t look very
frightening. To encounter an angel in scripture was a terrifying thing; which
is part of the reason they almost always begin their message with “Do not
be afraid”. The angels on my
Christmas cards look more like Mary Martin playing Peter Pan. I just can’t see
the wires holding them up.
Yet, when it comes to what
people think about God, both ignorance and fear are plentiful; one often
feeding off the other. We are attached to our ‘fear of God’; not fear as in ‘awe
of the holy’, but fear that somehow God is out to get us. Like Santa Claus
coming to town, “You’d better watch out…he knows if you’ve been bad or good,
so be good for goodness sake”.
Certainly the ancient Jews
associated fear with worship. Mishandle the Ark of the Covenant and you were
toast. Enter the Holy of Holies and you wouldn’t live to tell about it. But
fear has never worked very well with us. Maybe that’s partly why we have
transformed Christmas into a kind of Disneyland; an antidote to the real world;
a world that can be very brutal and very sad. However, Jesus’ birth in
scripture, as opposed to Christmas at the mall, is not soaked in flowing
eggnog, pageants or parties. The world surrounding Jesus’ birth had nothing to
do with a winter wonderland. It was a world much like our own; a world in which
those in power often seem to have no problem continuing the crooked ways of
their spiritual ancestor, King Herod.
So it’s important to remember
that Bethlehem was real, that Caesar and the power and oppression of Rome was
real. Despair was par for the course, as it sometimes is for us because it is
so easy to feel disconnected from God.
Truth to tell Christianity is
not a very spiritual religion. It’s a very earthy religion. The very
affirmation of the Incarnation, the belief that God took on flesh, seems almost
embarrassing, because we are infatuated with the spiritual; the thinking that
the spiritual is higher and nobler than the physical. We tell ourselves that if
we could just climb up out of the muck and mire of the carnal, the physical,
and move to a higher more spiritual realm, all would be well.
The Greek philosophers even
spoke of the body as a prison. But that thinking flies in the face of the
gospel. John writes, “The Word became flesh and lived among us.” He says
that on a starlit night God slipped in among us and assumed the very flesh that
we would often like to shed.
While we often think of God
as the antithesis of flesh, “No!” says Bethlehem, the manger and the birth. “No!”
say the Word made flesh. That the presence of God should emerge in Palestine as
a baby who could not speak and was
dependent upon a teenage girl for shelter, food, and love, is next to
impossible to wrap our minds around.
“God is great!” is the cry of
the Moslems; which seems quite easy to accept. That God is “little”, as
a priest once said, is quite another matter.
We are finite, frail,
limited. We cannot raise ourselves to God. God must come to us. The Incarnation
was, as the great theologian Karl Barth said, “God’s supreme condescension.”
And far from being a sign of weakness, Christians believe this stooping,
this enfleshment, this Incarnation, is a sign of God’s greatest strength.
Because it is about God’s unfathomable love; love that is passionate and
committed to risk.
People who teach life-saving
courses often tell their students never to jump into the water with someone who
is drowning. Throw something to them, reach to them, but never jump into the
water with them if you can possibly help it. Because drowning people, it is
said, “tend to drown their saviors.” Looking at the Incarnation this way, in light
of the crucifixion, it shows us just how reckless the love of God is.
Single mother and Christian
writer Anne Lamott, tells of taking her two year old son to Lake Tahoe, where
they stayed in a condominium by the lake. Being a hotbed of gambling the rooms
were equipped with curtains and shades that block out every speck of light so
that you could stay up all night in the casinos and then sleep all day. One afternoon Anne put her baby to bed in his
playpen in one of those rooms, in the pitch dark, and went to do some
work. Minutes later she heard the baby
knocking on the door from inside the room. Realizing he had somehow crawled out
of his playpen she went to put him down to sleep again, but when she got to the
door it was locked. Somehow he had managed to push the little button on the
doorknob. He was calling to her, “Mommy, mommy!” and Anne was saying to
him, “Jiggle the doorknob, darling. Jiggle the doorknob.”
Of course he couldn’t even see
the doorknob to know what she was talking about. After a moment, realizing his
mother could not open the door, panic set in. He began sobbing. His mother ran
around like crazy trying everything she could to open the door, calling the
rental agency and leaving a message, calling the manager to leave another
message, running back to check her son every minute or so. It was pure agony
for her that she could not reach her terrified little boy in that dark room.
So she did the only thing she
could. She got down on the floor and slide her fingers underneath the door,
where there was a few centimeters of space. She kept telling him over and over
to bend down and find her fingers. Finally he did. They stayed like that for a
very long time, connected on the floor, him holding her fingers in the dark,
gradually feeling connected, feeling her presence, feeling her love.
In essence I think that’s
what God has done in the Incarnation. Without Jesus God is virtually
incomprehensible to us. Only through Jesus are we able to grasp just how far
God will go to reach out and touch us; to tell us not to be afraid. Because, as
one writer puts it, “God is besotted with us”.
God could have ordered armies
and empires around like pawns on a chess board. Instead, one dark night long
ago God’s presence invaded the world in the shocking confines of a baby’s body,
making our own flesh a sacrament, a means of grace, an instrument and vehicle
for love.
It was thousands of miles
away and now two thousand years ago. And in spite of all the madness, sorrow,
and horrors the world has known since, God is still reaching out to touch us
through it, like finger tips beneath a door, telling us not to be afraid;
telling us that it is God’s deepest desire to wrap us in a blanket of mercy and
love, even as gentle as new fallen snow on a Christmas card.
AMEN
The Rev. Virginia L. Bennett,
D. Min.
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
Edwardsville, Illinois