1
Rev Deb
Christmas Day 2016
1. There is a poem by Ursula Askham Fanthorpe, an English poet.called “BC:AD.”
It goes:
This was the moment when BeforeTurned into After,
and the future’s
Uninvented timekeepers presented arms.
This was the moment when nothing
Happened. Only dull peace
Sprawled boringly over the earth.
This was the moment when even energetic Romans
Could find nothing better to do
Than counting heads in remote provinces.
And this was the moment
When a few farm workers and three
Members of an obscure Persian sect
Walked haphazard by starlight straight
Into the kingdom of heaven.”
In the immortal words of John’s gospel, This was the moment when “The Word became flesh and lived among us…full of grace and truth;”
the moment of Christ’s incarnation as a turning point in history and His presence sent fissures throughout all of life. Human history has been split in two at the point of his birth.
2. One reason Jesus has made such an impact is that those who enter into a serious relationship with Jesus still very often have a before-and-after sort of experience with the one we call Savior that marks personal history. The moment when before turned into after was not simply a one-time moment; it happens again and again as Christ comes to dwell with individuals of every generation in new ways.
Not everyone has a stirring conversion experience, but many people do. They can tell you about the moment that before turned into after, the moment when they gave their hearts and lives over to God revealed in Jesus Christ.
The story of Christ’s incarnation takes on a very personal form as we recall those moments in our own stories when we felt Christ dwelling with us, when we caught a glimpse of the glory of God through Christ’s touch on our own souls.
Those of us who are parents probably have memories and stories that revolved around the delightful disruption of children arriving. We had one kind of life before kids and another kind of life altogether after kids.
There are many such changes life brings our way. We might recall who we were before and after we got married. Or how things were before a spouse died, and after.
Have you had such a moment?
I will always remember one Christmas eve -
I was about 17 years old and still living with my parents. I was looking out my window when snow flakes began to fall slowly.
I lived in Michigan and that was not uncommon for snowflakes to fall - in fact, so many snowflakes fell over the years that I decided to move to Calif -
but that night after a while the street began to get white and the snow slowly got deeper - the tires on the cars outside disappeared - the ditches
we had ditches along streets where I grew up and those ditches filled in completely.
People began to go outside, not just children … and bring skis and sleds and throw snowballs and make snowmen,
and then the practical ones with snow shovels tried to keep clear a path.
My father and Mr. Donovan,
my next door neighbor,
were two of the practical ones - but they finally gave up.
Traffic in my neighborhood soon stopped -
That night children stayed up way past their bed time- including me… and the snow kept coming.
By the next morning it was a different place.
More striking than anyting was the silence.
No wheels moved. Icicles glistened and hung from branches and gutters.
The snow in the trees and on the ground muffled all sound.
You couldn’t help to strain to listen to it - and it was just silence. And it was a time of wonder.
Author Frederick Buechner wrote about an 8th-century physician and theologian, Sir Thomas Browne, who coined a phrase that captures that wonder [1]-
3 words - not even a sentence -
“ice splits starwise -
He observed that a single tap of an ice pick
at just the right point on the block of ice will send fissures shooting out in all direction,
and the solid block of ice will split in two at the star. And so he said, “Ice splits starwise.”[2]
I love that phrase. I
There’s another Christmas poem that expresses the movement of God toward us:
Descent by Luci Shaw[3]
Down he came from up,
and in from out,
and here from there.
A long leap,
an incandescent fall
from magnificent
to naked, frail, small,
through space,
between stars,
into our chill night air,
shrunk, in infant grace,
to our damp, cramped
earthy place
among all
the shivering sheep.
And now, after all,
there he lies,
fast asleep.
“Down he came from up, and in from out, and here from there.” The story of incarnation is a story of God drawing near, to be with us.
At the turning points in life,there are fresh opportunities for God to come here from there, in from out.
It’s sometimes at the most painful moments of life that we feel God drawing near.
Recalling Sir Thomas Browne’s observation that “ice splits starwise,” when a pick is tapped into a block of ice causing it to split at the point of the star, we can picture some of those watershed moments in life as star-shaped points at which God’s presence is revealed and felt.
The occasion may be as sharp as an ice pick hammering into what used to pass for normal.
The time may seem–temporarily–utterly dark.
The loss of what was before may seem irredeemable. Yet even in these desperate moments we may find ourselves walking straight into the kingdom of heaven.
There’s a Christmas story about World War II soldiers in London who were on duty Christmas day. One of the soldiers was accustomed to going to church with his family every Christmas morning, but was not possible to do so in this circumstance. So he gathered up a few of his buddies and they walked down a road leading toward the center of the city. They came upon an old gray stone building over whose main door were carved the words, “Queen Ann’s Orphanage.” They decided to knock and see what kind of celebration might be taking place inside. The matron who answered the door explained that most of these children were orphans whose parents had been killed in the many bombings that had taken place in London.
The soldiers went inside just as the children were tumbling out of bed. There was no Christmas tree, no presents. The soldiers moved around the room wishing all the children a Merry Christmas and giving them whatever gifts they had in their pockets: a stick of chewing gum, a Life Saver, a nickel, a pencil, a pocket knife, a good luck charm.
The soldier who had gotten his buddies together noticed a little fellow alone in the corner. The tyke reminded him of his nephew back home. So he approached him and said, “And you, little guy, what do you want for Christmas?” The child replied, “Will you hold me?” The soldier, with tears brimming in his eyes, picked up the little boy and held him very close in his arms[4]
I believe it is God’s deep desire to embrace us tenderly in such moments.
I think with the infant Jesus, God asks us: “Will you hold Me?”
Will you invite the Divine from out to in?
This is the moment for us that when before turns to after-
that we assent to embrace Christ,
coming to dwell with us full of grace and truth, that life splits starwise into a beautiful and mysterious before and after, embraced by a Divine Love that makes living possible and keeps hope alive.
[1] [1] Buechner, Frederick
[3]
[4]A World of Stories for Preachers and Teachers William Bausch, ed. Mystic, CT: Twenty-Third Publications, 1999, p. 275