Christmas Homily
Can you feel it?The hum in the air tonight as all our preparations come to an end and the celebration begins. This is the night when the membrane between heaven and earth is so thin you can almost see through it. Tonight is the night Christians measure all time against.Everything that happened yesterday is before Christ. Everything that happens tomorrow is after him and we are in the eternal now of God’s coming among us,
Emanuel, God who is with us, who is made out of the same stuff we are and the same stuff God is and who will not let go of either.
The main thing we are waiting for is the baby’s cry, but that’s not the only thing we are waiting for. Most of us are also waiting for something else, but not the same thing. Some are waiting to find out what’s in that big flat box propped up behind the Christmas tree.
And someone else is looking forward to waking up in a house where all the beds are full again, with children and grandchildren who have come home for the holidays.
Some of you have a new baby of your own, which means you are waiting for the first Christmas morning when you wake up in your own live nativity scene.I know others of you for whom this is a hard time of the year. There is that empty chair to deal with, that stocking that stayed folded in a box. All the rituals that were designed for two or more are now up to you alone and it is like the sound of one hand clapping.Christmas is the season when you wait to see if the hurt has let up any since this time last year, and you want it to so you can get on with your life. And you don’t want it to because that might mean you have stopped caring. Meanwhile the memories rise up to meet you, swamping you with a melancholy so sweet you can taste in the back of your mouth.
If you go back and sort through all your family photographs, you will find that most of them were taken at important events such as birthdays, weddings and holiday celebrations.They take us back to times and people. They takes us back to all our other Christmases. For some it is a reminder of the way life used to be, back when we were on the front row of the holiday show and not the stage managers for it. All those pictures and the Christmas cards we have savedare redolent of Christmas, the smell of fir trees, oranges studded with cloves, roast turkey and peppermint candy. It is that bleary hour when an exhausted set of parents sip coffee as the kids tear into the treasures that Santa Claus brought during the night.For some, this holiday is a reminder of the way life should have been but never was. Those who have looked all their lives through other people’s windows at such scenes of Christmas joy, but always as a peeping tom and never as an insider. Everyone is supposed to go home for Christmas, right?
Only where is that? Some of us know and some of us are still trying to find out, but for now it is right here. This is our home, and we are all inside. This is our Bethlehem,
where we have hauled the hopes and fears of all our years to lay them in front of a manger.This place is full of all our dreams and memories, all our best wishes for ourselves and others, including our ideas about what our lives should be like once God has been born into them. If you’re not sure what your ideas are, you can generally find some clues by looking at the Christmas cards you either sent or received this year. What kind of images are on them? What kind of words? Chances are that peace, joy, and love are on a lot of them, along with pictures that embody those words. And if you are lucky, you actually got to walk around in some of those pictures this season. You got to experience some peace, some joy, some love, maybe enough to wonder why you do not walk around in them more often.
However different our Christmases have been, one longing most people have in common this time of year is the longing for a calmer, purer, more centered life, and the way most people talk about that life usually has a lot of up words in it—as in “rising above anxiety, keeping your heads above water,” or other such phrases which we hope will transport us to the kinds of sentiments and scenes shown on our Christmas cards. Truthfully, even the pictures on Christmas cards are only moments in time. If we could see past the edges, we would probably see some pretty familiar sights. I have one card of a cozy little cabin in the woods with smoke pouring out of the chimney—but I bet the lot next door has an old singlewide mobile home with a rusted out 1979 ford pickup in the overgrown weeds.
What I mean is, even the best pictures of the nativity, the ones where the artist has placed every person in an adoring pose with the animals calmly lying nearby, they don’t tell the whole story.You know the story. The town was clogged with people trying to get registered for the census and accommodations were scarce. So Mary got a stall instead of a room. With some luck they got a pitchfork and a wheelbarrow. We know they got a feed trough for that’s where they laid their treasure, and that’s when the picture was taken—right then, while the star was still overhead and the angels were still in the rafters.
But what about twenty minutes later?The hole in the heavens had closed up and the only music to be heard was coming from the bar at the inn where there was no room.
One of the cows stepped on a chicken and the resulting racket made the baby cry.
As she leaned over to pick him up, Mary started crying too and when Joseph tries to comfort her she told him she wants her mother. If she had just married a nice boy from Nazareth, she said, she would be back home where she belonged instead of competing with sheep for a place to sleep. Then she said she was sorry and Joseph said to think nothing of it. They were cold and there was nothing to eat, but God was right there,
right in the middle of the picture, and peace was there, and joy, and love,not only in the best of times but also and especially in the worst of times because during those times there could be no mistake about whom was responsible.
It was God-with-us. Not the God-up-there-somewhere who answers our prayers by lifting us out of our lives, but the God who comes to us in the midst of them—however far from home we are, however less than ideal our circumstances, however much or little our lives reflect the Christmas cards we send. That is where God is born, just there, in any cradle we will offer him, on any pile of straw we will pat together with our hands.
Any of us who have prayed to be transported into God’s presence this Christmas will get our wish—only not, perhaps in the way we had thought. None of heaven’s escalators are going up tonight. Everybody up there is coming down tonight, right here, right into our own Bethlehem, bringing us the God who has decided to make his home in our arms.
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