Christmas
Eve December 24, 2011
Is.
9:2-4,6-7 Ps.96:1-4,11-12
Titus
2:11-14 Luke 2:1-14
Did you know that one of the most
popular toys in the Toy Hall of Fame is the stick. We spend lots of dollars on PlayStations, Wii’s,
Xboxes, and a kid wants to play with a stick.
How high tech is a stick? Parents
can remember Christmas mornings when two and three year old children have been
forced to open their expensive educational toys and what do they do? They play with the boxes and the
ribbons. And we are aghast and humored
at the same time; why can’t we just exorcise from them their native childhood
and make them to be the instant prodigies that we want them to be? We want them to achieve quickly extreme adulthood
intelligence so that they can be ahead of the curve at their young age.
Even as we want our babies to grow up, the power of the baby and of
infancy and of childhood prevails and exerts its winning influence over us if we
are behaving as we should as adults.
I think that it is the power of the baby that makes the Christmas feast
a feast of renewal for us at the end of the year when the natural light of the sun
is shortest and when cold prevails. At
the winter solstice the sun has been reborn in our part of the world. Our secular calendars make the Christmas
feast come at the end of the year and so it is a time when we are tying up
loose ends in our fiscal year. It is the
right time for a feast of renewal, and how we need a feast of renewal! How we need a sense of all things coming
together at the end of our year.
The feast of the baby Jesus has grown and accrued so much that it has
become a global celebration far away from the religious moorings of our
biblical faith. And that’s okay, since a
great event will always ripple and effect life far from its intended
purpose. Great events accrue lots of
different meanings and cultural responses.
And in the snowballing of all that has accrued, Christmas has grown for
now about 2000 years. It is our duty as the church to dig, as it were, an
archaeological shaft through all of what has accrued and imagine that we
tonight can arrive at something of the original wonder; the wonder we knew as
babies and young children and the wonder that still lives in babies and children
today.
The genius of the Christmas story is that it is able to bear what we
project upon it in our spiritual aspirations.
A good story demands retelling over and over again because it is able to
bear the projection of the audience. And
the silliest question to ask is, “Is the story true?” If you have to ask that question, then you
just don’t get it. It’s like asking a
little girl if the Disney Princess movies are true. That is not the question to ask.
What is true of the Christmas story is that it has the power to awaken
wonder. To be awakened to wonder is
perhaps the essence of the Christian faith: To know that we are touched in a
favorable way by someone greater than us and whom we cannot control with our
limited understanding.
The Gospels were written much later than the writings of St. Paul. And since they were written later, they were
crafted in such a way that the actual spiritual practices and teachings could
be encoded through the metaphors of the narratives of the life of Jesus.
Dominant
metaphors in the presentation of the Gospel were motifs of birth, infancy and
childhood.
The renewal of one’s life by the
Holy Spirit is called the new birth. The
annunciation, conception and birth story of Jesus is the story of how the world
is renewed by realizing God’s intimate presence within human experience. The story is a personal invitation of renewal
for each of us to know how God’s presence is made intimate to us.
Infancy and childhood are also motifs of the Gospel. Jesus said that wise adults could not
understand God’s kingdom; but it was given to infants to have it revealed to
them. Jesus also said that one had to be
childlike to understand and enter the kingdom of God. Here again we find the dynamic of wonder.
We can become so adult in the wrong ways that we limit our experience of
truth; we limit our experience of wonder.
And that is where we need the power of the baby to renew us again. We adults have been evicted from the Garden
of Eden of childhood innocence for so long and in so many adult ways that we
have forgotten wonder and that wonder aspect of our personality needs to be
awakened afresh. We often try to awaken
it in the ways that lead to addictive behaviors, but this feast of renewal is
an invitation to return to the gift and power of wonder that is as close to us
as everything that is retained within us from our first coming into this
world.
Babies, children, our pets, the beauty of Nature and the Christmas story
are drawing from us the power of nascent Wonder. It is very near and we but need to let it be
evoked and arise in us. And sometimes it
has arisen and we need to be reminded of how it has arisen within us. Ironically, it arises even in Christmas
sadness; the type of sadness that we feel because we miss people and pets who
have been in our lives but have died.
The experience of wonder even in this kind of sadness is the sudden
realization of how much love, joy and response that these people and pets have
drawn from us. They awakened our wonder
and if our wonder has been awakened, we know that we can open ourselves to new
wonder in new people, pets and events in our lives.
And so we are invited to this festival of renewal tonight; let us not
find that our infant and child aspect of personality to be incompatible with
our adult lives. The wounds of hard
knocks in life that often make us react with our “bah humbug” cynicism need to
be healed with a fresh encounter with wonder.
And this is the Christmas truth.
Dear friends, please let the Christ Child call us to a fresh encounter
with wonder and the power of this wonder will help us to re-embroider the
tapestry of all of the events of our lives to discern a new and fresh purpose
of God in our lives.
Let the warmth of Wonder arise in us tonight, as we whisper, “O Christ,
be born in us!” Amen.
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