Christmas
Eve C December 24, 2012
Is.
9:2-4,6-7 Ps.96:1-4,11-12
Titus
2:11-14 Luke 2:1-14
Good Christian friends
rejoice! Christ is born today! Christ is born today! In our language of hymns and poetry and in
the language of the liturgy we attempt to remember important events. On Christmas we proclaim that this world has
become something completely different after the birth of Jesus into this
world. We may argue endlessly about how
and why it is different and we may argue about details but it is fairly obvious
that our world is different because Jesus was born. We accept the fact that our
world has been completely changed because of this one person Jesus Christ and
if we think about it very long we can be baffled at the impact of one person
upon the entirety of human history. How
is it that such a person can be remembered and for such a long time in human
history? Most people are lost to the
general corporate memory within a generation unless they make it into the
history books but even great historical figures do not have the type of “staying
power” like that of Jesus of Nazareth.
How many people today claim to have a personal relationship with the
risen Caesar Augustus? Not any that we
know. How many people even claim now to
have a continuing personal relationship with Elvis Presley, a different sort of
king? Elvis had a few sightings in the
years after his death and even though his songs live in recordings, he does not
have the staying power of Jesus of Nazareth.
Christ is born today! How is the
birth of Christ both a past and present reality? How is it that Christ has become an
omnipresent trans-historical personal presence to so many people? One of the greatest mysteries of history is
how the historical body of Jesus of Nazareth became mystified into the
corporate body of Christ in such a significant and profound and expansive
way. How is it that we can say every day
that “Christ is born today?”
Christ is born today! How do we
know? We have no specific calendar time evidence
in the infancy narratives about Jesus from the Gospel. We are given the information that it occurred during
the reign of Caesar Augustus and when Quirinius was Governor of Syria but we
are not given an exact date in the Gospel stories of Christmas. The date gets assigned as part of the
teaching and evangelistic liturgy that developed within the church. The early followers of Jesus were very
baffled and mystified about the continuing presence of Christ in their lives
even after he apparently had taken leave of this world in his physical body?
How could Jesus be gone from sight and touch and yet still be ready to
be a potential “birthing event” within the lives of all who had the receptive
attitude of the Virgin Mary. The life of
Christ is conceived in me? Really? Let it be to me according to your word.
If we understand the metaphors of the New Testament we can understand
the liturgy of the Christmas narrative. The
early followers of Jesus believed that Christ had risen but had returned as a
mystical experience within the lives of all who had the serendipity of a new
birth. Baptismal waters were like the
amniotic fluid of this new birth event.
In the liturgy of the church, a person was born by water and the
Spirit. The liturgy was a public accompaniment
of this serendipitous experience of someone who felt like they had been born
again. And one was born again into a new
way of seeing this world. And the early
church proclaimed that Christ was within each person as the hope of glory. If you want fame and glory, you get it by recognition
from God; what more fame does one need?
The Christmas narrative is part of the spiritual liturgy of the early
church as they celebrated the liturgy of the birth of Jesus as co-extensive
with reality of the birth of Christ into the heart of those who were receptive
to this new way of seeing the world.
Why does Christmas have more public expressive power than the liturgies
of Good Friday and Easter? Christmas has
profound expressive power because of the power and the mystery of the infant
and child. The liturgy of the church
presents a year round cycle of learning; it is a very inter-generational cycle
of learning. If you have your choice,
which would you rather choose, dealing with the joy of birth or dealing with
the reality of death and the afterlife?
Good Friday and Easter deal with the reality of death and the afterlife and
all things being equal, we are drawn to the birth and childhood liturgy. We find it more universally appealing and obviously
Christmas is very child friendly.
Christmas is so powerful because it is the power of the infant. One only has to be present to a sleeping
infant or to see the smile of a baby or child to know the power of the
child. We know that there no higher
blessings in life than receiving the blessing of a child. An infant or child is not yet programmed into
having ulterior motives for everything; they are not smart enough to have such
motives yet and they retain what we call “innocence.” We love the blessing of the one who is
innocent and if we can make the world safe so that the innocent ones will
continue to give us their blessing we feel as though this is an important adult
vocation. We can feel this brush with
innocence also with our pets; we impute no ulterior motive to our pets and so
when they show us their favor we feel blessed.
Dear friends, tonight is a feast of Innocence and we desperately want to
have a brush with Innocence tonight and every night.
Tonight is a liturgy of Innocence.
We want to be born again. We want
to become like the infant and babes for whom Jesus said the wisdom of the
kingdom of God would be revealed. We
want to access the childlike so that we might access the original blessing of
Innocence that would let us know that we live in God’s kingdom of love, hope,
joy, faith and creativity. Tonight we
want to embrace Innocence and we want to be innocent without being naïve. We want to be innocent and freed from all
self-serving adult motives for doing anything in life. We want the power of innocence to co-exist with and to permeate our fully adult lives.
An artist or musician does not like to starve; as adults they have to
earn a living but they still hope to retain the sheer joy of creativity in
their calling. A preacher has to earn a
living too but in preaching, I want to access the art of inviting everyone to
the sheer experience of God’s lovingly wondrous, joyful innocence. In all of our adult vocations and
relationships we live in webs of multi-faceted motivations about which we cannot
be naïve; but in the midst of all our adult vocations and relationships we
still want to access the holy experience of innocence. We want to live the experience of having been
brought into this world for no reason at all except for joy. We want to re-access the smile that we had as
an infant for no reason at all. We want
to re-access the native joy of innocence and we want this experience to
permeate and influence our having to live with all of the adult protocols that
seemingly dominate our lives.
This original experience of innocence is still available to us tonight
and it is the reality that is proclaimed in the Christmas liturgy. Let us now take a deep breath and just
breathe in the original innocence of our births that is retained in our
memories forever. And I want you to know
tonight this original innocence is always, already available to us in our fully
adult lives.
This Christmas feast invites to be innocent without being naïve; we have
lots of naïve religion in our world that ends in cruel judgments and actions. The feast of Christmas is a feast of the new
spiritual rebirth of the risen Christ within us. And we can know the pure freshness of innocence
in the midst of the world of tyrants like Herod and the other violent ones of
our world.
Tonight let us invite the Innocent into our lives and let us allow the
power of innocence to be present in all of our adult relationships and callings
in life. And in our acceptance of the
Innocent tonight, let us vow always to make this world safe for those who are
vulnerable and innocent tonight.
Merry Christmas dear friends. Let
innocence arise tonight in your hearts. Let
Christ be born in us. Amen.
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