Christmas Eve December 24, 2025
Is. 9:2-4,6-7 Ps.96:1-4,11-12
Titus 2:11-14 Luke 2:1-14
The ascendency of Christmas in popularity both within churches and within many different cultures over the more theologically important Holy Week and Easter liturgy, is due the topic being more child friendly than the Holy Week and Easter observances. Yes, Easter is indeed the happiest of endings; the Jesus who was born was brought to a cruel death, but he came back to life as the hero on whose wings the rest of us so choosing, can also have assurance of life after life, or life after the death which occurs in everyone's life.
And we certainly edit and censor the Christmas pageant not to include the slaughter of the holy Innocents by Herod, or the forced migration of the Holy Family to Egypt for fear of their lives. We too, are editors of how we tell the Christmas story, just as the original writers were editions of their perspective of what the continuing experience of the life of Christ meant for the people of the local guilds of people who gathered and who became so evident for their "new" beliefs that they are dubbed as "Christians."
Christians were "anointed" ones, in the Spirit people, who themselves were surprised by the effervescence and group dynamic of this catching infectious enthusiasm, that they had to to try to account for this effervescence, its origin and the genius of its effective working.
The group of Christians had to account for the dynamics of what they were experiencing. Experiencing this inward anointing and enthusiasm was like a genie that needed a bottle to contain it and to give it a concrete social reality, to teach it, to perpetuate a spiritual methodology, a mystagogy to initiate people into as a rule of life.
The didactic writings and mystagogy of St. Paul came before the Gospel writings in the institutional process of the burgeoning Jesus Movement. St. Paul's mysticism was founded upon the experience of coming into an identity with Christ, a losing of the notion of a separate identity from Christ by the power attributed to the death of Jesus. "I am crucified with Christ, but I live, not I but Christ lives within. The life I now life I live by the faith of Christ." Not the faith "in" Christ as some external person, but the faith of Christ within me as this new alter personality of being able to check my ego at the door. In the Pauline writings, this experience was the mystery of the ages, "Christ in you the hope of glory."
So how does this Pauline mysticism come to attain origin discourse and how is this mystical experience encoded within an actual narrative? It happens in the teaching modes of the Gospel writing. It uses narrative to encode mystagogy. The secret of the Gospel is not to read them literally but mystically, and spiritually. We are to read the Gospels as "parables" which means that one has to come to the inward experience of the mystery to understand the intended meanings or one is lost in a childish and even idolatrous literalism.
And if Christmas has been overly childified, the Christmas narratives reside within the overall child motif of the Gospels. The Christmas story encodes the orientation into Wonderhood which the Christian mystagogues were teaching to their initiates.
The brilliant but very literal Nicodemus did not understand the mystery, the one that oracle Rabbi Jesus proclaims: You must be born again. How does the literal Nicodemus respond? How can I get back into my mother's womb at my age. Can we appreciated that the child motif, namely, the birth motif is a chief metaphor of the Jesus Movement, a Movement that exists because people had, have had for centuries, and are having now, these new birth experience which have the contextual coding of this identity with Christ.
What we know within this great big world of diverse experiences and mutual happenings, we can experience a sleeping baby, and in the baby's dream state, the baby smiles and coos. And we're in wonder and we're jealous without admitting it. This baby bliss has power over us because this baby is experiencing the innocence of the pre-linguistic state where good and evil or anything at all have not yet been designated. And we want to get back to innocence; and it is within us an unretrievable memory and we can only access it in projecting on the baby in bliss.
Everything about a baby is not bliss as any parent knows who has to attend to such a vulnerable one, but the baby bliss experience co-exists in this world of experience of everything else, including the world of cruel tyrants, mystic magi, and peasant shepherds.
And what else did oracle Jesus say? He has hid the mystery from the wise and revealed it to infants. This is a rather enigmatic way of saying the pre-linguistic, the extra-linguistic, the oceanic meditative state of Wonderhood can be known within everything else that happens in life. And the one who knows initiation into this state of Wonderhood is blessed indeed to know a saving accompaniment to everything else which happens in one's life.
Let us tonight enter into the baby bliss tonight. Let us embrace the linguistically inaccessible blisshood that resides within us in our memorial vaults but has been neglected and repressed by the many cruel things which have happened on our way to the knowledge of good and evil.
The baby bliss hood which we have forgotten is still in and with us, and when our adult egos too often formed by the paranoia producing hard knocks of life repress the original oceanic wonder at the edge of our inner consciousness; when our egos can crack and soften and receive this babyhood bliss as the warmth which melts hardened egos, we can know the peace and bliss without having any external reason for doing so.
And this is the mystagogy which is hidden in the Christmas story for us. Let the baby bliss of Christmas be the warming and melting fire for our egos so hardened by life's harms and hurt, and let this bliss give us the hope of new agency of being about to be better to and for ourselves, to our families and communities, and peacemakers of love love and justice in our world today.
Merry Baby Bliss Tonight! Enter afresh into Wonderhood tonight. Amen.
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