December 24, 2010

Merry Christmas! After four weeks of Advent and a week of bustling activity around Grace Church, Christmas is finally here. It has arrived at your homes as well—at least I hope it has arrived or is arriving. If we’re not ready by now, it’s too late.

Amidst all else, part of the excitement of Christmas is trying to make sure that everything is just right. In the little room behind me, called the sacristy, is a three-ring binder filled with photos of how this space is supposed to be decorated for Christmas, and I’ve heard that at least three different sets of bows were hung in one area, because they kept putting up the wrong ones. Everything has to be perfect, and I’m sure you’ll agree that it is.

We want everything to be perfect, but of course, so often, everything is not perfect. We are celebrating Christmas, many of us, in the midst of lives that are broken and suffering. Some of us struggle financially in these difficult economic times; some of us are struggling with our health; we may be grieving the loss of a loved one. For many of us, the holidays are a time when broken relationships with family make celebrating difficult. For those of us in such situations, this Christmas is not perfect.

The Christmas I remember best was not perfect, by any means. It was our last year in Sewanee, which is an Episcopal College, on top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere—well, actually between Chattanooga and Nashville, Tennessee. Two nights before Christmas Eve, we were at a party with friends and the freezing rain started coming down. By midnight, our conversation and the music were accompanied by the sounds of branches falling. The next morning the worst had happened—a power outage. More than an inch of ice had accumulated on everything, bringing down power lines and even huge trees.

One day passed with no improvement. Christmas Eve dawned, bright and sunny. Christmas Eve services were cancelled, but more tragically, the annual party at the Hethcock’s was cancelled as well (nobody parties quite like they do at Sewanee—whether you are a scotch or bourbon drinker is often an interview question for job candidates).

Christmas Day dawned and slowly power returned to the mountain. The Christmas Day service was cancelled as well, and throughout morning and early afternoon, there were frantic phone calls back and forth as we tried to figure out whether we could have Christmas Dinner as planned with the rector and his wife and other friends. Power came back to the rectory (it was on a main road) and dinner was on.

But it wasn’t just Christmas Dinner. We also had Eucharist. Jack Gessell, who was a retired professor at the School of Theology, had a record closing in on 50 years of celebrating the Eucharist every Christmas Day. It started when he was a young priest—first because he was the new guy, then over the years, because he was unmarried, and now, it was in order to keep his string intact. So 12 or 15 of us gathered in the living room of the rectory on University Ave in Sewanee (it’s two lanes and had at the time, two traffic lights) to celebrate the Incarnation of Our Lord. We stood in a circle as Jack, said once again, the familiar words and made Christ present to us.

As we stood there, warmed by a roaring fire, we experienced anew God’s presence in the world, born in a manger in Bethlehem, but present as well to us in the faces of our dear friends and in the bread and wine of the Eucharistic feast.

In spite of it all—there were no Christmas services, no carols, there weren’t even many presents because we mail-ordered everything and neither the mail nor UPS could make it through the ice. It was a memorable Christmas worshiped with none of the trappings. We worshiped, as shepherds did at the manger, the miracle of the incarnation—God coming to us in a baby.

We want everything to be perfect—and it never is. The parties never quite meet our expectations; the hype is always better than the game itself. And Christmas itself, whatever we hope for—that the presents we receive are just what we wanted, that the presents we give are received graciously and with love, that the gathering of family and loved ones takes place without rancor and conflict—somehow it’s never quite what we hoped for.

But our hopes, shaped by our lives, our minds, and our culture, can never encompass what really happened in Bethlehem two thousand years ago. The familiar story, known to us in Luke’s words, retold in thousands of carols, depicted in paintings, in nativity scenes beautiful like the one in the back of our nave, or kitschy—cannot convey the meaning of Christmas.

All of these efforts are attempts to capture the miracle of Christmas. But it can’t be captured, any more than it can be understood or comprehended. Luke’s words describing Mary’s response are enough for us, “But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.”

Our faith even falters as we approach the nativity this evening. We cannot imagine, we cannot fathom, God coming to us in this way, in a stable in Bethlehem. Luke’s story offers the contrast that challenges us to our very core. He begins, not in Bethlehem, but in Rome, with all of the power and might of the Roman Empire, and the peace and security provided by force of arms. That’s the kind of God we expect to come among us—a God of power and might, who can challenge his enemies and trample them under his feet.

Instead we get this, a tiny baby, born in the humblest of circumstances, to a couple who had no place to sleep that night. A tiny baby, whose birth was celebrated by shepherds. Yet it is that baby we proclaim to be the Son of God; that baby whose life, death, and resurrection, we claim transformed the world, and our lives.

For many of us, such claims are absurd, outlandish, unbelievable. Yet tonight we are here in this place; we hear and sing the familiar carols, the familiar story and are grasped again by the beauty of Christmas. Tonight, for a while, we want to believe, we want to believe that God came to us in this way once, in Bethlehem, that the birth of Jesus Christ did change the world, as it changes us, each time we encounter him.

We want to believe that in the midst of our hectic, our frantic lives, in the midst of whatever personal struggles we might have, in a world that seems dark and in a nation that seems to have lost its way, we want to believe that Jesus Christ comes to us in just this way. And tonight, we want to experience that coming, and like the shepherds, to kneel to worship at the manger.

The miracle of Christmas is that whatever our doubts, our cares, our fears and yes, our hopes, the miracle of Christmas is that we do encounter God in just this, a God has taken frail flesh for our sake; a God who comes to us humbly, with all of the weakness and dependence of newborn babies. In that baby, in that weakness, we see God. Come, let us adore him.