Christmas Eve
24 Dec 2021
Tonight is perhaps in the popular imagination the most holy of nights. As a child Christmas was far more important, far more meaningful to me than Easter. Christmas was magical in all the good sense of the world magic. As a child I did not have words, or even a real concept of, what I would now call a “thin space”, one of those places where you can feel the line blur between heaven and earth. Yet as a child I sensed I was in a thin space on Christmas Eve. I waited but always fell asleep before the big event, which to me was the coming of Santa Claus. And yes I blurred the idea of Santa with Jesus and the manger and the shepherds and wise men and all of it. It was one magical thin place experience for a child. It was full of uncynical wonder and awe.
I knew nothing of Advent until I was 30; before that it was a word devoid of any context real context other than a wooden calendar with a piece of candy behind every door. Now I view it as the season of anticipation, of the almost but not quite yet. I like the waiting; I am the only one in my family who delays opening packages or even cards because I love the anticipation as much as the contents.
Last year we were not able to celebrate Christmas in any of the ways we found familiar; our hope lay in a vaccine that was just beginning to be administered. This year we find ourselves in a better place, but surely not where we all hoped we would be. Our mental health has been stretched to the breaking point; for many it has broken. Yet as student of history I can tell you we are not the only ones who have found themselves in seemingly hopeless circumstances with anger and conflict ever where. There have been many times in recorded human history far worse than this.
So here we are again!! Perhaps you are wearied and worried. It is easy to become enmeshed in the hunt for the perfect gift, to, as they say, lose sight of the forest for the trees. Yet what we are called to celebrate, to rejoice in, is no less than God coming to dwell among us. Never mind the conflated narrative of Jesus’ birth; the so-called facts do not matter. It is the truth we seek, and the truth is that God became human so that humanity could become holy. That which is beyond understanding came to us in a form we could understand; never mind that we seem to have found great difficulty in understanding.
Kathleen Norris says that maybe it is a good thing we often arrive at Christmas frazzled and exhausted, for in that state the Good News of the birth of Jesus will touch us more deeply. The well person does not need a doctor. Oscar Romero, after his enlightenment in understanding the plight of the poor in El Salvador, realized that God came for the poor and the lonely. He said that only the poor and hungry, who need someone else to survive, can celebrate Christmas.
Because Christianity was birthed in the northern hemisphere, it makes sense that we would place this holiest of days in the bleak midwinter. We live in a world of great darkness, systemic evil abounds, and the days of winter are all about us. We may be dealing with depression, or at least weariness, and those blue Christmas services acknowledge that.
Jesus came to us as the son of God, but he also came as a descendent of outcasts: Ruth and Rahab, Tamar and Bathsheba and a host of larger-than-life figures in the history of Israel. Maybe the point is that if all of these fallible humans could be ancestors of Jesus, God identifies with all of us. God works not with the strongest and mightiest, but with an array of fallible and often weak human beings. God is one of us.
Maybe what we need to read tonight is not so much Luke as Isaiah. Are we not walking in darkness, deep darkness? If you allow the spirit of the season, the message of God, to enter your lives tonight you will have the yoke of your own burden broken, the rod of your oppressor smashed.
Expect an angel of the Lord to knock on your door (maybe that is the real reason we put out food on Christmas Eve). If you do not expect God to come, God will not come. If you instead acknowledge that we walk in great darkness, that you walk in darkness, and that there is no way but the way that God shows us, starting with a frail and vulnerable infant who was God incarnate, God among and with us, Immanuel.
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