Christmas Eve
December 24, 2018
Rev. Bingham Powell
For the last four weeks we have been on a journey through Advent, a journey, a pilgrimage to Christmas. And here we are at our destination: the Feast of the Birth of Christ. You can think of this journey as being a metaphorical journey with Mary, from Nazareth up in Galilee and south to Bethlehem in Judea. But as I hear the Gospel reading tonight, I feel that it might be more of a journey with the shepherds, a band of wandering nomads who in the middle of the night encounter an angel, and are understandably and justifiably terrified. In the middle of their anxiety and their fear, the angels tell them to fear not, and then proclaim the Good News of the birth of Christ. When the angels left, the shepherds turned to each other and they say, “Let us now go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.”
Like those shepherds, we have come here this night to see this thing, to celebrate “this thing that has taken place which the Lord has made known to us.” This thing—what an understated way to put what has happened—this thing, this birth of a child, and not just any child, but the incarnation of God. The perfect God deigned to dwell here in the imperfection of humanity. The all-powerful God chose to dwell in the weakness of an infant utterly dependent upon his parents. The King above all Kings chose to be born as a commoner to a poor family who have no place to rest their heads, who take refuge among animals in the stable. This is the thing that we celebrate tonight. With the shepherds we come to the stable to see the Lord in all of his glory, the glory of God’s love.
Christ’s birth is the ultimate sign of God’s love for us. As the poet, Christina Rosetti, so beautifully put it, “Love came down at Christmas, Love all lovely, Love divine.” A love so profound that he gave up all power, all strength, all privilege of divinity to come here and dwell among us, to be one of us; to experience our lives in all of our joy and sorrow, humor and pain; to experience the love of friends and family, and to experience the loneliness of rejection and death; to sing praise to God and also to cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
This is the thing that we celebrate tonight, this love that comes down at Christmas and offers us hope, the hope we hear Isaiah proclaim tonight that the yoke of our burden, the rod of our oppressor will be broken, that the clothing of violence can be transformed into fuel for the fire, that this Child will bring peace and justice and righteousness to a world yearning, groaning under the anxiety of insecurity and despair. And so, we come to celebrate.
I once heard it said that we live in the time between memory and hope. Tonight we celebrate the memory of Christ’s birth that the angels announced, and the hope of the peaceable kingdom that He will usher in as Isaiah proclaims. This is the thing we come to see and celebrate this night, this memory and this hope. Both are a light that shines in the darkness that dwells between them. In the darkness of the sorrow, pain, and loss that we have, and do, and will experience, in the darkness of oppression and injustice, in the darkness of sin and failure and limitation there is this light of the memory, and this light of the hope that we celebrate tonight. Not a light that will utterly banish that darkness, at least not yet, not until that hope is fully realized, but a light that can hold the darkness at bay and shine on the path that is before us.
This is the thing we celebrate tonight, this Child, this hope, this light that helps us navigate the space between the memory and the hope. Memory and hope can be a light, but we have to be careful because they also have a shadow side. The danger in memory is that it can devolve into nostalgia, nostalgia for a world that is no more, and perhaps never was. And the danger of hope is that it can devolve into an opiate that simply masks the pain of this world and keeps us complacent instead of being a balm to bring healing. We have to be particularly careful when we celebrate the memory and hope of Christmas because it is a holiday that is so ripe for these dual traps of nostalgia and complacency.
So as we celebrate the memory of this thing this night, we have to keep the fullness and richness of the story in front of us. A story that is not really all that quaint and tender if we take a few minutes to think about it, but it is a story of the grittiness of a birth in a barn surrounded by animals. As we celebrate the hope of this night, we have to keep the fullness and richness of that hope in front of us, a hope in which we are not simply comforted, but a hope in which the world is transformed by the grace and power of God, a hope in which the world’s groaning will not cease until it is fully realized.
We come this night to see this thing, not to get stuck in the memory, but to have the memory push us forward in hope of this transformed world. This is this thing we seek with the shepherds this night, a memory of Christ coming into the world two thousand years ago, and this hope of Christ’s coming again to lead us all into peace. Let the light of Christ enlighten the dark path before you as you come to see and celebrate this thing.
AMEN
