Hanging lights on a Christmas tree can be most stressful. Some nice person on the Internet has even made a list of Things Not to Say When Hanging Lights on the Christmas Tree. Let me read some of them:
"Up a little higher. You can reach it. Go on, try."
"What on earth do you do to these lights when you put them away every year? Tie them in knots?"
"You've got the whole thing on the tree upside-down. The electric plug thing should be down here at the bottom, not up at the top."
"I don't care if you have found another two strings, I'm done! "
"You've just wound ‘em around and around--I thought we agreed it shouldn't look like a spiral this year?"
"Have you been drinking?".
"Where's the cat?"
It's not easy getting ready for Christmas. Luke, in his narrative concerning the coming of Christ quotes the words of Isaiah the prophet: "A voice of one calling in the desert, Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him. Every valley shall be filled in, every mountain and hill made low. The crooked roads shall become straight, the rough ways smooth. And all mankind will see God's salvation."
I wonder what I would have heard had I been there that night. It is a question that annually haunts me. Would I have heard the choirs of angels singing or simply the sounds of barnyard animals shifting around? Would I have seen the star in the sky that night or simply two poor and very frightened kids? Would I have understood the hushed silence of the divine presence, or simply the chill of a cold east wind. Would I have understood the message of Emmanuel, God with us, or would the cosmic implications of that evening have passed me by?
I am convinced that had two people been there that night in Bethlehem it is quite possible that they could have heard and seen two entirely different scenes. I believe this because all of life is this way. God never presents himself in revelation in a manner in which we are forced to believe. We are always left with an option, for that is God's way. Thus, one person can say "It is a miracle", while another says "It's coincidence."
Certainly very few people in Palestine saw and heard and understood what took place that night. The choirs of angels singing were drowned out by the haggling and trading going on in the Jerusalem bazaar. There was a bright star in the sky but the only ones apparently to pay any attention to it were pagan astrologers from the East. If anyone did see Mary and Joseph on that most fateful night, they were too preoccupied with their own problems to offer any assistance. Not unlike today!
We celebrate Christmas in many ways, among them gathering with family and friends, exchanging gifts, holding pageants, and sending cards. Perhaps the most moving and memorable way we celebrate Christmas, however, is singing Christmas carols. Our musical memory lasts through the years, from our childhood into our old age, the melodies familiar and comforting, the words hauntingly beautiful and instructive at the same time. The readings for this morning are like songs, too, and their lyrical celebration of God at work in the world, saving, vindicating, calling, and comforting, links us to our ancestors in faith who shared our common hope and longing. We sing along with them today.
What is the good news we are waiting to hear, or waiting to see fulfilled, on one more Christmas morning? Perhaps we are waiting for a messenger who will tell us that the tide has turned, that the day of vindication and hope has arrived, that God is still with us. Or, perhaps we have secretly, privately, given up hope, in spite of our best efforts at decorating, cooking, visiting, and even gift-giving. Worse, we may have reached the point of assuming that it is all up to us to bring the peace our hearts long for, all up to "little old us" and our best efforts, with God not bothering to intervene at all. Can we even begin to make everything right? And yet, isn't Christmas about God intervening in human history? Isn’t Christmas about God telling us not to give up hope after all, telling us not to despair that we are all on our own?
In some ways, we might experience ourselves, or at least our culture, our nation, the world, as "a city in ruins," like Jerusalem so long ago. And yet, God is still speaking good news to us, today, in the "ruins of Jerusalem," in every broken dream, every heart-breaking loss, every contentious public issue, every insurmountable obstacle....God is speaking still, God is bringing good news. What are the broken things, the malfunctioning systems, the things that need to be made right? How does Christmas morning do more than remind us of what God has done but instead proclaims that God is active in the world today, in this setting of history?? In this day, how is God revealing God’s own self in the life of the community?
Perhaps this explains why the practice of singing the carols begins to express the inexpressible: we cannot put into words the incredible mystery of God-made-flesh, and yet we have known it in our bones. We have felt God with us even when we could never explain how that could be. Christmas is our communal recognition, our shared celebration, that God is with us still, God is still speaking, God is still acting in our lives and in the life of the world that God loves so well. God is still with us, and we celebrate, and we sing our songs this Christmas morning. But how will we continue to sing these songs, in the days ahead?
“Did you find what you were looking for?” You have likely heard this phrase uttered many times over these past few weeks during Christmas shopping forays. “Did you find what you were looking for?” Most of the time, you likely answered, “Yes, thank you,” or perhaps you enquired about something you had not been able to find. And in the context of purchasing something, you probably didn’t give your answer much thought beyond the immediate transaction.
But today, on this Christmas Day, let us consider the question again: “Did you find what you were looking for?”
Christmas is the proclamation that God spoke an etemal “yes” to us by slipping through the back door of history as a helpless baby, to grow up and live with us, die for us, and be raised from the dead to prove once and for all that our fragility, finitude, faults and failings are not the last word.
Christ is still renewing, redeeming and giving life to us — all of us, no exceptions. No matter what your life circumstances are this day, God called you here to speak a word of eternal life and love to you: a love that you didn’t have to eam or prove yourself worthy to receive. God’s movement is toward us and for us in the birth of Jesus Christ. This love is mystical, and it is the only enduring and life-giving way to fill the hole in your soul. It comes to us through Word and Sacrament and is present through this community. So come. Come to this Table. Come as you are. Come here today and you will find what you are looking for.
MPC
