December 25, 2005 At Saint Mark Church in Norman, OK
Isaiah 9:1-6 + Titus 2:11-14 + Luke 2:1-20
This simple story, so familiar, yet always so fresh and so new is all about relationships.
The heart of this feast is not the divinity of Jesus. It is not about angels, shepherds, inns, and wise men. It is about God’s radical longing for us. Only those who have grieved the loss of their greatest love in life can understand. This feast is about an end to God’s grieving and longing for us. It celebrates God’s last, best, and final offer to heal what has been broken by sin, to restore the intimacy of that first garden relationshipand close the breach between the divine and the human, heaven and earth In love with us with a love that we can barely dare to imagine, God places himself in our hands and in the hands of a troubled world. This is the heart of our wonder, the source of our Joy.
This birth is not just the birth of Christ that we celebrate, but our own birth as well.
Jesus was not born at the center of a holy world, but in a tiny remote nation occupied by a vastly more powerful Roman Empire. The population of that land lived under the threat of violence not only from the Roman troops, but from Jewish zealots seeking liberation willing to be terrorists to achieve it.
Our sense of the similarity of these facts with the condition of our world today makes the truth of this feast immediate. Not a lot has changed. There are still poor nations occupied by the powerful. There is still violence inflicted by troops and there are still zealots here and everywhere who madly resort to violence and terror to have their way and expel foreign troops in order to establish a political/religious empire of their own.
In the midst of it all, God still longs for us. We still celebrate Christmas and try to remember why while arguing over how to greet one another respectfully and be grateful for what we have rather than think about what we want.
The simple story we tell this day (night) is about relationships: what we mean to God,
what Joseph and Mary mean to one another, what Elizabeth means to Mary, what the birth of John means to Zachary, what we mean to one another. Our God is a God of Relationship: Father, Son, and Spirit, a God who not only loved this world into existence but also “so loved the world” as to become one with and in it.
If we are made in the image of this God, then we are a people of relationship who must resist every day anything that would isolate, separate, or exclude us from another.
We have, all of us, come from relationship and we are made for it. Nothing must disrupt nor diminish the importance of our relationships to one another: no ideology, no political system, no material stuff, no ambition, no job, no language should cloud or dim the vision of the human family that is so tenderly set before us with the story of Bethlehem.
This does not mean that we reject all things or refuse to grace our lives with beautiful
gifts or time-saving technology. These things can enhance the personal world and express our interior lives while bringing us together.
However, it does mean that we must spend as much time and effort on our interior lives and relationships as we do on the things we produce and consume so that these things do not take possession of us. And so, I give you a challenge today and propose a plan for the next seven days, the last seven days of this year. When we next gather and assemble in this holy place, we shall pass into another year of grace and life before God. Each night for the next seven, ponder the mystery, the joyful mysteries of your lives. Speak to friends and family members of the gift they are in your life. Let no one be taken for granted.
Then, when we next assemble in the name of the Lord, we will have refused to let go of Christmas, and what it means will have survived the trash pick-up and next month’s credit card statement. Because it’s about relationships and most of all about how God longs for us waits for us, and wants to feed us with His presence every day, every week, and every step of the way. This is the source of Christmas Joy. This is the heart of our wonder.