December 25, 2007 At Saint Mark Norman, OK
It is beginning to dawn on me that as long as we keep celebrating the birth of Christ in the way we have for the past few weeks, we are never going to get it right. Nice as it is for our economy to shop until we drop or run out of money; wonderful as it is to receive cards and family photos from friends with those letters that tell us way more than we need to know, and thrilling as it is to travel and spend some time with our families, if you get there at all with luggage, it is getting more and more difficult to get the point. Our children grow up thinking this is a birthday party for Jesus, and never get deeper into the mystery, the wonder, and the power that lurks in the reality of this festival.
The Incarnation is not something we celebrate.
It is something we must become.
What is beginning to dawn of me then is that as long we simply stick with the celebration and all its trappings and customs, enjoyable as they really are; we may never become anything. We are getting so trapped in all of this that the only thing we are becoming is greedy, guilty, depressed, and exhausted. I don’t think that is what we are supposed to be become because of the Incarnation!
The wonder of this night does not stop in Bethlehem. There is no point in celebrating the birth of Christ without wondering and asking “why?” “What was God thinking?” This Gospel we proclaim in a story both familiar yet strange, does not simply speak of God and what God does, it also speaks of what has happened to humanity.
There is in this story a marvelous cast of characters, a whole parade of people touched by this birth: an aging priest and his childless wife; a young woman called to give birth in a way unheard of in human history;
the dark night sky shining with God’s glory and shepherds hearing “Good News of Great Joy”; an aging couple living and waiting for God’s anointed. And Matthew gives us an anointed king who is really a brutal killer, a young and bold prophet who ends up in jail for his courage beheaded while his “messiah” runs around helping everyone else, a young man full of dreams and hopes whose fiancé comes up pregnant, wise men from afar who follow a star and kneel before a child. It is in the end, an affirmation of humanity in all its brokenness and its glory. It is a story told again and again in countless unnamed people among whom God’s Word continues to become flesh and dwell among us.
Those angels were bending near the earth with their harps of gold (not to heaven). They were speaking to us (ordinary people), shepherds at work no less! It’s all so familiar, yet so strange. Salvation breaks into creation by a birth. What could be more ordinary, common place, and normal than a birth? Yet behind it all for people of faith there is yet something curious. This silent night we find goodness and holiness in a scene so ordinary that we might miss it if it were not for our brothers and sisters who came before us. They left us with a faith that is capable of knowing that in the very ordinariness of our lives and times, goodness is more powerful than evil, faith is stronger than death. A stable can be cathedral. Humanity can become the dwelling place of the divine. Bread can become God. And so, this feast is then, not something simply to celebrate every three hundred and sixty five days, but something we become every day. “What shall we become?” we might ask ourselves in silence as we gaze a baby in a manger. what is it we shall become………………………. and when?