Christmas Eve sermon

Christmas Eve 2011 ['preached' on the internet]

No longer can I hear the story of the nativity with the same ears or see it with the same eyes of my imagination. For a long time, my heart has ached upon hearing the words, ‘O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie....’ Having gone to Bethlehem, no longer a little town, my vision of the place has changed.

The basilica, Christendom’s oldest complete and working church now devoted to Jesus’ birthplace, like so many other places in the Middle East, is a place of dispute. The Orthodox run the old part of the church where one gains access to the grotto that is the birthplace of Christ whereas the Franciscans hold masses in an adjoining church that is a smaller duplication of the older basilica. Elsewhere in the complex, Armenians worship.

The birthplace of Jesus is marked by a large star that most recently dates to 1717 and was also a source of dispute in the 19th century. Regardless of who wants the star in place and who does not, the star is clearly in a cave which was the typical place for animals to be kept as well as for women to give birth. Facing the star is the place where the manger was, just a couple of footsteps away. To venerate both, one must kneel down and stick one’s head under an altar and be careful not to bang one’s head against the suspended votives that surround the two spots.

The day I visited Jesus’ birthplace, things were not flowing smoothly in the basilica for the simple reason that Senator John McCain was visiting. He and his entourage swept past the long queue of people to descend the steep stairs into the grotto. The rest of us hoi poloi were left standing, waiting and waiting and waiting.

To leave Bethlehem to return to Jerusalem, one has to go through the partition wall, the thirty-foot high barrier that separates Israel from Palestine. It is forbidding, foreboding with its concertina wire up top, the gun turrets every so far, the huge sliding doors that allow army vehicles into the space between the two countries. Pedestrians walk through a cattleshoot-like tunnel to leave Palestine, enter the security area before exiting into Israel. The Palestinian side of the wall is covered by graffiti — exceptionally artistic paintings — whereas the Israeli side is barren.

Just as it is impossible to separate out the political from the spiritual today, so it was in Jesus’ day. Why should the Son of God be born into such a humble family, to an unwed mother who should have been cast off and rejected? Why should the Holy Family have had to scrounge for housing were it not for the census — a census dictated by an occupying force, the Romans. Then as now, the land where Jesus was born was under dispute. Most of all, why should God have chosen to irrupt into history at that point in time in that small person of a fragile baby?

Every year we come face-to-face with the mystery of the Incarnation, God-made-flesh, Emmanuel, in Jesus the Christ. Every year we have to grapple with the paradox of the splendour of God’s universe and the particularity of the crib. Every year we are reminded that the soft wood of the crib becomes the hard wood of the cross and that through this tiny infant humanity was redeemed. It is an awful lot to contemplate. In some ways, we avoid it all by the frenzy of shopping and preparing the household for guests and fancy meals. The mystery of the Incarnation is so mind-boggling when one gets down to it, that one chooses to focus on the candles and sentimentality of imagined perfect Christmas celebrations instead.

Underneath all the lights, wrappings, feasts, music and commotion, though, lies our simple human need to know that we are loved… loved beyond measure by the same God who created the universe and the Son of Humanity. That assurance is what we really seek. We yearn to hear God’s heartbeat under our ears, to know that God is as close as our breath.

Knowing that God loves us unconditionally and immeasurably will not take away the pain there is. God’s love won’t find us a job or housing or restore the ravaged hillsides and rivers of Vermont to their pre-Irene status. God’s love will not end cancer or improve the economy or bring back lost loves and friendships. Those sufferings are part of the finitude of humankind, they are the human condition. These limitations do, however, challenge us to make a difference — to bind up the broken-hearted, to heal the sick, to give water to the thirsty, to clothe the naked, to give food to the hungry, to visit those in jail. For those of us who know and love God, we are called to change this world to one where God’s mercy and justice — God’s jubilee — break into this otherwise incomplete and shattered world.

By struggling to infuse our world with God’s grace, we continue in the spirit that brought us Jesus who, as God made flesh, showed us God’s love. Jesus, the Alpha and the Omega, the source, the beginning — he, of the father’s love begotten.

We yearn for peace, we yearn for a healed world… and most of all, we yearn for God.

Come, Lord Jesus, come.

Come, fill our hearts.

Come, break down the walls that separate us.

Come, show us God’s love so that we might show it to others.

Come close once again.

Come, Lord Jesus, come.