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December 24, 2005

Anne Jensen - Dec 24th

Christmas Eve 2005

We have finally arrived at the loveliest night of the year. We all love stories, and there has never been a more beautiful nor a more hopeful story than the one told by St. Luke in the passage we have just heard. How many times have you heard this story? Have you memorized it? I find myself anticipating the words, just as I anticipate a favorite piece of music. And when I hear it I am thrilled to the center of my being. Does it work this way for you?

This year perhaps more than any other time in the last 30 years, we long to put our trust in God whose titles include “wonderful counselor, mighty God, Everlasting Father, and Prince of Peace.” The invitation for this night is simple: come and worship.

We adults approach this night with trepidation. Children don’t have to worry. They still feel the thrill of it. Grown ups, however, do worry.

--Am I going to be disappointed if I don’t feel the wonder I felt when I was a child?

--Is this Christmas Eve going to pass me by if I don’t feel it? Please God, let me feel something again, don’t let this night leave me indifferent; or worse, don’t let it leave me worrying about dinner tomorrow, about whether family members will get along with one another, or about the anxiety of gift-giving.

LEAVE ALL THAT WORRY AND ANXIETY AT THE DOOR…. By now we have done about as much as we can do. It’s time to change gears. It’s time to stop engineering the perfect Christmas. Gather around with those we love and cherish; welcome the stranger and praise God whose glory is beyond comprehension.

Tonight we remember the night when everything changed. Everything is either before or after this night. This is the night when heaven and earth were brought close to each other. This is the night when God became human. This is the night when the archangel spoke to the shepherds, and said, “Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.” And then, just to underline the importance of this announcement, the heavens were filled with angels who were praising God and offering a benediction of peace. In a burst of light and energy, everything changed.

And yet, no one knew that at the time. All this happened in the midst of ordinariness; people go back to their home towns, people have babies, shepherds watch their sheep; the government levies taxes. Only the angels knew about the change. We are celebrating a moment when God enters history and nothing is ever the same after that.

What a contrast to what we think of as Christmas—a set of traditions to be preserved: hearing the same story, which is properly read from the King James Version; Christmas decorations that have been passed down through the generations; a vision of family gathered at the hearth, a special dinner—all things that take us back to our childhoods: whether our childhood Christmases were really like this or we only pretended they were. We want to hold on to the Christmas we know and hope for.

Yet an irony of our faith is that on the very feast of the nativity of Christ Jesus, when we so much want nothing to ever change, we are, in fact, celebrating the great moment of change in human history. In Jesus God becomes human…God Incarnate, God in the flesh.

Bishop Steve Charleston says, “Incarnation means change. It means God coming into our time and into our space and into our lives and into our comfort zone and shaking things up.” God is creating and recreating in us a new way of being and challenging us to take seriously the changes that surround us and to be co-creators with God in the world around us.

Here at Trinity we are in the midst of change. Change is always a challenge because we don’t know what the future is going to look like. The message of the angel is that we are not to be afraid. God is with us.

What change is God working in you?

Because of the incarnation all of life becomes an arena of God's extraordinary saving activity, even here in Menlo Park. Recognizing this, suggests Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, is the secret to living the entire year with a sense of God's presence. This is the change that comes with the Nativity. God is not just “out there;” God is in the middle of our lives. The Archbishop puts it this way: "Here we are daily, not necessarily attractive and saintly people, along with other not very attractive and saintly people, managing the plain prose of our everyday service, deciding daily to recognize the prose of ourselves and each other as material for something unimaginably greater—the Kingdom of God, the glory of the saints, reconciliation and wonder." (Where God Happens, 2005).

We are the raw material for the Kingdom of God, for becoming saints, for being agents of reconciliation and for being people of wonder, whose eyes have a special lens for seeing the presence of God in everyday moments, everyday lives, and everyday situations.


Really!

In Jesus Christ, through the Holy Spirit, God dwells in us and we in him. Through him we can be changed and we can be agents of change and reconciliation.

St. Paul captures this so well in his second letter to the Corinthians. “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.”

In this broken and hurting world we have been commissioned to find pathways for reconciliation. Hear the angel say, “Do not be afraid.” Do not be afraid to hold a vision of peace and work for it, among each other, within our families, within our congregation, within our communities, and within our world. On this night, when we are blessed by the mystery of God coming among us as an infant, a baby to love and admire, can we allow our egos to slip away so that our true selves can be renewed and shaped by this most wonderful love?

If we can do this, our lives will be changed. Our changed lives make it possible for other lives to change when we love the infant Jesus, and when we care for all children—when we care that they have safe drinking water and enough food; when we care that they have an education instead of having a gun thrust in their hands and forced to join some ragtag army; and when we care that they can have medical attention.

Again it’s ironic that this holiday that we always want to be the same is the same celebration that creates change. It is a celebration year after year after year that no year is ever the same and that our lives are never the same and that every year we are older and hopefully wiser but still engaged with our God. The God of history is always making things happen. Change is not something that we as Christians should fear. Change is the nature of life. It is the nature of the church.

We must not fear the new but be active agents of bringing the new as God brings the new into the world every day, every week, every month, every year, and, yes, every Christmas. When we bring ourselves to the Christ child in the manger and offer Him all our hopes and fears we make room in our hearts for change…a change of heart that leads to reconciliation, a change that gives voice to justice, a change that enlarges our mercy and compassion. We are changed and we effect change—just as the flapping of a butterfly’s wing in Brazil can affect the weather in California.

So how shall we celebrate this festival of change? First I would say let us approach the manger with wonder and love. Do you know the power of a baby to change a hardened heart? Of course you do; it is not just sentimentality. We are hard-wired to love babies and to respond to their vulnerability. At an even deeper level we are made to seek God. St. Augustine wrote, “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee.” With an open and loving heart let us turn to each other and to the world to seek reconciliation and peace.


Tomorrow we shall rest in the traditions of Christmas, in the warmth of our families and friends, wrapping them around us like swaddling clothes. Let it be familiar and warm and loving. But the next day, we shall step out into the world changed and renewed. We shall be ambassadors for Christ, using the gifts God gave us to give glory to God.

We shall step out in our own incarnation and once again pick up our gifts and go to work with God to face change and make change for the glory of God's name.

This evening let us rest in the peace that is holy and in a time where time itself seems to stand still and the winds and tides of change are held back with the sounds of angelic voices drifting through a starry, cold night.

Let us pray:
Almighty God of change, God of what is new and what is coming to be, we want to be your partners in the world around us. But on this Christmas Eve we want to rest with you in that timeless moment of your nativity-- in the mystery of your incarnation. Let your Spirit so comfort us this night, so wrap us up in the swaddling clothes of your truth and compassion and mercy that we rest gently in your arms as a baby lying in a manger and know that there is time enough tomorrow for us to join you in changing the world. Amen.