Sermon for Christmas Eve, Year A
St. Philip’s In The Hills,
Tucson, AZ
The Rev. Vicki K. Hesse, Dec. 24, 2013
Candlelight Service 7:00pm
Gospel text Luke 2:1-20
May the words of my mouth and the
meditation of all our hearts, be acceptable to you, O Lord, our
strength and our redeemer. Amen
Merry
Christmas! It is good to be with you this evening to
celebrate the mysterious birth of our Lord Jesus Christ.
The opening lines of John O’Donohue’s book Anam
Cara,[1]
offer
a fresh perspective on being human. He writes,
“It is strange to be here.
The mystery never leaves you alone.
Behind your image, below your words, above your
thoughts, the silence of another world waits.”
It is strange to be here, when you think about it.
At the
heart of Christmas, the incarnation of God is strange.
We
celebrate no ordinary birth, no ordinary child.
Jesus is
the light of the world,
the
fullness of God made visible in human life.
This is,
indeed, a mystery worth pondering.
The silence
of another world waits.
The
familiar Gospel contains a mystery
that
never leaves us alone.
It was
not so ordinary for Mary, who,
“…treasured
all these words and pondered them in her heart.”
She
pondered.
In Greek,
word ponder, “soom-bal’-lo,”
means
“to throw together,” or “to combine.”
If Mary
was on Facebook, her “00 Year In Review”
would
throw together these images and posts
from a
very out-of-the-ordinary year in her life:
·
Receiving
Angel Gabriel’s message she will bear a son,
·
Seeing
Elizabeth’s
expressive joy that she is pregnant,
·
Feeling
the societal stigma of a young, engaged girl becoming pregnant before marriage,
·
Traveling
to Bethlehem
with her fiance’,
·
Giving
birth to her son in a stable,
·
Hearing
the exuberance of the shepherds as they, too received an angelic message to
come and see.
Mary had
a lot going on. It was not an ordinary
year.
She wished
for time to fathom the meaning of it all.
Mary
“treasured” the extraordinary circumstances,
as all
mothers do.
Mothers never
forget any what happens with their children.
Mothers hold
in their heart everything the child does,
or suffers, or is said about them.
Mothers
think about these things.
Mothers anxiously
try to find out what it all means
for the future of her child.
Mary,
like all mothers, treasured the words and pondered.
This
Christmas, we do not forget what has happened
in our
last year, our extraordinary circumstances.
Mary invites
us to treasure the lives we are birthing,
what we
suffer and what it means for our future,
through
the lens of this evening’s not-so-ordinary birth.
Mary
invites us to ponder the metaphorical meaning,
the
sacred and symbolic importance of light in the darkness.
The good
news announced in today’s scripture is this:
to us is born this day a
Savior, the Messiah, the Lord.
Personally,
we ponder the seeming darkness.
We
ponder our losses, our loneliness, our longing for change.
We
ponder the darkness, and yet
God
calls us here tonight to let the light of Jesus
seep
into those dark cracks in our individual lives.
Jesus’
light offers a heavenly peace
that is
beyond our understanding.
Meister
Eckhart said,
“Christmas
is the birth of Christ within us
through the
union of God’s spirit with our flesh.”[2]
We are
birthing, tonight,
the
light that heals us from dis-ease of fear,
the
light that delivers us from bondage of selfishness,
the light
that returns us from exile from loneliness.
Indeed,
we proclaim this in our closing hymn,
“O
little town of Bethlehem,”
in which the last verse reads
“o holy
child of Bethlehem,
be born in us, today.”
Communally,
we ponder the seeming darkness of our society.
We
ponder society’s voracious hunger for violence,
rapt
attention to consumerism,
dependence
on power to solve problems of the world,
just as Rome shaped Jesus’
world.
We
ponder this darkness and yet
God
calls us to let the light of Jesus guide our community,
like the
outcast shepherds,
to believe
the peace of another world is possible.
of peace
through justice,
of peace
through simplicity,
of peace
through compassion,
of peace
through gentleness,
of peace
through humility.
Personally
and communally,
we experience
the light of Christ by collaborating with God
to make
the world a better place.
St. Augustine said,
“God
without us will not, and we without God cannot.”
Do not
be afraid, the angel says.
Jesus is
the light in the darkness, so follow that light, \and in so doing, we share the
light with others.
The
National Gallery of London retains a fantastic and
evocative
image of light in the darkness called,
“The
Nativity At Night.”[3]
The 15
Century painting portrays the dark winter night,
cold and
without stars, lit only by glow of the newborn baby.
The composition[4]
of Nativity at Night shows
·
a
brilliant baby Jesus in the center, glowing radiantly outward from his
manger-crib.
·
Young
Mary kneels on the right, her face shining and her posture reverently kneeling
before the manger-crib.
·
Joseph
stands behind her, in the shade of the stable.
·
Several
angels kneel on the left, their faces,
bathed in divine light, peer into the manger and their
hands express child-like wonder.
·
The
doe-eyed ox and donkey faintly appear and look on with curiosity.
·
A
tiny, bright angel zooms across the sky
like a shooting star, carrying the light of Christ
to the terrified shepherds in the distance,
who encircle a campfire to keep watch over their flock.
·
The
shepherds raise their arms in panic and in praise.
Their response, begun in worship,
moves out towards the deep darkness of the world
as they share the light they experience.
The
inspiration of this piece,
St.
Brigid’s vision of the luminous miracle,
describes
Mary’s response to the birth in this way,
“…When
the virgin felt she had already born her child,
she worshipped
him, her head bent down
and her
hands clasped with great honor and reverence
and said
to him, “be welcome, my God, my Lord and my son.”
Indeed, “The
Nativity at Night” expresses
profound
theological truths.
The
light of Jesus does more than point to his transcendence,
the
light draws the viewer into the scene and
asks
of us a response.
The
moment I saw this image in my coffee-table book,[5]
I ran to
tell my friends about it.
I was
compelled to show it to several others,
expressing
the joy and the relief and the mystery.
That is the impulse of Christmas –
To tell out
loud that the light has come.
To see
the light in the mystery of our neighbor.
To live
into the words of the adult Jesus
“whoever
follows me will never walk in darkness
but will
have the light of life.”
Tonight,
the source of peace, God’s word of wisdom,
has been
made human, as hope incarnate.
It is
strange to be here. The mystery never leaves us.
For
Jesus the Christ lives, moves
and has
his being in our world and
the
world lives, moves
and has
its being in Christ.
And nothing
will be the same.
As we
ponder all these things – as we soom-bal’-lo – we can only respond
Gloria!
Glory to
God on High and
Peace to
God’s People on Earth!
Amen
[1] John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom, (New York, HarperCollins, 1997)
page xv
[2] Marcus
Borg & John Dominic Crossan, The
First Christmas: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Birth, (New
York, HarperOne, 1989) 237ff
[3] Summary
information found at http://bit.ly/1iaK9JB
cited on December 20, 2013.
[4]
Composition description inspired by The Rev. Dr. Grant Bayliss, University of Cambridge, at http://bit.ly/1iaKsUS cited on December 20,
2013
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