Christmas Sermon
Are we ready for the baby?
Merry Christmas.
It's good to see you all here,
to celebrate this feast,
gathered as a spiritual family.
Maybe we can for a few days,
enjoy the goodness and friendliness,
Even from bad and unfriendly people
Once a year.
I’m not the sort to complain that Christmas cheer happens so infrequently.
If it happened more frequently, It would get expensive.
Some wonder about the merits of this story.
To some it is sentimental. To others, familiar.
To others, obscure.
Who are these characters, after all, and why do they matter?
These Persian, Pagan magicians, bringing their Eastern and Exotic gifts?
The shepherds, who are your working class vigilantes,
protecting their flock from thieves and politicians,
honoring the honest family.
An Innkeeper,
Animals in the bedroom. Kind of stinky.
Why did the apostles say that God is there,
in this corner of the universe?
Why would we say such a thing? Why would we put God here?
In a stable.
Surrounded by those of ill-repute.
In Judea?
The apostles had begun to gather the people,
To live in a different way,
To live without resentment, and with generosity and gratitude,
to look away from the state and its Gods as the source of their power,
and become a community of hope and love.
The questions were asked about Jesus, the pilgrim:
Who is this man? Where did this Jesus come from?
Did he come from the Bronx? Or from Chappaqua?
Was he a public school graduate? Or did he attend St. Paul's?
Did he go community college? Or Georgetown,
or did he learn everything by himself?
Who were his parents?
Were his parents Democrats or Republicans?
Were they on the social register?
Or were they Gypsies? Who is this man?
So people told stories, stories that led us here
to this evening, in the midst of the shortest days of the year,
Mixed with other holidays, this story where in a short parable
Liberation is placed in the hands of An inconsequential Jewish family.
The church sometimes talks about this child,
this festival, as a gift.
God is with us, the scriptures say.
Rather than God being a concept,
God is known through our material bodies.
God is enfleshed, God suffers.
For most people listening to this story 2000 years ago would have thought
It must have been a mistake. This gift.
It must have been a mistake. The one true thing, the one good thing,
could not have been born here.
People said to the apostles, who tried to figure out how this came to be,
your God, who did not save himself,
your God, who came from nowhere,
your God the peacemaker,
It must have been a mistake.
"It must have been a mistake" they said.
Gods love power.
Gods love to make and break things.
Gods love to play with people's lives,
puff up the powerful,
and discard the rest.
It must have been a mistake.
Nobody could have been born there.
God is an emperor.
God is whatever toy I have.
God is what I say I am.
God is me.
Your God, it must have been a mistake.
He was born,
on the wrong side of the tracks, the Romans would say,
To someone of the wrong social class.
That he was born at all.
That was a mistake.
It must have been a mistake.
But it was no mistake.
The apostles saw a world that was broken.
A common sort of violence,
disease and death that marked people's lives.
the apostles saw that
the exchange of life and death
placed the divine as the author of human cruelty,
and found in the story of Christ,
someone who could change all of that.
We've been given something else, they proclaim.
We've been given something beautiful,
We've been given the one true thing.
We want to give it to the world, this love.
It’s wonderful to give.
But I’m finding giving a bit perplexing these days.
Everything people want
They buy already.
People don’t wait to receive.
If you want a new phone, You buy it.
If you need a new skirt or suit,
You can pay for it later.
If you want a book, Amazon is a few clicks away, and Borders
Is just around the corner.
Target sells well designed furniture, I hear,
There is no need to make your own.
That would take years.
And a lot of mistakes.
People get their own gifts.
Even receiving gifts
Is always a bit of a risk.
Who knows my book collection better than I do.
And who knows if I want a guitar,
Or the new music software.
I’ll buy my own.
I know myself best.
My mother used to consider giving an art.
She said, “you think of giving during the year.
You think of other people.
And when you’ve trained your eye,
You will find something unique,
Something absolutely them.”
It took time to find gifts,
It took a conscientious attention to others.
It probably took my father’s paycheck.
Sometimes, I wonder if this ease makes it
easy it is to break our toys.
To destroy our cities, to break our relationships.
And in our culture, we like things to be disposable,
and convenient. We want the expensive toys,
but even though they are made on the cheap.
If you have enough, if you have power,
you can break whatever toys you want.
You just buy another one.
That's power.
There's no limit on what you can have or own,
or take an then discard.
That's power.
Power is being able to break things.
That's one sort of power.
We know that things break and lives break and hearts break,
and they will always break.
There will be never be a time without us taking
the good things that have been given us,
and squandering them away.
We can't avoid breaking everything,
like trying to avoid stepping on cracks in the sidewalk.
It would be great if we could do that.
If we could so easily make that shift to be
so conscientous
that our lives would always be neat and clean.
This year, I relearned
sometimes when you break things
you can't always fix them.
You drop something, you break something,
you hurt someone,
and the mess is irrevocable.
But perhaps the revelation there is simply,
through this light offered us,
that we learn to see what we've broken.
It's not obvious always, and sometimes we hide in terror
from what it means.
We don't always understand the consequences of our actions.
We don't always see with clarity.
More often we can deceive ourselves.
the story reveals
how easy it is to break things.
The light now shines upon the patterns of cruelty
that we can so easily participate in.
We make things, and that's wonderful,
and we break things.
I wish I could say that salvation is
that we wouldn't break anything.
But we can probably look back at our lives
and see the broken things that have been scattered
along our path. We didn't notice them before,
until we saw the child, the vulnerability, the fragility,
of what we had broken.
Here is God as a child, the story urges us,
pointing to this desperate family.
Can you now take care of him and
His Vast Creation?
Here is the light:
That invites us to mend relationships that are unmended.
Perhaps what the one true thing,
We break things, but it is the light of love itself
that reveals the brokenness in the first place.
Where would we be without that first light,
but blind,
walking through our lives,
unaware of the harm we cause.
This birth is the starting place,
for those who wish to begin again.
Where we go is up to us.
Not up to Ceasar,
Not up to our toys,
but even in our fallenness,
In the unexpected places,
the frailty of our humanity,
the vulnerability of our embodied selves,
is where we find the divine,
the transcendent, the joyful.
A child now leads the way.