Sermon at The Church of the Holy Apostles, New York City,
December 24, 2006, Christmas Eve
The Reverend Elizabeth G. Maxwell
Isaiah 9: 2 - 4, 6 - 7
Psalm 96
Titus 2: 11 - 14
Luke 2: 1 - 20
 

     In the name of the one who humbled himself to share our humanity, that we might share the life of God.  Amen.

     In the last few days leading up to this joyous Christmas Eve, a poem has been rattling around in my head.  I finally surrendered to it, and decided that I would like to share it with you.  It’s written by the English liturgist Janet Morley, and it’s called The Bodies of Grownups. 

The bodies of grownups
come with stretch marks and scars,
faces that have been lived in,
relaxed breasts and bellies,
backs that give trouble
and well-worn feet:
flesh that is particular,
 and obviously mortal.
They also come
with bruises on their heart,
wounds they can’t forget,
and each of them
a company of lovers in their soul,
who will not return
and cannot be erased.
And yet I think there is a flood of beauty
beyond the smoothness of youth;
and my heart aches for that grace of longing
that flows through bodies
no longer straining to be innocent,
but yearning for redemption. 

     “no longer straining to be innocent, but yearning for redemption.”

     Now, I realize that on first blush this poem may seem like a strange choice for a Christmas Eve sermon.  After all, it doesn’t talk about angels or shepherds or the birth of the baby Jesus.  I think, though, that the reason that it took root in me this last week is because it speaks of essential themes of this Feast of the Incarnation.  And it suggests what is at stake for us who come here to church on this holy night.

     The first theme touched on by the poem and touched on by this festival is the theme of journey.  We have been, those of us who are churchgoers, on the journey of Advent- which this year has been very short, it seems, because Advent IV was just this morning and we are hardly caught up with ourselves.  We’re not ready!  Getting here to church has taken all that we could manage, perhaps twice in one day.  That’s true if we are regulars – and it may have taken all that you could manage if this is your first time in a long time.

     More profoundly though, we come to church on this evening because of the journeys that our lives have brought us on.  Those journeys are written on our bodies and on our hearts, in stretch marks and scars and wounds and joys; they are the journeys that reflect who we have been, who we have become, and who we are becoming.  They contain our delights and deepest sorrows, our sexuality, our work, our aging, our families and our friendships, disappointments and illnesses, and grievous losses, secrets, fears, and longings for ourselves, for others, for our world which is so troubled.

     We come this night with baggage and experiences.  We come with lives and journeys that are unfolding still and are unfinished, and these stories of our journeys knit together in some mysterious way as we are all here together on this night in a manner that we can barely imagine.

     Our journeys and our stories knit together too with that precious and familiar story of the first Christmas, which also recounts a journey – maybe more than one.  It tells of a census called by the Emperor, of a young man and his betrothed far from their home, a woman late in her first pregnancy and then giving birth to her first child, giving birth in a barn because there is no room in the normal lodging in that town so far from where they normally live.

     She gives birth in a kind of a way station, among the animals.  It is insecure, temporary.  The manger is the resting place where the child is laid and swaddled, after an exhausting labor, after an exhausting journey to get to Bethlehem.

     And this journey of the Holy Family is joined by the journey of the shepherds who are out in the fields, watching their sheep.  They are alerted by the angels.  They are surprised – they’re not expecting anything like this.  They are rough people, outsiders.  One commentator says, “We can think of them as being kind of like bikers, or gypsies.”  But they’re called to come and wonder at the baby, and although at first they are afraid (because why would God be speaking to them?) their fear gives way to joy and wonder, and they hasten to see.  And they tell Mary and Joseph what they’ve heard and seen from the angels, and they praise the child and vanish from the story, having done their part.

     We are not told any information about the journey of the angels on their great wings, but the tradition does tell of the mysterious journey of Emmanuel, God with us- perhaps the longest journey of all in self-emptying and vulnerability- the journey of the one who humbled himself to share in our humanity – Mary’s boy Jesus, the baby lying in the manger.

     So on this night there is a convergence of journeys: ours, Mary’s and Joseph’s, the shepherds’…all of us coming to this manger where the infant Christ lies sleeping, where he wakes to cry, where he’s hungry, where he’s touched and handled and held by his loving parents.  As the old hymn says, “The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.”

     This touching and handling and holding leads me to the second theme which is, of course, bodies.  The Christmas story is so very physical and earthy, isn’t it?  The messiness of the birth is not told, but it must have been so very  messy – blood and water and sweat, tears and mother’s milk.  She would have been a very young first time mother.  We can imagine what a blessing the other human’s presence was: Joseph, doing the best he could, catching the baby with his hands, soothing, swaddling.  We can imagine the sounds and the smells of the beasts in the dark, and the rough wood of the feeding trough that becomes the cradle.  It has always meant a great deal to me that the animals were there; it’s as if the story tells us that the Incarnation touches all flesh, not just humans’.

     The story implies the body experience of fear and loneliness and exhaustion, and also the heart-opening tenderness and amazement of the parents as the child emerges from his mother’s body, flesh of her flesh.  The other great Christmas gospel tells us that this flesh of Mary’s flesh is the Word made flesh, the revelation of God’s love lying in the manger.  It is particular flesh, as the poem says, particular as each of us is, and it is determined also by larger historical and political currents.  The Jesus child is already a refugee; he lives in an occupied country.  He is poor, marginal, an outsider for whom there is no room.

     All of the life and ministry of this man, whom the child will grow up to be- his preaching good news to the poor, his eating with outcasts, his healing the sick, his breaking down barriers- is prefigured here in the manger story.  This child will grow to take on the full consequences of a life of love and solidarity with those most in need.  He will take on the full consequences of challenging the powers that be.  He will bear all that human beings suffer, and all that human beings do to one another, and he will transform that in love, in the flesh  He will say to his friends on the night before he dies, “This is my body; it is broken for you.”

     And the incarnation that we celebrate this night is not just about Jesus; it’s about us.   It’s about where God is to be found, not long ago or somewhere else, but here and now in the flesh, in the midst of human life.  Surely, in the human lives (and we dare say, the other than human lives as well) of those we see as marginal and outcast and other.  Christmas speaks of the preciousness of flesh, of bodies – speaks of the Iraqi woman maimed by falling bombs who doesn’t even show up in the casualty count; of the child dying of a preventable disease in Africa; of the strange and marvelous fins, feather and fur of some endangered animal species; of the body of one of our soup kitchen guests, smelling of sweat or of urine, one from whom we might want to avert our eyes.

     These, says Christmas, are bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh.  Our stories converge; we are knit together in the incarnation, and God is also in the midst of the more familiar particular human lives and relationships of each one of us.  God is revealed in the tenderness and passion of a lover’s kiss, the touch of a dog’s fur, the laughter of a child, the vulnerability of one of our elders, in any act of kindness, in the making of beauty, in our groans of prayer and songs of praise, and in our work for justice – God is revealed.  And Christmas points us to the wonder, the hallowing, the grace filled-ness of embodied life.

     Our embodied life is imperfect.  It is broken and full of failing, and yet here is God.

     And that, in turn, brings me to the final theme of this night, which is redemption.  The angel speaks to the shepherds, “For you is born this day, in the city of David, a Savior who is the Messiah, the Lord.”  The poem speaks of a perspective we may come to after a certain amount of life experience.  We so often say that Christmas is for children, and it is.  And it is also for adults- no longer straining to be innocent but yearning for redemption.

     What is the redemption, the salvation, the wholeness we so long for?  What is the wholeness we long for personally, in our relationships, in this world so full of violence, for our planet so endangered?  We need a sense of redemption and wholeness that does not pretend that we can go backwards, but rather takes in somehow all that we are, all that has been done- that loves, that forgives, that imagines, that transfigures.

     How does this newborn child redeem us?  One answer to that is revealed in Jesus’ life and teaching and death and resurrection, in his way of love.  And in our lives as we follow and learn and are challenged to love and to be loved, as we live our faith by God’s grace, and as we fail and are loved still, and begin again.  In that way our journey converges with God’s story of incarnate love revealed at the manger, and the question of redemption takes our whole lives and more.

     But here, at the manger this Christmas Eve, there is a particular invitation to redemption.  Today, a child is born for you, sing the angels.  God is revealed in the Christ child’s flesh, in this and every moment, and we are invited to ponder, as Mary does in her heart, the divine presence in this newborn baby – the humble, the hidden, the infinitely vulnerable, the infinitely needy.  We are invited to feel how dependant this child is on our love, our care. For this is how God comes on Christmas Eve – in naked flesh, in weakness, wide open, brand new.

     The paradox of Christmas is that we are redeemed by being loved and trusted, not because we have it all together, God knows.  We may be like the shepherds who have to hear, “Don’t be afraid.”  But at the manger, as the sacred story converges with our stories, if we will stay awake, if we will receive this manger child- then we too in some mysterious way give birth to the holy.  And we are then called to wonder at and nurture the new life of God being born in our lives.

     The manger is a way station, a resting place, undefended, unfinished.  But as we open to this mystery, we are born anew even as we are birth givers, for, in the words of Meister Eckhart, God is always needing to be born.

     Can we take this in?  It is the great good news of Christmas: today, God has come among us in vulnerable flesh, with a love that embraces all that we are, that asks us to be vulnerable too, and that needs the love that we can give.

     In contemplation of the newborn babe this night, we may find a way to see the precious, broken, wondrous beings who share with us in the life of the body as also bearing God in the days to come.  Open your heart, ponder, give birth, be born anew and carry forth the life of God into the world, and so – again and again, redemption comes.

     Let us join with the angels’ song, “Glory to God in the Highest and Peace on Earth, Peace to absolutely everyone.”

     A very Merry Christmas to you all.

     Amen.

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