Christmas Eve: Journeys
Thumbnail image taken from Wandering Wisemen Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/thewanderingwisemen/?ref=page_internal
Clare L. Hickman
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Ferndale
Dec 24, 2020—Christmas Eve
Isaiah 9:2-7; Luke 2:8-20
One of my favorite things on Facebook is a site called the Wandering Wisemen. Every day during Advent, these Playmobil magi and their camel Hezekiah make the journey toward Christmas. They travel afar, encountering strange things, having marvelous adventures, and learning a great many things about themselves and each other as they trek from kitchen to bathroom, over bookcases and through laundry baskets. Here they are, for instance, on one of the early days, showing the gifts they are bringing. Hezekiah, it is noted, privately believes that his is the greatest gift of all.[1] Or here, when Balthazar refuses to even consider the claim that Gaspar’s kale chips tasted “just like Pringles.”[2]
Every year it brings me joy. But in a year during which traveling for the holidays means telling the kids to come up from the basement, it has been particularly apt to follow a great journey that takes place within the walls of a single house.
No doubt about it, we too have learned to “travel in place.” Of necessity, we have spent more time at home, more time with ourselves, than many of us ever had before. Which has been both stressful and insightful, a gift and a challenge
If you live with a spouse, and perhaps children: you might well have been living and working together, 24/7. And there’s no way around the fact that spending more time together is likely to have been a growth experience. Especially if there are things you had been ignoring, difficulties you’d been dealing with by avoidance, this time will have brought those front and center. Fault lines will have become impossible to ignore.
But even if you don’t live with other people, there is still the challenge presented by how very much time we have all been spending with ourselves.
We cannot journey out in the world. Instead, we have been invited (“invited”) to journey within ourselves. Within our own inner landscape. And whereas you might think we’d know the way in here, it can be a lot more confusing than we expected. It would be nice if we were automatically like the Wandering Wisemen, on a journey toward the God who chooses to dwell within us. But much of the time, it feels more like wandering vaguely, or (frankly) like getting stuck under the sofa like a Roomba, destined to keep bumping against the wall until our battery dies.
There’s a metaphor in there somewhere, of God finding us and gently carrying us back to the recharging station. And hey, that might be exactly what you need right now, and this isn’t the time to worry about following the example of our little Playmobil friends and their wise camel. There will be time enough, a lifetime in fact, to ponder what to pack, where to go, and how to find our way.
Some people are good at such things: they’re terrific travelers. They’re either super organized, and great at planning and packing for the journey ahead; or they are great at rolling with it, when things don’t go quite as planned. Brian, for instance, was an amazing traveler on both fronts: great at planning, and never lost his cool when things went wrong.
But not everyone has those skills, especially when it comes to internal journeys.
So we’re probably going to take the long way to Bethlehem. The scenic route on our quest to believe and trust that God desires to be born in us. Some fits and starts on our pilgrimage to come face to face with the Creator of all things in the most humble and powerless places of human life. We will almost certainly get lost, or led astray by things that claim to be the way, when they’re really just shiny tourist traps. We will have packed the wrong things, taking along ten pairs of rainboots when what we really needed was our willingness to go barefoot. And we’ll lie awake at night sometimes, afraid that we don’t know the language, forgetting that there is no language God cannot speak.
Which is to say: unlike my beloved late husband, our preparations will go astray and we might not react well when things don’t go as planned. But that’s okay too. Because even at that moment when you yank the car to the side of the road somewhere outside of Paris, and storm off through the (admittedly very picturesque) hedgerow, even that moment is part of the journey.
In the willing moments and the unwilling. In the preparation and in the spontaneity. In the carefully planned gifts we want to lay before God, and in the things we surprise ourselves by giving Her instead. We set out for Bethlehem. This is the journey we are taking, pandemic or no pandemic. This is the visit we can make this Christmas.
Relationship with God invites us to journey within ourselves. The God who made us draws us forward, like the shepherds, calling us toward glory. We’ve been told (over and over we’ve been told) that we will find it (find glory) in surprising places; but to be honest, part of us never really believed that. The shepherds probably didn’t either, and neither did the Magi. But there it was anyway: the glory of the God of the Universe, found in poverty, found in risk, found in humility, found in joy.
For many, this has been a year that has taken us deep into our vulnerabilities. Into our loneliness, into the growth edges of our relationships, into financial insecurity, into fears about our health and the well-being of our country. Which is hard. All of it is hard. But it also brings us closer to Bethlehem, closer to the manger. For as we travel on our inner journey, it is in those ragged places within us, the places of uncertainty and discomfort, that Jesus will be born.
May you be blessed on the journey. May you be guided by stars and angels along the way, drawing you toward that place where heaven and earth meet and the Christ child is born. In Bethlehem. And in the most humble, wounded, doubtful part of you. Christ is born and God is with us; once, and again, and eternally!
A joyful and blessed Christmas to us all. Amen.
[1] https://www.facebook.com/thewanderingwisemen/photos/a.1506079306347674/2835372933418298
[2] https://www.facebook.com/thewanderingwisemen/photos/a.1506079306347674/2833037973651794