Christmas 2022

Clare L. Hickman

St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Ferndale

Dec 24, 2022—Christmas Eve

Isaiah 9:2-7; Luke 2:8-20

I never quite got my outside lights up this year. For several weeks, I just couldn’t get into the spirit. Then, I finally decided that putting up decorations might kickstart that Christmas-y feeling, but I had to put them up by myself … and wound up knocking the whole big reel of lights off the top of the stepladder. I stared down at them, knowing I had shattered several of the settings. They were toast, and I’m not gonna lie, I was tempted to just walk away. But I pulled myself together to gather them all up, fold up the step ladder, and put everything away. My Christmas was apparently going to have to come without the aid of porch lights.

          And indeed, here we all are. Singing ourselves “joyful and triumphant;” hearing angels proclaim glory to God in the highest; and hoping that we will feel that spark of joy, the blazing hope, the almost-painfully sweet awareness of God-with-us.

          There is so much that can get in the way, crowding into the clearing we’ve attempted to make. So many tattered parts of our life that feel out of place in the picture of Christmas, so much heartache and worry that still weigh our hearts down when we were hoping they might, at least for a moment, feel light.

Which can leave a person in the middle of a church service, all twinkly and hushed and beautiful, feeling out of step somehow with the whole business. Feeling like this story isn’t really for them, because if it were, wouldn’t they FEEL a little more glorious, and joyful, and triumphant?

Hush then. And close your eyes, if you need to shut out the shimmer, in order to hear the whole story. A story that very much includes angels singing “Glory to God in the highest,” but makes it clear that such a song comes smack in the middle of a story about broken families and scandalous relationships; about poverty, homelessness, and refugees; about weighty governmental regulation, on top of armed occupation, rounded out by state-sanctioned murder.

Which is to say that the angel song isn’t MEANT to be a celebration of all the ways in which the world around it is wonderful and perfect and lovely. For all that Advent is a season of preparation, Christmas doesn’t come because we are ready. We probably aren’t ready AT ALL.

But Christmas comes anyway. For no other reason than that God’s deepest desire is to be in relationship with us, and our own yearnings for that very same thing reach back towards God. So Christmas comes anyway. Not as a God who swoops in and decorates our tree and makes the dinner, or even a God who can wave a divine hand to end war and poverty and all the other damage that comes from human selfishness. Instead, Christmas comes as a God who will be with us, right here with us, in all of the struggles and joys that the story of a very real child born into a very real world can bring to life for us.

Inhale: God is with you. Exhale: Especially when it doesn’t feel like it.

The scriptures invite us to breathe this Christmas story into our very souls. Not just the shiny parts, like those singing angels. And not just the surface realities of shepherds and magi and innkeepers. But all those people who were surely just as people-y and messed up and magnificent as all the folks in the world today. All of those characters, with God longing to be with them, to know them, and somehow, through that, to save them all.  

Walk into the story, and you will find them. Walk into the story, and you will find yourself.

You will find the innkeeper who refused to give Mary and Joseph a room. An innkeeper who’s surely been run ragged all week, with all these people in town for the census. Whose hip makes it hard for her to sleep, and she probably took it out on that nice couple, and doesn’t that sound just a little bit familiar?

You will find the shepherds, keeping watch over their flocks. We already know how far outside polite society they are, living as they do with the animals. But scripture invites us to imagine what else they might have brought with them to that hillside. Worry for a dying father, perhaps. Or the ecstatic, terrifying hope of a plan to marry a sweetheart, or look for a new job, or move to a new town. All of them with a whole life’s worth of the same kinds of thoughts and dreams and fears that you have.

And then there’s the magi. Whom we grew up thinking of as exotic foreign kings in fancy robes, and have now realized as eastern sages, practitioners of a mystic religion that we don’t really understand. What brings them on this journey? Is Balthazar trying to wrestle down a guilty dissatisfaction with the religion his parents raised him in? Does Gaspar’s gut churn with jealousy and insecurity, sick with the realization that another mage is now lauded as the wisest at court? Someone in that caravan is surely wrestling with heartbreak, because of course they are, and maybe it’s Melchior—running away from unrequited love back home, or perhaps chasing it, never daring to speak it aloud to one of his traveling companions.

All of them part of the larger movement of the story: the shepherds there as the poor, to whom angels sing the promise; the magi there as signs of the nations who will be drawn to the Good News of God-with-us. But they are also real people with a whole person-load of things that push and pull at them.

And so are you. You are part of the larger story, part of the humanity that God longs so deeply to be in relationship with, that He comes to be born as one of us. And you are also here as the individual that you are. Like the innkeeper and the shepherds and the magi, filled with all the highly questionable goodness and curious fallibility that surely draws God to each and every one of us in the first place.

So you’ve deposited yourself here tonight, perhaps feeling a bit like a Christmas fraud, wondering if you’ll allow yourself to be transported to Bethlehem, to greet the birth of the child. But fear not. You don’t need to be transported anywhere, because the whole point of Christmas is that God is coming to you. Right there, wherever you are, in whatever condition you happen to be. They shall call his name Emmanuel, because Jesus is the sign of how deeply God longs to be with us. With YOU, in all your messy, unlit, not at all prepared magnificence. With you, all the way, no matter what. Ride or die.

That’s the good news of Christmas, my friends. May the deep truth of it spark within you, and sustain you long past the holiday (way, WAY past that cold day in January when *you* have to take the lights down off your porch). Merry Christmas, one and all. Amen.