Sermon - A Christmas Like Every Other (12/24/2020)
Isaiah 9:2-7; Psalm 96; Titus 2:11-14; Luke 2:1-14
I hate to say it, because it sounds like such a cliché, but: This is a Christmas unlike any other.
I know, it is a cliché. This is a Christmas like no other. So much is different, about Christmas this year, so much has to be different. For just about all of us, everything about this holiday, this year, is different. And to be honest, not all of it is bad. At my day job, we were unable to have our annual office Christmas party this year, and to be honest I can’t say that I missed it. And I know for sure that Edgar didn’t miss it.
But this year, a lot of things are different that are not for the better. For thousands upon thousands of people this Christmas will be spent in hospitals or ICUs, or home alone in bed. Or worried about loved ones in hospitals or quarantine and they cannot visit them. And even for those of us who are healthy, many of us will not see the ones we love this year. And we can legitimately ask: What does the story of Christmas have to say in this unique and unprecedented time?
It’s a time when so many of us are simply overwhelmed. I mean, Christmas is always stressful, but even more than in past years. With children having been home, going to school online for months, with lots of people working from home. Many of us are cut off from friends and from all the relationships that we have at school and at work and around the community. Spending so much more time at home, especially now that winter has come again. Some of us are experiencing great stress, others are experiencing a lot of boredom, and loneliness. And the thing that makes it really hard is that the people around us are going through exactly the same thing, and so when we try to lean on them, they are often unable to provide us with the support that we need. And so our level of tension and stress goes up. In this situation of unprecedented anxiety and weariness, what does Christmas have to say?
I’m afraid that I don’t have a new Christmas story to tell you this year. Instead, I have the same Christmas gospel story that we read on Christmas Eve every year – the story of an unmarried teenage girl, carrying her first child, setting out with her boyfriend on a journey that, on foot or riding a donkey, would take a week to complete, even if you weren’t nine months pregnant. And then giving birth alone, with no family or friends around, in a stranger’s stable, surrounded by farm animals and their sounds and smells. Knowing that God never promised that they would not experience stress and hardship and loneliness – but believing that God would come and be present to them in the middle of it. That’s the story I have for you this Christmas.
This past year has been tumultuous in so many different ways. The pandemic has opened the eyes of many people as to how deep the inequalities and injustices of our society have become. Some of us are doing just fine, and yet the lines at the local food pantries here in Mount Vernon have more than doubled in the last year. year. Those of us lucky enough to own a home have seen our home values go up, while hundreds of our neighbors who have lost their jobs or income are now facing eviction during the winter, with the pandemic still spreading.
In all of this, some of us have found it our duty as Christians called to love our neighbors as ourselves to join with those working for an end to these profound inequities. And some of us have resented the suggestion that somehow we are to blame for this situation, knowing how much adversity many of us have experienced. And others have felt that, regardless of whose fault it is that our world has gotten so messed up, if it’s not our responsibility to fix it, whose is it? And however we have reacted to these questions, I think we’ve all had the experience that people we love have reacted differently from us, and we mourn the distance and the strain that this has put on our relationships that wasn’t there just a year ago.
So in this world of deep divisions and mistrust, what new word is being spoken to us tonight, about inequity and injustice, about broken relationships and broken dreams and broken bodies and broken faith? Once again, I’m afraid I don’t have any new story to give you. I have the same story we tell every Christmas Eve: A story of an emperor and a governor who imposed hardships on people so they could raise more taxes to benefit the privileged at the expense of the poor. A story of a king that would order the murder of children to protect perceived threats to his political standing. A story of an army of angels singing a song of peace and the casting aside of fear, but they sing not to everyone – only to the shepherds, only to those whose work keeps them out in the fields at midnight, far from their homes and their beds and their families. It is a word of great joy for all people – but it is a word that is not entrusted to all people, and especially not to the comfortable, but first to those who are on the margins of society: Look! God has been born, on the margins of society along with you. Go find him, a baby lying in a feeding trough.
We come together tonight, at the end of a most difficult and trying year – and it’s not over yet, we still have another week to go. Who knows what yet can still happen? But we stand at the cusp of a new year, and while the future has never been guaranteed, the depth of the uncertainty and the fear we feel about the year to come perhaps is new. The promise of vaccines gives many of us hope, yet there is so much that could still go wrong, and relief is still months away at best. Surely, there must be some new Christmas story that can reassure us? Something that can give us hope for this new season of deep uncertainty and the unknown?
And once again, I have nothing but the same old words that we hear every Christmas Eve. The old words of the prophet Isaiah from 26 centuries ago, through whom God promised that one day, a child would be born who would bring about a kingdom of peace, and of justice and righteousness that never ends. Where all the human tools of violence and destruction and coercion will become pointless, useless for anything except fuel for the fire.
We may live in new times, but we Christians have the same old story to tell. But it is a story of a God who is present in every place and every time, and who became especially present as an actual human being in a particular place, and at a particular time. And so is able to speak to us in our place and time, in our circumstances, whatever they are. However unusual they might be.
For this is a story of a God who loves us by entering into creation. And starting, as we all do, as a helpless child, utterly dependent on others. Born in poverty, among the weak and the despised. Who helps us by coming alongside us and sharing our struggles, our pain, our fears and our joys, and who forms us into people who can walk with one another in this same way. For this story teaches us where to find God: not in the strength of kings and armies but in the vulnerability of a human baby. Not in royal splendor but in a barn, surrounded by animals. With the divine child entrusted to two young, underqualified and underprepared, fallible human beings. The story teaches us about a God who, in the midst of poverty and distress, can still forget self, take risks, become vulnerable, even face death – all for the sake of love.
There really isn’t any other story that we need. Not even this year; especially not this year. And as we go forward with faith in the God who loved us enough to join us in this messy and chaotic and dangerous world, we find that God becomes present yet again whenever we have the faith to live according to this promise. That God is love, that God is here for you, that God’s desire for you is only for your good, that God’s purposes for you will be fulfilled. And then, God takes flesh and blood again, not just in Bethlehem, but here, in you and in me, and in our communion together. It is an old promise, but God is eternal – ancient, and yet ever new. Tonight, this promise is all that we need.