Christmas Eve Meditation

Sermon

Thank you all so much for being here this evening, for leaving a cozy home, for arriving with a full stomach and the sleepiness that follows a big meal and a glass of wine, making your way through one of our dark and rainy Portland nights, to come to church, of all places, on Christmas Eve. On behalf of the Westminster congregation and our leadership boards, I welcome you to this place. I know some of you have come here for years, or maybe for some of you, this is your first time. Whatever the case may be, I am glad that you are here tonight as we sing together, and pray together, and twist our candles on, and wish each other a Merry Christmas.

I must offer you all a true confession: I used to not like Christmas very much at all. In my first years of ministry, I was never able to be with my family for the holiday, and I spent many an awkward Christmas dinner with folks from the congregation who kindly took me in. But even after I had my own family, Christmas often felt so forced—the joy felt forced, like a “you must feel joy or Jesus won’t be born” sort of way. The décor felt like clutter. The commercials—oh, the commercials! Those of us of a certain age remember the Sprite commercial set to a 16^th century hymn tune that became an earworm of a mash-up for me:

Good King Wenceslas looked out on the Feast of Stephen
When the snow lay round about deep and crisp and even
Sprite makes brighter holidays, lymon is the reason,
Sprite goes well so many ways to bring you cheer this season.

And truly, there is a lot to poke fun at in this season. The sweaters. The eggnog, which is basically cream with sugar and rum. Who thought that was a good idea??

All the trappings never added up to a deep meaning for me at Christmastime. The forced cheer and the relentless Muzak carols never made their way to the profound mystery that my theological self so deeply hoped to experience.

This year we find other obstacles to Christmas joy. The situation in Israel and Palestine tears at us, and we bewail the death of so many innocents. We’re becoming numb to the ongoing war in Ukraine. Political unrest worries us. In our beloved Portland, our unhoused neighbors remind us we have far to go before we reach smart solutions and merciful hearts. It is a challenge to feel the Christmas spirit, so maybe we’ll have to rely on Sprite and eggnog to help us fake the feeling.

How do we recover the joy of this season, the mystery of it, and the hope that is ingrained in this funny little birth story?

Let me tell you what happened for me. So there I am, going along, crabby at Christmas (that would make a good Hallmark Christmas movie), doing everything I can to wait to put away the nativities and take down the Christmas tree until New Year’s Day, grumbling at home about this and that and the other. My spouse and child endured me during Advent and Christmas, and I thank them for that.

And then… my daughter tells me that she loves Christmas more than any other holiday. She loves the lights, the music, the decorations, the nativity sets, the singing, the trees, the cheer—all of it. She is excited for the holiday. She loves that this story centers on a baby. She loves seeing all the generations come together at church. And her joy has infected me. I get to see Christmas not through the eyes of a tired, jaded pastor, but through the eyes of a hopeful adolescent. And my heart, while no longer three sizes too small, is now at least big enough to hold all that Christmas brings.

I have now come to appreciate Christmas for what it is: a gift, a thrill of hope in a weary world, a testament that what we face in the present moment is not all there is. How can we, how dare we, allow joy and hope and peace and love to enter our lives when there is so much suffering? Perhaps a better question is this: how can we not?

God did not design the human heart to be capable of only one thing. We are not built only to worry. We are not built only to fear. We are not built only to grieve. Nor are we built only to rejoice, to laugh, to sing. We human beings feel all the feels—never conveniently, never comfortably, but oh so very fully.

I do love this Christmas story the gospel writer Luke tells. I love how this awkward, scratchy story has morphed over thousands of years into something sweet, sentimental, and exegetically wrong. I don’t know if this is really how the birth of Jesus took place, with his unmarried but betrothed mother finding herself with child after a visit from an angel, with his adoptive father doing not the lawful thing but the moral thing and keeping the betrothal. I don’t know if they really had to travel away from home when she was close to her due date, if they took shelter in the animals’ space in the home of strangers, if the newborn really was swaddled and laid to rest in a feeding trough. It’s a lovely story grounded in hope and fear, regardless of whether it happened historically or not.

I do know that the Jewish kin of Jesus suffered terribly under the grip of the Roman empire, that they were taxed mercilessly, that poverty and short life expectancy were the norm. I do know that being unwed and pregnant was like a death sentence. I do know that the ancestors of Jesus never let go of the promise that God would send a messiah, that God would do what was right, that God would not abandon them, the way a mother would not abandon her nursing child.

And all of that—the fairy tale, the hard history, the hope and the faith and the doubt and the crabbiness and the twinkling lights and bleating sheep and the mother exhausted from labor and the poverty and the war and the imperiled children and the prayers for peace—all of that comes to a head in the birth of Jesus, and all of that meets us tonight on Christmas Eve.

Our hearts were created to hold all of that, and it will be hard, and it will be both unbearable weight and unbearable joy. Because Jesus being born in the backwater colony of an uncaring empire meant that God would sneak in where and when least expected. And our celebrating that birth tonight means that we have not given up on God, that we have hope that God will sneak in again, maybe in Gaza and maybe in Ukraine and maybe in Washington, D.C., and maybe on Burnside and 3^rd and maybe in your heart, tonight or tomorrow or the day after that.

Christmas reminds us that God has not given up on us, not two thousand years ago and not today. And my saying that to you probably won’t convince you it’s true. Lots of people told me that, but it wasn’t until a child I love deeply, my daughter, showed me what Christmas was like that I really began to believe.

So my hope for some of you is that someone reawakens Christmas joy for you in a way that allows you to gently hold both the sorrow of the world and love of God in your heart.

And my hope for some others of you is that you become the awakener, that as you love this holy night profoundly you find a way to show that to someone else.

And my hope for all of us is to have faith enough to see God present in our hearts and in the world, tonight, tomorrow, and in all the days to come.