Thursday, December 27, 2012

All we have is a child, and everything in the world looks like a promise


Christmas 2012

Christmas is a confused jumble of stories, sources, traditions, customs. We pull together what is “Christmas” to us from a variety of places. At the 4 pm service we read the accounts of the birth of Jesus from both the Matthew AND the Luke gospels. Those two evangelists tell different stories about Joseph, Mary and the Babe in the manger; Mark and John tell us nothing at all about how Jesus got here, but they both allude to Jesus’ mother and brothers and sisters.

We also include in “Christmas” dozens of customs from all over – a mélange of Charles Dickens and medieval carols and Coca Cola ads. The piano accompaniment to “the Charlie Brown Christmas” means the holiday to us as much as Handel’s “Messiah.” “The Miracle on 34th Street” captures the essence of the season as much as any number of elegant musical settings by Benjamin Britten and Ralph Vaughn Williams. This season is a sentimental time, and a hopeful time, as we approach the turning of the year and all of the promise that the birth of a new child brings.

But back to the Bible: even with all these different strands of stories about the birth of Jesus, the Gospels all include some mention of dark things. Even the blessed Wise Men, when they come to honor the Baby Jesus, inadvertently play a role in terrible destructive things. Herod, powerful and yet weak, so fearful of this child, this king-to-be, uses the Magi’s hopeful seeking for his own wicked ends. He uses his military might to kill all the baby boys just in search of the one who escapes his grasp. The Holy Family flies to safety, just in time.
Christmas has always included this poignant mix. Charles Dickens wrote his “Christmas Carol” against the backdrop of the deprivations and hardships of industrial England, contrasting the bounty and warmth and cheer with loneliness and hunger.

Christmas is, in a way, a kind of crystal ball: what we see in it, what we experience, is influenced by what we bring to the encounter. There is an old saying, that if all you have is a hammer, then everything in the world looks like a nail. The terrible events of the past couple of weeks have reminded us that if all you have is a gun, then everything in the world is a target.

But tonight, all we have is a child, and to us, everything in the world looks like a promise: a promise of hope, of love, of grace, of forgiveness, of starting over, of seeing the world in the way this child sees it. And since this child is God, that means seeing this world in the way God sees it.

One of the things that our Christian tradition enables us to do during this season, is to hold together all of these things: the promise and the pain, the abundance and the loss. We can miss someone so much during these days that it hurts, and yet at the same time be overjoyed with gladness at the things around us. 

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