I preached this sermon on Chistmas Eve, 2020, for the congregation I serve, St. Mark’s Lutheran in Baltimore.
*
I once stayed in a small log cabin in the woods of Vermont on a summer vacation.
The woman who owned the cabin lived just up the hill
on land that had belonged to her family for generations.
In fact, the cabin had been hand built by her father;
she was born in the upper room.
Up late one night,
I detected the smell of sulfur rising up from the basement.
I was worried it was a gas leak,
and so called the owner, even though it was well past midnight.
She arrived a few minutes later, emerging out of the darkness,
wearing a coat over her nightgown.
She had no flashlight.
Even in the deep darkness of the night,
she knew her way home by feel.
*
I think that each of us has one road or another that we could travel by heart,
in the pitch black night.
Perhaps it’s not a path through the woods of Vermont,
but maybe it’s the road back home to a place we lived and loved well.
From the moment you turn off the highway, your body knows the way.
The curve of the bend or the rise of the bridge;
the pause at the stop sign, and the moment to slow down before you fork to the left.
Each of us has a road we know by heart.
A road that brings us somewhere that feels like home.
*
I look at the nativity so beautifully laid out before us.
We set out the figures each year, in our churches and in our homes,
each piece familiar and well loved, each in its own place.
You might place the shepherds on the right or the left,
might have the magi far off or close by…
but this is a scene we know by heart.
It’s as familiar as a lullaby, and as comforting.
Looking at it each year, it’s hard to remember that, for those who were a part of this story,
the arrival was never guaranteed.
At the creche, we have the gift of hindsight, and to us, the outcome seems predetermined.
But for those who lived it, it must have seemed anything but.
This year, as I listen to the story once more, I notice something I’ve never seen before:
That this is not only a story of arrival,
but a story of journey.
Every character in this play traveled a road to arrive at this moment.
And unlike the familiar bends and turns of the road that carries us home,
this road was a path the cast of this holy drama had never traveled.
It’s unlikely, for instance,
that Mary had ever left Nazareth, as a poor young girl of sixteen.
Perhaps Joseph had traveled to visit relatives in Bethlehem before,
but likely not with a heavy pregnant fiancee at his side.
The shepherds leave the scrubby hillside on the outskirts of town
and walk to the small city, where locals snub and scorn them.
They are chasing a scrap of a dream —
a figment of their imaginations, even.
And the magi, who we hear of in Matthew’s gospel —
they have set off on a journey without even a road to guide them.
Just a new star tugging at their hearts,
telling them: follow.
Everyone in this story is a dream-chaser, a star-gazer…
each of them listening to scraps of dreams and the whispers of angels
rather than good, old fashioned common sense.
They are a collection of impossibilities.
And perhaps, with every step toward a destination that could turn out to be fool’s errand,
they are wondering:
Why are we doing this?
This journey is not safe.
It is not wise.
And yet.
I must. Follow.
*
It’s a bit ironic to be thinking of journeys
in a year when so much of our time has been spent staying in one place.
Restricted to our homes through this year of quarantine,
we’ve not been traveling much of anywhere.
Many of us, I’m sure, are missing the familiar paths we travel this time of year,
whether it’s the trip to the home of someone close to us,
presents bundled into the car,
or the arrival of those beloved to us, spilling through the doorway
or pulling a chair up at the table.
This year, Christmas is different.
Tinged with the longing for friends or family,
Corroded with fear or worry or loss.
It’s been a year of staying in one place,
and yet I feel as if I’ve traveled to a strange new land.
One where every day is rife with uncertainty.
One where we scrutinize the jagged red lines of charts and graphs
as they climb steadily upward.
Our heart rates climbing too.
The numbers are increasingly impossible.
And yet we know that each soul lost belonged to somebody.
Maybe this year, we’re closer to this story of Christ’s birth than we have been before.
This year we know what it is to set out toward an unknown destination,
to live one day at a time,
to search our minds, trying to remember what the angel told us:
Do not be afraid.
Even as the numbers rise.
Even as the world around us feels increasingly chaotic.
*
We are not the first to live through difficult days,
and we will not be the last.
In 1943, Lutheran Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a letter to his family
as he prepared to celebrate Christmas in prison,
jailed for his his leadership in the German resistance to the Nazi regime.
“For a Christian,” he writes,
“there is nothing peculiar about Christmas in a prison cell…
That God should come down to the very place which [we] usually abhor,
that Christ was born in a stable because there was no room for him in the inn —
these are things which a prisoner can understand better than anyone else.
For the prisoner the Christmas story is glad tidings in a very real sense.”
If one thinks of the terrors that have recently come to so many people [with the fire bombings] in Berlin,” he continues,
“then one first becomes conscious of how much we still have for which to be thankful…And maybe in this way it becomes clear to many what Christmas really is. . .”
*
What Christmas really is.
Is it possible to be a people of hope,
this worn and weary Christmas?
Or are we just foolish, looking for love where love is scarce,
looking for light where there is none?
Christian hope is illogical.
For it’s only when all is lost
that hope is found.
It comes to us when we are at our most desolate.
Writing a letter home from our prison cell,
or unwed and pregnant traveling a long road,
or scanning and scanning for the graph to change directions,
waiting to stop counting the dead.
God comes, anyway.
No matter how dire the circumstances.
Comes to walk alongside us in this fractured, fraying world.
Comes, “not as a monarch but a child,” as the ancient hymn goes.
A God of infinite power, infinite possibility,
compressed into small grasping fists and a minute, beating heart.
What kind of God is this?
who loves us like this?
And this love, this light, this hope,
is for everyone:
You who are lonely,
you who are broken-hearted.
You who are grieving,
You who who are weary.
This love is for the filthy right and the wretchedly poor,
the lost, the found, the wandering.
But to catch sight of it, we must become dream-chasers, and star-gazers…
We must abandon the world of reason
and set out into the night
seeking the source of love.
Seeking God-with-us: Emanuel.
*
What sort of journey have you made this year,
heading out into an unknown land?
And where have you seen Emmanuel: God with us?
I have heard God-with-us in the clattering of pots and pans at 7pm in cities around the world,
as people hang out their windows, thanking the health workers who have cared for us with courage.
But in that clamor I’ve heard another celebration:
We are still here. We’ve made it through one more day.
I have seen God-with-us in the myriad of ways
we’ve cared for each other here in Baltimore
taping fliers to telephone poles or slipping them into mailboxes
saying, what do you need?
How can we help?
Here at church we’ve serving at soup kitchens,
offered rides and errands to make sure everyone can weather these days.
And I see God in each of you,
Each of you: reflections of divinity.
*
This week I stood by my window as the light faded to darkness
and looked for a star.
Not a star, really, but two planets: Jupiter and Saturn,
aligning for the first time since 1226.
“The convergence,” it’s called —
or sometimes, the Christmas star,
as some imagine that it was a similar convergence
the magi followed to find the Christ child.
Tea in my hand, I stood, watching,
waiting as the pinks faded to blues,
and then I saw it.
A bright light in the sky.
This new star appeared to us on the darkest day the year,
the darkest day of this year.
As if to say,
The night is long, yes,
but the light is coming.
Tonight, Christ the morning star
is risen among us.
Take heart. For the dawn is coming.