Sermon on December 24, 2020: Christmas Eve
A Christmas sermon, by the Rev. Daniel Moore
When I was a child, and was filled with a childlike excitement in the days leading up to Christmas, my favorite story to hear was the poem A Visit from St. Nicholas, which begins with those famous words: “’Twas the night before Christmas.” I especially loved the first part, with its vivid language, painting pictures with words that I could almost see:
The children were nestled all snug in their beds;
While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads;
And mamma in her ‘kerchief, and I in my cap,
Had just settled our brains for a long winter’s nap…
I loved to nestle all snug in my bed. I had no idea what a sugar plum was, but I definitely wanted it dancing in my head. It made me laugh to think about my parents wearing stocking caps and long johns to bed, and there was something so peaceful about the idea of a long winter’s nap—it sounded so much better than just “going to bed.” What a lovely, cozy story. What a pleasure to imagine such a family, and to picture them in my mind.
Now that I’m older, I have a harder time being filled with a sense of childlike wonder. There’s a little too much wear and tear on the soul for it to come very naturally. And now that we have almost passed fully through the Year of Our Lord, 2020, this Christmas, there is a different kind of imagining. I stand here in this pulpit, preaching to a church filled with empty pews, directing my vision to a tiny glass object in the loft, and trying to imagine that there is someone there on the other side. Trying to imagine you as I saw you before. You, and your children, and your parents and grandparents, and the family and friends who came with you. Trying to imagine you in your homes, peering back at me through the glass, trying to make a connection, to take an absence and turn it into a presence.
Are you nestled there, all snug in your beds? Do visions of sugar plums dance in your heads? Or are you by yourself, celebrating a Christmas in the room all alone? What is it like for you where you are, right now? What are the cares and concerns of your heart? Are you hopeful, and if so, what is its shape? How are you dealing with the sense of alienation that so many of us are going through, myself included?
I stare into an empty church, and I imagine you, and I wonder.
If we imagine what it’s like for other families this Christmas, we must not fail to imagine what Christmas was like for the Holy Family—what the circumstances were like for Mary and Joseph, on the night that the Christ child was born. We are used to imagining a scene that is similar to the poem: a child snug in blankets, a mother seated in adoration, a father standing with pride—cozy, soft, and glowing. The animals softly bleat, the angels are glorious, the shepherds are happily welcomed, and the three wise men are there right behind them. Like a scene from a Pre-Raphaelite painting.
But we know that this is not the right scene, not the most helpful way of imagining. We must imagine the reality of this event. The reality of abandonment by family and community, who could not accept them, and their status of family outside of wedlock. The reality of forced migration by the government, even amidst the third trimester of pregnancy. The reality of alienation from any semblance of community in their hour of need—their hour of greatest need, seeking to be welcomed so that a Child could be born. Scripture says that there was no place for them in the inn. That was the reality: there was no place for them. They took up no space in others’ thoughts, others’ hearts, others’ dwelling places. As extraordinary and wondrous as the birth of their Son must have been, for them, it came amidst the reality of fear and desperation, terror and estrangement. There was no glossing over it. It may have been their darkest hour thus far; and yet, somehow, God was present with them all the same. God is always present, we might say, but this time it was different. This time it was God in the flesh, the living, breathing promise that God is really present—not as an observer, not at an arm’s length, but as one who also experienced need, as one who was also vulnerable to the changes and the chances of this life, of the givenness of reality no matter the circumstances.
Mary 2018, by Ben Wildflower.
Depiction of Mary, a mother who took her baby across a border to flee turmoil.
It may not be the Christmas story that we want to hear, but it is the Christmas story that we need to hear—in a year that changed the course of our lives, and altered the shape of reality. A year when reality shakes us into the fact that the death toll in this nation now exceeds 326,000 people from the pandemic, in the span of only 10 months. A year of reckoning with the extent to which racism has spread like a cancer through our institutions and structures and in our own hearts in ways of which we are unaware. A year of social distance, which are two words that I would be glad never to speak again in my entire life—of distance from our families, friends, and neighbors, and the toll that distance takes on our relationships and our mental health. We can and should name the moments, the sources of blessing; but, we must tell the whole story, the true story, the story that we need to hear so that our eyes may be opened to the truth that God is with us.
If I’m being honest, this year, the Christmas spirit feels like a spirit of alienation. Perhaps I am not alone in thinking this way. And that is why I believe that this year, we are afforded the gift of celebrating Christmas more truly than we have ever celebrated it before. Because Christ was born into alienation; it was written into the story of his birth. This is what it means to say that God is with us—that God is one of us. This year, we have been given the gift of invitation: to be drawn into the God who has already drawn near to us, who is present with us no matter what reality we must face.
So, no matter the status of the stockings, and whether they are hung by the chimney with care; no matter whether we see visions of sugar plums that dance through the air; we have seen a different vision, and we have heard a different story, which shatters sentimentality and scatters the darkness. We discover the reality of being a people who dwell in darkness but have now seen a great Light, bursting forth in our lives in a way that we once could not see. We encounter the Word who has taken on flesh and entered into the depths of our experience: a Child, visited by shepherds, heralded by angels, welcomed by parents, brought into a family that was formed not by nature but by grace. In this Child, in Jesus Christ, we discover that we receive God’s fullness, a grace upon grace. And the more that we fix our eyes upon this Child—the babe, the Son of Mary, the more that we will see it.
Therefore let us rejoice, and lift up our hearts, and give thanks and praise to the God who is among us, who is with us, and who has caused a new light to shine in our hearts, as we behold the glory of God in the face of a newborn child, Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.