Sermon — December 24, 2023 (Christmas Eve)

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

There’s a certain kind of magic in a good Christmas gift.

You might think that the magic happens when you receive the thing you’ve been hoping and praying for—when you come tearing out of your bedroom at five o’clock in the morning and run out to the Christmas tree and see the new bike you wanted standing there, and think, Wow! I’ve been begging Mom and Dad for this for months. But how did Santa know? And then you realize, Oh, right, I’ve addressed a dozen letters to the North Pole over the last three weeks asking for this bike; I’m so glad one of them made it through the mail. And this is great. It’s a wonderful feeling to have the thing you’ve been yearning for more than anything else finally arrive.

But the true magic of the perfect gift comes when you receive a something you didn’t even know you wanted: when you open that box on Christmas Day and think, “What on earth is this?” I don’t even know what it does. And then you study the box and realize: Wait. Yes. I never would have thought of this—I didn’t even know they made these things—but you, my beloved, you know me better than I know my self, and you knew that the one thing that was missing from my life was a Bluetooth-connected portable eye massager offering five different modes of eye fatigue relief. Thank you so much. Now our home is finally complete.

You laugh, but it’s true. Well, maybe not for eye massagers. But I know that the best Christmas gifts I’ve ever given are the ones that someone mentioned once, six months ago, and are long since forgotten, or the ones they never even knew they needed. To buy someone the random book that they’d read a review of once and then forgotten is to show that you were listening when they said it sounded interesting, and you heard and remembered. Even better is the totally-un-asked-for gift, the one you knew would be perfect for them, because you knew them, and you cared, and here it is, the perfect token of your admiration and love—a melon baller wrapped up nicely with a bow on top.

It feels good, as ridiculous as the gift may be. Because it doesn’t matter what it is. What matters is that you’ve been seen, and known, and loved.

“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light;” Isaiah wrote more than 2500 years ago, “those who lived in a land of deep darkness—on them light has shined.” (Isaiah 9:2) Isaiah’s people, living in dark times, were waiting for salvation, waiting for someone to help. While many things have changed, the world still seems dark these days. The boots of the warriors Isaiah described millennia ago continue to tramp across the world. The many imperfections of human society that Isaiah condemned continue to be imperfect. Our lives continue to be imperfect. Every one of us has tasted the bitterness of loss, or absence, or regret. Every one of us has sometimes fallen short. Every one of us is yearning for something this Christmas Eve, some change, some help, some salvation. Christmas is a perfect time for that, because Christmas is the holiday of prophecy fulfilled, of a Messiah long-awaited who finally arrives.

That’s we need this Christmas. A Messiah: someone who will come and set things right. We want world leaders who will bring us peace. We want politicians who will solve our nation’s problems. We want therapists or priests who will fix our marriages or our friendships, who will somehow break us out of the old patterns we’ve fallen into yet again. In the deepest, darkest days, we pray to God for light. We beg God to do something, to send someone to save us from this mess.

Christmas is the answer to that prayer. And yet: What we want for Christmas is a Messiah; what we get is a baby. What we want is a “Wonderful Counselor”; what we get is a babbling infant. What we want is a “Prince of Peace”; what we get is a carpenter’s son. What many of us want more than anything else, what we yearn for more intensely than any bicycle or melon baller is for some light to shine in the darkness, for God to finally come and make things right; what we get is a child wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.

It’s nowhere near enough to fix it all. And yet it’s the only thing that can.

What we want for Christmas is for God to fix it, whatever it is for us. God sees the darkness of our world. God hears our prayers for help. And God comes down to help, but not the way we expect—not as an avenging warrior, not as a mighty king, not as an adept politician or even a wise old friend, but as a newborn child, innocent and weak.

God looked at us. God looked deep into the heart of each one of us. God saw us, and God knew us, and God loved us, and God chose to come and be with us. Because God knew us more deeply than we knew ourselves, and God knew that the gift we needed was not the one we wanted.

What we want is for everything to be fixed, for the geopolitical calculus and the electoral politics to change, for our families and friends to finally just accept that we’re right and do what we want for once. But the problem isn’t out there. The problem is in here. We can set up Security Councils and we can pass legislation and we can set new boundaries in our relationships, but you and I know that we human beings can undermine those things in five seconds flat. We’re very good at that.

What we need is not for the problems in our lives to be fixed by some external force, for everything to be set right once and for all by a Messiah. What we need is for our hearts to be healed. What we need is not the receive the gift itself, whether the much-anticipated bicycle or the unexpected melon baller. What we need is to be seen and known and loved, as we really are, and to know that we have nothing to fear. To know that when we feel shame or regret or fear, when we lash out in anger because we’ve been wronged or withdraw into apathy because it seems like there’s nothing we can do, what God feels is not wrath or blame or judgment: What God feels is love, for you. What God wants is to come down to be with you, to live and to die as a human being just like you, because God loves you. And the only way to change your life, and the only way to change the world, is to know, to really know, that you are loved, no matter what, and to live as if that might really be true.

So maybe you’re stepping foot into this church for the first time tonight and you’ll never come again, or maybe you’re here more often than either of us would like. Maybe every gift is already wrapped and arranged precisely under the tree, or maybe you haven’t quite finished shopping yet. Maybe you’re headed home to an evening of warmth and joy, or maybe your heart is heavy tonight, because the ones you’ve loved are far away or long gone. But I say to you: “Be not afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of a great joy which will come to all the people.” God sees you, and God knows you, and God loves you, and the proof of God’s love is right here, lying in a manger: “for to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord… Glory to God in the highest!” (Luke 2:10, 14)

Amen.

Sermon — December 24, 2023

Michael Fenn

Lectionary Readings

If you are like me, primarily a dweller of the city of Boston, there is a normal level of this kind of existential terror that happens when you move to Wyoming. And not just because of the hunting, fishing, cowboys, bears, or the ever-present wind. 

I moved to Wyoming to do the Episcopal Service Corps right after I graduated from college. I arrived on the last flight into Cody, Wyoming and the director of my program picked me up in the pitch blackness. I got vague glimpses of the asphalt as we wound through the roads of the Bighorn Basin, going to Walmart because I had forgotten some basic necessities, and then eventually pulling into the house at the retreat center I would live in around 9:30 pm. 

Over the course of the next few days I would steal glimpses out of windows, and see the landscape as it passed by as we drove around on various errands around Cody. I remember this feeling of terror, of anxiety, of wonder, and pure awe. For the first time the world was so big, the mountains so grand, the sky so looming, the desert basin so vast, and the glory of God reflected in such a way that I was wholly unaccustomed to. I had a number of conversations with people that confided that they had shared a similar experience upon moving there, it was a landscape that inspired awe and wonder and terror for the unaccustomed. 

At some point in October after I had moved I got used to it though, seeing for dozens of miles in every direction became expected, I grew accustomed to distances that were unfathomable to my Massachusetts mind, it became my normal life just like my life in Boston. The views settled in and became commonplace–the background image of my new life. Until they didn’t.

Every so often, I would suddenly see the landscape around my house as if it were the first time–the terror, the awe, the wonder renewed in my sight. I would look at Foretops’s Father (the mountain at the center of the Bighorn Basin) again and my heart would be strangely warmed, I would sit on the top of the hill out back of our house and see Teepee’s Doorway (the valley that leads into Yellowstone) and wipe tears from my eyes. There was no pattern to these moments, nothing that I could do that would definitively make these new moments of wonder unlock for me. Though I did have to make the first motion to actually look, and look again, and to keep looking. 

As we approach Advent this year, I am feeling like we have allowed a lot of our most profound and radical stories to settle into the landscapes of our lives. Though, I cannot deny that the familiar stories bring a level of comfort. The birth narratives of Jesus are what many Christian children cut their teeth on when they are being introduced to the faith, and at this time of year we easily settle back into them like a big comfy chair–particularly as Christmas becomes an ungrounding and stressful time. There is a nostalgia and a familiarity to the birth narratives such that they remain stalwart in people’s minds even if they do not remember much else about Christianity. 

And this makes sense, there are really cool angels who bring the glory of God to earth and talk to people, Jesus is born in humble (but usually depicted as quite cozy) beginnings, wise men come bearing strange gifts, in some apocryphal traditions a small boy comes to play the drums for the newborn Jesus and his family, and humble shepherds are invited to witness the newborn king. However, I have been attempting. comforting as I find these stories, to put myself out there into the stories again, to look again and again and hope for that same sort of radical transformation. 

Today’s story, the Annunciation, feels to me like it has settled into the territory of a bit nice and mystical. Mary just seems to have some cool stuff happen to her, the angel Gabriel comes, and the Annunciation seems to be the mystical stepping stone to the real hoo-rah that we are waiting for, the birth of Christ. 

However, if we look and look again, I think what we miss in this story is how brave Mary’s “yes” actually is. In my reading, the bravery of Mary’s action in this story is threefold. 

First, this angel greets her in a very strange way, and she is greatly troubled. Here we can note that an unrelated man and woman conversing in public would have been unusual and scary. And also that this man is an angel. Mary is truly greatly troubled to even find herself in this situation. 

Second, we can note what exactly the angel is saying to her. In the first bit of what the angel Gabriel is saying to her, the whole thing about kingdoms and her son, is a direct threat to the Roman occupation under which she lives. The region in which Mary lives is a powder keg of a place ready to explode at a moment’s notice. It had only recently come under full Roman occupation and dissent was brewing in major ways. At this tense moment an angel comes and tells her that her son will be the one to upend all of this. 

We see this idea most clearly in the Magnificat, one of our most ancient Christian hymns that we sang today. It promises that God will totally cast down the powerful–the kings, the emperor, the governors. It promises that the rich–the landowners, the merchants, the emperor–will be sent away empty-handed. It promises that the proud–the generals, the politicians, the scholars–will be scattered in the imagination of their hearts. All the normativity of the world under which she lives will be destroyed and upended, and she will be an accomplice to this.

Third, Mary is a young, unmarried woman who is told she is going to bear a child. I think there are a lot of apparent dangers here that we can understand. Being any one of these things in Mary’s society comes with a certain amount of danger, to be a young unmarried woman who is bearing a child puts Mary in significant danger. Many modern commentators note that Mary’s subsequent visit to Elizabeth–her cousin who lives kind of far away where nobody knows Mary and she can lay low for a bit–may well have been the result of the danger that she must live through in order to bear the Christ-child.

I hope I have sufficiently highlighted the bravery of Mary’s “yes” in this story, and maybe even shifted your view of this story to how earth-shaking this moment is. For this brief moment the fate of the world hinges on one young woman’s decision to make the brave choice to say yes to bearing the Christ-child. The birth of the Christ-child is predicated on Mary’s  heroic choice to step out of what would have been a normal life to step into danger. 

The good news is that Mary did say yes. Because of Mary’s bravery our savior in Jesus can join us in our humanity. Because of Mary’s daring decision, Jesus can be incarnated to be our salvation. The world has been profoundly changed because one woman decided that she would make the brave choice and say “yes” to what the Lord called her to do. We only get to revel in the joy of Christmas because of the danger Mary took upon herself, and she did so with great faithfulness and with rejoicing. 

So let us rejoice because of Mary’s yes, on account of Mary’s courage, and for the coming of the Christ-child to be with us this Christmas.