Year A / Christmas / Christmas Night
Readings Isaiah 9.1-6 / Psalm 95 (R/v Luke 2.11) / Titus 2.11-14 / Luke 2.1-14
“She wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger”.
All our Advent waiting has come to this moment. This moment when the promise of our patient and hope-filled expectation is fulfilled in the birth of a child.
Our readings this evening try to capture and express this birth as the joy of a mystery. The mystery of God that you and I have long awaited for in faith and that we trusted our hope in throughout our Advent journey. In fact and story, in word and rhyme, and in metaphor and imagery, they describe this birth, explain its significance, articulate our rejoicing and proclaim what this day is about. “Today is born our Savior, Christ the Lord”.
We have heard Isaiah’s prophecies of this child’s coming as the end of darkness and burden on earth and the dawning of God’s light and peace. We have listened to Paul teaching us that this child is the grace of God appearing in our midst. And with Luke's narration, we have gazed on God’s radiance shining through this child’s nativity that occurred a long time ago amidst the dark and harsh realities of Roman history and the poverty of human life.
Yet, all of them do not adequately explain who this child is. For the baby lying in the manger was God.
What language cannot appropriately express, or theology and religion fully give an account of, our faith makes up by giving us enough reason and inspiration to come here tonight.
We’ve come to stand before the manger and to see this child. We’ve come in gratitude for God’s gift of himself in this child. And we can rejoice for God’s love that this child will reveal to us in our everydayness, as he once did in history.
Perhaps, honesty has moved some of us to also come and see this child tonight. We’ve come because we know deep within our very selves is a hunger that only God can fill. And, by coming here we trust that we will be fed with the goodness he has always filled us with and we believe that he will continue to lavish even more upon us who are wanting and in need because of our human condition.
Also, there may be some amongst us who have come to stand before the child, not to see but to seek God’s mercy. God who always forgives, accepts and welcomes again the lost and the stray. And yes, this child’s outstretched arms then are nothing less than God inviting us into his merciful embrace.
Whatever has moved us to come before this child tonight, it is in our gazing upon him in the manger however that you and I will experience, again, something of the great mystery of God who chose in love to become one like us so that he can be with us.
We will never fully comprehend the reality of this love of God that motivated his decision to come into our midst. Yet this child’s birth -- and all it means for our wellbeing and happiness, indeed, for our salvation -- must assure us that our belief is true. And so, we are also comforted with peace tonight.
But God becoming human must also challenge us: how is it possible that God should desire to come into our world and into our lives with all their poverty and finitude, with their pain and suffering, with their stains and soils from sin? Surely, this truth ought to tell us something of what we mean to God and what God should mean to us.
I believe we know the answer; it is deep within each one of us.
Knowing it, there is only one right expression we can make this evening: it is to humble ourselves and to join the shepherds. Together with them, we must approach the manger. Like them, we come not to just see but to adore and to worship this child whose name is Jesus, born as our savior and incarnate as Emmanuel, God with us.
As we come with the shepherds, we must not be afraid to let go and to leave behind the fairy tale images of Christmas that Hallmark cards and the window displays at Macy’s reduce to Christmas quaint and traditional, to Happy Holidays commercial and secular.
Let us come and kneel before this baby lying in the manger who is God. Let us place our successes and failures, our hopes and regrets, even our holy and unholy actions, before this child. Yes, let us offer all that we are to the infant Jesus whose arms are reaching out to you, to me for our embrace, for our welcome, for our self-offering to him who is our Lord.
Then, let us profess our faith in the beauty and the goodness that is the great truth that God became man and dwelt amongst us.
As we do this, we will not hear the angels singing, “Glory to God in the highest, and peace to people of goodwill”, as the shepherds once did on that cold, dark night. But as the English Cardinal Basil Hume so rightly articulated what surely must be our innermost feelings tonight, you and I, we too will want “to sing those same words when the great truth of Christmas begins to dawn again” in our hearts and in our minds.
And this is all that matters, not just tonight but always.
(with some insights from Basil Cardinal Hume)
Preached at Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta Parish, Dorchester, Boston
Photo from the Internet
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