From the Pulpit:

Christmas is for children. The 5:30 worship tonight was full of them, all dressed up in costumes of nativity characters over their fancy dress up clothes, their faces clean and their hair mostly combed, and with them they brought not only their mothers and fathers but grandparents from out of town. Glitter is the big thing for the little girls, and I’ve learned never to assume that we’ll have even one Mary because almost all little girls want to be angels. The boys are somewhat more flexible and so we have shepherds, Joseph, and kings, and the pageant goes off in whatever chaotic delight it happens to manifest this year, and it is adorable. We sang lots of carols and lit the star for Silent Night, and when we were receiving Holy Eucharist, who do you suppose slipped into the communion line but Santa himself, taking spiritual nurture before his long night of delivering presents. It was magical, just as this service has its own mystical magic, but I am convinced that Christmas is for children, and by that I mean the child who lives within each one of us no matter how old we may be.

By the time you get to be as old as I am you’ve had a number of Christmases you’d just as soon forget. Last week we had our Blue Christmas worship precisely for the people who are having that Christmas this year, and it was a time of solace and tears. But the memories we cherish are the ones we see through our child eyes, the ones they sing about in all the songs with snowflakes and candles and everybody getting along, not to mention the wishes that come true. 

Our granddaughters, Talbot, Annie B, and Mathille are having that kind of Christmas this year. Mathille is too little to remember it, but Talbot is six and Annie B is four and a half and their daddy told me that as they are so full of anticipation they have been playing for weeks with the Playmobil nativity set. If you aren’t familiar with Playmobil, they are little plastic people about this tall and the nativity set has everybody you think ought to be there, myriads of little figures with sheep and king’s gifts and all the things you need for imaginative play. The problem is Mathille. She turned one in September, so now she’s a good walker which means she gets into all the big girls’ stuff, and there’s also the issue of teething, which means anything that might feel good to itchy gums goes right into her mouth. One day as the girls were playing with their nativity Ben heard Talbot shout in the playroom, “Mathille, you are never going to go to heaven if you keep chewing on the Baby Jesus.”

So there you have it. Enough theology for us to chew on for a long time. I hardly know where to begin. Well, heaven is as good a place as any. It is all about heaven, though I dare say not about getting into heaven by our good behavior. That first Christmas was about heaven coming to us. Not because we were good, not because we were well behaved and deserving, but because we are beloved. Think of what happened when God slipped back the curtain that divides us and at first just let Gabriel slip through to give Mary the heads up, and now, on this night when she labors like any other woman,  --  and we know that labor is painful, as earthy and messy as anything can be – and not even in a clean room, but in an animal’s stall --  now on this night God yanks that curtain all the way back and whole choirs of angels spill out to fill the skies with their singing, and finally God’s own self slips out of the body of a young woman and is held in her arms. No, it’s not about our going to heaven. It’s about our being in heaven and heaven being here because God is here with us. And it was not for a night, and it was not for thirty three years. It was forever. It is now. That curtain never got put back. I know people who have seen angels in this church. They are all around us singing, Peace on earth, good will to all.  

Garrison Keillor wrote this week “We try to save our children from wild, unreal expectations.  And now here is Christmas, a wild story of 3 a.m. miracles if ever there was one. It surely isn't about good manners or good work habits. We teach it to our children, each in our own version, and God alone knows what they make of it all.” I say this story is all about letting go of anything tame, anything expected or contained. It is about seeing with eyes that are unjaded, and playing with God because God came to play, God came to delight and comfort and dance with us. God came to show us that even in the midst of everything that is broken and sordid and disappointing, in the middle of it all is joy, the songs of angels, the bright light of unexpected stars. They are real and they are always and forever. We are the ones who sometimes lose the ability to perceive. 

Now I know there are realists here tonight, people who will be quick to point out that it doesn’t look all that much like heaven to them, what with there being wars and flu epidemics and famine and rude drivers and scam artists and a still shaky economy. I’m not naïve enough to tell you that all this isn’t true. But I’m telling you it is not all. God did not wait to come until we had solved all our problems. God did not wait until we had cleaned up our act. God did not wait until our hearts were pure enough to receive him and never to let him down. No, God came to a little backwater town, to poor people, in a time of oppression, where dead bodies hung on crosses at the roadside. God came to people who needed him, as God comes to people now who open their broken hearts to let him in.

Mathille, Talbot scolded, you’ll never go to heaven if you keep chewing on Baby Jesus. Oh, wow. What have we come here to do tonight but chew on Baby Jesus? Talbot has heard what they are telling her in Sunday school but they don’t tell it all in kindergarten. As outrageous as it seems and is, Jesus offers himself to us to be nothing less  than the food we need for sustenance. If we have itchy gums and they feel better in the process I’m sure nothing would make Jesus  happier. Someday I’ll be able to talk to Talbot about the profundity of this Eucharistic feast. Someday, when she is big enough to understand I’ll thank her for being a better sermon resource than any journal or website, because in her precious six year old way she understands about the blessing that comes to us in the mysteries of this night. Tonight we delight in the fact that God came to us in the miracle of the Incarnation not just for us to look at. Not just for us to tell stories about his life and his teaching, not just for us to emulate him as best we can though we’ll always fall short, but for him to become us, our souls and bodies as the prayer saysm, so that we may become like him. The stories are wonderful, full of wonder, and when we hear the familiar carols we return to being able to see all this with our own six year old eyes, but because we are older we see with those eyes and hear with a heart tempered by wisdom that we are enfolded into this story. It would not go on without us. It is anything but sentimental. It is a dynamic of which we are integral parts. We have been blessed and in being blessed we have become part of the blessing. In the immortal words of the angel Clarence in the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, we get our wings. We receive so that we may give, and in the giving we receive ever the more.  

Let us pray. Precious Lord, come to us this night in the form of a real child, awaken in us the childlike wonder with which we first came to know you. Let us hear the song of the angels as if it had never before been heard. Help us to welcome you with the purest of hearts, and when we reach out our hands to receive yourself as bread and wine, help us to know you living and breathing within us that we may share your most precious love with the world.

 Amen.