Sermon - The Rev. Dr. Elise Feyerherm, December 25th, 2023 (Christmas Day)

On this blessed morning, we celebrate that Love came down and was born all those centuries ago in a land that even now is wracked with violence and death and unimaginable suffering. It is hard to see evidence that the world has been saved; I have been thinking this every Christmas for many years now. If Love has indeed come down, why is the world still so full of hate?

Recently the iconographer Kelly Latimore created an image he calls “Christ in the rubble,” depicting the newborn infant Jesus, Mary, and Joseph under the rubble of a city in flames (you can see this image at the end of the sermon). The new parents cradle their child protectively, bent over him as if to shield his tiny body from harm, while above them, buildings topple and smoke billows from windows. The space in which they crouch is reminiscent of images of the tomb where Jesus was laid after his death; it could very well be their tomb as well. Lattimore created this image to illustrate the message that if Jesus were born today, he would be born under rubble, as so many infants are being born these days in that very same land.

We naturally ask the question: what difference does it make that this infant, the Word become flesh, was born? What difference does it make for children who this very minute are being born in the rubble all over the world, from Gaza to Ukraine to Yemen and beyond? One baby, one life, in one place – how can that birth two thousand years ago save anything outside its own minute sphere? It feels a little like moving one grain of sand in an effort to keep a whole beach from eroding. And our beach is definitely eroding.

An ancient hymn reflects on this seeming impossibility, in which a single Incarnation has effects far beyond anything we can imagine; it is number 82 in our hymnal:

Of the Father’s love begotten, 

ere the worlds began to be, 

he is Alpha and Omega, 

he the source the ending he, 

of the things that are, that have been, 

and that future years shall see, 

evermore and evermore.

The words that speak to me most are those that say that Christ is the source and ending “of the things that are, that have been, and that future years shall see.” An alternative translation speaks of the “source and end that join as one all that is now, has ever been, and in future will be done.”   Every possibility, every world, every cell and molecule, every time and place, is joined as one in the Word made flesh.

In 2022, the film that won the Academy Award for Best Picture, as well as awards for its leading and supporting actors, its director and screenplay, was a film called Everything Everywhere All at Once. The film starts with the premise that there are an infinite number of alternate universes, all created by the choices we make at every moment in our lives. Each time we make a choice, another universe is created, and it splits off from the rest – but all of these universes still exist, in a complex constellation called the “multiverse.” 

It tells the story of a Chinese immigrant woman named Evelyn who runs a laundromat with her husband, and who is being audited by the IRS. In the midst of the audit, Evelyn is recruited by a version of her husband from another universe to fight an evil power that is threatening to destroy all the universes – a power that is pure despair and nihilism. Evelyn learns to access skills from her other selves in other universes where she has become a kung fu expert, an award-winning actress, a chef, as she battles the evil force and its minions.

As she experiences these multiple versions of herself, Evelyn also encounters versions of people in her current life, seeing what they might be, what they struggled with, what love might have been able to do. Even the IRS auditor, a seemingly bitter and heartless woman, appears in another universe as a person with compassion and joy, and it leads Evelyn to have compassion on her. 

Jumping across the multiverse, however, has a cost; humans cannot do it for long before they begin to fragment, the container that is their being beginning to crack and fall apart. We cannot hold all those possibilities together in ourselves without being destroyed. Evelyn reaches that breaking point, but what saves her is the decision not to destroy the evil which has infected her daughter, but to love and accept her, telling her daughter that there is no place she would want to be except with her, no matter what.

But here’s the thing: we created beings cannot survive crossing from universe to universe, but God can. The Word, born of the heart of the Parent, holding as one all that is and has been and will be and all that could be – this is the One who can be in every possibility without fragmenting. This is the One who experiences all things, all sorts of pain and rejection and yet can still choose love. And this is the One who was born as a tiny infant in the most ordinary and vulnerable of circumstances. Yet that singular birth, because it is God who has been born, exists in every possibility, every world, every time, every place, even those that seem full of pain and despair.

Christ is born in rubble, and because of that, even that circumstance holds within it the possibility of redemption, even if only in the love two parents feel for their newborn child. This is the gift that is given to us this day. It is God saying to each and every time and place, each and every one of us, the selves that we wish we could be and the selves we hate being, “I choose to be here, with you, no matter what.”

It is no accident, I think, that in the film Evelyn’s daughter is named “Joy.” Joy is reclaimed with the words “I choose to be with you, no matter what.” We are given the gift of Joy on this morning, now and always, as Love chooses us, time and time again. Merry Christmas, everyone.