Sermon - The Rev. Dr. Paul Kolbet, December 24th, 2023 (Christmas Eve)
Some things become so familiar that you do not see them for what they are anymore. Christmas is one of those things. It is everywhere in the world with Christians and lots of non-Christians putting up lights in the darkness, singing along with carols on the radio, gathering around trees in their homes, and exchanging gifts with their loved ones. That this is the case is a testimony to the powerful allure that this uniquely Christian holy day has for the human heart, but it is an allure that is easy to take for granted and leave unexamined because it has seemingly always been there. There are not enough remarks about what is distinctive or even strange about what we are celebrating at Christmas.
Christmas is a holy day that pulls in the opposite direction from the other stories we constantly tell and are told. Our hero stories, enshrined in one blockbuster movie after another, are stories of people who struggle yet overcome and eventually experience success, and celebrate their victory. Perhaps we tell ourselves this story over and over again looking for assurance that we, too, can win and come out on top. They are stories of ascent where we are looking for heroes or looking to be heroes. Resources abound, especially if you can pay for them, to help you climb. There are coaches to help you win. The big questions then have to do with determining what you really want and your willingness to do whatever is necessary to achieve it.
I hardly ever go a day without hearing human life forcefully explained as a constant struggle for dominance, where survival is driven by Darwinian competition against one another as if that explains everything that matters. It justifies brutality and cruelty by claiming that such things are just part of the dog-eat-dog natural order of things. There are people in this system–and all of us run into them–where the only relationship they seem to be able to understand is where one person is up and another person is down. Who is up and who is down? Who is winning and who is losing? If this is the case, it is no wonder we have this “crabs in a barrel” experience, where each day potentially involves being stepped upon or stepping on another.
A consequence of these repeated hero stories is a persistent anxiety. “What if I don’t win? What if instead of rising, I fall. What if something goes wrong?” There is fear, fear of some misstep, misfortune, or mindless mistake. The pressure is to succeed as if it is the only path where you can feel safe knowing, that there are comparably fewer resources to catch the falling and failing. Anxiety and fear work their way into the workplace and personal lives everywhere, but, we are told not to worry about this, just become more determined than ever to climb, succeed, and to win.
Christmas, nevertheless, persists as something of an opposite story moving in what often appears to us to be the wrong direction. It is an ancient holy day of descending or falling. Its plain outward telling is about the Source of the universe descending not to an earthly human throne (which would be outrageous enough), but to a feeding trough reserved for cattle otherwise known as a manger. That infant would grow up yet stories about Jesus are nearly always stories of descent. Recall the story in John chapter 8 where a woman was caught in the act of a notorious sin. We’re told of a crowd encircling her hurriedly picking up stones to throw at her as punishment for her crime. You can picture each of them standing on their tip toes, elevating themselves to see where to direct their rocks. Jesus joins the crowd and instead falls to the ground, evidently scribbling in the dirt or something. Somehow witnessing his lowering of himself, the crowd dispersed, and that woman was left safe with only Jesus who gently asked her, “‘Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” She said, ‘No one.’ And Jesus said, ‘Neither do I.” Or at the last supper where Jesus got up from the table only to lower himself and wash the feet of his disciples while instructing them that they should do likewise. He often said, “The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant… (Matthew 20: 27-28 and Luke 22:25). As if that was not enough, when Jesus dies on the cross forgiving his executioners, the earliest Christian traditions have Jesus descending even further, to hell to preach to the dead (1 Peter 3:18-20).
The point of Christmas, of Jesus, is that God dignifies what we have judged to be unworthy and low by making it God’s own. The Invisible appropriates the visible, the Infinite appropriates the finite, and even that lowly manger is so dignified by God’s presence that it becomes more worthy to be bowed before than any royal throne. Christianity is our name for the life of joy that comes from this surprising discovery that unsettles the competitive, judgmental, hierarchies that we find ourselves in whatever century we live in. St. Paul in his second letter to the Corinthians recounts an argument he had with Jesus in prayer where Jesus declares to him, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” Paul, therefore, explains, “So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me.… for whenever I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12: 8-10).
That is so different because God’s grace shifts the question from “What do I want” to “How do I best respond to being wanted?” Not the arduous decision about what to love, but responding to the fact of already being loved. Not some restless, anxiety driven, climb to the top, but the freedom like Jesus to descend without fear to join others where there are as they are person to person. This experience is such a great gift that the natural response is to give gifts back. That is why we exchange gifts with one another on Christmas. It is an act of pure gratitude for what we have been given. We are not so much giving as giving back. And, it is a giving back, for what we have been given while life is happening to us, much as it was happening to the three wise men who responded to the gift of Jesus by giving him their own gifts. To be a Christian is to grab onto that baby Jesus as someone we can love, but then in holding him, that baby grows, and we discover somehow that we are being held, and we discover that at the very core of life is a divine kindness that can be known that carries us along not only just in the darkest days of winter, but every day without end.
The accounts of relentless Darwinian competition always celebrate their manufactured strength and only see weakness in love. But their posturing is really a poverty-stricken form of power fearful of its own scarcity. It pretends to explain so much, but, in fact, has so little to say about the wellsprings of kindness and care in our world and why that sort of love persists so stubbornly despite all. Isn’t the scientific fact that love persists, nevertheless, in spite of all, also in need of explanation? Isn’t that the more central point about life?
The love that is the source of the universe, the love revealed in the Christmas manger, is what is infinite and secure. Like St. Paul discovered, it is what true strength looks like. How do we know that? Well, it is the kind of thing that the more of it you give away, the more of it you have. This kind of love is never scarce. Jesus himself explained that even if you could give all the love you have away … even to your enemy, you would discover that you only had more love because of it. That is a massive clue that radiating out of the center of the universe is the very love that created it in the first place.
To people like us, the Christmas story can all seem too good to be true, too wonderful to be believed, but isn’t that the case with everything that matters most to us? If you allow it to work on your heart, I suspect that you will find divine love being given to you through the very human flesh that God made God’s own and dignified in Jesus of Nazareth. The same love that motivated God to take on flesh and blood in Christ also led God to make you and everything else. If you look into your own heart, and find it mysteriously to be a gifting heart, you can find there the generous love of the Creator. This love is the root of all things. This truth of Christmas is the truth that matters, and no wonder, Christmas has the allure that it has for people everywhere, even if they do not know why they love what they love.
Let Christmas take up residence in your homes, in your hearts, and in your beliefs. Because you realize that God loved you enough to become like you, you may love him enough to become like him. May not only the daily tasks of celebration occupy your time, but may you always wonder at the marvel that is the truth of Christmas, where infinite love is not something we need to generate or make, but comes to us in a form that every one of us can understand, even if it means bowing with the animals before a manger looking into the eyes of an infant who is always more than what we see or imagine.
Merry Christmas! Amen.