The Light

Propers: The Nativity of Our Lord (Christmas III), A.D. 2019 A

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Christmas Day is sacred. It is holy. Words barely seem to do it justice.

They say, on Christmas Day, no evil spirit dares to go about abroad. They say at midnight, beasts of the field and farm can speak, as once they did in Eden. They say that at the moment Christ was born, all the bells on earth rang out for joy. This is folklore, of course, legends. But they express a real truth.

On this day we recall with reverence the astonishing story that the Creator of this and all possible worlds, willing to humble Himself, to empty Himself, became one of us, in flesh and in blood, in body and in soul, forever to seal the chasm, torn by sin through the heart of this world, separating God from His beloved children. Today the barrier between the sacred and the profane, the eternal and the temporal, the perfect and the broken is incinerated by the white-hot fires of God’s love for us.

What could be simpler, what could be humbler, what could be holier than a man and a woman in an unremarkable land, in less than ideal circumstances, welcoming an unexpected Child into this broken, violent, and beautiful world? This is how God chooses to meet us; not as a conqueror, a warlord, a general, not as the second coming of Alexander the Great, but as a baby—a neighbor, a child, a brother. This is how God breaks into our world, silently, by night.

And there He makes holy the very things which we take most for granted, things of hearth and home, things of community and mutual care; the hard work of living in marriage; the self-sacrifice of forming a family and raising a Son. In a world of infinite distractions, of crass consumerism and information overload, God says, “Here! Here I am! Born among you in family and faith! Here you shall find what is good and true and beautiful. Here you shall find the real amongst the illusion—here in your neighbor, here in the needy, here in the now.”

Christmas Day is unlike any other. We let down our guard, take off all that armor. And we allow ourselves simply to love, to welcome, to forgive and to give. We allow ourselves to become, like God Himself, a Child again. And the world is full of wonder and magic and miracles, of feasting, generosity, and warmth. Here is light amidst the darkness, heat amidst the cold, abundance amidst the stark and brutal scarcity of winter’s ice.

Here the Light is born in darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it.

And so I wish you all the joys of Heaven on this blessed Christmas Day. For indeed I think this the one time of year when our cynical society allows itself just the briefest glimpse of the Kingdom of Heaven, which all the commercialization on earth cannot obscure. Christ is born, no matter what we say or do. No matter the stresses, no matter the disappointments, no matter the fears. No matter what old wounds may fester or what old grudges keep us in their grip. No matter how many times tiresome pundits insist that it’s all just pagan nonsense anyway. No matter any of that—for Jesus Christ is born.

He is the hope of all mankind, the fulfillment of every promise, the forgiveness of every sin. And no matter how the earth may shake or the kingdoms of man vent their impotent rage, all the darkness of the cosmos cannot extinguish this one holy and everlasting Light. And that Light will only grow. He will grow in the hearts of all who welcome Him, in the mouths of all who speak of Him, in the hands of all who serve the Lord by loving all that He has made.

Someday that Light will become a holy fire to burn down all that oppresses us, all that enslaves us, all that seeks to keep us dead and buried in the ground. That Light will fill up all the world and blaze out until Heaven itself is one with earth. For once the flame is kindled, once the spark is set, once the Son of God has come among us, to die for us, at our hands and for our sake, once He has Risen having harrowed hell and hallowed Heaven, then nothing—nothing in this or any other world—can ever separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

The die is cast. The wheels turn. And the engine of salvation proves as inexorable as Christ Himself rising from His tomb with all the ransomed dead resplendent in His train. The King of Kings is born this day and will not stop in His conquest of death until God at the last is All in All.

Light is born. Life is born. And in Him, all shall have new birth. He that arrives today in a cave shall go on to conquer and empty the grave. And then it shall be Christmas forever, Christmas for always, Christmas for every lost and wayward child of Adam and of Eve—for as surely as Jesus is born of Mary, so shall He be born in us anew.

I’m going to leave you, if you’ll indulge me for just a moment more, with the words of perhaps my favorite Christmas poem—because prose, to be honest, does little justice to the wonder and the miracle of Christ’s birth. It’s called “A Child of the Snows,” by the inimitable G.K. Chesterton.

There is heard a hymn when the panes are dim,
And never before or again,
When the nights are strong with a darkness long,
And the dark is alive with rain.

Never we know but in sleet and snow
The place where the great fires are,
That the midst of earth is a raging mirth,
And the heart of the earth a star.

And at night we win to the ancient inn,
Where the Child in the frost is furled,
We follow the feet where all souls meet,
At the inn at the end of the world.

The gods lie dead where the leaves lie red,
For the flame of the sun is flown;
The gods lie cold where the leaves are gold,
And a Child comes forth alone.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.