The Christ Mess

Propers: The Nativity of Our Lord (Christmas I), AD 2020 B

Homily:

Many ages after God created the heavens and the earth, when man and woman were formed in God's own image; long after the great Flood, when God set the rainbow in the clouds as a sign of the covenant; 21 centuries from the time of Abraham and Sarah; 15 centuries after Moses led God’s people to freedom; 11 centuries from the time of Ruth and the Judges;

A thousand years from the anointing of David as king; in the 65th week as Daniel's prophecy takes note; in the 194th Olympiad; the 752nd year from the founding of the city of Rome; the 42nd year of the reign of Octavian Augustus; in the Sixth Age of the world—all earth being at peace—Jesus Christ, eternal God, Son of the eternal Father, willing to hallow the world by His coming in mercy, was born of the Virgin Mary in Bethlehem of Judea.

Tonight is the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, God made flesh.

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

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

This is not the Christmas we’d wanted, is it? This is not the Christmas for which we had hoped. There are loved ones who cannot gather with us. There are beloved traditions that will not be observed. But the truth is that Christmas has never really gone according to plan. Yet regardless of our preparations or frustrations, Christ is born. God is with us. And it is Christmas.

Let me tell you how a typical Christmas at the Stout household would go. A week or so beforehand the guests of honor would arrive; that is, the grandparents, my mother and mother-in-law. And they would begin their annual frenzy of cooking and baking and decorating and projects with the children, putting together cookie plates for the neighbors, pomanders for the centerpiece, rømmegrøt for Christmas Eve, and a feast of biblical proportions for Christmas Day following the last of the services over which my wife and I would officiate.

Some years we would have 15 to 20 people over, reading books, playing games, watching movies, laughing, eating, drinking, resting, ruminating—having a blessed and a merry Christmas made possible by the founders of the feast.

Now let me tell you how this Christmas is going. It’s not safe for the grandmothers to travel. One of them broke her arm. We haven’t made cookies for the neighbors. In the three days leading up to this Christmas Eve, our parish administrator got rear-ended on Highway 10—she’s alright, thank God—the office computer crashed, I had a funeral, and then yesterday there was a blizzard.

We have been invited to Christmas dinner by a dear couple who have already suffered and recovered from Covid. And for this we are most grateful, not only for their hospitality, but also because it was beginning to look like a Chinese take-out Christmas. I imagine many of you could tell similar stories. Even as we see the vaccine dawning on the horizon, 2020 has taken from us what we wanted our Christmas to be. Yet even in this, there may be a silver lining. God has always shown His true glory not in destruction or in wrath, but in redemption and resurrection. He meets us in our mess and raises our darkness to light.

We like to imagine that our childhood traditions are eternal, that they’ve always been and always will be. There has always been a Christmas tree. There’s always been holly and ivy and kissing under the mistletoe. There have always been gifts. These are comforts to which we cling, the sure, solid pillars propping up our year. When the world seems constantly changing, when we cannot keep up with the madness, the holidays return us to things timeless and true, to faith and family, hearth and home. Christmas traditions are the peaceful port amidst our winter storms.

Except that none of that is true. Our timeless traditions are nothing of the sort.

Every year we are inundated by news blurbs and social media memes about how Christmas is secretly pagan: how the Christmas tree is thousands of years old; how Santa is really Odin incognito, with eight tiny reindeer replacing an eight-legged horse; how kissing under the mistletoe goes back the druids with their white robes and weird golden sickles. And to be clear, none of that is true. No serious historian adheres to any of it. Yet we eat it up, don’t we? Not just at Christmas, but at Easter and Halloween. We pretend that everything’s secretly pagan. Everything’s secretly thousands of years old.

And I imagine there are a couple reasons for this. But one of them is that in a world of constant change we want to have eternal things. We want to have some sort of tangible connection to a tradition that always was and always will be, stretching back into the shadows of prehistory and forward into a future yet unknown.

Nobody wants to hear that the first Christmas tree appeared just 400 years ago and didn’t really get popular until the nineteenth century. No-one wants to hear that Santa Claus, while based on the historical St Nicholas, is almost entirely the creation of Washington Irving and Clement Moore—and that his reindeer have nothing to do with Odin, and everything to do with Finnish postcards popular at the time.

My family’s heritage is rather hodgepodge: German, Norwegian, Irish, British. We collect Christmas traditions from the far corners of Europe and mix them all together into one big old American melting pot. It’s a lot of fun. But almost everything we do is from the last 200 years. Christmas as we know it is from the last 200 years. Before this there were Church services, of course, and there were wild drunken debauches in the streets—the very reason so many rulers over the centuries have tried to cancel Christmas.

But Christmas as we know it, the Christmas of hearth and home, of faith and family, of giving gifts and celebrating children, of St Nicholas stuffing stockings and Christmas trees lighting up the house, this is all the product of three recent books: A Christmas Carol, “A Visit from St Nicholas,” and “Old Christmas” from the Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon. None of it is ancient. It’s barely even old. And believe it or not, that’s a good thing, because the Christmas traditions we have now are one heck of a lot better than the sort we’d had before.

Christmas has never gone according to plan. It has never been eternal or unchanging. It has never looked before quite the way that it does now. Do you think Joseph planned on marrying a woman carrying a Child not his own? Do you think Mary planned on having her firstborn son in a cave, and laying Him in a manger? Do you think either of them planned to flee into Egypt with an infant on the run? Our Christmas has had car wrecks and snowstorms; their Christmas had a genocidal madman wipe out an entire generation of children from Bethlehem.

It’s crazy. It’s unexpected. In many ways it’s really quite awful. Nevertheless—it is Christmas. Nevertheless, Christ is born. Nevertheless, God is with us, God is for us, God is one of us. And He isn’t born in glory and light. He isn’t born amongst pomp or riches. There are no cookies, no tree, and the only gifts come with a warning to flee the country on penalty of death. Christ is born in the midst of our chaos, the midst of our woes, the midst of our mourning. He Himself is the Light, shining in the darkness, which the darkness cannot overcome.

Next year we’re going to do Christmas big. We’re going to have the whole family over. We’re going to cook and bake and laugh and play and make the most wonderful memories you can imagine. The children will be so happy to see their grandmothers. We will be so happy to be together. And we will enthusiastically embrace every wild, woolly, wonderful, and ridiculous Christmas tradition ever passed down to us by family or by book.

But that’s not what makes it Christmas. On this night, Christ is born. Born in a manger. Born of flesh and blood. Born into a broken, fallen, beautiful world, which He will die to save. And from now on, that’s where God will meet us. He will meet us in our neighbors, in our enemies, in our families and our homes. He will meet us in vulnerability, in the needs of a helpless babe and homeless mother. He will meet us in the poor, the hungry, the powerless, and the refugee. Go and seek Him there.

He meets us in our mess, and raises us to life, seeing us through the darkness, through the storms, through the very grave itself. God has come to earth this night, that all the world be saved in Him. And no pandemic, no storm, no spoiled plans can ever stop Him from forgiving you, loving you, going to hell and back for you.

Christ is the gift of Christmas. And nothing—nothing—can ever take us from Him.

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