The Holy Night

Propers: Christmas Eve (Christmas I), AD 2021 C

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.

Ah, Christmas Eve. The most miraculous night of the year. The decorations, the lights, the wonder. The family traditions. The food. When else can elves and saints and wintergreens, and maybe even the Krampus, find welcome together at the hearth? It’s hard to know just what to say on a holy night like this. The day rather preaches itself. What can one speak of Christmas that hasn’t been better said by a tree?

It is that peculiar mixture of the Christian and the pagan, the natural and the supernatural, that gives this night its resonance so deep within our hearts. And by pagan, mind you, I don’t mean those tired old clichés about the Church stealing elder holidays as though she were the Grinch. That’s nonsense. No, by pagan I mean the pre-Christian, the natural, the seasonal, the human.

Every winter festival will quite naturally follow winter themes: light amidst the darkness, warmth amidst the snows, the hope of green amidst all this icy white; along with heated food and drink, and gifts of generosity to spite the fear of looming scarcity. But what makes it Christmas—what makes it the Nativity—is the knowledge, the promise, the sure and certain hope, that God has come to join us here, has come to join us in all that is natural, seasonal, human, pagan.

He has come to join us in both feast and fast, both light and dark, both warmth and cold. He joins us at the fireside, with elves and saints and Krampuses. He joins us in our songs, our meals, our families, our memories, our joys, and also our griefs. In Jesus Christ, God is born among us, born to our world, to our communities, to our homes and into every heart: born to laugh and weep and learn and teach and heal and toil and sweat and bleed and die and to love us every step of the way.

To join us in our sorrows, in our hardships, even in our death—and thereby to conquer! To fill up death and sin and hell to bursting with the infinite life of God so that the grave is no longer our foe but our cure: our medicine for everlasting bliss. Jesus’ incarnation to a family hallows every family. His life of quiet service in a backwater corner of empire makes our lives, our work, even our anonymity holy in ways we can barely comprehend. And His death breaks death’s back forever.

That’s the miracle of Christmas: that here are God and Man made one. Here the holy is brought into the home: the Tree of Life restored to us from Eden! Here we know that we are never alone, never abandoned, never forgotten; that God Himself suffers with us, goes before us, leads the way even into the tomb and rises unto Heaven with all the ransomed dead resplendent in His train! It’s right there in the Name: Immanuel, “God with us”; Jesus, “Yahweh saves.”

This story of redemption, salvation, everlasting and inexhaustible divine love, transforms everything, brings dignity and meaning and honor to every human life and to all of God’s Creation. What can our response be, but to overflow with grace? And in a world still scarred by sin, a world in which the salvation already accomplished by Jesus in His eternity is yet playing out for us in space and in time, it is easy to forget—to forget that God is with us, that He comes to us in those who are little and quiet and poor and forgotten and overlooked by the powers that be.

But at Christmas we remember. Even if just for a moment. Even if just for a day. Because that’s all most of us get here below: glimpses of eternity, foretastes of the feast to come; like flashes of reality caught yet briefly within this shattered mirror. And so the lesson of this night remains the same for us as it was for Ebenezer Scrooge: We must learn to honor Christmas in our hearts, and try to keep it all the year. For every day is Christmas, when the Holy Spirit brings Christ to birth in us.

You know, Bethlehem is a rocky, hilly place. You’d think it a terrible location to graze sheep, and yet they find a way. They find the grass between the stones, somehow. Bethlehem was famous in the Bible for having been the hometown of David, the great king of old—Israel’s King Arthur. Most of us know that from Sunday School or perhaps some Christmas specials. But Bethlehem is also notable for those lambs.

See, it’s not all that far from Jerusalem, and if you know anything about Judaism, about the Hebrew Bible, then you know that the most important holiday of the year was Passover: the spring celebration of God liberating His people from slavery. And the Passover was celebrated with a meal in the home, like our holiday meals. And the centerpiece of that meal, mind you, was lamb—because in the story of the Exodus, all those who wished to partake in God’s Covenant, to be numbered among His people, painted the doorframe of their homes with the blood of a lamb.

The blood marked them as God’s own, so that death would “pass over” that house.

Well, if you are a good, observant Israelite, traveling to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover, you don’t bring your own lamb with you from home, now do you? That wouldn’t make much sense. You buy it when you get there. So you’ve got a city full of people who all need lambs. And you’ve got Bethlehem, just a few miles away, with all these flocks. Bethlehem is important for the Passover.

Now, there’s only one breed of sheep indigenous to the Holy Land, and they’ve been there for 5,000 years. Unlike European flocks, which drop their lambs in spring, sheep in Israel lamb in midwinter. And those lambs are destined for Jerusalem. There was a watchtower in Bethlehem from which the shepherds would watch over their flocks by night. You need one in that sort of terrain. And there was a tradition recorded in the Talmud that the Messiah, the Christ, would be born within sight of that tower. Born in the city of David. Born with the lambs, to die at the Passover.

See, it’s true that we don’t know for certain when Christ was born. But it is entirely appropriate to celebrate the Nativity in midwinter: both for the natural sign of the sun reborn at the solstice; and also because Jesus is our winter Lamb. And so even at His birth, we see the shadow of the Cross. “Behold the Lamb of God,” proclaimed His cousin John, “who takes away the sin of the world!”

Most Christians throughout most of history, and throughout the world today, do not refer to Jesus’ Resurrection as “Easter.” That’s a Germanic word, really only used in Germanic languages. For most Christians the Resurrection is Pascha: Passover. Bethlehem provides the Passover Lamb. Christmas already sets the scene for Easter.

When the angels appear to the shepherds in our Gospel reading this evening—whom I  like to imagine up in that tower—they do something quite remarkable. They sing. And the reason this is remarkable is that in the Old Testament angels sing in Heaven. They sing out in exultation before the ineffable presence of God. Now here they are on earth, in front of shepherds, in the middle of the night, singing the birth of a Child.

And so we are shown, without any ambiguity, that the Lamb of God is God. The Son of God is God. In Him, in Jesus Christ, has Heaven come down to earth. And so of course the angels sing! God has made this world His Heaven! He has made this cave His Temple. He has made this woman the New Ark of His New Covenant. God didn’t send someone else: He didn’t send a king or an angel or a prophet or a saint. God came down, in the flesh, in the womb, into Bethlehem. He has come into this fallen world to set us free, all of us, from sin and death and hell, forever.

And you simply cannot stop Him. God knows how hard we’ve tried. He just keeps coming, just keeps forgiving, just keeps rising again from the dead. His love is inexorable. And tonight we celebrate the birth of that love to every human heart. Christmas, dear Christians, has saved all the world. May what is known in eternity be seen in us today.

Merry Christmas, beloved. To us a Son is born.

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