Born

Madonna col Bambino, by Daniel Murray

Propers: The Nativity of Our Lord (Christmas I), AD 2023 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; 12 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 it. This is the day that most of us spend the entire year looking forward to, the stuff of childhood dreams and happy memories, of old stories and new gifts.

I know how stressful it can be; hectic holidays are something of a cliché in our society. But that just goes to show how important they are to us, how we strive to run them smoothly. We all want the perfect Christmas, not so much for ourselves as for those whom we love. And in the generosity of the season, this perfection somehow includes all of our imperfections. All is grace at Christmas. All is here forgiven.

Now is the night of rebirth, of the Light shining in darkness, of new beginnings. Tonight we return to childhood in only the best of ways. Tonight we are eternally young. And our world again is filled with wonder, adventure, exploration, and vast new vistas of possibility. Here are miracles and magic, spirits and saints.

Here we are not afraid to confess in joy, “I do not know!” For “wisdom is the recovery of innocence at the far end of experience; it is the ability to see again what most of us have forgotten how to see.” And so the only appropriate way that we can describe this night is as holy. All of this is holy.

The purpose of Christianity is mystical union with God. That’s why we do everything that we do here: all the prayers, the stories, the classes, the songs, the liturgies and the Sacraments; all of it is so that we may know union with God in Jesus Christ our Lord. And that is rebirth. It is death and resurrection every day, drowning in our Baptism and rising with the Spirit of Christ alive and burning within us.

God, we must understand, is younger than we are. He does not grow old. He does not grow tired. He sees every sunrise and always cries, “Again!” And so to return to God, to know God, is to be young again. Not foolish, mind you, not naïve, but open and selfless and free. We think that’s very hard! And oftentimes it is. But not at Christmas. At Christmas we allow ourselves to be whom we ought and want to be: to be as loving as a child, yet with the ability of an adult. Thus is God disposed to us.

Today we tell the story of God entering our world, of the Creator becoming one with His Creation, like an author stepping into her own book. He does this for us, and for our salvation, that God would come down from heaven when we could not claw our way back up to God. We have fallen, yet were never forgotten.

We knew this day would come. We prayed for it, for centuries, for millennia. Every plaintive cry, every lonely soul, reaching out, reaching up, to know we’re not alone. I think that is the heart of every prayer, and the root of every desire: our longing, our thirsting, for the divine, for the infinite, eternal, and transcendent; for the One who loves us all. He is our alpha and omega, our beginning and our end, in whom we all live and move and have our being.

Of course, we wanted Him to come down on our terms. We wanted God atop a warhorse, with legions of angels behind Him, bearing forth the flaming sword and scything through our foes. We want Good to come down and wipe out all evil and force the world to be right. Yet God does not work that way. Love doesn’t work that way. Instead He came as we least expected, as a child, born among beasts, under the threat of death, born to a powerless young woman in a conquered little country on the outskirts of empire.

A Christchild! What a contradiction in terms! Let us not be sentimental. In the classical world of the Roman Imperium, children were not human. They were fragile and bothersome and not of much use at all, not until they could pull their own weight. And so they were seen as expendable. One could dispose of a child on a whim. If this shocks us, well, it’s because Christianity changed the world—the Western world, at least. I’m not saying that people didn’t love their kids, but their kids did not have rights, did not have value, had no inherent human dignity or worth, until we learned to see God in a Child.

The scandal is not simply that God has come to earth, but that He’s born at the bottom of the pile. And so He forces us to see everyone as human, and everyone as divine, made in the image of God, sustained by His Word and His Spirit. We used to think that strong men, special men, might earn some measure of divinity after death. But when God Himself descends to us, He ignores the winners and makes Himself one with the losers: with the forgotten and the impoverished and the oppressed.

“He has shown the strength of His arm. He has scattered the proud in their conceit. He has cast down the mighty from their thrones and has lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich He has sent away empty.” Sing it, Mary. Jesus flips our whole world on its head—turns an upside-down world rightside-up. In the Cross we now see it aright.

The point of Christmas Eve is not simply that Jesus was born to Mary a long time ago in a Judea far, far away. If that were the whole of it, then I doubt we much would care. It’d be just another doctrinal assertion, recited in the Creed on Sunday mornings. No, the point of Christmas Eve is that Christ would now be born in us. We are to bear Him forth in this generation, as the Blessed Mother bore Him for her own. And how does that happen? I’m glad that you asked. Christ is born to us in Word and in Sacrament.

In Holy Baptism, we are given His Name and His Spirit. In the Holy Eucharist, we are given His Body and Blood. And when we have the Name of Jesus, the Spirit of Jesus, the Body and the Blood of Jesus—what does that make us? It makes us Jesus! All of us together as His Church. And then we are sent out to be Jesus for others: to feed the hungry, house the homeless, clothe the naked, rebuke the sinner, forgive the penitent, speak truth to power, liberate the enslaved, and raise all the dead from their graves!

The way for Christ to be born in you is to see Him in everyone else. Because He is in everyone else! Every neighbor, every loved one, every enemy, every child. And should this all sound daunting, do not despair, for it isn’t really we who do it, but Christ who does it in us. Good works are the fruit and not the root of our salvation. Don’t worry about saving yourself; Jesus has that handled. Simply concern yourself with being Christ for others, by seeing Him in them. For the salvation of others is our own.

If loving your neighbor proves difficult, then here’s my tip to you: simply pretend that it’s Christmas in everything that you do.

For all the boots of the tramping warriors and all the garments rolled in blood shall be burned as fuel for the fire. For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders; and he is named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. His authority shall grow continually, and there shall be endless peace.

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

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