Christmas
December 25, 2009
The Rev. Dorian McGlannan 

Christ is born: give him glory!

Christ has come down from heaven: receive him!

Christ is now on earth: exalt him!

O, you earth, sing to the Lord!

O, you nations, praise him in joy, for he has been glorified.

            Christmas Canon – Orthodox Liturgy

On this most holy night, we are called to receive Christ, to hold the incarnation in our hearts, to touch the incarnation with our arms, to speak to the incarnation from the depth of our being. We are called to receive.  That Christ Jesus became one of us is a gift beyond measure.

It is so easy to get all turned around at this time of year.  It is so easy to miss the whole thing.  Oh I have fun with the gift giving piece.   Most people enjoy gift giving when it is done in a loving and thoughtful way, when it is simple, when it is from the heart.   But when all is said and done, the greatest gift is the gift of faith. 

Each year I always take part in two white elephant gift exchanges.  In these gift exchanges, the person who opens a gift is then able to trade it for something they like better.  At one of the gift exchanges in which I took part this year, there was an uncharacteristically desirable gift that everyone kept trying to steal.  This gift went from person to person until the last person was finally able to claim it.  At that point, the gift could no longer be stolen. 

How easy it is to lose a material gift. It can be stolen at a white elephant exchange or put in the closet never to be seen again.  A material gift can end up at the Salvation Army or the local homeless shelter.  But the gift of faith can never be stolen from us.  When faith takes charge of our lives, it stays forever.  The gift of faith can lift us out of the worst possible situations and enable us to glide through the heavens with ease and grace.  There may be times of doubt; times of turmoil but the gift will always rise again.

The interminably prolonged commercial season of Christmas can be a hard time to keep the gift of faith alive.  Sometimes we become enslaved to the crib and customs that surround this particular time of year. At times it is overwhelming.  Almost every year, despite my best efforts to keep this season from unraveling in my heart, I hit the wall some time during the days before Christmas.  I want nothing to do with my life as I know it.    A couple of weeks ago, in the midst of a particularly frustrating time, I decided to check out my niece’s Facebook page. On it she wrote, “need someone to occupy my apartment for two months”.  She lives in New York and I immediately wrote back. “I’ll take it”.   It is amazing the negative lightening bolts that can come barreling our way, the work of some demonic force trying to keep us from being with God.

In some ways the bad economy has been a good thing because it has forced us to leave a lot of the glitter and glitz behind and focus on what does matter in our lives.  For me, whenever my spirit feels stuck, the gift returns in the form of the relationships I have.   If I did not have people to love and people who love me, I would be lost.  If I did not have daily contact with people expressing their lives in faith, I would not know where to turn or where to go.    But everyday I see it; I see Christ in so many faces rich and poor, well heeled and homeless.  It does not matter; when Christ shines in someone’s life, it is a river of faith flowing from him or her to me.  That river of faith brings me up when I am discouraged and I know my river of faith brings others up when they are discouraged.  Here have a taste of the living water; let me share my living water with you when you are dry.  Let me drink of your living water when I am dry. 

I believe the poor economy has corrected many people’s guilt filled need to attempt to please others with stuff.  In the end, that has been a blessing. You who have come tonight have made a conscious choice to not be concerned, at least for the moment, with physical gifts; you have come seeking the gift of the spirit.

From the very first Christmas to this very night, the celebration of the birth of our savior has had all kinds of expectations wrapped up in it.   The Jews who waited for the Messiah had their own ideas of who the Messiah should be.  They wanted a God of glory, birthed by the right family, introduced by the right people, with the appropriate protocol.  Instead they received a baby born in poverty, in a dirty stable, in the plain, uninteresting city of Bethlehem, from a family whose heritage hailed from the despised city of Nazareth.  Expectations turned upside down, inside out. 

The power of the incarnation is that Jesus became human.  On the feast of Christmas we celebrate the humanity of Jesus more than at any other time of the year.  Jesus was here in person, walking among people for 30 odd years, healing people, teaching people, providing for the outcasts, inviting the sinners and dining with the despised.  He was not called to be at the head of the table, he was called to wash the feet of his disciples. 

Christmas is an emotional time.  All kinds of feelings well up within us at this time of year.  If we have a family member who is ill, or we ourselves are ill, the weight of those burdens increases because it is Christmas.  But those same burdens can be lifted when we have people of faith to walk with us.  In Latin America, people walking together in faith is called accompaniment.  The gift of accompaniment means so much to people who are struggling with this time of year.  We may be or know people who have lost spouses either through death or divorce.  This will be a dramatically different Christmas for them.  We may know or be people who have lost children to death or substance abuse.  This will be a dramatically different Christmas for them.  In these situations, the gift of accompaniment is the most precious.   Because whatever emotions we may have, one thing is for sure, Christmas puts them under a microscope and like the Nutcracker they become larger than life. 

Iranaeus, a third century church father, tells us that “because of his boundless love, Jesus became what we are that we might become what he is”.  That is a tall order.  No one can truly bear that kind of responsibility.  None of us will ever be Jesus.  But we can be Christ-like.  In our prayer we can bring the spirit of the incarnation into our lives and give ourselves to Christ.    Christian formation is a life-long endeavor that is at once demanding and exhilarating. Even those of us who have had conversion experiences or some kind of crystallizing mountain top experience, know that what really has happened is that we’ve agreed to go on the journey with Christ.  We don’t have all the answers; we simply know how to ask better questions.  The greatest gift of Christmas is the gift of faith, a faith that is ever seeking, a faith that is ever longing to know more and to have greater understanding, a faith that is freeing.

Jesus became one of us.  In the midst of a setting that was humble and dirty, Jesus gave us the gift of himself as a human being.  On this Christmas night may all of us be open to receiving the only gift of Christmas that can set us free, nothing more and nothing less than Christ who came to restore humanity to God.