Christmas Eve, Year A, 2016 – Isaiah 9:2-7; Titus 2:11-14; Luke 2:1-14
And while they were there the days were fulfilled for Mary to give birth, and she bore her first-born son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger.
This is the night on which we are called out of the hustling and bustling world to come! and kneel for a moment at the cradle of a child. We come, with Mary and Joseph and a donkey and an ox and a cow perhaps, to a birth. It is so ordinary! A child is born, as so many children have been born, as a child is no doubt being born somewhere at this very moment. It is so ordinary. They are so ordinary, this young woman and her soon-to-be husband, this barn in which they shelter, for there was no room for them in the inn.
And yet in them, on this night, such a light! On this night a light is lit to pierce the farthest corners of the night. Out of the darkness to the cradle we come this night, our candles glowing here and there like stars in the sky. The stars are small in the expanse of the night—small as candles, small as a baby is small. But there is behind each pinprick star a great ball of fire with the power to make and remake worlds. It is the same with the child who is born this night.
At his birth, the heavens sing.
And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying,
“Glory to God! Glory to God in the heavenly places,
and peace to his people on earth.”
For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
It is God’s Word that is spoken this night, King of all kings, the Prince of Peace. And it is spoken, the great and saving word is spoken, in a mother and her child.
This is the wonder of it. For surely there is nothing smaller, nothing more vulnerable, nothing more ordinary than a baby. Tiny and wrinkled and red when they are born, often screeching at the top of their tiny lungs. And yet in this child Mary holds in her arms, a vast and mighty joy.
It is a joy we know in part at every baby’s birth. To hold a newborn in your arms is to know each time the blessed gift that a baby is and the way they touch our hearts. One of you was saying to me just last week: it’s the hands that amaze me. Tiny, perfect fingers, curling around my finger, reaching out to have and to hold this other human being from the very first breath.
Each of our children’s births was a miracle to me. But it was Nicholas who came easiest, and so his first moments were calm. He lay in my arms and looked up at his new Dad and me with wide bright eyes, simply gazing into our eyes for the better part of an hour. I will never forget it. And in that hour there was an echo of the mystery of this night.
There is a love that is woven into the very fabric of our being. It is known in the eyes of the child, and in the tiny hands that wrap around our finger as soon as they touch it. It is known in the tenderness in the father’s gaze as he sees for the first time his little one. It is known in the joy in our hearts.
We have a new baby in this church, baby Thomas. Danielle, his mother, told me that she laughed her new baby into the world, he came so fast and so easily. And her laughter is a sign. For there is at the heart of all things a joy springing up, joy in the child and the life that is given, joy in the love that rises here, at the very beginning of things.
It is love that is given us this night, love that was given us in the beginning, sown into our nature as God’s own creatures, sown into our being in the image of God. It was love that was lost somewhere in the garden, when we turned away from the face that looks upon us always with love, when we turned away, turned in upon ourselves, and hid from his gaze among the trees of the garden. It was love that was lost, the easy love of the baby who gazes into his parents’ eyes, his whole heart there in his eyes, innocent and unafraid.
It is love that is ours and love that is lost and love that is given us this night again. Love of the Father in his own Son, the only-begotten. Love of the Father spoken in the Son before all worlds and time began.
In the beginning was the Word and the word was with God and the word was God. The word was with God: the Greek word here is “pros”. It has the sense of being turned toward, the son turned toward the Father and the Father toward the Son in an endless movement, an endless gaze of love in the very being of God.
And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us and we have seen his glory, glory as of the Father’s only Son. It is love that is born in our midst this night, love of Son for the Father, love of the Father for the only-begotten Son. God catches us up this night in this child in the movement of love that is his, the unending inclination of the heart, Father turned to Son and Son to the Father in the being of God; God catches us up in the child in the movement of love that is his, and invites us to turn our hearts back to him. God the Father looks out at us through the eyes of his Son Jesus the Christ, the child born this night.
God looks at us with perfect love, in the child, the Christ, and he asks us to turn our eyes back to him.
He reaches out his hand to us, in the baby’s tiny hands, and asks us to let him take our hand.
I sing of maiden that is makeles
King of all Kings to her son she ches.
It is love born among us on this night, through this ordinary maiden on this ordinary night, a love so deep and so broad and so high that we cannot begin to grasp its measure. King of all kings, for our sake made man. For our sake lying in the manger, for our sake hanging on the cross. For that is where it ends. This is the love of God, that looks into our eyes with the compassion of God and knows how far away we have gone. This is the love of God, that looks into our eyes when they are darkened and bleared and smeared, this good world smeared by trouble and by toil; these good lives we have been given. This is the love that looks into our eyes and suffers with us all that is lost, that names us in our lost and lonely places God’s own child still, and lifts us into God’s arms. It is love that looks into our eyes this night, in the child who is born, so that we may look again in peace into his.
This is the night of our hope. We come in the darkness of the night to the manger where the light shines. The light shines in the darkness in the deep eyes of the child, and the darkness did not overcome it. So we lift our candles high, and we sing our song. We sing like stars or angels in the night, glory to God and peace on earth.
But this is the miracle: in the child given to us today God invites us not just to sing with the angels, but to live the love that is given us on earth, in our ordinary days. My son Nicholas, now grown up and sitting in a café this week, noticed an unusual couple beside him. The woman was smartly dressed and clearly professional, at home drinking her coffee in the café. The man eating lunch beside her was scruffy, unkempt beard, much older, and the snippets of his conversation that Nicholas heard were unexpected. Aliens in the internet; threats from unseen eyes. The couple puzzled him; he couldn’t figure them out. They left. And then Nicholas left…and passed the man from the café sitting in his sleeping bag on the sidewalk outside. When I was hungry you gave me food…
It was Christ the woman met in the café that ordinary day this Christmas, and Christ’s love she lived.
Christ gave up his heavenly glory to come and walk with us. That is the kind of love he plants in our hearts this night.
To sing with each moment of our ordinary lives: each of our lives, each of our families, each of our days, now a song where this night’s Word is heard. Each day of our lives, the place of this song:
Silent Night, Holy Night,
Son of God, Love’s pure light
Radiant beams from thy holy face
With the dawn of redeeming grace
Jesus Lord at thy birth.
