Welcome! We want to offer a special welcome to the Church of the Nativity
to all those visiting here this Christmas morning,
family members and friends and neighbors.
It is good to be here,
to choose to come here in the midst of whatever else is occurring
in your home on this morning.
You wouldn't be here, you see, if you were just celebrating a winter feast,
the solstice, the new year, Yule or Saturnalia.
You could have your Christmas tree and all the gift giving,
the greeting cards and special baking and festive foods,
the parties and hot toddies,
and quite a few of the season's songs
all without being here right now.
But no, you are here,
and I would say that this is because you know
that here is the heart of Christmas,
here is the nourishment for the spirit
and healing for the heart and the joy of renewed hope.
And so we come to worship, to sing the praise of our Lord Jesus Christ,
to join our voices with others in adoration,
and be reminded again of God’s great love for us
expressed in this tremendous gift of Jesus, the Light of the World.
Is. 9:2 The people who walked in darkness
have seen a great light;
those who lived in a land of deep darkness—
on them light has shined.
I have been thinking about how this holy day focuses on Jesus as a baby.
Having been a hospital chaplain
I know something about all the ways in which
being born is a risky venture.
So much can go wrong,
that it makes the healthy, normal births
seem even more like miracles.
Today we have all sorts of medical know how and technology
that routinely intervenes and saves lives,
but what was it like 2000 years ago?
For the one being born birth is a painful and traumatic experience.
The new human being is literally
pushed out of the safety and enclosure of the womb,
out into a chaotic and unknown void
where sights and sounds and tactile sensations
do not as yet have names.
And then, after you are born,
you are totally dependent upon those around you.
You cannot communicate your need.
You cannot control what your body does.
You can't even lift your head by yourself.
A newborn lamb or calf can get right to its feet after birth
and find its way to its mother's milk,
but human infant must wait until its nourishment is brought by mother.
How vulnerable! How utterly vulnerable is a human baby!
Babies newly born are at the mercy of the circumstances
into which they have come;
the newborn may be embraced within loving arms,
or left in a dumpster or be subjected to abuse and neglect.
It makes me wonder at how vulnerable God became,
when the Eternal Word took human form.
I've wondered at God, thinking if I were God,
I would not choose to be born in Bethlehem:
too small a town,
no major hospitals in case something went wrong.
If I were God, I wouldn't want to be born in winter
and in the middle of a trip,
and to parents of limited income.
Even with the crowds of people at the inn,
if you have enough money, you can buy what you need.
But not poor parents.
And I wouldn't want to end up being born in a stable;
think of how unsanitary that was.
And I wouldn't want to be born 2000 years ago;
Their knowledge of medicine then was much more primitive.
And the country was under foreign occupation,
with this King Herod, a brilliant but ruthless ruler, running things
and acting paranoid
and doing ghastly atrocities
like killing babies because one might grow up to replace him.
If I were God, I'm not sure I would want to take so many risks,
to be so vulnerable.
Why would God do that? Love, wondrous love, for you and for me.
What a strange and wondrous God
who would become a baby and place himself entirely
in the hands of human beings.
The God who created us, God the Omnipotent, the Eternal Word,
places himself in human hands,
so completely was the Divine Self-giving in love with us.
How then ought we to respond?
Or how can we respond in any other way
than to meet that vulnerable love with an embracing openness.
To quote Meister Eckhart, a 13th/14th century mystic:
Here, in time, we are celebrating the eternal birth
which God the Father bore and bears unceasingly in eternity,
because this same birth is now born in time, in human nature.
St. Augustine says,
“What does it avail me that this birth is always happening,
if it does not happen in me?
That it should happen in me is what matters.”
We shall therefore speak of this birth, of how it may take place in us.
In other words as Matthew Fox, a contemporary theologian, has said:
“We are all meant to be mothers of God.”
Today as you come to this Holy Table
to receive your Christmas communion,
it is the human form of God in the garments of bread and wine
which will be placed into your hands.
What will be your response to the love God has for you,
the love which led the Baby of Bethlehem
to the cross outside the walls of Jerusalem?
The love of God made vulnerable in his dependency at birth
and in his complete self giving at death
demands our response.
O, come, let us adore him.
(with thanks to Richard Rohr for tipping me off to these quotations from Meister Eckhart and Matthew Fox)
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