The Basic Mechanics of Christmas

I don't have a Christmas sermon to write this year. But over the past thirty years, I've written my fair share. Each year the details change and our context is different. But the core message is the same: God is with us. 

Seven years ago, my Christmas sermon turned out to be my last as rector of St. Francis Church in Holden. It was preached in the shadow of the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT. Although I preached then on the appointed text from Luke's Gospel, I peaked ahead to Matthew 2:16-18, which is also an important part of the larger Christmas narrative.

One of my "go to" metaphors over the past three decades has been Simon and Garfunkel's "Silent Night/7 O'Clock News." That recording brilliantly juxtaposes the famous Christmas hymn with the actual news from August 3, 1966. It's still worth a listen.

This, for me, is what Christmas is all about. It's that place where heaven and earth meet, not generically but specifically. Here. Now. This is the good news of Emmanuel - God with us not "once upon a time" but right now, wherever the light shines in the darkness.

I find a similar theme in the poetry of Joseph Brodsky, U.S. Poet Laureate in 1991, who wrote a series of Nativity Poems, including December 24, 1971. One of the powerful lines in that poem goes like this:

Herod reigns but the stronger he is, the more sure, the more certain the wonder. In the constancy of this relation is the basic mechanics of Christmas.

Herod reigns. His name changes over time, but the basic mechanics of Christmas and the Incarnation refuses to allow us "spiritualize" the good news. For me this is the core and great heresy and it's alive and well today. In the name of the one who was born in Bethlehem and who died at Golgatha, people bifurcate their faith and their ethics. But that's bad faith. The economy, the environment, and politics have everything to do with Jesus of Nazareth. It matters when people are being held in cages at our southern border. It matters when Palestinians can't travel to Bethlehem to celebrate Christmas. Peace on earth and good will to all people requires of us that we strive for justice and respect the dignity of every human being. Always with God's help.

Herod reigns. And he seems invincible at times. Yet Herod never gets the last word. The more hopeless the world seems, the more clear our wondering of what not only might be, but will be. This is the great mystery of our faith: Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again. We live in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection and in the sure and certain hope that Herod's power has a term limit. So that even as we celebrate the first coming of Jesus, we live in hope for the culmination of human history when every tear is wiped away, and the nations study war no more.

The constancy of this relationship between what is and what will be is indeed the basic mechanics of Christmas. It leads us, in each new year, to the work of Christmas, as the great Howard Thurman once put it. His prayer continues to be my prayer for 2020.

When the song of the angels is stilled, When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry, To release the prisoner, To rebuild the nations, To bring peace among others, To make music in the heart.