What Christmas can't do

Maybe this holiday season so far has been joyous, gentle and kind for you, filled with good will and cheer, and if so, I am glad. To me, this year it feels like Christmas came on like a freight train. I couldn’t keep up, and maybe I also didn’t really have the bandwidth for it – in the end, I didn’t even get the ornaments onto my tree. But I couldn’t just admit defeat - there is actually a red and green bin still sitting unopened in the corner of my living room. 

I love Christmas, I absolutely do. But also, if I’m honest, it can be big let-down. Along with all the shimmer and warmth, for most of us Christmas is also usually awkward and exhausting, and, except for, maybe, like 4 years in middle childhood, Christmas is almost never how we remember it was or how we hope it will be.  
 
This year many of us are walking around with the collective burden of sorrow for our communities, and our nation and world, anger or helplessness coming in waves that don’t just subside when bells start jiggling and chestnuts start roasting. 
Some of us have lost a job we loved and don’t know what’s next. Others here are wrapping our heads around a scary diagnosis - our own or someone close to us. Some of us have kids that we can't talk to, not really, no matter how much we try. Or we’re spending the holiday season overwhelmed with the grief of missing someone who isn’t with us anymore. 
And plans change, people are sick or have to work, and the dinner will have fewer place-settings than it is supposed to have. Tonight or tomorrow, some of us will drink too much, or silently worry about someone else drinking too much. And some of us will spend the next couple of days trying to ignore the gnawing loneliness, or suppress the persistent anxiety, and just be happy like we’re supposed to on Christmas because, hooray! It’s Christmas.
 
When it comes down to it, Christmas is just not big enough or deep enough to hold all the expectations and longings we pile onto it.
 
The good news is, it doesn’t have to be. We’ve got it wrong. Christmas is not a happy, hollow celebration; Christmas is a reorientation to the future. Christmas is the beginning of God’s joining us in this life - in every single ordinary, beautiful, scary, sad, unholy, joy-filled, and disappointing part of human living.
 
In fact, after the exciting events we are about to recount tonight, the Christ-child’s story will become so ordinary, so commonplace, so representative, that Luke will sum up the next dozen or so years of Jesus’ life in one line: “And the child grew and became strong; he was filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon him.”
 
His next years will be full of absolutely ordinary things –cuts and bruises, stomach flu, temper tantrums, baby sisters, making friends, being teased, doing chores, laughter, anger, gladness and tears. And like every human life these years will also be full of tragedy and loss and fear and surprise. Politics and violence shaped the world when Jesus lived in it too. His early years are as a refugee in a foreign land, during his teen years many Galileans are killed in political uprisings. Throughout his childhood, Roman atrocities continue happening in the villages around his. And before Jesus turns 30, Mary will bury Joseph. His dad doesn’t get to see his son’s ministry begin. And then she will have to helplessly watch her son die.  Because Jesus lived an ordinary human life.
 
Our traditions and rituals are not strong enough or deep enough to hold all the expectations and longings we pile onto them. But God-is-with-us.  This One can bear it. He’s here to go into the darkness. He’s here to go right toward the pain and the suffering and bear it for us all. That is why he has come. 
All the strained relationships and lost opportunities, all the people we hurt and those whose hurt we can’t release. All the rage we feel at the world’s injustice, all the love we have and don’t know how to show, and all the places where we are just disappointed—we are called to confess them, in pain and sorrow, to this child, this God in here with us now, who has lived it all alongside us.  
 
To feel the brokenness, the incompleteness of it all, and pour it out to God is not some kind of failing; it’s brave faith. Telling God the truth of our sadness, anger, worry, and unfulfilled longings is an act of trust. Trust in the one who knows the longing, who is bringing the healing, who can handle our sorrow, and who will make the world whole. 
 
Christmas isn’t actually for jolly and cheer. It’s for laying our vulnerable hearts open to the one who came vulnerable among us to save us all.  
 
Tonight we will glimpse the future that is coming. Together we will sing carols of God’s in-breaking in the present tense and be returned to the deeper, ancient, eternal and ongoing redemption that can’t be stopped, and keeps on going, even when we’re distracted, or exhausted, or evil feels strong, or darkness seems especially dark. 
 
That’s all the preaching I am going to do – now the rest of you will join me -  all of us will take up the prophets’ promises, and the angels’ songs, and the shepherds’ awe, and Mary’s defiant predictions, and the Joseph’s brave obedience, and by song and story we will bring our whole selves to this glorious mystery, And however you come is how you’re meant to be.  

As we are present here to the presence of God with us now, may our hearts be open, for the next hour, may we be pulled from the ordinary into an eternal truth that pierces the darkness with light.
 
Settle in, and let’s begin.
 
 Lessons & Carols:  Luke 2:1-20
 
God comes into this life not as a mighty force overthrowing evil, as much as we may wish that were so, but as a helpless, displaced child, into the arms and care of unprepared people in a broken world. The light has come into the world. INTO the world – the very fabric of it. Inseparable from it. Tangled and tied and mixed up and stirred in, so that it cannot be extracted. The ordinary is now infused with the holy; Christ is in the world. God is irreversibly here. 
 
In this fast-paced, urgent, pressing era of shorts, reels, and loud, relentless breaking news, we may not have the attention span for the deep, quiet, steady, long game of God.  But this is why we’ve gathered here, to soak in this truth together, and surrender to the bigger picture for a time. 
When we leave tonight, we may still be weary or strained, the future will stay foggy, and the present is not magically made simple. But the end of the human story is written when the Christ child took his first breath: death will not prevail. And now, even the hard and confusing parts of our own ordinary lives are part of a cosmic upheaval of hope that we don’t control and the world can’t escape. 

Christ has come; the world belongs to God.  

Christ is here; we are not alone.  

Christ is coming; the future is God’s.

 

Let us pray.

God-with-us, 

thank you.

 Receive, our disappointments and longings, 

our desires and our failings, 

our prayer and our praise. 

And help us receive your peace, your love, 

your joy, and your hope. 

May we be hushed by the beauty of your world, 

and seized by the joy of our belonging.

May we embrace our humanity in all of its complexity, 

and embrace one another with grace and generosity. 

Root us and ground us in your enduring love, 

make our words and actions join your healing, 

and our ordinary lives contribute 

to your peace and life for all people. 

We pray these things trusting in your promises 

and resting in your love, 

Amen.