The Church of the Ascension
December 24, 2007

In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. AMEN.

Yesterday morning in the Christmas Pageant, Mary had a meltdown, a fairly major one.  It happens in even the best of families.  Perhaps it has already happened in some of yours this year; and, if not, it may very well yet before the season is over.  Christmas is not easy on us; the emotions run pretty deep and barely disguised.  Fatigue is real; expectations are huge.  I talked to my son Brian yesterday as he was beginning his shopping.  He is such an American man, frantic and oh so earnest at the last moment about getting it done.  I could hear the anxiety in his voice.  Hearing him talk, one could scarcely believe that he was buying for only one person – his wife.  She had long since finished all the rest.  Some of you are bleary eyed from the cooking and wrapping and fretting.  Others of you have already had about as much familial frivolity as a soul can bear for one year.  Still others are sad, penetratingly sad, because you are separated from one whom you love.  And, yet, here we all are: gathered for Mass on Christmas Eve, the most magical night of the year.  If it gets more beautiful than this, I cannot imagine it.  And when all is said and done with emotions from high to low, there is nowhere else on earth that I would rather be than here remembering the night that Jesus was born. 

In a thinly veiled attempt to find new material for this night, I asked a good friend this week what he looked for in a Christmas Eve sermon.   He said, “Oh, I prefer a very brief but sweet story, followed quickly with “Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night." I suppose I should be grateful he stopped short of suggesting that I wear a Santa suit!  Though not very helpful, he is probably not alone in his sentiment!  As fabulous as the night is, for most of us a good night’s rest is looking more and more appealing.  Yesterday when I was urging parents of small children to bring their kids to Midnight Mass – a notion which I know is ridiculous but one I truly support, I suggested that a good dose of antihistamine always helps to make them nice and sleepy.  Ascension parents, though, are a reasonably well differentiated group, who recognize a line when they hear it.  They smiled and apparently ignored me.  “Poor ole Father Buddy,” they murmured, “he really is slipping if he thinks we are bringing our three year old to Mass at Midnight!”

But because the evening is so beautiful and so filled with wonder and awe, I am unabashed about trying to get everyone to come – young and old.  You can sleep tomorrow after you have stuff yourselves!  This is a night to be here!  I have never understood why some very religious folks seem irritated that a number of people, who don’t make it to church every Sunday, seem to come on Christmas Eve.  It makes perfect sense to me; and if this is the only time you can get here for whatever set of reasons, welcome home!  I am delighted to have you.  The chance to gather around this table of Grace makes the rest of Christmas not just bearable but colors it with unmistakable joy – for this is the real thing!

The temptation for priests on Christmas Eve – and I am no exception - is to go and on.  For a wordsmith, even a limited one, the desire to find just the right phrase in honor of this night is almost overwhelming.  But, of course, it is not possible to capture the mystery of this event, certainly not in a simple sentimental story or even a few well chosen words.  In ways that go beyond anything commercialized by the season, Christmas is the story of God and us.  After a few days when all the tinsel is re-wound, when the lights are stored for another year, when even 106.7 ceases to play “The Little Drummer Boy” every fifteen minutes, the truth of Christmas will linger. 

Christmas truth lingers because it was on this night that a light was made to shine in a great darkness.  Make no mistake about it: the darkness was great; and as we well know even on an occasion of hope like this, it still can be.  But because of Christmas it will never be as dark as it was, and the darkness will not overtake us.  Christmas truth lingers because it was on this night that a beacon sent to lead us began to shine brightly before us.  The beacon does not guarantee that we never veer from the path; we know better than that.  But it assures that being lost forever will not happen because this is a beacon that not even death can extinguish.  Christmas truth lingers because it was on this night that we received the joyful word that living in fear is no longer necessary.  “Fear not,” the angel said not because nothing fearful exists but because we never have to be alone in our fear again – and that makes all the difference in the world.  Christmas truth lingers because it was on this night that Jesus came to be born.

Understanding how all these things came to be and what they mean to us as they continue to unfold after all these years is more a matter for the heart than they the claim of our creed.  Christmas is about the heart not about the head.  At the end of what undoubtedly was the most remarkable night of her life, Mary, the scripture tells us, treasured all that had been said and done and “pondered them in her heart.”   We too ponder these things; they stir us in ways that defy our understanding, calling from us emotions that come from who knows where except that they must come from deep within us.  We ponder them not to put too fine a doctrinal point on them but to let them tug at our hearts, nudging us toward that which is good and peaceful and filled with hope.  We ponder them seriously for we suspect that they will take us to places of service and sacrifice, just as they took Mary to places that were hard and yet remained for her and shall for us strangely joyful.

Christmas changes even the most hardened heart.  It is a night that begs for forgiveness and reconciliation, a night that invites us to let go the old and tired resentments that have served us so poorly for longer than we can even remember.  Christmas is a night above politics.  It moves us from sensible policy to generosity we scarcely knew ourselves to contain.  On this night our borders do not exist.  Christmas is a night in which denomination dies.  Concerns with how we worship and the fine print of our beliefs are exposed as minor but divisive differences that matter so little.  And even if it is in part a fleeting moment, Christmas is a night of hope, the memory of which somehow sustains us in the coming year when business get backs to normal.  The reason we hope so much on this night is that every year we gather for Midnight Mass, we take the chance of being converted.  Somewhere deep in our souls we know that little by little we are moving toward the Kingdom of God, that we are being shaped in the likeness of Christ, that we are slowly becoming the person God creates us to be.  Maybe this will be the year when the truth of Christmas changes us forever. 

This moment is different.  This moment is real.  This moment is Christmas.

In the name of God:  AMEN.