Tag: Christmas Eve

O Great Mystery: A Sermon for Christmas Eve

I preached this sermon on Christmas Eve, December 24, 2022, at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne. The lectionary text cited is Luke 2:1-20.

A couple of years ago, after both of my grandparents were gone and their house was in the process of being emptied and sold, I received a package in the mail. My cousin had sent me a few of my grandmother’s Christmas decorations, including an ornament or two and one of those plug-in yule logs from the 1950’s with electric candles on top of it. It meant a lot to receive these things and to be able to put them up alongside my own childhood decorations. 

And among my grandma’s decorations was a small, slightly timeworn Nativity set. The figures have a few chips and cracks, a fragment missing here or there, and it’s just the bare essentials: Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus in the manger, and a donkey and an ox. That’s it. No shepherds or angels or wise men. Just the Holy Family and a couple of animals attending them. At first I thought maybe some pieces were missing, that the scene felt incomplete, but now I have come to love the simplicity of the scene—how these few figures capture a quiet moment before the arrival of the angels with their songs and the clamoring shepherds with their questions. The donkey and the ox, it seems, are able to simply take the miracle in stride.

It’s interesting, as much as we love animals, that we don’t usually say much about the ones present on that wondrous night in Bethlehem, although they show up in nearly every depiction of the Nativity. If you read the text from Luke closely, you might be surprised to notice that no animals are explicitly mentioned. The Christ child is laid in a manger, a sort of feeding trough for livestock, but the creatures themselves are only implied by the setting.

In fact, it’s in the first chapter of Isaiah, and not in the Gospels, that we discover the donkey and the ox who eventually wandered their way into our collective imagination and into my grandmother’s Nativity set. They are found when the prophet says: 

The ox knows its master, the donkey its owner’s manger, but Israel does not know, my people do not understand.

The implication of Isaiah is that it’s the animals, embedded as they are within creation, who are able to recognize their true source of life and sustenance in ways that we humans, in our delusions of self-sufficiency, are not able to do. God longs that his people might be as trusting and dependent and open to his protection and providence as the donkey and the ox are to their caregivers. But are we? As we arrive at our Lord’s manger on Christmas, as we behold, in the flesh, the Redeemer of the Earth, do we finally understand who he is, what he offers, what he asks?

The question persists, and the donkey and the ox bear witness. In the early centuries of the church, the combination of Isaiah’s imagery and the nativity account were blended into a verse composed by an unknown author and chanted for centuries in Latin at the midnight prayer office on Christmas Day: O Magnum Mysterium. O Great Mystery. In English, it reads: 

O great mystery and wonderful sacrament, that animals should see the newborn Lord, lying in a manger! O blessed virgin, whose womb was worthy to bear the Lord Jesus Christ. Alleluia!

A simple verse, but it contains much to ponder. For it says that the Magnum Mysterium, the Great Mystery, is not just the birth of Jesus, but the witnesses to that birth—that it was the animals, before anyone else, who beheld the Lord in his manger. It was the animals, not the shepherds, not the wise men, who first saw their Creator enter his creation and then gathered in to greet him. Only the animals, wordless, attentive, uncalculating. They knew their master’s voice, they recognized their owner’s manger, and so they huddled close, sharing their solid warmth with him and his mother in the chill of that silent, holy night.

What can this scene teach us, we who still struggle to understand?

It is often said that our Savior being born into such a setting is a sign of God’s humility; that it is a great self-emptying of divine power to be born as a helpless infant, surrounded by animals, lying in a feeding trough. And God’s humility is indeed part of the Great Mystery of Christmas, but I think we miss something important if we just leave it at that. 

Because anyone who has worked with animals, or who has simply cared for and loved them, knows that they possess their own sort of wisdom, their own inherent dignity and grace. Not just the donkey and the ox, but all of God’s creatures play their own role in the vast network of interdependent life on this earth, each carrying in their very bones a knowledge of what they are, and what they must do to live, to flourish, to endure. Animals are different from us, but they are not lesser than us. 

And so perhaps for Christ to be born into their company is not so much about divine self-abasement as it is a sign of human reconnection with the fundamentals that shape and sustain all of life, including our own: birth, and death, and nourishment, and warmth, and companionship, and trust. All of us need these things. All of us can give these things. 

Perhaps the Great Mystery that we glimpse this night, alongside the animals at the manger, is not God’s weakness, but God’s true, elemental strength. For what is stronger than showing up in deep solidarity with creation? What is mightier than taking part in the persistent, generative power shared by all living things? 

What if the wonderful sacrament is not to be understood so much as Christ descending into a poor and helpless form, but as the Creator arising into his creation, emerging from the hidden depths of the cosmos, from the womb of his mother, from the cradle of eternity, to claim all the earth as his own beloved home, to name all living things as his kin—as sacred partners in the unfolding birth of the Kingdom? 

For it should not be lost on us that the very things Jesus will later name as our essential Christian vocation—feeding the hungry and thirsty; sheltering the weak; being present to the most vulnerable,—these things are not lofty theological propositions. They are creaturely things: old, and instinctive, and earthy. They are the basic stuff of life. And they are, O Magnum Mysterium, the very things that the animals offered Jesus that first night in Bethlehem.

For the ox knows its master, and the donkey its owner’s manger.

But the question remains: do we know? Do we understand yet? Or are we so overwhelmed by the seeming complexity of God, or the complexity of our world, that we have forgotten the ultimate simplicity of what is needed, what is given, what is required of us in this life: to tread lightly and compassionately upon this earth in union with all of creation? 

Might we, on this most blessed of nights, rediscover our truest selves? We who are made in the image of the God who now bears our image, too. We who are called only to love; called only to sustain one another, to sustain the earth, as he sustains us. O Great Mystery, that life— messy, tearstained, bleeding, breathing, fragile, undaunted, beautiful life—is itself the most wondrous sacrament of all.

In it, may we finally come to see that Christ is not born this night to save us from our humanity, nor to deliver us from the world he has made, but to inhabit these things fully, to love them fully, that we might gather alongside all creatures, to behold the majesty of God in the flesh, and to join our voices with the song of the angels and the bray of the donkey and the bellow of the ox, a chorus of unceasing praise. Tonight, may the whole world at last know its master, know its Lord’s manger, and thereby know itself for what it is—beloved, sustained, redeemed.

The Nativity scene is here, in our midst. Our Savior awaits. What the animals did first and best, let us do so now, too, with the joy that is fullness of life. 

Come, let us adore him.

Hands: A Christmas Eve Sermon

I preached this sermon on Christmas Eve, December 24, 2021, for Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN.

Just over a year ago, I had the privilege of sitting at the hospital bed with two of our beloved parishioners, Dick and Vera, just before the end of Dick’s life. He was not really conscious at the time, but it was such a blessing, given all of the complications of hospital visitation these days, that Vera was able to be there in person with him to say goodbye after many decades of marriage. 

And there is one image from that afternoon that I think I will never forget—how Vera reached out to hold Dick’s hand, just as she had always done, and how, even though he was deep into his passage away from this life, his hand squeezed back, and his thumb gently caressed her hand. A memory that was deeper than consciousness, a memory of love so deeply inscribed into him that nothing, not even the approach of death, could inhibit its expression. When Vera also left us earlier this year, I thought of the two of them holding hands again in the new life that is promised to us, and it made me smile.

I remember, too, several years ago, holding my infant godson, so afraid I would drop him, so in awe that my life had even a small connection to the beauty and the possibility of this new life. I remember how his little fingers, tiny and determined, would wrap around my finger, surprisingly strong, an instinctive urge to hold on, to connect. His grasp felt like an inquiry, simple and direct: will you be there? Will you care for me? Is it true that I am not alone in this big, strange world? Can I hold onto you?

I think it might be said that from the beginning of our days to the very end, there is no gesture more fundamental than to reach out to the ones we love, to feel their fingers intertwined with ours. Because, if you think about it, this is what we always do—when we’re happy, when we’re frightened, when we’re falling in love, when we’re waiting for important news, when we can’t quite walk on our own strength, and when we must say goodbye for the last time: in all those moments of life when words fail us, we reach out, and we just hold hands. 

I think it can also be said that our journey of faith is much the same—like that famous image from the Sistine Chapel of Adam and God extending their hands towards one another at the moment of creation, their fingertips separated by an infinitely small distance—underneath all of our striving and our doubting, our seeking and our praying, we are extending our hand out into the deep, into the vast mystery of life, reaching out for something certain, something true, something that endures, something (or Someone) to hold onto. When all is said and done, we yearn, quite simply for a God who will reach back and clasp our hand and say, I am with you. Hold onto me.

And that is exactly what we are given on this night. A God whom we can hold onto. A God who holds onto us. All of the music and the lights, all the activity and the excitement, all the exhaustion and ambiguity and yearning that characterize both the holidays and life in general—all of it finds its answer here, in the birth of a child in Bethlehem, in the terrified wonder of the shepherds in the field, in the song of the heavenly host, in the courageous heart of a young mother, and in the tiny hand of an infant that reaches out, surprisingly strong, towards your own hand. It is the hand of God, holding yours in the cool and pregnant darkness, and it is the answer to your own questions: I am here, now. I will care for you. You are not alone in this big, strange world. You can hold onto me.

How else would love come to find us if not like this: in the flesh, in the way we most instinctively understand? How else could God close that infinite distance between the fingertips? Only like this, only by letting us, at last, take his real, incarnate hand. Only by becoming as one of us, in order to say,

I have always loved you, I have always been for you, ever since the beginning, but now I am with you, too. And I promise I will always be here to hold your hand. 

Even when everything else slips away, even when everything you counted on seems to disappear, I am here.  When you laugh and dance for joy, I will take your hand and dance with you. And when you are weak and afraid, I will be there, too, for my fingers are intertwined with yours now, my life is intertwined with yours now. Just hold on.

I don’t know about you, but in the uncertain times in which we find ourselves, when the preciousness and the precariousness of the present moment are both felt so keenly, I need this good news of Christmas more than ever. I need to be reminded that even in a broken world, there is hope, and that God is still with us. 

In the birth of Jesus–the birth of God among us –our outstretched hands brush against the glory of heaven. In the birth of Jesus, we find that the whole world is full of sacramental possibility, especially in those simple actions of love that make up our lives—the wound mended, the bread broken, the injustice addressed, and yes, the hand held. All, now, instruments of grace, because God has taken them on as the work of God’s own hands.

What a gift to be given. And what a gift to pass on to others. Because, essentially, that is what we are trying to do here at Trinity, as followers of this holy child of Bethlehem, this Savior born for us—we are showing up for one another and for our neighbors and for our community, especially the most vulnerable in our midst, extending our hands in love. We are facing life together, we are celebrating and mourning together, studying and praising together, hands clasped in prayer, hands clasped in greeting, hands clasped in solidarity, hands clasped in trust. 

All because, on this beautiful, silent night, when even the loveliest words ultimately fail to express the fullness of our joy, a hand reaches out to us, a tiny hand from the manger, yes, but in truth a hand reaching out from across eternity, down through garlands of stars, down through the centuries of longing, down from the hidden source of our deepest wonder. And it gently caresses our own, a love so deeply inscribed into it that not even death will inhibit its expression, holding us, softly, but firmly,

as if to say, quite simply,

It’s going to be ok. I am here. Just hold on.