Christmas 2009 “What Child is This?”

Christmas 2009
“What Child is This?”

Will and I hang our Christmas cards on red velvet ribbons hanging from the door frame to our parlor.
I love looking up from the dining room table which tends to be the center of Christmas wrapping and writing and list-making, and spotting the rows of cards, remembering the friends who sent them.
I can happily distract myself from whatever I’m supposed to be doing by focusing on one or two cards, remembering the friends who sent them.
Among them of course are cards made from photos proudly featuring kids and grandkids.
This year in one perusal I spotted a family I didn’t recognize at all. A proud mother and father flanking a gorgeous little guy about six months old. “Who are they?,” I wondered.
They turned out to be friends of my son’s fiancée, people I’d never met.
But what struck me was how they fit right in with all the regular Christmas cards surrounding them, the ones depicting Mary, Joseph, and the baby.

On one level, the Christmas story is so simple, so simple that toddlers can understand it, especially toddlers who have new little brothers or sisters.
Because on one level, the Christmas story is a birth story about a mother, a father, and a new baby.
Our Christmas cards this year featured a painting by Botticelli of Mary and Jesus. Except for the haloes, Mary and her baby are depicted as a healthy, happy mother and a plump little baby staring into his mother’s eyes.
The expression on Mary’s face looks just like the young mother of the family I didn’t recognize.

The Christmas story, the reason we’re all here tonight, draws us into celebration partly because birth itself always calls for celebration.
The fact of birth itself, the coming into being of a new human life—isn’t that holy enough, isn’t that sacred enough, to bring us together tonight in wonder and awe.


Just below the photograph of the familiar unfamiliar family is another very different image.
It’s an ancient depiction of Mary and Jesus from the Eastern Orthodox tradition called “Our Lady of the Sign.”
You may have see it: Mary is facing us, eyes looking at us. She’s holding up her hands like this—in the ancient position of prayer.
Here’s what’s surprising: It’s as if you have x-ray vision. You can see through Mary’s robes right into her body. And there is the Christ Child, sitting with great dignity, looking out right at us.
What you have to squint your eyes to see is that all around Jesus is a velvety darkness and twinkling in that darkness, stars.

Stars. Because of course the story of Christmas is not just about the miracle of all births, but also about one particular extraordinary birth.
And here’s where the Christmas story becomes wild and crazy It’s a story about a human birth, yes, but at the same time it’s bout a God who out of wild explosive love created a universe—stars and galaxies and planetary systems and quarks and black holes— out of nothing, and then stayed around long enough to realize that at least in the vicinity of earth and specifically of human beings, things were quickly going downhill.
It’s a story about a God who grieved for the lost goodness of the earth, whose heart was so pierced by the suffering caused by human resentments, selfishness, cruelty, greed and all the sins you and I know only too well—whose heart was so pierced by alienation from the children who had drifted so far away, that God in the person of Jesus Christ—and this is mystery so I can’t describe it too clearly—chose by an immense creative leap to take a human journey starting in a woman’s womb.
St. Paul tried to express the wonder of God’s crazy self-exile: “[Jesus Christ] had equal status with God but didn't think so much of himself that he had to cling to the advantages of that status no matter what. Not at all. When the time came, he set aside the privileges of deity and became human! Having become human, he stayed human. It was an incredibly humbling process. He didn't claim special privileges. Instead, he lived a selfless, obedient life and then died a selfless death.”

Can we entertain one wild notion together, just for a moment?:
That God loves us, each single one of us millions and billions of us—so crazily as to want to be with us, to be one of us?
I find it so hard to grasp. I suspect because we’re so used to being loved partially—for the spiffy parts of us, for the things we do well. For what makes us “successful.”
So the greatest miracle of all is when someone knows everything about us, absolutely everything—and still takes delight in us, loves us extravagantly, as if we were the most special person in the universe. When someone will do anything, sacrifice anything, to be with us.

That’s the ultimate Christmas gift, the one that never wears out or gets out of date—God’s wild, exuberant love.
I invite you tonight as we celebrate that first Christmas together, as we sing and pray and receive Communion together, to hold your cares and worries, your frustrations and griefs loosely—they are part of you but not all of you. And then let yourself be loved extravagantly by a God who journeyed to earth to be near us, and who will never let us go.