December 24, 2024 - Christmas Eve
My friends, I speak to you tonight in the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.
Well, Merry Christmas, Epiphany! We have seven songs in tonight’s bulletin, so I promise to keep this sermon a bit shorter than usual. It’s good to be with you tonight.
We have spent four weeks putting off any formal Christmas celebration here at church to observe the season of Advent, a time of waiting, of resting, of anticipation, of looking forward to this night and to tomorrow morning. Of course, that does not mean that all Christmas traditions have been put aside: Christmas cookies have been decorated, songs are on the radio, and the tree was lit in downtown nearly a month ago. We’ve discussed this in sermons of late, this difficulty of being a different community within a wider community that just wants to celebrate Christmas! Well, now we can, and fully.
In our family, one of those traditions celebrated a bit early has been the watching of Christmas movies. I asked some friends this week what their favorite Christmas movies were, and the usual titles were floated: It’s a Wonderful Life, Home Alone, Elf, The Grinch, A Christmas Story, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer... and even Die Hard. But in our house (or at least in mine, as it’s not one of Abbey’s top three), Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is a must-watch. There have been at least a dozen adaptations of this story for the silver screen over the last century, but without any doubt, the best of these is the one w/ Kermit, Miss Piggy, Gonzo, and Michael Caine, The Muppet Christmas Carol.
In one of my favorite Christmas songs not written for the church, Kermit the Frog sings these lines toward the beginning, when Ebenezer Scrooge is still being all scroogey: “Tis the season to be jolly and joyous, with a burst of pleasure, we feel it arrive; it’s the season when the saints can employ us, to spread the news about peace and to keep love alive.” I love Kermit, and as an Episcopalian, I love this idea that the saints use this season specifically to employ us to spread the news about peace and love. There’s an opportunity for us to spread peace and love even more than we usually do when so many of those around us are tuned into Christmas. I love that.
Overall, the Muppet version of Dickens’ tale is just a wonderful, happy, silly, joyous movie. And that’s what we get this season, right? A lot of joy. We’ll sing “Joy to the World” tomorrow morning, my girls will open too many presents, we’ll smile and laugh a lot, and we’ll all probably eat too much food. It’s a time of joy.... for most of us.
See, I’ve been reminded several times this month and this week that the holiday season is difficult for many. There are trips to the hospital, trips to the nursing home; there are broken relationships and intense loneliness; there is poverty, there is hunger, both in our communities; and more, all throughout December. Rarely does the difficulty of life take a vacation. For some, the holidays can bring pain more fully than they bring joy. Justice, peace, and shalom do not yet reign over all, as we were reminded during Advent.
Thankfully though, the joy we find this night, the joy we find tomorrow on Christmas morning, that joy is not based in the sort of things one might expect, it is not based in expensive gifts or even good food, it is not based in some sort of miraculous alleviation of all difficulty or trouble, some end of the world “all things being made right.” This, of course, is where the gospel story comes in for us this evening.
In the second chapter of Luke, we find the most familiar biblical account of the birth of Christ (we’ll read it tomorrow morning too). St. Matthew gives us a few short verses, but Luke is where we read about shepherds, about angels, about a manger, about swaddling clothes, and perhaps most importantly, about Mary. Some of my sermon tomorrow morning will focus on her role in this narrative, but tonight, the focus is far more on where and how God chose to be with us, a world-altering decision, an expression of literally unbelievable love.
You might think that for maximum efficiency and exposure in the first century, the God of all creation might choose to come to earth in Rome, perhaps as Caesar or as his heir; a common refrain of the time was that Caesar is Lord, professed in worship of him. Or, if not in Rome, perhaps God would come as one of the leaders of the Jews in Israel, as a sword-wielding Messiah, ready to do battle against Rome and reclaim the world for God’s chosen people. They certainly expected that. Instead, of course, God came to be with us in the incarnation as a little eight-pound, six-ounce, newborn baby, or something like that. God came to a cave, or a stable, or a family room, scholars differ there, but God came in the form of Jesus to the humblest of places, to, as Pastor Bob said on Sunday, to a strong, confident, unmarried woman in a patriarchal society, to someone so steeped in the scriptures that she could sing the Magnificat in celebration at the news.
God came to be with us in the humblest of ways, to the least advantaged of people, incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and made man, to live all the difficulties of life alongside us as one of us, not from a privileged position of power, but fully human, just like us. That, my friends gathered on Christmas Eve, is the good news we celebrate this night; that is the reason for this season and for all that the church has done in the two thousand years since. Immanuel, God with us, not above us, or far from us, or somewhere towering over us in the sky waiting for us to make a mistake, God with us is the reason we, as Kermit said, are jolly and joyous. God with us is the reason we are all here tonight.
There’s another song in The Muppet Christmas Carol that I really love, sung by a gigantic and boisterous Muppet that represents the Ghost of Christmas Present. The ghost sings about joy, “It’s in the singing of a street corner choir, it’s going home and getting warm by the fire, it’s true wherever you find love, it feels like Christmas.” Here at the Church of the Epiphany, I’m thrilled to say that you really can find love on a weekly, daily basis, and so it often feels like Christmas around here. This joy we feel tonight is available to us all year long, because we all work to live as though God is with us and God loves us, all of us, no exceptions. Thanks to the birth of Jesus Christ, we know that that is true, that God loves us so much, God came to be with us and we need merely live as if we believe it, for the good of ourselves, our loved ones, and those in need of love around us.
That is the message of Christmas for us tonight: God is love, God chose and chooses to be with us, and now we need merely to love, and love abundantly. Merry Christmas.
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