This sermon was preached for Christmas Day, December 25, 2023. The texts for this sermon were: Isaiah 52:7-10, Luke 2:1-20, and Psalm 96.
A couple of Sundays ago a group of us went Christmas caroling to a local retirement community and an assisted living facility. As I was walking into our second performance, a middle-aged woman approached me, guiding an elderly man by the elbow. “Is this where the caroling is happening?” she asked.
She and the man who was clearly her father sat right up front and as we started into the first hymn, I saw tears well up in her eyes. She continued to cry, softly, as we sang and her father sang, too, in a soft, slow baritone. I held her in my heart as we sang, although there was no way for me to know why she was crying. Tears are so many things: sadness, fear, but also happiness, relief, profound joy, gratitude, appreciation of beauty. All I could really be sure about was that our music touched her deeply.
Yesterday at the Christmas Eve pageant, we sang the carol, “Away in a Manger,” the one that contains the line that makes me roll my eyes each time I sing it. It goes, “But little Lord Jesus no crying he makes.” The carol was clearly written to be sung by or to children and I can’t help but suspect that that line was slipped in there for nefarious purposes - probably in hopes of inspiring children everywhere to stop crying already and go to sleep. But I don’t think the insistence that Jesus was a tender and mild infant in that and other carols actually does us adults any favors as we contemplate the miracle of the incarnation on Christmas.
Because baby Jesus definitely cried and that is good news. The best news, in fact. On Christmas we revel in the astonishing truth that God chose to be fully human. Truly human in all that entails. The full range of human experience: sadness, fear, but also happiness, relief, profound joy, gratitude, appreciation of beauty. He felt them all. And made them all holy.
One thing I find myself saying a lot these days to folks, men and women, young people and old people alike, is that church is the perfect place to cry. Usually I say it when someone's apologizing and trying to mop themselves up in my office. But other times the tears’ve come at church because of a beautifully romantic story someone else just told, or a gorgeous solo piece a choirmember just sung, or the appearance of a lovely memory of days and people gone by. I say church is the perfect place to cry because church is the exact right place to be authentically yourself, to be wholehearted in whatever way that means for you right now. Church, at its best, is the exact right place to reveal yourself and be truly heard and seen, the exact right place to open up and let love in.
The very first thing God did on earth was cry. And in a very profound way, the birth we celebrate tonight is God’s response to all our cries. God saying to us: you are not alone in this, O my creation, O my people. I am with you, in all of it, from beginning to end, from birth to death and beyond.
When I think of baby Jesus, I think of how babies and toddlers do everything with their whole bodies. My daughter is a bit more than one year old, and when she is happy her whole body wriggles with delight. She does this little feet kick thing as if joy goes all the way down to her toes and she just has to shake it all out. And when she cries, her whole face crumples in and she’s got those big, fat baby tears. It’s amazing.
Baby Jesus did everything with his whole body, too, just like her. And then, as a young adult just about my own age, Jesus gave that same body for us, wholeheartedly, willingly on the cross.
There is no halfway when it comes to God’s love. God is all in. And that means being fully, truly human. Being broken open by the same things that break us open: music, laughter, beauty and pain, grief, ecstasy, and poignant memories.
It matters that God became incarnate as a very particular human being, in a particular time and place. It matters that he was a Palestinian Jewish man born to an unwed mother from Nazareth while Quirinius was governor of Syria. We celebrate and retell all those things on Christmas, every year.
It also matters that Jesus was human in all the ways that are universal to all human beings everywhere. That through his life and death, Jesus sanctifies the essential experiences of every person on earth: including our weaknesses and our vulnerabilities, including the fact that we actually all do cry. All this means that the closer we get to the things that make us uniquely and profoundly human, the closer we get to God.
My invitation to you this Christmas is to do it with your whole body and your whole heart. Be all in on Christmas this year. All in on the love, all in on the joy, all in on whatever makes you laugh and certainly all in on whatever makes you cry. Especially the carols.
Here is the paradox of Christmas:
The fragility of the infant reveals God’s awesomeness.
The humility of the manger demonstrates God’s majesty.
The cry of the newborn is the most joyous sound in the world.
There's a moment at every birth when we hold our breath and wait for the baby to cry. And when we hear it, that cry, that's when all the joy and relief comes rushing in. Because that's when we know they are alive, they are truly here.
Today we are gathered here at the moment of Jesus' birth and we hear it and we know, Jesus is alive, God is truly here with us. Alleluia! Merry Christmas! Amen.
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