Celebrate the Gift (and Receive It in your Heart) Christmas Eve by The Rev. Donald L. Hamer, Rector
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I have been struggling this year as I prepare to celebrate Christmas. It’s a struggle I have every year, but this year perhaps I am engaging it a bit more deeply. And the struggle is the tension between the glitz and the glitter, the joy and the celebration, the giving and receiving of gifts, on the one hand, and the realization that there is something more that we are missing. It has been said that in order to see what is in the manger on Christmas, we have to first go through that crazy prophet in the wilderness who dressed in camel’s hair and ate wild locusts and called for a baptism of repentance. And it is true that part of my dilemma is connecting the John the Baptist message of repentance with the joy at Jesus’ birth. Two weeks ago on Advent 3 I shared that tension in what I was considering as a possible Christmas card:
On the front of the card was a depiction of John the Baptist, standing beside the Jordan River, with the saying, "Greetings from our house to yours.” And when you open the card you find these words:
Our thoughts of you at this time of the year are best expressed in the words of John the Baptist, 'You brood of vipers!' The axe is laid to the root of the trees, and every tree thatdoes not bear good fruit will be thrown to the fire.
Merry Christmas from Don and Debbie.
Not the sentiment we want to hear when we celebrate this holiday.
And then it hit me as I was reading an Advent devotional I have been following this year. All of the magical and glorious events in Luke’s infancy narrative -- the angel appearing to the shepherds in the fields, the heavenly chorus singing “Glory to God in the Highest,” the star that attracted the Wise Men’s attention to travel across a continent – all of those were necessary to get our attention, to get us to pay attention to this thing that God was doing.
Think about salvation history from the very beginnings of the Hebrew Bible and you see a history of God not getting our attention: The creation of everything; the Garden of Eden prepared for the first man and the first woman, the call of Abraham to leave his home for a place unknown to start a new nation, the rescue of that nation through the miracle of the Exodus as they fled Egypt, the rise of the nation of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah. When the Jewish nation was going astray, God sent The Prophets, saw the Jewish nation through defeat and exile, and restored the nation of Israel. And when that didn’t bear the fruit that God intended, I can just imagine God saying, “Okay, I guess I need to do this myself.”
And so God sent Jesus. And to make sure God got our attention, God pulled out all the stops: Virgin births; previously barren old women conceiving and bearing children; Angels and Heavenly Hosts proclaiming to shepherds in the field and singing celestial anthems; stars leading wise men across continents. I can just imagine God saying, “That ought to get their attention.” And that’s what we hold onto and think of as “The Christmas Story.”
But that is just the packaging – the wrapping on the real gift.
The packaging is beautiful, and it is important. It is important to our human nature and to the ways in which we engage as human communities that we celebrate the beauty and the glory of the remarkable, indeed unimaginable gift that God has given us and the way Jesus is introduced to us.. And yet, when we focus more closely on how God arrives, we discover the real meaning of the gift: A vulnerable infant, born into humble circumstances, homeless at birth, born to parents as yet unmarried. This is the reality of how God chose to enter directly into human history. All made possible because a young virgin opened herself to the possibility of the impossible, consented to be God’s instrument in breaking into our human cycle to forever change the course of human history.
The form in which God chooses to enter in the person of the infant Jesus tells us something about God. It also tells us something about what it means to be a follower of Jesus. God has come to us because we, by our own power, can never create communion with God. True communion, truly opening ourselves to be touched by God directly, is done by opening ourselves to the reality that God has come to us; communion is created by God, not by anything we ourselves can manufacture or create. Nothing we can ever do or say will bring us closer to God; opening ourselves to receive the Gift God provides is the only way.
The Carol “Joy to the World” perhaps says it best: Joy to the world, the Lord is come. Let earth receive her king. Let every heart prepare him room, and Heaven and Angels sing . . .
For us to fully accept the gift of Jesus this Christmas, we must turn away from the notion that we initiate and God responds. That’s the way we like to think it works. No. It doesn’t work like that. God is the giver. We are the receivers. Let earth receive her king. Let every heart prepare him room.
As we think of our heart preparing room to receive Jesus, think of it as a 21st century version of Mary and Joseph’s search for a room in the inn. As we celebrate Christmas, does God see a lot of frantic activity and a “NO VACANCY” sign on the outside of our hearts? The Spirit is knocking on our door: All we need to do is to make room for that Spirit to enter our hearts, and to re-learn the truth that heaven and earth always have been joined, and that God re-entered the world in the person of Jesus to remind us of that.
Even many of the activities we typically associate with Christmas can get us off track a bit. Look at what leads up to Christmas: Every church, including this one, has some sort of holiday giving tree or program. Each commercial radio and television station has some sort of giving program that people can contribute to. The Salvation Army has the red buckets out at all of the grocery stores and shopping malls. And let’s be honest – we feel good about it when we give to any of these things. And they are all wonderful and necessary parts of the holiday, and certainly in the spirit of our honoring the birth of God’s son.
But all of these opportunities to give can overshadow the reality that accepting the birth of Jesus into our hearts requires us to be good receivers. And that is not so easy for most of us. It is part of our American ethic to be self-reliant and not dependent on others, and without realizing it, we can adopt that same attitude about our relationship to God. We don’t really need God’s help, we convince ourselves, and in our own way, figure we’ll just double up on prayers if and when we do.
And yet the message of Christmas is exactly the opposite: God is the giver, and we, like Mary and Elizabeth, have to open ourselves to God’s action in order to receive this most extraordinary and unexpected gift. One of our favorite Advent and Christmas texts is from Isaiah Chapter 7: “The Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Emmanuel.” (7:14). But we don’t usually hear the context, which is the prophet trying to convince King Ahaz to put his reliance on the promise of God rather than in alliances with military powers like Syria. And the king scoffs when the prophet tells him that the sign God will send is a baby.
Just as King Ahaz thought he knew better than God what he needed, so too we like to think it is we who advise God what we need. And as is so often the case, God answers with gifts we may not have asked for. And they make us nervous because accepting Gods gifts, if we do it authentically, can transform us into people we don’t necessarily want to be.Accepting God into our hearts can lead us to places we had not planned on going, and that makes us nervous. We tend to be much more comfortable in our relationship with God when it is about giving a little of our abundance and our power in order to confirm to ourselves that we are indeed as self-sufficient as we claim. But that religion is not what Christmas is about. And it certainly is not what is involved in being a follower of Jesus.
This Christmas, let us remember that the real meaning of the season is first learning genuinely to receive and hold onto the gracious, unimaginable gift that God has given us. It is fine and good to love the packaging; but we miss the whole point if we stop there. Like Mary and like Elizabeth, we need to acknowledge our need for Jesus and open ourselves to the possibilities that letting Jesus into our hearts creates. Don’t hold onto the wrapping paper and leave the gift behind. This Jesus we claim to follow does make a difference. And unless we accept the gift, nothing else that we do makes much of a difference. And unless we accept the gift of Jesus into our hearts, the real work of Christmas never gets started, and nothing else that we do makes much of a difference. Amen.