Christmas Tapestry by Patricia Polacco

           

                        There is something special about this night, isn’t there? Year after year it happens, each Christmas Eve bringing back memories of all the ones before. The smell of baked hams and roasted turkey, oranges pierced with cloves, cut boughs of pine that decorate doors and mantle-pieces. The colored lights reflected off silver spheres and tinsel that cover our trees. The welcome sound of children’s laughter, and that wonderful, warm feeling of people gathered together.

            It is our own private miracle. And all of it tracing back to what William Butler Yeats once memorably called, “the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.” Jesus, our Savior, born in a stable.

            We have so many ways to measure greatness in this country. One of the most significant, given our love of football, is the Heisman Trophy which goes to the best college player. This year the winner was Robert Griffin III from Baylor University. But I wonder how many of you could tell me who won the Heisman ten years ago? Or take another of our measures – the Oscar – who won “best actor” in 2006? Or the national championship in 1982? Or the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995? 

The Nobel prize is surely the most coveted and celebrated in the entire world. But I suspect there aren’t too many of us who have ever heard of Joseph Rotblat or the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs?  They were the co-winners in 1995.

Eric Crouch won the Heisman ten years ago. He never played a down in an NFL game. Today he is a vendor for recreational and playground equipment in Nebraska. Best actor in 2006 went to Philip Seymour Hoffman for the title role in “Capote”.

The consensus number one team in 1982? Okay, that one was a ringer. It was Penn State. But here’s the thing: the Heisman, the National Championship, the Oscar – these are a big deal year after year. These are the people and the teams that make the headlines; the lead stories night after night. They show up on the covers of national magazines. But as important as they were, how many of us even remember a few years later?

Yet two thousand years after his birth, you could go just about anywhere in this world and ask just about anyone, and almost everyone will know the name of Jesus. He never won a Nobel prize or a Heisman trophy. He never led great armies or wrote a book. His parents were poor and uneducated. He never left his country. He never held a political office. The great bulk of his ministry took place in an obscure area that encompassed no more than a few square miles.

Yet this same Jesus changed the world. That is an historically verifiable fact. Who would have thought it possible? 

That’s the message of this night: that God doesn’t do things the same way we do; that God’s ways are not our own. And that’s what Paul is saying here in this fifth lesson. These first Christians weren’t chosen by God because of their wealth or their power or their status. This wasn’t something they had earned.  God’s choice wasn’t about them. It was about God; about his love and about his grace – unearned, unmerited – the same love, the same grace that comes to each of us there in that stable. 

            Scientists will tell you the longest night of the year is the Winter Solstice. This year it was just this past Thursday. Any kid can tell you, though, that those scientists have got it all wrong: the longest night, by far, is Christmas Eve.   How in the world do you go to sleep when you know that the very next morning you are going to wake up and find all these incredible presents just waiting for you under the tree?

What a contrast between our Christmases today and that first Christmas so many years ago.   Arriving in Bethlehem, the holy family didn’t get to stay in a Hilton or a Ramada Inn. They were shown to a stable. No comfortable beds with clean linen sheets. No carpeted rooms with heat and running water. What they got was a simple cave filled with animals and lots of hay. And that is where Jesus was born.

You have to wonder what went through Mary and Joseph’s minds that night. They knew who Jesus was. They remembered what the angels had told them. Now here they were in a smelly stable, their little baby lying in a feeding trough. “So God, this is how you treat your son?”

We have so many different ideas about where we think we’re going to find life in this world; life at its best and most satisfying. The world tells us it is in having the right possessions; or in being successful. The world says it is in meeting our own needs, satisfying our desires, being in control and having power.

This evening, I would like you to consider the possibility that there is another way… that there in the stable God is not only speaking to us about how near he is, but also showing us (showing us by his own choices) a different way, a better way – a way that runs contrary to the wisdom of this world… the one and only way to life itself.

 Wealth, sex, success, power. I’m not suggesting they are evil or wrong. With the right heart, they can be a blessing. No, what I’m saying is that they simply aren’t the answer that many of us think. They were never meant to carry all the weight of our need for meaning and purpose and hope.

Here in the stable, what we are seeing is something higher; something so much greater and more beautiful than all those other things. That’s the message here. It is the call to use our lives to make a difference; to be a blessing. It is the invitation to serve instead of putting ourselves first and trying to be served. It is the challenge, in short, to make love our goal: the same kind of self-giving love that we see embodied (made flesh!) there in that tiny child.

The great, contemporary poet, Ann Weems, asks “What do I want for Christmas?” Her answer:

I want to kneel in Bethlehem

   the air thick with alleluias,

      the angels singing

          that God is born among us.

In the light of the Star,

   I want to see them come,

       the wise ones and the humble.

I want to see them come

   bearing whatever they treasure

to lay at the feet

                 of him who gives his life.

 

What do I want for Christmas?

To see in that stable

     the whole world kneeling in thanks

         for a promise kept:

             new life.

For in his nativity

     we find ours.

 

Is it possible that contrary to everything this world would tell us that it is right here in the stable and in its call to love that you and I find the way to life at its very best? One thing I can promise you this Christmas Eve: you will never know until you open this gift and begin to live it for yourselves. 

[1] Ann Weems, “Kneeling in Bethlehem”, Westminster Press.