In profound silence let us await God among us

The Rev. Bret Hays Christmas Day Dec. 25, 2011

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  Call God crazy, if you wish. Nothing will happen if you do. Call the Gospel writers fabulists; you wouldn’t be the first. But don’t be so disingenuous as to claim that the world is all right on its own, that it doesn’t need a savior. Trouble is never far from us. I’ve been to shopping malls in the last days before Christmas; I felt like I was being punished for reasons I didn’t understand. And that’s what now is known as a first-world problem. Mary and Joseph were not first-world people. Life was difficult, even before the Romans showed up to extract tributes and impose an alien, decadent, and cruel way of life in a land that was supposed to be holy, and conquered the people who were supposed to be a light to the nations of the world. Life got harder as the Romans perfected the art of siphoning all the resources out of a province and stamping out dissent. To make the work more efficient, they would conduct a census. Their empire was expanding with no end in sight. The world was sliding deeper and deeper into injustice and exploitation, as it tends to do when left to its own devices.

   Time and again, God had responded to the needs of the world, the cries for help and assurance. God had revealed a law of righteousness, and sent prophets, priests, and kings to renew and repair God’s relationship with God’s people. These measures worked. For a while. But we fell away again and again.

   You could have called God crazy for trying the same thing over and over, yet expecting a different result. You could call God patient, too, or look at the details and see God revealing something new each time. But on the original Christmas Day, God did a new thing, made a new beginning in God’s relationship with humanity. The light of the world, the wisdom from on high, the one through whom all things came into being, came into the world. Fully divine, and yet no less human than any of us.

   God became one of us because God loves us, and God knows all our troubles, how much we need a savior. Ultimately God, not us, will set all things right because only God can. Becoming one of us was essential to God’s plan to reconcile the world to God, to reveal God’s love in a new way, to initiate a new way of being in relationship, one that is open to all people, and to break the backs of all the forces that seek to keep us apart from God and from one another. That is why we celebrate Christmas, because of what God has done, and is doing, and will do for us. That is why we look with awe upon the Christ child, because in this tiny, speechless, helpless body, set in this rough-hewn wooden food trough, the divine bread of life was pleased to dwell among us and offer himself as nourishment to a world starved for hope.

   There is so much more that could be said about the birth of the Christ and its implications. Greater minds than mine have written volumes on the subject. But there will be time for all that, time to hear the words of Christ, to witness and take part in the inevitable confrontations of his mission. Silence is also a fitting response to such profound love and mystery. There will be a time to hear the words of Christ, a time to respond in speech and in singing, but Jesus’s first moments among us were moments of the purest peace the world had known since God rested on the seventh day of creation. So please join me for a moment and dwell in holy silence, sharing the peace of Christ, the peace of Christmas.