CHRISTMAS EVE 2022
Do you know what “Beth-le-hem” means?
The literal
translation of that word from Hebrew into English is House of Bread.
Bethlehem means “HOUSE OF BREAD.”
So Jesus was born
in the house of bread.
The Child of
Bethlehem—the House of Bread—grew into the Man of Jerusalem. And “Je-ru-salem” means, literally, “The
City of Peace”. So, the Child of the House of Bread became the Man of the City
of Peace.
That’s the problem
with Christmas: we know how the story ends. We cannot linger long by the stable
because we know that the story of that little child born in Bethlehem will end,
years later on a cross in Jerusalem.
We are the People
who don’t want to know “how the story ends.”
We want to find
out for ourselves about the ending. We want to be surprised. We want the
pleasure of hearing or reading or seeing the story without knowing how it ends.
“Don’t ruin the ending for me,” I’ve said to people countless times. I
don’t want to “be told” how the story ends. I want to discover “the ending” for
myself….”spoiler alert!” has become part of our culture's 'familiar sayings'.
But we know this
story all too well. We have all heard the Angel’s song before. We have all
known the shepherds’ wonder before. We have all gone to Bethlehem before to see
this thing that has happened before. There’s the mother and her newborn babe,
and Joseph in the background. And, more importantly, we know the end of the
story that began in Bethlehem. The story ends on a bleak and brutal hillside in
Jerusalem—that Baby, grown to manhood—hangs from a cross between two thieves,
suffering, bleeding, dying.
We’ve heard it all
before. Old news. No better than reruns late at night.
So where’s the
wonder, where’s the magic, where’s the mystery of it all?
Imagine this—you
don’t know what’s going to happen next, you don’t know about Jerusalem and the
Cross. Imagine you don’t know the story. Imagine it’s all happening right now,
for the first time. Imagine this…and LISTEN.
It gets cold in
the Judean desert. Not like the cold of Connecticut—the cold there is
surprising and sharper, more distinct, because the days are so much warmer than
here in mid-winter. So, imagine that kind of cold—the cold that suddenly chills
you to the bone and leaves you weak, vulnerable, helpless.
Imagine the
desert’s cold. Then imagine this, a baby is being born.
That is miracle
and magic enough. A baby born in the cold on nearly the darkest day of the
year. A baby born hungry and chilled, wrapped hurriedly in rough blankets and
handed to his mother. The mother is almost a child herself—a young,
unsophisticated teenager—and she takes the child and holds it to her breast.
Miracle and
magic. But not the whole story.
That child, in
most ways, is just like any other baby—vulnerable, helpless, totally dependent—but
in one way, that Child is different, unlike any other baby ever born.
That child,
mother’s milk running down his cheek, cold and hungry—that Child is God.
Here’s where the
story of that magic, miraculous baby—as magic and miraculous as every baby—turns
weird. That Baby is God.
This is the part of the story we miss and
don’t hear and don’t fully appreciate because we know it so well: THAT BABY IS
GOD.
This is the Eve of the Incarnation. What we
celebrate this night is not just the magic and miracle of birth and new life
and joy—we celebrate something hopelessly profound, utterly mysterious, totally
irrational.
Tonight we
celebrate that God—the great God Almighty, the Creator of all that was or is or
ever can be, the one who flung the stars into infinite space and formed this
earth, our island home and made us from imagination and hopefulness—that
God…the Holy Otherness…the “Being-ness” that brought all else into “being”…that
God took on flesh, the Divine and Ineffable and Eternal ONE took on Humanity
and Carnality and Mortality.
If we didn’t know
how the story ends, we would stop believing the story right here, right now.
It’s too much to bear, too fantastic, too unbelievable, too irrational….And
yet, in spite of all that, it is TRUE.
And when God took
on human flesh and became one of us, all humanity—each and every human being
who ever lived or lives now or will someday live—each human being became a
little HOLY. The magic and miracle runs
both ways. When the HOLY ONE became HUMAN, all HUMANITY became a little
HOLY.
We tend to say
that God is “omnipotent”—all knowing. But
there WAS ONE THING God—who is Eternal Spirit—did not know. God did not
know what it felt like to be mortal and have flesh. So God became a human
child—to know hunger, know cold, know pain, know suffering, know death—just
like we human beings know those things.
But when God took
on flesh and became a human being, God learned some other things from us. God
learned how humans experience wonder and joy and excitement and hopefulness and
love. From the flesh God took on, God learned love. God learned about love from
Mary, who held him and nursed him and kept him safe. God learned about love
from Joseph, who guarded him and cared for him and taught him. God learned
about love from Jesus’ disciples love for him and the love of those Jesus
taught and healed.
Jesus—who is God
incarnate—learned Love from human beings like us. The true meaning of the
Incarnation is contained in what God learned from being human. And what God
learned from taking on flesh was this—God learned how to love.
I know this all
sounds backward from the way we’ve been taught about it. In the breathtaking
gospel I read from John tonight, it says “God
so loved the world that he gave his only son….” I know that’s the way we’ve been taught—that
it was God’s LOVE that caused God to put on flesh in the first place. But the
magic and miracle runs both ways. God DID put on human flesh because God
LOVES us; and when he became human, God learned about “human love.”
God loves in a
different way that we love. There’s even a different word for God’s love in
Greek. God’s love is always AGAPE in Greek. Agape is a pure, ultimate and unmotivated concern for
another’s well being. That’s a kind of love
human beings are incapable of feeling—and that’s because it’s not a “feeling”
or an emotion at all. Agape
is more like a “philosophical position” than it’s like what we human beings
would ever call “love”. Until God became a human being in the person of Jesus,
God’s love was distant, detached and rather “passionless”.
And human love is
always full of “passion”. Whether it is a mother’s love for her children or a
husband’s love for his wife or the erotic love between two lovers or the noble
love of one’s companions and community and nation—whatever kind of “human love”
we’re talking about—it is full of PASSION and messiness. Somehow, in becoming
human, God learned that “passion” that caused
the Child of Bethlehem to grow into the Man of Jerusalem. Amen.
