University Presbyterian Church - Chapel Hill, NC

WORTH PONDERING 

Luke 2:1-20

A Meditation by Robert E. Dunham

University Presbyterian Church

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Christmas Eve              December 24, 2007

            Garrison Keillor is best known as the host of “Prairie Home Companion” on NPR. In his public persona Keillor is a humorist and entertainer and mediocre singer, but he is also a person of substance and faith, and occasionally he speaks of faith to church groups, even Sunday School classes. Earlier this month, he accepted an invitation to meet with the senior high class at an Episcopal Church in New York City. Later he wrote about the experience, describing the class as a talkative, inquisitive group:

We sat in a sort of triangle, two couches at a right angle, a line of chairs, a window looking out at the snow on Amsterdam Avenue, and talked about the rather improbable notion that God sent Himself to Earth in human form, impregnating a virgin who, along with her confused fiancé, journeyed to Bethlehem, where no rooms were available at the inn (it was the holidays, after all), and so God was born in a stable, wrapped in cloths and laid in a feed trough and worshiped by shepherds summoned by angels and by Eastern dignitaries who had followed a star.

This magical story is a cornerstone of the Christian faith and I am sorry if it’s a big hurdle for the skeptical young.  It is to the church what his Kryptonian heritage was to Clark Kent.  It enables us to stop speeding locomotives and leap tall buildings at a single bound, and also [just as outrageously] to love our neighbors as ourselves.  Without the Nativity, we become a sort of lecture series and coffee club, with not very good coffee and sort of aimless lectures.

On Christmas Eve, the snow on the ground, the stars in the sky, the spruce tree glittering with beloved ornaments, we stand in the dimness and sing about the silent holy night and tears come to our eyes and the vast invisible forces of Christmas stir in the world. Skeptics, stand back. Hush. Hark. There is much in this world that doubt cannot explain.

(I might have told the kids that when you use the word "awesome" to describe everything above mediocre, you're missing a word for Christmas Eve, but I'm not their editor either.)[1]

There is so much to love about Christmas Eve: the majesty and mystery of it all, the carols and the candles and the beauty of this wonderful space on this night, the voices of the choirs. We look around and see the old familiar faces of prodigals who have come home for the holidays and others who make their annual pilgrimage to this place.  And, of course, at the center of it all, there is the message and the good news around which we gather.

Tonight is also a hard night for many, I know… indeed, for some of you… for whom 2007 has been a most difficult year.  The luxury of the Christmas season points up in sharpest relief the conditions of human misery elsewhere, it’s true… and the traumas and the tragedies have taken their toll.  Yet, here we are once again, gathered amidst the candlelight and the poinsettias… gathered once again to ponder the message of this night, to consider the heart of a God who loved the world so much... to think about that stable, about the young couple who there delivered into the world the Son of God... to remember the angels' announcement of the event not to the royal or the devout, but to simple shepherds. Such thinking is enough to jar us out of any complacency, any fatigue from the pace of this season... it is enough to catch us in some way by surprise.

For no matter how routinely we approach this night, no matter how many times we sing the familiar carols, no matter how well we think we know these twenty verses of Luke's Gospel which we read every Christmas Eve, we may still leave this sanctuary tonight deeply moved and full of wonder once again.

Luke paints the whole picture in this small scene.  God's Son, vulnerable as every infant is vulnerable, subject to all the conditions under which we all live, fully identified with every human being's need for love, lies here unnoticed, without trumpet or drum roll and without a place to lay his head.[2]

Of course, we’ve heard it all before, most of us. And as the story’s skeptics are quick to point out, the world seems not to have changed, despite all our telling of it.  Maybe that is a charge to lay at the feet of God… or maybe the blame is ours. Maybe we’ve stopped hearing the story after all these years, stopped leaning into its possibilities.  Kathleen Norris, that wonderful writer, suggests that the very familiarity of the story works against our hearing of it, as do the distractions all around us on this night:

We have many defenses against hearing the Christmas readings and taking them to heart. The images are resoundingly familiar… and the nativity story is so colored by nostalgia that listening takes considerable effort. It’s hard for us to remember that, as is always the case with scripture, we are continually invited to hear “a new song,” words full of possibilities we have not yet seen and can’t imagine. All we need are the ears to hear, but our tired old ears resist us at every turn.

[And as the Christmas story is read] we may suddenly remember that we forgot to take the rolls out to thaw, and this means that our … sister-in-law will have gained another weapon in her war of one-upmanship on the domestic front. Or our listening is interrupted when our child comes to us in tears because another child bent the halo she is wearing in the pageant, and we must fix it, right now.[3]

Beyond such distractions, after hearing the story so many times, we may have probably stopped noticing its oddity… stopped engaging it as skeptically as the high school students in Garrison Keillor’s New York City church school class. And even some who love this season know that deep down what they love has more to do with the borders and boundaries of Christmas than with its heart and its hope. Hope requires work to sustain it; it is not something we can simply bring out of the box at Christmastime like the crèche and the lights and the ceramic angels. Yet, there is something in this story that can stir hope in us still, despite our defenses, despite our cynicism and skepticism. How can that happen?  Maybe it can happen, as Kathleen Norris says, if we are willing,

like Mary, to take the words in, to treasure and ponder them, because so much is possible when we do. As these words wash over us they penetrate, despite our defenses and distractions. Their spirit can move us and change us, whether we will it or not. Simply being present is enough, for [the] church [on Christmas Eve] is a place that allows this transformation to occur. If we feel utterly exhausted, drained of all feeling and weary with worldly chores and concerns, so much the better. Our weakness is God’s strength. Our emptiness means that there is room for God after all.[4]

So, listen. Simply listen. Let the words wash over you. Let them penetrate your heart and soul… this night, and tomorrow, and the day after. Take the story with you tonight… those of you who are full and those who are empty. Take the story with you… those who find these days filled with delight and those who are weighed down by deep sadness. Take the story with you... those who know it by heart, and those who have heard it, perhaps, for the first time. Take the story with you. Ponder its possibilities. Savor its promises. And maybe… maybe you will come to see that, even if you are having trouble making room for God, at its heart the story is about God making room for you… for us. It is a story worth pondering.

            I would not pretend to speak for you.  I do not know the decisions you have made, the anxieties you’ve harbored, the securities you’ve sought, the questions that have nagged you deep into the night.  But this much I know: that the Christmas story is told for everyone.  This much I know: that the birth of Jesus in a common stable means that there is no place so common that Christ cannot be present there.  This much I know: that Gabriel's entrusting of the human future to a teenaged girl means that there is no person too young to be part of God's plan, and that the elderly man Simeon's encounter with the infant Jesus a few days later in the Temple means there is no person too old to be transformed by the wonder of Christmas.  This much I know: that mystery is something to be cherished rather than avoided.  This much I know and would declare to you: that light penetrated the darkness at Bethlehem as never before, and despite all subsequent attempts to snuff it out, the darkness still has not overcome that light… not even whatever darkness it is that may inhabit your life on this holy night.  For, as the poet Ann Weems says:

            Into this silent night

               as we make our weary way

                 we know not where,

              just when the night becomes its darkest

                and we cannot see our path,

              just then

                is when the angels rush in,

                  their hands full of stars.[5]

     May the light of the Christmas stars lend light to your life this night, and fill your heart and soul with wonder… and with this story worth pondering.  A blessed Christmas to you all.