Christmas Eve Luke 2
What are some of your very favorite Christmas stories?
Ooooo, I like that one too.
These are the stories we tell and listen to and watch for every year alongside the story of Jesus because they tell us something about what we’re longing for in our lives.
The gifts and feelings that we’re hoping will be a part of this night.
One of my favorites is the story—The Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, and specifically, I love the Muppets version. I love seeing Scrooge’s transformation from a selfish, lonely miser to someone who finally cares for those who have been loving to him all along. I love how Charles Dickens cared about so many people who were having a very hard Christmas—because of failed systems, because of unfair gaps between rich and poor, because of cold and greed and lack of care.
Jesus came into our world exactly for the people who most need the world to be transformed. In a New York Times article last year called “Christmas is Weird,” Esau McCaulley tells a story from his Alabama childhood about receiving an amazing gift and how this Christmas story is exactly for everyone who feels left out of the usual Christmas stories of comfort and joy. Esau hopes that we will care about this:
This Christmas, many boys and girls will wake up in very difficult circumstances. Their basic prayers for food, rescue, safety or a particular toy will go unanswered. Many of my most urgent and desperate [prayers] during childhood went unanswered for years on end. Why God answers some prayers with miracles and not others is a question [people] have pondered for centuries.
But Christmas… has never promised to soothe every pain or cure every ill. Unfortunately, life with God doesn’t work that way. Instead, Christmas is the grand miracle that makes space for all the smaller miracles. It gives us enough hope to walk a little farther in the dark toward the glimmer of something that seems too distant to reach.
Christmas is, in the words of the Gospel of John, the light that shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. The path to that light has taken many forms…
these odd incidents led us directly into the presence of a child who filled our hearts with wonder…
Christmas suggests that God has not forgotten anyone. [God] came as a child, weak and vulnerable, unable to lift his head without assistance or to wipe his own bottom. [God] did this so the weak and broken things might feel comfortable approaching the divine.[1]
These are the stories we tell and listen to and watch for every year alongside the story of Jesus because they tell us something about what we’re longing for in our lives. We’re longing for people to be kinder to one another. We’re longing for good gatherings with people we love. We’re longing for people to reconcile and for peace to spread throughout the world. We’re longing to see evidence of love coming alive.
But remember this, if you are feeling weak and vulnerable and broken this Christmas… the story is so much for you—the story of having no place to go but finding a place, the story of being welcomed from the outside to the warm inside, the story of traveling from a distance to see a miracle.
Remember tonight that God comes to meet you, not in how things should be, but meets you exactly where you are—and in the grand miracle of Jesus birth, God makes space for all the smaller miracles.
Watch for them… and may each one give you hope to walk a little farther in the dark toward the glimmer. Tell the stories… because the path to God’s light has taken many forms.
Embrace the odd… because our own odd stories lead us directly into the presence of Jesus who fills hearts with wonder.
Thank you for coming and sharing and listening this Christmas Eve—and when you go to whatever’s next tonight, may you leave with comfort and hope, love and wonder, peace and joy.
[1] Christmas is Weird by Esau McCaulley
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/23/opinion/christmas-is-weird.html
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