Christmas Sermon

Rev. Paddy Cavanaugh, Christmas Eve Service, Year C – Christmas I, 12/24/24

Readings: Isaiah 9:2-7, Titus 2:11-14, Luke 2:1-14(15-20)

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, amen.

Good evening St. George’s and merry Christmas! It is a joy to be back with you on this night. For those of you who are new or visiting – welcome. I’ve been away for the past few weeks celebrating a small nativity of my own with my wife Winnie. In October we welcomed the arrival of our first child, Mary Winston, who is right here in the pews with us tonight. There is nothing like a fresh new baby to bring the miracle of Christmas to life, is there?

Though, as we know, giving birth to a child in modern America is a far cry from the rustic nativity scene described by St. Luke. Instead of riding a donkey to a dingy stable, we took our CR-V to Inova Fairfax Hospital. There we were greeted not by shepherds, the lowliest of the low, but by highly skilled nurses and doctors. Instead of the grunts and snorts of pack animals, we were lulled by the truly incessant beeping of an EKG machine. And finally, rather than an angel bringing “good news of great joy for all the people,” we received quite an impressive medical bill from a claims adjuster.

However, there is one part of the modern nativity experience that remains totally unchanged across millennia. After the haze and frenzy of labor subsides, for just a moment, time stands still. As I gazed down at my newborn child, swaddled under a heat lamp like a baby chic at the county fair, that ancient feeling known to Mary and to every parent from the beginning of time descended upon me. It is a feeling of most profound wonder at a life yet unlived coming into being. A life I hope and pray will be filled with joy and purpose; fulfillment, and connection; wonder and awe.

And interspersed in the elation of that moment of wondrous possibility, comes also the anxiety of knowing that life will bring heartache and pain. Struggle which I know I cannot spare her from, as much as I might try.

In the few minutes that this little girl had existed, it felt like I had caught a glimpse of a lifetime – of her life, and of every life. And before the nurse whisked her away to the nursery, I thought to myself. This must be a glimpse of what God feels in every moment He looks down at us.

Now, why am I telling you this? It’s a lovely story but I know you all came here to hear about Jesus’s birth, not Mary Winston’s, and as wonderful as I think she is, I’m under no illusion that Mary Winston is Jesus. However, I do believe that the experience of her birth, and the birth of every child, does speak volumes about why God chose to come to us in such a peculiar way on that first Christmas. Why instead of coming in power and great might, did God come to us as the fragile infant Jesus? When you think about it, it’s odd isn’t it?

Well let’s start with what we know about God. If it’s true that God is our loving parent, as I believe He is, then I believe it’s also true that God experiences an even fuller and more perfect version of the love and heartache that I did when God looks down at us. Therefore there can be no doubt that God desires even more strongly that we experience all of the richness and be spared all of the pain that this life brings us. So what is an all-powerful and all-loving parent like that to do to bring us both fullness and safety?

One option would have been for God to simply remove the possibility of sin and suffering from us in the first place. In the primordial nursery, the Garden of Eden, God could have child-proofed every sharp object, removed that meddlesome serpent and that seductive fruit so that His first children, Adam and Eve, never had the option of becoming estranged from His love in the first place. But God, being no divine dictator, knew that to remove the possibility of making choices that lead to pain, would also mean to remove our agency to choose love. God’s first gift to us, after life, was freedom.

Another option to spare us from our worst impulses would be to set up rules and guidelines to steer us more closely towards the life of love intended for us – and God of course did that. The Ten Commandments, the teachings of the prophets, and our conscience are those guidelines for us. But as any parent who has caught their child with their hand in the cookie jar knows, rules will be disregarded, and we will come up with the most inventive reasons for disregarding them.

So what was God to do? I’ll tell you; this is what God did. God, knowing that what we needed far more than a heavenly helicopter parent, decided to run down from heaven towards us, not in strength and power to discipline us, but in the weakness of the Child Jesus. To give us himself, as us. Not as an abstraction, but as something – someone – we could have a relationship with on human terms. God, in the birth of his Son, Jesus Christ, came to share a life with us, living as fully human, and fully divine.

God became human, not in the flawed sense that we are, but in the sense that were made to be, so that through Jesus’s life we might know how to love each other as God does. And God in Jesus remained divine so that when we fell short of that love, God would be so fully united us as to cure us from all sickness and sinfulness through his sacrifice. A sacrifice to cure us even from death.

The infant Jesus, whose wondrous birth we celebrate today, is the hinge between heaven and earth – the ultimate reconciliation of us children with our loving parent. At Jesus’s birth all time stood still. As the angels shouted their cries of glory, the yoke of our burdens, the bar across our shoulders, and the yoke of our oppressors had already broken.

And as that ancient feeling of love and wonder descended upon Mary as she gazed down at her child, that same look of love shown forth upon her; upon all of us from a little child. Tonight we celebrate the birth of that little child who is both God and human. A God who looks down on each of you, right now, with more love than you can imagine. Amen.