Evil often is loud and in your face. It wants to look big and permanent. Evil will try to subdue your psyche. There are many pockets in the world with intractable problems: poverty, crime, abuse. These and other problems cloud our vision and make us forget what we heard in the Gospel today, that Jesus drives away the loud demons, Jesus has authority over evil. Evil can obscure the good right in front of us. However, if we stick with it, we will be reminded. We will be fed. God will open our eyes, sometimes in the most unexpected places through the most unexpected people.

As we recognize the grace of God, so we are invited to turn toward this new thing, to repent and live into this new and graceful way of living.

God is always ready to do a new thing when the circumstances call for it, and God has many, many ways of acting within the context of human history.

The heavens have been torn open and so has the curtain in the Temple. We have been shown Jesus as God's beloved and we have been shown him in his saving work of dying that we might know ourselves judged for all the ways in which we victimize others and then disallowing us the status of victim any longer because we are forgiven and loved and freed for new life.

Who is your star? Who got you here? The short answer, for many of us, is Jesus. But even for the lifelong believer. Jesus isn't the whole story. So who got you here? What bright star did you follow that lead you, defying all astronomical rules, to believe in this unbelievable story? We all got here somehow. What about you?

Having experienced the incarnate word in the child Jesus, we now are charged with being witnesses to the light. Witnesses who will carry that light out into the world outside those doors. And so, with thankful hearts for the gift of God incarnate among us, we are drawn back out into our lives in the world, to scatter the darkness for others, to be witnesses to the light.

The incarnation, both in its announcement to the world and in its execution by God is counterintuitive to our notions of power and authority. We generally idealize people with a pedigree, position of authority, or wealth and overlook those who are on the margins. We generally praise the self sufficient and scoff at those who are in need. Yet God chose to work through the outcasts and the marginalized.

What if we refuse this year to let Christmas end? If we were to live in a way that reflected God's generous incarnational love to us all year, would we begin to remember that however beautiful, the end of Christmas carols is not the end of the story?

In a little while we will sing of the hopes and fears of all the years meeting in the child whose birth we mark this night. Our hope is for a life freed from fear and our fear is the progenitor of violence and victimization. Gratitude is both the fruit of real hope and the antidote to fear and we see the seeds of that truth in the Christmas story, the glad tidings of great joy that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us --all of us-- full of grace and full of truth, the first gift of God's self giving love which brings universes into being and opens to us the way of abundant and everlasting life.

The Incarnation requires more than God breaking into the world, it requires human participation. God in humankind is half the incarnation. The other half requires humankind to be in Christ, to participate in God's action in the world.