Br. Keith Nelson

The Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ: Christmas Eve

Isaiah 9:2-7

Merry Christmas!

It is likely that you are here in this chapel tonight because you seek an encounter with Jesus, whose humble birth we celebrate with awe and joy. Perhaps you are also here because you hunger for meaningful tradition in the midst of life’s changes and chances. You may be here because your mother or spouse or best friend loves coming here, and you came because you love them; or because you love gazing at the flickering candles and singing familiar, beloved carols, and why not? It’s Christmas!

Whatever the reason, you are most welcome. To be led through our doors by any one of these reasons has drawn you nearer to the ground of your humanity, in which God delights. And to be drawn there is to be drawn nearer to the heart of God: God who on this night, in Jesus, became truly human for our sake, to “center our senses in himself,” in the words of one ancient Christian writer.

Each Christmas has a tendency to summon up all the Christmases we have known, like Dickens’s ghost of Christmas past. Recalling some of them may bring painful memories, experiences that sadden or haunt or even imprison us, memories of people we loved deeply who have died, or whose paths in this life have diverged from ours in some permanent way. Other Christmases past bear in their wake some of the most innocent and spontaneous joy we have ever known. We feel more generous, more connected, and more alive recalling them for even a moment.

These Christmas memories also rehumanize us: they soften our hearts and open us to the joy and pain of others. To be human is to be bound up with others, to have meaning in someone else’s existence.

So I will do what preachers do, and remind you of something your heart knows, yet the world wishes you would forget: You are not a number, or a data set, or an algorithm. You are not a product or a service, a demographic, or a subscription. You are not a birth certificate, a social security card, a passport or a green card. You are not a salary figure or an insurance policy or a student loan balance or a piece of real estate. You are a person: a human creature of God our Creator, fearfully and wonderfully made, irreplicable and irreplaceable.

We live in a society that at present strategically and insidiously erodes the gifts that make us most human. Seen in this way, your presence in this chapel tonight, full of your human desires, motives, and memories, is an act of resistance. However small, it is to resist the great dehumanization of the world.

Jesus was born, lived, and died in just such an era of history:

“In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered.”

In other words, a census was announced for the purpose of taxing each individual. Each human represented one denarius, a coin stamped with the face and title of the Emperor. As if for emphasis, Luke repeats the word three times in just five verses.

Mary and Joseph lived in a time when imperial control was increasingly consolidated and brutally enforced in places far from Rome, like Syria-Palestine. The vast capital of the world’s greatest power stocked its granaries, erected its monuments, maintained its roads, and swelled its markets with luxury goods paid for with taxes. These taxes disproportionately benefited the imperial household, the Roman military, and Roman citizens over non-citizens, like those who lived in occupied Judea. In a sprawling and corrupt infrastructure, local tariffs and extortion from tax-collectors made the system that much more dehumanizing.

Jesus, born in the midst of his parents’ fulfillment of this imperial obligation, is laid in a manger: a trough from which animals ate. The manger, perhaps affixed to the wall, was presumably the only safe and secure place to lay a newborn, in a crowded room practically overflowing with people and animals.

A little box, in a little room, in a little town.

A family being watched, named, and numbered by a powerful occupying force.

This was the sign declared by angels, by which the shepherds would recognize, “in the city of David, a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.”

Roman soldiers and princes, then and now, look for the Son of God on imperial thrones and imprinted on coins.  But the Christian life is an unavoidable call to watch for a very different sign – this boy in the manger who will become the man on the cross. It is a call to read this sign etched into the details of our days and the struggles and joys of others, especially those most different from ourselves, and especially those most subject to exploitation and erasure by the imperial machinery of our own time.

Our finitude; our dependence upon others; our ignorance of God’s ultimate plan and purpose; our inability to walk by our own light or rebound from tragedy in our own strength; our injuries and illness; our anxiety, depression, or disability; our aging and diminishment; our mortality:

These are the mangers of our lives that must receive, again and again, the newborn Christ.

The maker of heaven and earth desires us whole, with nothing hidden or discounted. Our most intimate Friend, who knows us inside and out, rejoices to lay his head in the tangled pile of straw in that overcrowded stable that is my life, and yours. His presence there will make it – will make you – a temple, a home for the divine presence in our midst.

If what you have been waiting for this Christmas has not arrived, or not in the form you expected or hoped; if the approach of Christmas summons ghosts from the past or fears for the future; if you find yourself on the verge of falling apart or losing hope as the manic lights twinkling around you blur in a wash of tears; if the sugar, fat, and alcohol leave you overstimulated and exhausted, angry or disappointed at everything and nothing; if any of these “ifs” ring true:

This is your moment. You possess many mangers in which to lay this infant Savior.

Christmas presents us with a yearly invitation to accept, or renew, our commitment to become truly human. This is not an admission of all the things we have failed to become, much less a groveling before a cosmic judge.  It is rather a joyful and liberating acceptance that Yes, we are fragile, complex, and incomplete beings . . . and thus ideally suited to be the raw material for God’s transforming work.

In embracing that call we begin to reflect God’s true purpose for us as followers of Jesus.

Our fragility becomes suffused with his strength, our complexity with his simplicity, and our incompleteness with his wholeness, in God’s time and by God’s grace. Our true worth is recognized and recorded forever in a wholly different census than that designed by the powers of this world.

The word “register” that Luke used three times to describe the census of the Emperor Augustus is used a fourth and final time in the New Testament, in the Letter to the Hebrews. There we hear these words:

“You have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood which speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.” (Hebrews 12:23-24)

You are enrolled in heaven, written permanently on God’s heart.

A helpless infant waits for you to embrace him as the prince of peace, whose kingdom knows no end.

Come, let us adore him. Amen.