Christmas Day: December 25, 2017

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Robert James Magliula, OHC

Christmas Day - Sunday, December 25,2017

NEW! Listen to Br. Robert preaching

Br. Robert James Magliula

Today is the day and everything is in place. We know the hymns. We know the readings. We know the whole story so well that we can tell it by heart: the star, the shepherds, the angels, the baby. Because it is so familiar we can forget the strangeness and power of this story. We are here to settle into a mystery, to follow a star to Bethlehem and gather around a manger. In our time, we make the journey with a sense of vulnerability and insecurity which is not unsimilar to the conditions of life in first century Palestine.

  
Christmas, at it’s heart, is a festival of vulnerability. This birth sheds light not only on what has been birthed in us, but also what has not. It’s a time when some are weighed down by the burden of old losses, even in the face of the audacious declaration that the heart of the universe loves us so much that it comes to us to beat in a vulnerable infant.

In a recent article, Sr. Joan Chittister quoted Joan of Arc who said, “How else would God speak to me if not though my imagination”. Her article went on to say that God speaks to all of us through our imagination. That’s what our imagination is for. She wrote, “Imagination is learning to see beyond what we have to what could be.” The mystery of today’s feast is best entered through our imagination.

Each of us has a picture of what that infant looks like. Well, today is the day to close our eyes and reach into that picture, and take him into our arms. Examine his fingers, count his toes, and say to yourself, “This is God in my arms.” Feel his breath, feel his warmth spreading through those swaddling clothes. This is what God has decided to look like, and all for love of us. Shocking, isn’t it? To behold the Creator of the Universe dependent on the kindness of creatures. Sure, we know the story by heart, but do we hear God’s message for us today?

In the first place, a baby is---in the best of worlds---evidence that a love affair has taken place. That’s certainly the case with this particular child. God has loved humankind from the moment we were thought up. But the relationship had been a rocky one. In the beginning God figured that paradise would be enough for us; God gave us everything and hoped for the best. But we wanted more than everything. So God gave us something more concrete by initiating a covenant of mutual fidelity to be our God and for us to be God’s people. But we were not faithful.

So God gave us more guidelines in the Ten Commandments, but we broke them. God then took another step by simplifying the covenant to loving God and our neighbor. But even that was too much.

The history of our love affair with God is the story of our repeated frailty and God’s forgiveness. Every time the distance between us has threatened to end the relationship, it is God who steps across the breach, taking on more of the burden, until with the birth of this infant, God accepted it all. God came to where we were, to be flesh of our flesh. All we had to do was to believe that we were loved enough for God to live and die as one of us.

Christmas has a way of exposing a paradox in the human condition. We desire to be loved, yet we find it so hard to allow ourselves to be loved. We organize our lives around the pursuit of love, but in the one place where it is offered unreservedly, we pull back and obsess over a thousand other details in our lives. Once we have sufficiently sidetracked ourselves, we renew our desperate attempts to find love, inevitably looking in all the wrong places. The love manifested in the Incarnation does not deny our separateness, our humanity, our frailty, or even our aloneness. In the Christmas story, we see God become helpless, become like us, become subject to the tensions of growth, become flesh so that we might have the confidence to recognize that we have the stuff it takes to become like God.

Love sheds light on people and situations. Luke’s narrative is flooded with a light generated by love, light overcoming darkness. But as we know from our own lives, we do not always welcome the light. Light changes things. Light makes us see parts of ourselves and others that we’d rather not see. It can frighten and anger us to be reminded that we are not perfect, not in control, not invulnerable. Light reveals truth, and truth is usually a blow to the ego, since there is nothing we can do to win, earn, or deserve the love that it offered. It is an extravagant gift, given freely despite our imperfections and resistance. Unfortunately, many have experienced the giving of gifts as something with strings attached causing them to step back to calculate the cost. We have only to take a realistic view of the circumstances of this birth to curb our ego and recognize our pride and fear of vulnerability.The mystery of Emmanuel---God-with-us, shows us just how far God will go to be held in our arms. This is the first part of today’s message.

The second part of the message is that in doing so, God has blurred forever the distinction between the divine and the human, the holy and the ordinary. God could have come to us as some great power more recognizable as God. Then we could have kept our distance. But God chose to come among us as an infant, and a poor one at that. Choosing flesh, God chose the lowest human common denominator and in doing so left us no escape.That’s why it is so important today to let the star show us a real child. In choosing to enter in such an ordinary way, God showed us that flesh and blood, dirt and sky, life and death, were good enough for God. More than that, God made them holy by taking part in them, and left us nothing on earth that we can dismiss as trivial or unknown to God. The very scandal of Christianity lies in the fact that it sees divinity in humanity. 

 
This feast is the commitment to life made incarnate. It is the call to see God everywhere, and especially in those places we would not expect to find glory or grace. It is also an obligation to see that everything leads us directly to God, to realize that there is no one, nothing on earth, that is not the way to God for us. The moment we can really look to everyone and everything as a revelation of God, is the time when war, prejudice, and hunger would disappear. Everything would be gift, everyone would be sacred.

 This day God has come among us as a infant and a lover, and every ordinary and created thing has become transparent with God’s glory. There is gold in the straw, myrrh in the dung, the cows smell of frankincense, and the star shows seekers from every corner of the earth where to look for God---not up in the heavens but in the wondrous muck and chaos of our lives and world. If we have the wisdom to embrace the everyday stuff of our lives, then God is born in our arms.  +Amen.