Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Robert James Magliula, OHC
Christmas Day - Saturday, December 25, 2022
“Do not be afraid; for see – I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.” Luke 2:10-11
Today Bethlehem is more than a geographic location in Palestine. Today Bethlehem is within us. Both are situated amidst hope and joy, sorrow and loss, conflict and violence, healing and reconciliation. The older I get and the more I experience the beauty and pain of life, the more I want to live the Christmas story in this time and in this place. The story that matters and makes a difference is whether Jesus has been born again in us today.
What good is it to us if the angel announces good news of great joy to the shepherds if that good news is not also announced to us in our lives? What good is it to us if the shepherds go see this thing that has taken place if we do not also see it? What good is it if Mary treasures and ponders how these things can be if we do not also wonder at the mystery of God-with-us? What good is it if Jesus is laid in a manger in Bethlehem if he is not also cradled in the manger of our heart where God’s life and our life intersect.
Today the manger of our humanity is filled with divinity.
Once the shepherds leave having told Mary and Joseph what the angel said, there is only silence. Neither of them say a word. Maybe that’s how it should be. Both had their lives ruptured by angelic encounters. Gabriel’s encounter with Mary at the Annunciation and Joseph’s encounter with him in a dream don’t lead them out of doubt and into faith. Their encounter with the angel leads them out of certainty and into a holy bewilderment. Out of familiar spiritual territory and into a lifetime of pondering, wondering, questioning, and wrestling.
Like Mary and Joseph, many of us were raised with a precise and comprehensive picture of who God is and how God operates in the world. Who knew that our life with God would be to shed our neat conceptions of the divine and emerge into the world vulnerable, and new, again and again?
This, of course, is what Mary and Joseph had to do in the aftermath of their angelic encounters. They had to consent to evolve. To wonder. To stretch. They had to learn that faith and doubt are not opposites—that beyond all the easy platitudes of religion, we serve a God who dwells in mystery. If we agree to embark on a journey with this God, we too will face periods of bewilderment. This can frighten us as it did them and tempt us to try to hold our relationship with God at a sanitized distance from our actual circumstances. Such efforts leave us with a faith that’s rigid and inflexible. It’s when our inherited beliefs collide with the messy circumstances of our lives that we go from a two-dimensional faith to one that is vibrant and alive.
Silent treasuring and pondering are how we begin to make meaning of Jesus’ birth beyond an historical fact or doctrinal belief. We don’t need more facts or information. It’s a time to move from the event of Christmas to the meaning of Christmas. Making meaning is not so much about explaining, understanding, or analyzing. Treasuring and pondering are the work of the heart--- to interiorize the reality of God-with-us. Not a concept to be explained but a truth to be lived. Only we can encounter the treasure his birth holds for us. Only our pondering can reveal the things about him, us, and our life together. We don’t need to be afraid to go to that place, to become intimate with our own experiences, even our mistakes, and learn from them. God hides in the depths, even the depths of our sins. We humans crave meaning. We need to make meaning and allow Jesus to give meaning to our lives. We need to ponder and open ourselves to what this birth might mean for our life today. By it, God is inviting us to inhabit the fullness of our humanity.
Despite the way our culture markets Christmas, it is not an escape from real life. The point of the incarnation is that Jesus is one with us in the ordinary. The “good news of great joy” is announced in the ups and downs, frustrations and celebrations, joys and sorrows, of life. The birth that interrupted and called the shepherds away is also the birth that returned them to their fields and flocks. They carried the birth of Jesus back within them. Their fields and flocks were not different, but they were. Like the shepherds we must leave the scene of the nativity, the event of Christmas, and return to the fields of our lives---to the ordinary and the routine, the familiar daily work, and worries. That’s where we will ponder and treasure God’s embodiment of our humanity. That’s where we will glorify and praise God for all we have heard and seen. That’s where all of life and creation are made holy in the joining together of heaven and earth, divinity and humanity, spirit and matter.
Every year I come to this feast wanting one thing---- to be reminded of the truth of the angel’s words, so that I can rely on this birth in my life and in our world which aches to hear the good news of great joy that can overcome our many divisions. I think deep down that’s what we all want. This manger holds the Creator of us all. Every aspect of our lives, and all of creation are cradled in Him. Today the Creator is born and by that birth we, the created, are offered the gift to be reborn.
+ Amen.
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