Christmas Message
Monday, December 25th, 2006

The stories of Christmas are full of miracles, angels appearing in dreams and worshipping with shepherds, magi guided from the east by a star, and above all a virgin conceiving a child in a supernatural way. And all along the story’s paths we see the hand of God bringing time, place, person, and events into order to the end that He himself would come and take his place among us.

But strangely while we focus on those events as we read the stories and sing the carols there is perhaps the greatest part of the story, the most miraculous, that remains largely untold.

Why?

Why did God choose this way?

To be God is to have infinite options, all moral and good, to achieve any desired end. We humans make our decisions based on time, money, resources, our health, any number of things but God is not limited in the slightest by any of those considerations. God can simply will and it comes to pass. And knowing that I remain at a loss in the face of it, this incarnation, this day so long ago in Bethlehem.

We speak of God coming to rescue us, as the carol says “To save us all from Satan’s power when we had gone astray.” But God could have just as easily and with perfect justice looked down on what we had become and what evils he knew we would still do in the future and simply said “Enough” and willed it all into non-existence in the hope, perhaps, of starting over.

God could have, as well, just simply left us to our own devices like an exasperated parent and said “If that’s the way you want to live have it your way” and moved on.

Perhaps our Lord could have come in blazing glory, the glory that was rightly His and once and for all set all things aright in a flash of His power. The Bible tells us that even holy men tremble in the face of angels how so more would evil rulers, sinful people, and practitioners of any darkness fall before the face of Christ in His majesty?

Only time prevents the mentioning of all the possibilities of God in relating to His creation and especially to us human beings and when our imagination runs out it does not mean they end.

Yet why this way?

Why would the Almighty come so obscurely, not even bothering to arrive in Jerusalem or Damascus or Rome?

Why would the eternal God take on something so frail and temporary as humanity?

Why would the all powerful one subject Himself to becoming a creature that is so limited, so prone to evil, and broken?

There seems to be no answer that makes sense in the way we humans define that term. There is no logic which allows our intellect to understand. Our imaginations pushed to their limit can only touch the edges of the depth that lurks below the surface of the simple stories of Jesus’ birth.

The miracle transcending all others which we call to mind in this day is a miracle of love. Love of a kind and scale that makes child’s play of our deepest thoughts and renders our loftiest ideals small and mean in comparison. Love which always threatens to overwhelm us in its strength, drown us in its depth, and pull our feeble words out of our mouths in a holy silence. Love of a kind to the end that ours is similar only as a grain of sand resembles a desert, a single stem the prairie, an eye dropper the ocean.

It is a love that has seen us in our smallness and chooses to come in the smallest most gentle way possible.

It is a love that knows how little we often understand and so comes among us with a body and words and bread and wine so that we are not overwhelmed by it all.

It is a love that remembers that we are but dust and so takes dust upon itself in the hope that it can be divinely transformed.

It is a timeless love that knows we are prisoners of time and so takes on time for itself so that we can share in eternity.

It is a love steeped in the knowledge that we are sinners and despite our limitations are defiant and prideful and so chooses to humble itself in the hope of our deliverance from our dark state.

It is love that sees the terror of death and our struggles in the face of it and wills to endure our greatest fear so that its ultimate power is broken.

There will never be a way to fathom such love, a love beyond human that nevertheless choose to become one with us. To see it as it truly is is to stand in pure holiness, unfettered goodness, and undying light. We may travel to the end of our thoughts and still only realize we are on the thin edge of the love of God. And when we do there can only be worship of the deepest kind.

Yet for reasons beyond our comprehension this love is for us. Unearned, undying, and burning with holy passion. Our greatest response is to simply receive it, embrace it, and share it, and in so doing be ourselves transformed into the likeness of the child who came to us so long ago and far away and lives in us still.

As we do that we will truly begin to understand and live the miracle of Christmas

I drove home alone from shopping tonight after a cold walk through the mall parking lot and a pleasant evening with my mother. So many thoughts.

We were looking through ornaments and a wave of images passed through me, people I had lost, the passing of time, the state of things, and a quiet melancholy that sometimes comes with the season. But heaven was close too and so were the kind of cleansing tears we Orthodox like to think of as a second baptism.

Somewhere beneath the layers of work, a few hard months, and the cold evening wind there is still a heart and a soft spot that can be reached. I was beginning to worry, you know, that I was much too tired or perhaps was doomed to pass through this time of year with robotic efficiency. Yet the quiet place inside that was lost has been found and if it doesn’t last at least I have it now and I’ll enjoy the moment.

How I wish a deep and enduring peace in Christ for myself and those I love but even more for this tired old world! And part of me thinks that maybe, just maybe, this holy season will be just that for the world. I’m probably foolish, of course, but I’m glad I can still feel that way, still hold out for something better, and believe that it’s not all useless or a night without end.

Thank you Lord, for that gift given to us sinners a glimmer of light that the darkness cannot overcome.

It’s been a good day today and the ice is thawing.

Yesterday was spent making fruitcake and having a good conversation with my mother. Today comes good news from the doctor regarding my cholesterol levels which have taken a dramatic decline (almost fifty points). The schedule is starting to get under control and the mandolin practice is starting to pay off as I practice carols for the folks where I work. A good sleep last night makes a difference as well.

I think everyone in our family knows this will be a hard Christmas. My brother’s death will touch everything but that’s not bad because it means he’s missed and we’re inconvenienced and lost in a certain way without his presence. It would be more frightening if all of this had happened and it meant nothing. The irony is that in some ways he will be more present to us in his absence then he was when he was with us and we sort of took things for granted. In the normal course of life we often are not truly present to each other because we never ponder that things can end. When they do we seem to value what, or who, was lost in a different way. Death and loss are a jolt that wakes us from the slumber of the everyday and teaches the value of what matters. But it does so at a horrific cost.

So Paul will be there in every gift, every thought, every moment of our time together in a way that he should have been, and each of us should have been to each other, had we not just made the assumption that everything will be as it is always has been world without end. Again that is as it should be because he mattered and still matters and will always matter. While the years may change the way we understand this the fact of it will remain.

The moral of this story? Whenever and however you and yours get together at Christmas go beyond the gifts and the food and the parties and be present with those who share your life and this moment. It goes by too fast to just put everything on autopilot and assume there will be some future time when you can put in the time and effort to bind your heart to those you love.

Now and only now is available. Always has been, always will be. World without end. Amen.

A link to a story about a larger Episcopal Church in Virginia that has voted overwhelmingly to leave that Church.

I spent several years recovering from life as a Baptist Pastor in a wonderful evangelical and charismatic Episcopal Church in St. Paul. Church of the Messiah was a healing place, a place that helped me understand liturgy and began the process that brought me to Orthodoxy and for which I will always be grateful.

And what has happened to ECUSA grieves me. The leaders and members of that once great body have traded thier inheritance for a bowl of pottage, or better said a thin watery soup that has no ability to nourish or sustain the soul. There are, of course, individual parishes where the lights are still on but they are like healthy tissue surviving in gangrene and every day the illness threatens to consume it.

I have acquaintances who are Priests in ECUSA and a sister who remains there and all I can do is hope for the best. God can do great things but in a church fascinated with baptizing whatever the culture sends and symptomatically celebrating anything, it appears, at variance with historic Christian faith it would seem to be an uphill thing. It is one thing to be a church that has struggled through persecution from without and another to be a body of people grossly deformed by choice.

My best hope is that this is a temporary thing and somehow something good and decent and dare we say even Christian emerges from the ashes. Some people gloat over what has happened to ECUSA and point fingers and say “See, I told you so…” In one sense they’re right. Having left, for the most part, the historic faith or any pretense to it the church is in a death spiral and it may be only a few years before the numbers and the declining endowments mark the final fiery crash. But what joy could there possibly be in that? ECUSA’s decline means that souls are being lost and faithful remnants stretched to the breaking. Taking a perverse pleasure in that is at least as bad as the heresies that made all of this happen.

Until then we can only pray.

The Christmas spirit hasn’t hit yet, but at least there’s a sense of hope.

Of course that hope isn’t about the world, or at least the way it is at present. This “post Christian” era has become the era where things like common sense, decency, intellectual rigor, and civilization have joined faith as a thing of the past. And we’re paying for it big time. Having cut ourselves from the moorings of that worldview (Christianity) which made us civil, prosperous, educated, and less prone to say, running into battle naked and painted blue, we now are what have conned ourselves into thinking is “free”, that is we are adrift on an ocean of our own thoughts, emotions, hungers, and deficiencies in a rudderless ship with no sails. I sometimes wonder why God hasn’t just taken a look at all of us and decided for the sake of mercy and the good of this planet to hit the “delete” button and send humanity back to wherever failed experiments go. That is if we don’t do it ourselves first.

So I don’t have much hope in people, myself included. We’re just at a real stupid stage right now and the best I suppose we can hope for is getting out of it without a wholesale slaughter. And anyone who claims they can solve it only indicates thier delusion.

I have to throw my hope in with God. Although from my little world the current evidence for some sort of control in all of this is not at a high point I still believe. I still think that Jesus just plain makes sense and although I’m far from a perfect example of what that means I’ll still give it my best shot. And as to Christmas, well, devils in human form visit us all the time and do thier worst so why couldn’t God visit and give His best?

After all it would only take once…

I must confess there is a part of me that sees the Middle East and the struggles of these times with a jaundiced eye. On the way to work today I said to my wife “Maybe what we should do is realize the Iraqi’s are just not intellectually, socially, and emotionally capable of civil government and put Saddam back in power.” Perhaps, I think in dark moments, they need to feel the iron fist and hear the sound of the chipper shredders at work again to realize that using thier freedom to settle centuries old grudges is just plain stupid.

And I think sometimes as well about what would happen if Christians stood up and administered the same kind of harsh justice and retribution that seems to be so much a part of the Islamic world these days. When the Pope is insulted by Turks just do what thier mob would do and rampage in the streets a while and burn the embassy to the ground. The truth is the Islamic fanatics are able to do what they can do because they have only felt the smallest edge of our power and truthfully have no idea what hell could be unleashed if were truly angry.

But therein lies the point, we are not called to anger, to destruction, or revenge. It is not our way and when we resort to it we degrade ourselves. Our Lord, our Prophet, our King calls us to a different way of life and it’s not always an easy way because we must sift everything, even our thoughts and emotions, through His teachings. In a broken world this puts us at a short term tactical disadvantage against any agressor even as we hope for the salvation of the world and the Kingdom come. At times that Kingdom has come only through our own bodies being broken, like His, for those who hate us.

I will tell you that I do not always understand this. I know it in my brain as factual but it does not always touch my heart and certainly often misses influencing my attitudes. Can I truly, as Jesus asks, love someone like Osama Bin Laden and any number of those people in the angry mobs who really do want to hurt me and make my life a kind of slavery to thier warped vision? Can I pray for them? Will I be strong enough? And what happens when push becomes shove and they are not somewhere over there but right here and in my face?

I have no answers. I probably won’t until the time comes. But faith is only true when its challenged and these are challenging times indeed.