“Playing Christmas Out”

Ripples radiate out from the birth of each and every child, even the smallest. Ask Andrew and Alissa from this parish about the past two months since little Jubilee joined them. Ask Kate and Jordan in a few weeks after their daughter is born. A baby, no matter how long-expected or desired, breaks in suddenly to a family system and shifts all its patterns. The parents’ private world shifts: when, how, or if they sleep and eat; their public world too: how they spend time and money.

The birth of my brother Joel has rippled through much of my life. I am the oldest of four children; Joel the youngest. He was born with two stomachs and a doubled esophagus. Surgeons operated five days after he was born. A serious staph infection set in and compromised a lung, requiring a second surgery a month later. Then followed a childhood susceptible to bronchitis, winters spent indoors, and an article about his original condition in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Eventually, my little brother Joel recovered and has lived as normal a life as any of us. He turns fifty this year. But his birth and ill-health shifted my world. I grew up too fast, too soon. Although only seven years old, I took upon myself the role of a third parent, suppressing the fears I must have felt in order to care for my other two siblings. I remember sitting with them in our 1953 Dodge sedan under the elevated tracks of the Orange Line near Boston Floating Hospital while my mother and father spent time inside with the tiny, helpless baby.

This childhood experience shaped the man I was to become, for better and for worse. I work very, very hard. I take on responsibility with ease. I am a good person to have around in a crisis – like when fire erupts in a five-foot tall metal candlestick at church. I make a great adult.

But, but, a voice has often whispered in my head, “If you don’t do it, it just won’t get done.” Or, “Your worth depends upon perfect performance and how well you please others.” Sometimes I have pushed myself so hard to act responsibly that I never got around to feeling my own feelings. Where did Mark, the seven year old child, disappear to?

Over the past few years, rippling out from the births of two grandsons, Tristan and Eamon, my world has begun to shift again. I find myself much more eager and able to play. Playing out my feelings has diminished the perfectionist drive, made me less anxious about work, freer, more likely to seek and accept help from others. Now I seem to be surrounded by babies and children everywhere; at work, around this church, in the news on radio and television.

+++

Christmas celebrates the long-expected, and yet sudden, in-breaking of God’s love. Epiphany traces the unfolding or playing out of God’s birth in our private and public worlds.

Let me repeat: Christmas celebrates God’s in-breaking; Epiphany traces the unfolding of God’s birth.

Drawing on Luke’s gospel in her Christmas sermon here at St. Paul’s, Mother Melissa encouraged us not to get so caught up the “things” above and around us that we miss seeing God born in the small, the ordinary, and the close at hand. The next Sunday (December 27), Stephen Crippen re-phrased the Gospel of John’s pronouncement of the incarnation this way: the Word was made flesh and got stuck in an elevator with us and a homeless woman.

But tonight’s gospel, our Epiphany gospel, comes from Matthew and reflects a very different account of the birth of Jesus (Matthew 2:1-12). For Matthew, the birth of the Christ child radiates ripples through even the highest levels of the social, political, and natural worlds. While Luke paints an intimate, domestic, and local scene of Mary and Elizabeth, Joseph, the animals and the shepherds, Matthew focuses on the public dimensions of the story: first of all, the social scandal of Mary’s pregnancy and Joseph’s dilemma of whether or not to break his engagement to her. Then, after barely mentioning that Jesus has been born, Matthew moves on to describe the ways the public world shifts because of the baby’s birth: a new star appears in the heavens leading wise men from the distant, foreign East. Their inquiry about birth of an infant king causes the reigning King of the Jews, Herod, along with his whole political establishment, to tremble. Herod trembles because he knows deep down that the one opponent his human tyranny cannot defeat is God’s anointed one, the king praised in tonight’s psalm (72) for defending the needy, rescuing the poor, and delivering the oppressed. The wise men, those strangers and outsiders, are so overjoyed to be let in on this secret, this mystery, that they play it out even further by giving generously of their treasure to the child and his mother.

An image occurs to me to try and visualize Epiphany as the unfolding or playing out of Jesus’ birth. I hope I can convey it to you. Imagine a point, infinitesimally small, but infinitely full. Visualize that point extending itself as a line, taking on a first dimension. The line then unfolds into a square, adding a second dimension. The sides of the square unfold several more times, expanding into three dimensions, growing into a cube. Point extends to line; line unfolds into a square; square into a cube.

Just so – in the gospel stories we will hear read throughout the season of Epiphany that begins tonight – does the significance of Jesus unfold. The point represented by his birth extends, stretches out into a line with the star and the wise men. That line unfolds into two dimensions with Herod’s fear of a child and the generous gift-giving the wise men. Then into three dimensions with Jesus’ baptism, which demonstrates his solidarity with our sin and brokenness; the redemptive and celebratory wine provided by his miracle at Cana in Galilee; Jesus’ first sermon in his hometown of Nazareth announcing good news to the poor, release to the captives, sight for the blind, and the jubilee year of God’s favor for all; a huge catch of fish gifted to discouraged fishermen; and, finally, Jesus’ transfiguration where the child whose birth was signaled by a star comes to shine with his own inner divine light.

The incarnation in which we Christians believe does not remain just a point, a single moment in which God breaks into our world. Incarnation is a process, an unfolding, a playing out, of God’s love. Incarnation unfolds as a new way of relating to others, even a new world order founded upon generosity rather than tyranny – the giving away of what is most valuable to us.

+++

So I wonder: How might you play Christmas out in your life this year? Are patterns shifting in your private or public world? Do you sense a sudden, but long-desired, in-breaking of God’s love beginning to unfold and take on dimension and shape?

And I wonder what ripples already radiate out through St. Paul’s from new programs and new faces – so many of them families with young children – from new needs and new opportunities born in our midst?

A very wise man, African-American Christian writer Howard Thurman, offers us this answer:

“When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among sisters and brothers,
To make music in the heart.”

Tonight, on the Feast of the Epiphany, our Christmas work begins to unfold, playing out the birth of a little baby.

Back to Sermons