Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church

Christmas Eve 2005
The Rev. Melissa Skelton

It’s 7:30 this morning I’m walking down our front steps, geriatric dog under may arm, ready for the morning walk. We’re out on the green patch in front of our house when I sense the presence of someone else. I turn to see a woman in her pajamas on the front porch next door smoking a cigarette. She, I find out, is our next door neighbor’s mother from Kansas here for the holidays. She tells me that it’s been wonderful to see her son and his wife. Only one problem. They all awoke this morning to bathrooms and showers that didn’t work.

“Not exactly a perfect Christmas” she quips.

I head to church. After mass, I and others are putting the finishing touches on this space only to find that the sanctuary light which many have been working on over the past week has an electrical problem and can’t possibly be fixed before this or tomorrow’s mass. The sanctuary light—the emblem of Christ’s presence with us out of all days on Christmas.

“Not exactly a perfect Christmas” I think.

The longing for a perfect Christmas versus how it really turns out—the longing for a perfect life versus how it really turns out. I believe we feel this tension very acutely this time of the year. That’s because this season tends to stir up all the longing we have within us for joy, love and peace. And with families and friends spending time together, it’s also the time of year we have a chance to measure how the perfection we long for stacks up against the reality we experience in the most intimate community many of us have known—the community of our families and friends.

And what’s strange about it is that most of us have lots of experience with Christmases that don’t measure up the images of the perfect Christmas in our heads—times when we were in conflict, times when we were unhappy, time when things fell apart, times of loneliness, illness or death.

And yet the pictures of the perfect Christmas persist and haunt us, giving us a reason to feel cheated when life doesn’t measure up to those pictures.

And so let’s go ahead and just for a moment and talk about the perfect Christmas that lives in our minds and hearts. Now I know that one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to a picture of the perfect Christmas—but indulge me here and where I’m off for you, fill in some of your own details.

OK, the perfect Christmas…

First of all it involves gathering—some meal in which family and friends, and everyone whose important to us is there. And so in this picture of the perfect Christmas, no one we love is out of town, overseas on duty, or is otherwise engaged.

We arrive at the house, you and I, to find that all is ready or being prepared. A tasteful wreath hangs on the door and the house is clean and uncluttered. The table is set with the good china, the silver and the crystal. Candles and flowers sit in the middle of it all.

The tree, beautifully shaped, was not just bought off a lot but was retrieved during a trip to a Christmas tree farm. Unique handmade ornaments collected over the years hang on the branches. A fire burns in the fireplace.

You and I are offered a drink and hors d’oeurves before dinner and conversation begins. It’s delightful to catch up with everyone as the children amuse themselves peacefully with their friends.

After a while dinner is served and, oh, what a dinner it is. Our hosts have outdone themselves. Turkey, homemade bread, a new recipe for stuffing from Gourmet Magazine that turned out to be completely delicious, and vegetables, that, praise God, were perfectly cooked.

And all the while, cordial conversation and the children on their very best behavior. No rancorous political discussions for our perfect Christmas takes place in a time with no political struggle and certainly no war.

Then comes coffee and three different desserts, gathering around the shining tree and opening of a few presents before going off to church for the Christmas Eve service which unfolds in a way that is full of order and beauty—good music, a short sermon and pleasant words of comfort.

Now while this picture may not match yours exactly, I hope it does capture something of what many of us may find ourselves longing for at this season—the kind of life that where things go according to plan, where things feel secure and comfortable.

Longing for a life that was more orderly and secure must have been what many of the Jews experienced around the time described in our gospel reading—the time when Joseph and Mary went to be registered during the reign of Augustus. For it was a time of when the Jews as a people were not in political control of their own lives, a time when what happened to them was very much subject to the whims of other leaders or the ups and downs of their own internal religious and political groups who disagreed about what it meant to be a Jew and to live life with Jewish integrity.

Within this chaos there was a good bit of nostalgic longing for a time when life was clearer and they were more in control. In the Jewish people’s memory, this perfect time was the time of King David, for it was under David that Israel became a nation united under the political rule of one person. And it wasn’t under just any person—it was David, the one beloved of and anointed by God.

In Luke’s gospel, however, we learn that God’s new presence is going to mean something very different for the kind of more controlled and secure life that the Jews longed for. For instead of the return of the a David-like king who would bring back a life of order and security—we get the story of Mary, a pregnant teenager and Joseph, her older and perplexed husband who have their baby in an animal’s stall because there is just no room for them at the local inn—can you imagine a more imperfect and inauspicious beginning?

It’s in this less than perfect situation that we discover something even more amazing—Mary’s baby is the Messiah—not the hoped for king who would bring back order and security, but--Emmanuel—God with us.

What does this mean?

I believe it is this—in the story of Christmas, God does not identify God’s self with a perfect, ordered and secure life—a life that is predictable, where everything goes according to plan, where there is no surprise, conflict or embarrassment. Instead God is born over and over again in real human life—lives just like ours—full of order and chaos, security and insecurity, certainty and doubt, togetherness and brokenness.

And so let’s return to our pictures of Christmas—pictures that are still about a gathering but come a little closer to how life might actually be.

Let’s still picture guests at a house, but it’s a house in which not all the family is gathered and not all the guests were able to be there because grandmother is in a nursing home and somebody’s son is serving in Iraq. Let’s still have a big table set in preparation for the guests, but let’s put fingerprints on the dishes and some of the knives and forks on the wrong side of the plates because the children set the table. Let’s make the fire hard to start because of the rain and the room a little smoky because someone (again) forgot to open the flue. Let’s make the guests not quite so cordial. Let’s throw in a political discussion or two with some real disagreement. And let’s add some overly excited children who end up crying.

And for the dinner, maybe the rolls are burnt a little because whoever was supposed to watch them was busy listening to someone else talk about her back trouble.

And let’s make the tree sparkle but this time its one of those trees that isn’t really perfectly shaped—one that had to be turned with one side toward the window because it sort had a whole in it.

And finally, just as the group is heading off to church, a church that turns out to be darker than it planned to be on account of some unresolved lighting problems, let’s have someone discover much to her dismay, that something’s wrong with the plumbing.

God’s coming into the world—God as Emmanuel—God with us—proclaims that this unidealized picture, this far from perfectly ordered and controlled life is, in fact, the shining, even dazzling place where God chooses to meet us, where God invites us to be his people of joy and love and peace.

And so I pray this Christmas that you and I will receive the ultimate gift—the gift of our lives as they actually are—and the gift of the God who becomes flesh and dwells there: wonderful Counselor, mighty God, prince of Peace—God with us.