Luke 2:1-14

In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. All went to their own towns to be registered. Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David. He went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.

In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, “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.” And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying,

“Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!”

As I looked out the kitchen window at my snow-choked backyard this last week, it was hard to remember that there had ever been a time when it was green: when the lavender and the honeysuckle were in bloom, when the little Japanese maple stood clothed in its delicate leaves. Living through the long winters in Maine taught me what Seattle had shown me in only a week: that when snow comes and stays, it’s hard to remember a time when any other season ever existed.

In the second chapter of C.S. Lewis’s book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, little Lucy stumbles through the back of a wardrobe into the imaginary country of Narnia. Although it’s summer in England (where the wardrobe sits), it’s winter in Narnia. Shivering in the cold, Lucy soon meets a Faun, Mr. Tumnus, who tells her about the wintertime in Narnia. The wintertime is perpetual and is the result of someone called the White Witch. “It’s she who makes it always winter (here),” Tumnus says, “Always winter and never Christmas; think of that!”

Always winter and never Christmas. Always winter and never Christmas.

To ignore for a moment the anachronistic sound of this phrase when applied to our gospel lesson, is this perhaps the way Mary and Joseph and their family members and friends felt under the oman authority referenced in our gospel for tonight—an authority which decrees that a census is to be taken for taxation purposes, sending Joseph and the pregnant Mary on a forced journey to Bethlehem? Always winter and never Christmas.

Is this also the way that Mary and Joseph felt when they couldn’t find a comfortable place to stay where Mary could give birth to her son, but ended up making do in the place where the animals were kept? Always winter and never Christmas.

Is this the way that life was for the shepherds in our gospel, shepherds who were tired and dirty from living in the open, shepherds who at that time were outcast from their Jewish communities because they fed their flocks on others’ land and had no time for observing religious rituals? Always winter and never Christmas.

And, finally, though we’re here tonight to celebrate Christmas, is this a bit of how we’re feeling this year, a year when it’s been hard to know, figuratively and now literally, whether we will find solid ground or slippery ice under our feet, a year in which uncertainty has felt never ending? Always winter and never Christmas.

What I’m referring to as “always-winter-and-never-Christmas” is a world which seems bleak, and cold, where a kind of hopelessness has settled in because we believe that things are frozen and can never change, where we have even lost touch with the memory of a world where green shoots once emerged.

And so, why on Christmas would I spend so much time describing the wintry feel of our lives and the lives of the people in our gospel lesson? Why not just look at the newborn baby and sing as the angels do: “Glory to God in the highest heaven”?

The answer is pretty simple—without a sense of the social and political and personal weather, if you will, into which Jesus was born, we cannot get the significance of his birth. Or rather, though many of us do have a sense of the significance of his birth in our guts or in our hearts, tonight at least we have to try to put some words to it, words that we can repeat to ourselves when the winds blow and the snow falls and when all around us or all that is within us is held in the grip of the cold.

And so let me redo Lewis’s phrase to say something about who our God is and under what conditions our God chooses to become newly present in the world.

Always in Winter, Christmas. Always in Winter, Christmas

It’s in the wintry times, the times that are cold and bleak, the times of frozenness, oppression and despair, in times that are uncertain and that seem never to let up, that our God chooses to be born. It is in fact those very conditions that seem to evoke a new birth.

• And so: Always in Winter, Christmas.
• Always when nothing seems alive, life.
• Always in the darkest times of our lives, light.
• Always in times of oppression, liberation.
• Always in times of intractable conflict, peace
• Always in times of despair, hope

These are the stunning gifts that our newborn God brings to us and to those to whom his birth is proclaimed in our gospel.

Always in Winter, Christmas.

And we need to hear this—that God becomes incarnate, bringing life, light, liberation and both a comforting and confronting peace and joy to the places where our lives and the lives of others are most lifeless, dark and frozen. God becomes incarnate, showing us that lifeless, dark and frozen things do not in God’s economy stay that way.  

And, of course, God’s life-giving, light-bringing, snow-thawing energy does not come wearing robes and a crown as the emperor does but will come from a humble and seemingly powerless corner of the world. For our story says that the prince of peace who brings the great thaw is born in an obscure town and sleeps in an animal’s feed trough. This is the mystery we have been given, the story we may discover that we have already been living.

Some years ago I was at a board meeting at Tom’s of Maine. As one of the Vice Presidents of the company, I was routinely invited to attend, and because it was Tom’s of Maine, we did groovy things at those meetings. At this particular board meeting, we started our time together by doing a connecting exercise led by a Christian Jungian therapist who was an old friend of the founder. What she told us to do was to go outside in silence and to choose an object that expressed where we were in our lives. We would then reconvene and share this with each other.

It was late fall/early winter, so we all put on our coats and went outside. The trees were bare and in some places patches of snow were on the ground from a light snowfall a week or so before. I looked around and couldn’t find anything that looked alive. And then I turned down a path and there was a bush covered with red winter berries. “Finally something vibrant, something that expresses who I am or at least who I want to be,” I thought. And so I broke off a branch to take back.

But as I was going back toward the building there on the ground was a tiny brown pine comb no bigger than the end of my little finger. “Pick me up,” it said to me. And so I bent down and picked it up and went inside.

When it was my turn to share, I showed my two pieces, spending all of my time talking about the branch of bright red berries. Our facilitator listened, nodded and then asked, “But Melissa, what is that tiny baby you have in your hand? What is that tiny one all about?” 

I was speechless. I did not know what to say. I did not know how to describe the power in what was so unremarkable and so small.

Tonight’s story of God born to obscure parents in an animal’s shelter in a small town announced by an angel to outsider shepherds is trying to tell us that God comes to us and to our world as the small but powerful seed that contains within it the warmth of the sun and the greenery we had forgotten was possible within us and on the face of the earth.  To this we need not be speechless any more, but lift our voices with the angels and sing: “Glory to God in the highest.”

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