The Rev’d Stephen C. Holton
Christ Church, New Haven, Conn.
Christmas Eve
December 24, 2020
What images do you associate with Christmas? Perhaps it’s the tree, glowing softly with lights in your family’s living room. Maybe it’s a groaning sideboard, full of turkey or Christmas roast or ham and sides. Maybe it’s presents stacked under the tree, waiting to be opened by eager family members on Christmas morning. Perhaps it’s singing carols by candlelight at midnight mass, surrounded by friends and loved ones.
Whatever your Christmas memory is, it’s a likely bet that it’s different this year. 2020 has been hard for us all. We can’t gather as we have before for meals; we can’t sing together at mass; perhaps even your Christmas packages have been delayed under the strain of shipping services and the post office.
There’s a lot we may miss this Christmas. But one of the things that has carried over for me is the Christmas crèche. We started the service with it—and I hope you got a glimpse of what the crèche looks like here in the choir at Christ Church—and perhaps you’re gathered around your own crèche at home.
The Christmas crèche is a wonderful memory for me; adding the baby Jesus to the manger each Christmas eve, arranging the animals and shepherds around the holy family, and starting the magi on their journey in another room, moving each day closer and closer to arrive at the Epiphany.
So much of the story of Jesus’s birth is captured in the figures of the crèche, our acting out of God’s story of the incarnation.
The crèche is built on that narrative from Luke—the trip to Bethlehem, the stable, the shepherds and angels gathered around the Holy Family and the infant child. The Protoevangelium of James, attributed to James the brother of our Lord, fills out the details that influenced Saint Francis’s own staging of the nativity scene that’s come down to us today in our simplified plaster and wood scene.
I was once in a live nativity scene—not unlike Francis’s first crèche—with Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus on bales of hay, with a hastily constructed stable around, a donkey munching on the hay bales, a cow that wasn’t so sure she wanted to stay in the same place that long, a couple of sheep that smelled terrible, a host of shepherds in bathrobes with improvised staffs, and an angel perching precariously atop it all.
Things did not go as smoothly with that live nativity scene as with the nice sculptured scenes you may have in your homes, that we have here at church. It was live and real, and animals are unpredictable, Mary gets cold, and babies get hungry. Eventually someone brought hot chocolate which warmed my fingers which had grown cold against the metal of my shepherd’s crook. It was a good experience. And I was glad when it was time to go inside.
The real thing was different from the model we gather around tonight.
That’s the thing about my image of the Christmas crèche, isn’t it. It seems sanitized, cleaned up—frozen in time just after the moment of Jesus’s birth. Everything is flattened out, tied up neatly together. There are the shepherds, the angels are singing about peace on earth and goodwill, and the Messiah is born. Everyone is happy. Everyone is full of hope. In the soft glow of starlight, of candlelight, the light rustle of angels’ wings filling the air, the dangers and problems of the world fade away far into the background of the scene. Everything is light and love.
It’s not a bad scene. It’s not a bad feeling. After all, the incarnation is about God’s love revealed in human form. It is full of hope! It is full of joy!
But that version of history leaves out the rest of the story.
Think about it. If Mary and Joseph were alive now, what would Mary say if Joseph said to her, his fiancée, that they had to take a bus to Hartford to register to be taxed. Mary is probably fourteen years old, nine months pregnant, and travel is none too easy for her. Maybe she’s sick in the mornings, or maybe at night. It’s cold outside, and she didn’t plan on making this trip. In fact, she didn’t plan on having a baby! That’s still a mystery: how did this happen? Mary asks. She’s young, and afraid, and the rest stops on the way to Hartford don’t have clean restrooms.
When Mary and Joseph arrive in downtown Hartford, the Holiday Inn doesn’t have any rooms to offer; they’ve had a COVID outbreak and are closed for two weeks. But a helpful garage attendant says they can sleep in an empty office in the parking garage; there’s just a cot there, but they’ll be warm.
This is not where Mary wants to be. It’s not what she hoped for, not what she planned. But there, in that little cramped office, with a heater that’s alternately too hot and not hot at all, she begins to go into labor. The contractions are so fast, so close together, that she knows the baby will be born soon. But Joseph’s forgotten to pay his cell phone bill, and so his service is cut off, and he can’t call for an ambulance to the hospital. It’s now or never, the baby is coming, right there on a cot in a parking garage.
In and amongst the pain and fear, Mary delivers her child, wipes him clean as best she can with some spare t-shirts in Joseph’s bag, and holding him close, hears his first cries. The garage attendant and a maintenance worker come by, wearing their masks, to see what’s happened, and gradually a small motley crew of folks who live in the park nearby wander in, seeking some warmth, and find the family there.
Everyone feels better—a baby has that effect after all—and everyone has a little more holiday cheer on that cold night, in that unexpected place, sharing together just a moment of humanity in a cold, dark world.
Gradually they wander off to their own paths, but they hold in their heart that moment of strange humanity, that baby born in an unexpected time, in an unexpected place. They remember the hope in their hearts for just that moment.
Maybe that retelling of the Christmas story seems strange or too rough, the parking garage too dirty, the circumstances too strange. But I suspect everything seemed rough, strange, dirty, and frightening to Mary that night two thousand years ago in Bethlehem. And maybe, this year, that’s the message we need to hear again. Maybe that’s part of the message of the angels—part of the message of the incarnation:
That God comes, not in an understandable way, not at a convenient time, not to a world that is beautiful and filled with hope and light,
But that God comes precisely in a moment of pain, blood, sweat, and even fear. God comes into a world just like our own—a world full of danger and death dealing. And God comes as a vulnerable infant, not magically protected from the evil of the world, but risking the reality of it—just alongside us. With us. As one of us.
God so wants to be with us that God comes and risks everything, even death by execution, to show us God’s love.
I like the sanitized version of the crèche, the beautiful soft light of candles and the story of the beauty and holiness of the incarnation that it tells. But I suspect it was rather more rough and tumble than that.
I suspect that Jesus would be right at home in the mess we live in right now—be wearing a mask like the rest of us, aware of the danger of disease, the evil of gun warfare in our streets, the despair of addiction, the horror of racialized violence and oppression. He knows the feelings of mothers that worry for their black and brown boys, fathers that worry for the safety of their daughters, children that worry about COVID, and grandparents that miss their grandchildren. He knows the plight of the unemployed waitress, the harried postal employee, the teacher struggling to reach his students on zoom, the emergency room nurse, and the doctor who’s just taken off his scrubs and mask and face shield for the day.
That’s the real world. The one where animals smell and people get sick and bullets fly and death is real. And it’s exactly into that world—the messed up one that we know—that Jesus comes.
Make no mistake—Mary was afraid that night. The shepherds were alarmed by the angels. Joseph was probably nervous, too; it wasn’t his plan for Mary to give birth in a stable, after all. But the angel says, “Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.”
Fear not, my friends in Christ. God has come among us, this savior, this infant in a manger—two thousand years ago, and in this place, in this time.
God has come into the mess of the world—the real world that we know. And God is saving it. This is the world into which he comes. You are the one to whom he comes.
May the fearless, loving, joy-filled peace of Christ dwell in your heart this night and always.
O come, let us adore him, Christ the Lord.