Diana, Nick, and Hilary joined me this weekend in watching old home movies of Christmas. One of them is 1989, the year both kids were safely into adolescence, and while they were watching old images of themselves, I remembered my own relief on that occasion: it was the first year nobody got anything they could put their eye out with, and much more important, it was the first year there was nothing for me to assemble.

But there were other Christmas memories as I watched. I remembered the look on Diana’s face in 1969 when she first encountered the fact that my mother loves Christmas and goes to great lengths to celebrate. Mom was an only child with few cousins, and always wanted big celebrations. She also loves giving presents, and the gift-giving scene could get quite intense, especially once grandchildren were added. Then I remembered my father for two things. He was the man with the trash bags folded by his recliner quietly keeping the situation from crashing into total entropy. He was also the man from whom I learned the art of giving gifts in sequence. A little thing here, a little thing there, and finally the big gift that made everything else useful. That memory suggested a way of connecting the very distinct lessons Christians hear tonight in virtually every western Christian church.

Dad always started with a puzzling gift, a teaser. One year I got an engineer’s cap several gifts before finding a new train set. I find that suspense in the first lesson. You have to do some work to discover that the passage was written as Israel found itself caught between warring superpowers, Assyria and Egypt, and felt sure that one or both of those countries would crush them, as Assyria would do in fact when Israel made the wrong alliance. What’s puzzling about this gift is what Isaiah offered as they worried.

In those days near eastern countries believed that war was to a large extent a contest between the gods of the respective peoples, and the stronger god would win—they also knew that having the best weapons and the most soldiers helped, of course, but they very much counted on a mighty god to give them victory. Israel also hoped for a terminator type of god and a great general as king. To their astonishment Isaiah says that what God offers is a totally different way of understanding things. Instead of victory he offers peace, wonderful counsel indeed; the new king will establish and uphold a new world order not with firepower but with justice and righteousness.

You cannot mandate justice and righteousness, you can only offer them. God does not micromanage general evolution or personal development, but the offers are put there gently and clearly. I am intrigued by this, and in quieter moments ask how I can more fully step into that world order in 2006. God will not force me so will I have and maintain the relentlessness of my father with his trash bags, sticking with it until the chaos is overcome and a little more light shines in the darknesses of my life?

The centerpiece of all the gifts is Luke’s story, one that through the years has become so beautiful to us. Two of the hymns we sing tonight, “Once in Royal David’s city,” and the imaginative “In the bleak midwinter” attempt to convey the beauty of the scene. I invite you to meditate on them in your prayers during these 12 days.
I cherish that beauty, but I have to remember that Luke the painter also wanted us to appreciate its oddness, its unattractiveness. I grew up in the country outside of Lancaster and remember many a summer day playing in barns and stables—I wouldn’t want my wife to writhe in labor in one, and wouldn’t want my children born in the germs, bugs and filth that a rustic stable uniquely provides.

But that IS why the scene is beautiful. It speaks of God’s presence among the weak. Since 9/11 we have sensed ourselves as vulnerable in new ways. And 2005? This year started with the tsunami, a week later Diana and I were viewing devastation in Sudan with armed guards at our side, there have hurricanes like we have never seen, and then there have been those funerals here in our valley, one over at Trinity, Bethlehem, funerals of those service people who have died in the war. And I must add here that I am grateful beyond words for the efforts this parish has put into relieving the suffering.

But my point is that again, without managing our development, God demonstrates solidarity with us, and comes among us in the most vulnerable and fragile form available: a baby born in complete poverty and social disgrace. Humans usually talk and act differently towards people we perceive to be somehow beneath us socially or economically, and beneath that is how we relate to children and infants. The less risk, the freer we are.

That is the point. God will not take over your life or make you a robot, but God does want us to see in Jesus a total companionship in our vulnerability, our fragility, and our mortality. This is the aha moment for those puzzling over Isaiah’s words: God will be totally with us and take all of our experience in—we really never do walk alone. The most effective way for us to relate to each other is one that acknowledges mutual vulnerability, the fragile and precious child in each person, even the most hardened Scrooge we know.

The point here is that the Christ who would die still loving us and rise still loving us is with us and for us. He is here for us now in the Holy Eucharist.

I tell students of preaching that the trick to illustrating a sermon is simply to ask yourself how you know that what you are saying is true—where have you seen it.

To do that, I have to turn to the third gift, the punch line in my father’s crafty series of presents. For the third gift is the most remarkable and the unexpected one. Christmas is the only eucharist in which we ever hear from the book of Titus, the first surprise. Then, the next is that passage we heard sounds a little like it’s still Advent: we are told to remember that we in a historical process between Christ’s first coming and the day when the universe fulfills its destiny. The final surprise gift here is that we are reminded that having met the love of God in Jesus we now have the direction and strength to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives. Who asked Santa for self-control this year? Who pages through the Hammacher Schlemmer or Sharper Image catalog dreaming of becoming more upright and godly.

But here is my illustration and explanation of why I am in awe of God’s power tonight. Circumstances this year have seen me doing what bishops seldom get to do, namely frontline pastoral work with quite a few people in three regions of the diocese. I have been overwhelmed by the uniformity of what is happening for some of them. They have overcome childhood notions of God as angry judge and cosmic spoilsport. Their learning how to increase their sense of God’s accessible and discernible presence with them and for them, has had a remarkable effect. Having found themselves loved and valued by God, like Jack Nicholson in “As Good as it Gets,” having been loved they want to be better people. I was somewhat stunned to see that the experience of acceptance and forgiveness has not produced primarily relief and safety to go on as before or just go shopping, but created a new sense of strength, created a desire to become more and more people with a solid core of integrity and compassion. If our astoundingly narcissistic culture is going to change it will start only when more people make the decision for growth as these sisters and brothers did. It’s hard work, to be sure, but it is doable work when we rely on and practice the presence of God.

Observing this so often this year and in very unusual settings has been my greatest gift of 2005 because in it I see real hope for the world. I would hope that each of us will appropriate as thoroughly as we can the reality of God’s gentle presence with and for us and increasingly become agents of peace and good will to all.

God bless us every one.