Sermon for Christmas Eve 2005, 11:00 pm

Christ Church Riverdale

The Rev. Robert C. Lamborn, Rector

 We often remember Christmas in particular years by what other events were going on–the year of a big snowstorm, or the first Christmas we had children, and this year Christmas in the memory of New York is likely to be as the year of the transit strike.  Thankfully the strike ended Thursday and I was saved from activating the Christ Church contingency plan, which would’ve involved e-mails and a voice mail message to try to connect people with cars with people who have no way other than public transportation to get here for Christmas services.  Although the New York transit strike was in the national news and important to the rest of the country, nationwide this may be known as the year that media outlets picked up on the idea that individuals and retailers don’t seem to say, “Merry Christmas,” as much as they used to.  Some on the right have described a secularist “War on Christmas,” although for more people there’s just a sense of the generic “Happy Holidays” having become the more-frequent greeting.

Although I haven’t noticed an appreciable difference myself this year, to me the issue is different whether it involves a person or a business.  As an individual, before I say “Merry Christmas,” rather than “Happy Holidays,” I want to be sure I’m saying it to a person who observes Christmas, just as I’d want to know whether or not it’s someone’s birthday before wishing them a happy birthday instead of just good morning!  Retailers, on the other hand, face a different issue, because their goal, understandably, is to make a good profit, something quite unrelated to a baby born 2000 years ago under unusual circumstances in the Middle East.  Yes, people do ignore and even resist the Prince of Peace but I am concerned about that resistance in human hearts and in the halls of power not in the decorations and advertisements of retailers.

Earlier this year, before the transit strike, I was getting off the subway at 242^nd street and about to start down the long stairway to Broadway, when I noticed a woman with far too much to carry to get down the stairs on her own.  She had a suitcase like the kind you carry on an airplane and just make it within the size requirements, and a baby in a stroller.  Since I know what it’s like to schlep a baby in a stroller  around the subway system I asked the woman if I could help.  She was extremely grateful, but did the exact opposite of what I expected her to do.  Instead of giving me her suitcase so that she could carry the baby, she took my briefcase and thus was asking me to carry her baby.  Whoa!  She gave me the baby to carry, and she’d never seen me before in her life!  I could’ve been a child-snatcher, or clumsy, or who knows what, and she had no way of knowing, just trusted me with her baby.  You can bet I was extra-careful coming down those stairs and a little bit nervous until I made it to the sidewalk.  After I exchanged baby for briefcase and started walking up the hill to 246^th street the exhilaration started to hit me: Whoa!  This woman trusted me with her baby!  What an honor!  I knew right then it was a Christmas moment.

We are trusted with God’s baby!  And it’s exhilarating not because God doesn’t know us, but because God does, knows what we’re capable of, and trusts us anyway.  What an indescribable honor!

In an Anglican monastery in England there is a statue of Mary and Jesus very different from most representations of the Madonna and Child, where Mary cradles Jesus in her arms, all wrapped up, watching him and protecting him.[1]  In this statue, Mary is holding Jesus out in front of her, like this and his arms are open wide.  Why?  This baby Jesus seems to be greeting the world with open arms, the arms of love with which he will embrace all of God's people.  And embrace them he did during his life, teaching, healing, reconciling God’s world.  But Jesus also ended his life with his arms open wide, open so that he could be nailed to a cross and hung up for shame, and scorn, and death. 

This is what love looks like; love not closed but open love that won't make pain go away immediately, but love that will heal us deeply, more deeply than we even know we are hurting.

This is what love looks like, this Jesus of open arms, with Mary seeming almost to offer for us to hold him.  And who can resist a baby; who can resist cooing, touching, admiring and wanting to hold a baby?  “But wait a minute, this baby is God incarnate, after all, King of Kings, Prince of Peace--what if I don't support his neck right, what if he starts to cry and I can’t get him to stop?

But Mary is patient, and continues to hold Jesus out and in this baby God and Mary offer us, in this Christ Child, we learn more about God than we could from a library full of theology books. God who can seem so distant, so other, even fearsome; God loves us and, yes, trusts us enough to come to us as a baby absolutely vulnerable, not able to do one thing for itself.  This is love that knows no bounds; this is power that needs no coercion.

You and I will have the privilege of taking Christ into our hands--later in the service, as we do again and again when we worship God, taking Christ's body in the Bread of the Eucharist.  But when we go forth from here our hands will take something else something no less of God.  We will go forth into a world God has entrusted to us, has placed into our hands to love.  This world seems ordinary most of the time just like there’s a lot of ordinariness about the birth of Jesus, but despite that ordinariness, or even because of it, both Jesus and world are vessels for the divine, sacraments of God’s presence, bearers of God’s love.  So let us remember Christmas 2005 not for the transit strike or even for media flaps about saying, “Merry Christmas,” but for the mothers on the subway who need help with their children, and the privilege of helping them, for the hearts aching for the coming of the Prince of Peace and the honor of pointing to him.  We have been shown what love looks like, what Christmas looks like in an open-armed Jesus being handed to us by Mary.  May that love stretch our arms wide open in response.