It’s not the same, is it?
Christmas church at a distance is just…odd.
Family isn’t gathered as usual, or we’re gathered with lots of new precautions and stresses. We’re missing folks around the table and tree – and some of us are actually seeing more family on Zoom than we would with usual holiday travel.
Parties, shopping, decorating, caroling are all changed because of job losses and social distancing. The Christmas rituals of celebration and love are just different this year.
For some of us, it just doesn’t quite feel like Christmas.
For some of us, it’s actually better this way.
Either way, we don’t need to pretend it’s the same.
Because disruptions, change, difference, and the disorientation that comes from all of that, is exactly where Christmas starts.
Nothing was usual in Bethlehem, after all, in that particular season and year we remember today.
They weren’t in the middle of a pandemic, staying home and separate out of care for one another. They had a global tax census forcing people to leave home, travel across the country, and crowd together where there’s not enough room. Mary and Joseph are out of their element, in a makeshift guestroom – maybe with more extended family around them than ever before – and now holding a brand-new infant: an adorable, unpredictable bundle of disruption and change.
Everything’s just as different in first-century Bethlehem as it is in twenty-twenty New Jersey. Nobody’s ready for what’s happening, we’re all off balance, and – right in the middle of that – God shows up! In a manger.
I wonder if that detail about the manger – which Luke repeats three times in telling the story of Jesus’ birth – is meant to be a signal about the disruption, the change, the not-the-way-it’s-supposed-to-be-ness of God’s coming. Putting a baby in a feed box draws our attention to just how not-like-we-planned it this whole arrival is.
And if that’s the case, then everything that is wrong with Christmas this year is actually right.
Maybe we’re really not supposed to be prepared for how God really comes.
Maybe things aren’t supposed to be “normal’.
That’s great news. Let’s be honest, we’re never going to be really prepared for the coming of God, no matter how predictable things are. So thank God we don’t have to “get back to normal” to receive and share all the blessings of Christmas; to experience the peace or joy or hope or love we long for.
Maybe the disruption of our habits, our homes, our workdays, our relationships is something that creates a perfect space for God to be born, to become one with us, to be with us.
I don’t think that God needs us off-balance and uncomfortable to get in to our lives. I do think that when things change, when traditions aren’t the same, it gets our attention and helps us notice God at work. So we’re more ready to see and feel God’s real, physical presence – in a manger of all places! (Or whatever our 2020 version of ridiculous substitute for a baby bed or a heavenly throne would be.)
So, today, as we remember the story of God slipping into a feed box in a crowded hill town, changing everything, look around at your life. Look around your Christmas that isn’t what you’re used to, the things you’re not prepared for, and think about how that might be showing you where God is turning up in your life; or what God is up to, here and now.
After all, in this whole year of worshipping together in so many different places – out of sync with the people who’d ordinarily be in the next pew – new spaces have become sacred, time has become holy in new ways.
Bible study and classes, prayer and worship, visits and friendships are traveling through the electrons and data-packets of the internet this year, as Emmanuel, God-with-us, moves into our disrupted spaces and lives. Required registration has made worship more intentional for some; live-streaming has made it more serendipitous for others.
This building has become a place to launch prayer into the world, instead of a destination for prayer.
God-with-us is establishing our homes, our neighborhoods, and even the wilderness of the internet as holy and sacred, filled with power and love and the complete presence of God.
Where else has God become noticeable in the disruptions in your life?
I’ve noticed that the disruptions of our face-to-face life have made phone calls – ordinary, just-voice phone calls – special, holy, and life-giving for me this year. There’s something sacred, a presence of God, in recognizing a voice, seeing you with my ears, whether we are talking about grief or joy or money or the weather.
The changes and disruptions of this year have reconnected many of us to God’s creation. People take up birdwatching from an isolated room; others get rooted in the earth by digging into our gardens. Many of us have been tuning our lives to the demands of walks and kibble and playtime as animal shelters empty and God’s creatures move into more of our homes.
Disruptive protests have reminded us to notice the face of God in the black lives cut short by violence and neglect. Those disruptions have prompted conversations in boardrooms and legislatures and kitchens and driveways about we can use changes in our habits and assumptions, our brands and behavior and budgets, to help free ourselves and others from a history of oppression and separation.
The economic challenges of the pandemic have revealed the breadth and depth of generosity in this congregation. Long-distance friendships are getting closer when physical connections are interrupted. The disruption of our offices and schools has made fuzzy slippers into reasonable work wear (okay, that one’s a stretch for the presence of God, but it’s a blessing anyway!)
We do need to grieve what we have lost – people who have died, illnesses that break our hearts, jobs needed that have vanished, work we loved that has changed, opportunities we can’t claim again. But where the change is painful, when the disruption hurts, where we grieve: that’s exactly – exactly – where Christmas comes most profoundly, where Christmas matters most.
Not in the normal, the predictable, the safe, the well-planned times and places of our lives, but in the manger, in the ways we never would have done this before.
Into the middle of everything not-normal, Luke tells us, comes the entire, all-powerful, presence of God, lying in a feed box, bringing healing into the brokenness, love into the cracks, peace into the changes.
Love takes advantage of the disruptions, the change, the unpredictability, to show up in places we weren’t looking for love. Love, lying in a feed box, comes in and settles down with our discomfort; makes a home in our imbalance and impatience; moves in to the mess we’re mixed up in, and embraces it all.
And that’s how the joy, the peace, the hope of Christmas come to us. Not from perfect timing, polished rituals, unbreakable traditions.
Joy bursts upon us from love welling up in the mess.
Peace takes hold of our hearts from love rolling with all the change.
Hope grows from love that takes up our tired frustration or lonely grief and says: yes, this is real, but this is not the end, this is not all, there is so much more.
There are angels singing, even now.
The miracle of Christmas doesn’t come in spite of the fact that there’s no crib, and no room. The miracle comes because there’s no crib, and no room: so a baby in a feed box catches hold of our attention, makes us fall in love, and loves us into the joy and peace, the generosity and hope, the holiness of God with us, the sacredness of this unplanned, strange and wonderful now.
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