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Christmas Eve

Forrest Church • December 24, 2002

We gather here tonight for many reasons. Some of you are present because an Christmas Eve worship ticket came packaged with your family holiday obligations. Others may seek to cleanse an admittedly secular palate with just a taste of something sacred. That’s fine too. I can see that a majority of you are regulars–bless your hearts–or perennials, who together comprise the members and supportive friends of this congregation. My gratitude goes out to you for making this service (and all our services) possible. There are a few here among us–our most honored guests–to whom I offer a special Christmas welcome. You know who you are. You have come through these doors, because the roof just caved in on your life and you didn’t know where else to turn. To you, I dedicate this evening. More than any of us present, if the angels sing tonight, they sing for you.

Whatever brought us here, we are now together. In suspended disbelief, we meet at the manger where the baby Jesus lay wrapped in swaddling cloths, attended by oxen and shepherds and kings. At this old familiar yet still entrancing shrine, we yearn to spring the secret of eternity from the lock of time. Christmas Eve is more than an oasis of beauty in a fallen world. It marks the buried treasure on our soul map, reminding us that our own journey from birth to death is a sacred pilgrimage. Tonight on this journey, we pause at the crossroads of eternity.

In order not to miss the crossroads’ markings–marking the spot of our hidden treasure–we move from the familiar world of signs into the realm of symbol. To do this, we must break habituated patterns of stop and go, wait and walk, yield and danger and men at work, entering instead the precincts of an hour whose logic lies outside of time. In short, tonight we exchange the assumptions of secular existence for a new set of operating instructions. In Christmas past and Christmas present, we find–coded in ancient symbol–a manual for joy ("Joy to the world") and peace ("Peace on earth").

Signs and symbols look alike, yet could not be more different. Signs offer literal directions; symbols encompass the truth toward which they point. Because of the difference, when we confuse a symbol for a sign, we betray its meaning. Biblical literalists do this all the time. Honoring the letter, they kill the spirit. We too reduce living symbols to mere signs, almost every day. Take peace, for instance. You can put "Peace" on a placard, yet march with violence in your heart. As for the war you are protesting, it too will be fought in the name of peace. All wars are fought in the name of peace.

Symbols are different. In the language of symbol, peace always heals, for it participates in the very healing it evokes. In the Christmas story, peace on earth is emblematic of forgiveness and reconciliation, not double-speak for retributive justice. In other words, for those who bank on the force of such reasoning, Christmas is sorely lacking in the logic of real politique. To celebrate Christmas, we must leave the world of signs and enter the realm of symbol, where truth transcends fact. Here, shepherds are awestruck by angels and kings march not to war but on a long, mysterious journey to worship a child, the prince of peace incarnate.

With war clouds gathering even as we too gather here in holy worship, to enter the symbol-world of Christmas may seem daunting this year. By such logic, however, it has always been daunting. We don’t look back tonight to a simpler time. The third year of the common era–one thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine years ago by scholars’ reckoning–was marked in Judea by a great, common tax (a war tax if you will) imposed by Rome and shouldered unequally, as taxes almost always are. At pain of death, together with all his countrymen, Joseph, a humble man whose lineage (the Bible says) traced back to King David, traveled on an arduous journey to Bethlehem, the City of David, to be enrolled on the tax-collectors’ books. His fellow citizens crowded the highways, each to register at his or her hometown, then to pay the forbidding new assessment of 80%. 2 shekels for you, eight for Caesar. Among these travelers journeyed Mary, an unwed soon-to-be mother, to whom Joseph gave needed assistance and then his very heart. The roads were crowded, the inns all full. Viewed in the context of the times, the star above Bethlehem heralding Christ’s advent attended the most unpromising of all imaginable births.

In addition to staggering taxation, at the outset of the first millennium the violence of an arrogant imperium spilled over into each of the Roman principalities. During the very year Jesus was born, children were killed in Judea at the behest of Herod, the imperial magistrate. Legend later had it that Herod licensed this bloodshed upon learning from the Magi of signs that foretold the birth of a mighty prince who one day would contest his throne. Whatever fear possessed him, the whip of Herod’s violence drove many Jews, including Joseph, with his young wife and stepchild, to flee the country for their lives. The King needn’t have worried about Jesus. Neither then nor later would this prince of peace reign in the counsels of power. Jesus’ reign would only be in hearts that were open to his saving grace. "The Kingdom of God is within you," he said. The Kingdom of God is a Kingdom of peace.

Upon receiving the Nobel Peace prize last month, Jimmy Carter reminded us that war can be epitomized as the destruction of one another’s children. For evidence, we need look no further than Bethlehem today. Do the clouds of war rising over Bethlehem not extinguish our vision of the star above Jesus’ cradle? Not if the Christmas story is true, they don’t. But the truth of the Christmas Story can be proved (or disproved) only by us. Its proof is told deep within our hearts.

History suggests that unfolding events will almost always prove optimists naïve. The facts are on history’s side here. Nonetheless, Christmas fills the heart with hope. Hope, another symbol of the season, is optimism transfigured and redeemed by faith. Hope speaks in the eternal language of love to the broken-hearted and in the eternal language of peace to a war-torn world. Hope answers the signs of life’s desecration–even war in the name of peace–with symbols of eternal majesty. Not majestic like Herod or Caesar. Not majestic like Rome or even like America, heretofore at least, a much kinder and gentler Rome. But graced instead with the eternal majesty and dignity of a child whose very existence witnesses to a power beyond that of all the world’s principalities. Even tonight, this child again inspires us to worship not the idols of mammon or might but the presence of God incarnate, the Holy, the sacred, the symbol of our promise and of the world’s redemption.

In the realm not of fancy but of symbolic truth, peace means peace and only peace. And so it does tonight. Peace on Earth, the story goes. Joy to the World. Kneel at the manger. Adore the child. Pray to the child and for the child and with the child. Enter the circle of peace on earth, where even the most bewildered and forsaken among us may rediscover hope and encounter joy. This is the story of Christmas. It is a beautiful story, but not alone beautiful. In the language of the heart, this beautiful story also happens to be true.