Christmas Eve

The red flag on the parking meter was visible, and sure enough, Scott Seomin found a souvenir on his windshield. But it wasn’t a parking ticket from the city of West Hollywood, California. Instead, it was a poem that went like this:

The meter was red, as time had expired.
In the rush of the season, we knew you’d be tired.
A parking ticket would just make you blue,
And in the holiday spirit this just would not do.
So during this time of friendship and good cheer,
Season’s greetings to you and best wishes all year.

What a pleasant surprise: A mysterious meter maid who doubled as a poet.

One Advent season, a pastor found a small tree in his office.  Its branches were bare. Hanging from one branch was a spent shell casing. What did it mean? On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me a cartridge in a bare tree.

A few days later, he got four boxes of children’s candy marketed under the trade name “Nerds.” Attached to each box were several pieces of pipe cleaner which looked like spidery legs. It was “four crawling Nerds,” don’t you see? The next day he received a block of ice wrapped in a Ziplock bag. There were five playing cards stuck to the ice.  They were all kings. Five cold kings.

For 12 straight days this pastor received a gift of Christmas. Every day, a different piece of the puzzle. Every day, a different part of the song. Every day, a different greeting in a different location. His office. The secretary’s office. The church kitchen. The men’s room. Even the outside of his office window on day eleven, from which hung eleven Pampers (as in eleven diapers diaping).

Everybody loves a mystery. More to the point, everybody loves solving a mystery. “How did you do that?” the child asks the magician … figuring if the magician would just move slower, or let the child get closer, the child could demystify the magic and be “let in” on the secret.

Most mysteries are solvable with observation and information. If we could just see a little more … or read a little more … we would get it. If you play the game Clue long enough, and pay attention carefully enough, it will become obvious that it had to be … simply had to be … Colonel Mustard, in the drawing room, with the lead pipe.

But there are some mysteries that are not solvable with more information or more time. In fact, the more we see … the more we know … the longer the “seeing and knowing” goes on … the deeper the mystery grows. Science is like that. One answer leads to 20 more questions. And 20 answers lead to 200 more questions.

The same being true for human beings. If I know you only in passing, it’s easy to go home and tell my wife that I know all there is to know about you. I can characterize and categorize you after ten minutes. But if I spend ten hours … ten days … or ten years with you, I may have to go home and confess to Jeanette that I never really knew you at all. Because every time the world turns, the light hits the prism of your being and becomes refracted in wonderfully diverse and surprising ways. Which I do not have to tell Jeanette, because it is from Jeanette that I learned it first. That’s because love is the ultimate mystery … followed closely by the personality of the beloved.

God’s love is like that. As is tonight’s story of God’s love. You know it. There is not a piece of it which is new. Or strange. Or changed. In fact, where details of the story are concerned, there aren’t many. So, we take a few liberties and add a few embellishments. We stick in animals that weren’t there. We create characters who weren’t there. We write lines (sometimes, whole speeches) for the characters who weren’t there. Because without them, the story seems too spartan … too simple … too severe.

Yet we keep coming back to places like this, on nights like this, to hear it and sing it … over and over again. Because deep within us, we can’t abide any thought that it might not be true … or that God’s gift might have every other name in the world on it but ours. As Peter Gomes once said: “What interests the populace is the mystery of the manger. But what interests the philosophers is the legacy of the mystery.”

So, what is the message? Is it that love comes down … that God breaks in … that light trumps the dark … that holy things and common things can meet somewhere out back and coexist? It’s all of that and more. It’s that the world is an acceptable place for deity to do business … and that human beings are acceptable creatures for deity to do business with. For if Easter is about the next life, then Christmas is about this one … and that we shouldn’t be in all that big a hurry to get from one to the other.

For if God can live here, so can we. Albeit differently than we have done so far. Because we’ve got a baby to take care of now. Whose name is Love. And it would be a shame to drop it or walk away from it … having seen what it looks like … and having felt what it feels like.

Which is why Christmas, which begins with a visitation (God’s), is ultimately about a transformation (ours). Have you ever noticed that most secular stories about Christmas are conversion stories? Either somebody’s heart is changed, or somebody’s outlook is changed. We love reading Dickens’ A Christmas Carol because, at the end, Ebenezer Scrooge finds that he need not be as cold and cruel as he was.

And we love watching Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life because, at the end, George Bailey finds that his view of the world need not be as cold and cruel as it was. And in a world that resigns itself to the mantra “The way things are is the way things are always going to be,” we’ll light a candle to any suggestion that the world (and we) could be different.

We know that the infant Jesus is somehow the Word of God. We know that strangely, inexplicably, impossibly, the very creative power that brought the whole universe into existence lay on a pile of cow feed in the outskirts of Bethlehem, wearing a diaper. It’s a mystery and a wonder that will never completely fit into our brains, but by faith we believe it to be true, comprehensible or not.

But why did God choose to take flesh and live among us? Why did God come to us at Christmas? Why did the mind of infinity, the animating force of everything, the foundation of reality itself show up in our world and in our lives as a helpless newborn?

It would seem to be a mystery, but perhaps God came to us in order to be with us. Maybe God came to us to be close to us, to understand and unite with us. God came to us because God couldn’t stay away. God came to his broken and imperfect world because he made it, loved it, and called it “very good.” God was born among us to be among us. Why is God with us in all that we go through? Because God loves us.

So, when you see your friends and family this Christmas, see the God who loves you. When you miss those long gone, see the God who longs for you. When you see the lights and the decorations, know that God chose to be in the world and in your life because God loves you. Know that God was born for you, lived for you, died for you, and rose for you. Know that God cannot bear to leave you. Know that God is always with you. Know that God loves you.

Christmas is an act of faith. God the creator becomes an infant in a crib. Who could believe such a mystery? Yet that is the testimony of we who call ourselves Christians. The hope of the world was laid in a manger in a stable in Bethlehem.

As an old poem puts it:

‘Twas the night before Jesus when all through the earth
Every creature was stirring for a savior’s new birth.
Christ was on earth, all things were like new.
Now people could see what God wanted to do.
When it’s the night before Christmas
From the ground to the sky
God’s glory is near, and Jesus comes by.

            Have a merry (and loving) Christmas!