Christmastide 2014

Saints and Seasons

 Advent and Christmas take their place as part of the great pageant of the liturgical year. It’s a pageant that begins long before, in the Old Testament with the people of Israel (and before) and continues on with Christ‘s birth and teaching,  suffering and death, Resurrection and Ascension to the right hand of God’s glory. And on. It’s a story that began out of nothingness, before creation, and has no end. 

But what happens if you don’t know the story before this particular story, the story behind the story? ? The waiting and longing of a People in darkness?  We if we see Mary as a passive, perhaps unwilling vessel rather than a tower of strength? What if we see the shepherds as pastoral icons rather than the social outcasts that they were? It was they who were the first to answer the call to come to Jesus. Does that make a difference in how we see the story? What difference does it make if we see the Wise Men not as kings, but astrologers who followed a star, and not for 12 days, but for years?  And dose anyone even know that “the 12 days of Christmas” are the days after Christmas, not before?   What good is it if we leave Jesus in the manger, little white Lord Jesus, no crying he makes?  Do we really think of Mary kneeling  serenely by his side on that first Christmas night and not lying exhausted and spent on the bloody straw? Such a lovely Hallmark picture. And such a useless one if that’s all we see, if that’s all we know.  

Christmas is the story of a consuming love, of love incarnate, a love which will not let us be. It is not a saccharin, if improbable, story that can be discarded after the 25th. Christmas Day continues the story of God’s search for his creation, for each of us  - a love and a longing so unrelenting that finally it incarnates into our very flesh. 

There’s darkness and evil and despair in our lives; we lose our way; we think we can control our inner and outer worlds, but we cannot.  There’s unbearable tragedy in our world, and closer to home, in our ives. We need to know a God Who longs for us, Who calls to us and and waits for us, Who welcomes into Her arms of love and saves us, no matter what shape we are in; Who never gives up. We may see God as She, welcoming and warm, or as He, relentless and untiring. However we know God, we see only a fraction of the The One Who created us male and female in the Divine Image, the One Who “by the power of the Holy Spirit became incarnate by the Virgin Mary and was made fully human.” 

 So many people drag into their adult lives a Sunday School faith, a wimpy and ineffectual Jesus, a ferocious and judgmental God delighted to damn us,  a hateful God who I too would reject. And so many more, countless numbers, are being raised without any Sunday School faith at all, not even a distorted one, with nothing to hold onto when the darkness comes. And the darkness does come. When it does, we we need a vigorous, adult faith that can sustain us and take us to the other side of the dark.

Come, newly born Light, shine ever brighter in our hearts, spill out of our hearts and shine into our streets and into our troubled world, and fill it with the brightness of Yourself. 

Come down,  O Love divine, seek thou this soul of mine...

For none can guess its grace til he become the place 

wherein the Holy Spirit makes his dwelling. 

Hymnal 1940 #376

Louise Buck