Luke 2:1-20
Christmas Eve Message
December 24, 2020
But when you’re gone, who remembers your name?
Who keeps your flame, who tells your story?
Those words are not from one of our beloved Christmas hymns that fill in the holes of the Christmas story with images like the “cattle are lowing” and angels “singing sweetly o’er the plains.”
They are not part of the script of a favorite Christmas movie together with phrases like “You’ve been given a great gift, George: A chance to see what the world would be like without you” in It’s a Wonderful Life.
You won’t find these lines in a treasured children’s Christmas book like “Maybe Christmas doesn’t come from a store. Maybe Christmas perhaps means a little bit more” from The Grinch Who Stole Christmas.
No, these words are sung in the final song of the musical Hamilton as a multitude of founding fathers and a couple of mothers talk about whether and how they will be remembered.
That’s what we are here to do tonight. We are keeping the light that is Jesus flickering and we get to start at the beginning when he came into the world in the usual way just as babies this very second and every moment of history have.
It’s a story of connection. God so wanted to reconnect with humankind. The bond that had been broken between people and God was restored with those first cries on that night in Bethlehem.
And God has never stopped trying to connect with us ever since.
That’s the story that is ours to tell. Not like an epic story of a king born among comfort and privilege and servants. No, this story of that night in Bethlehem goes to the common denominator among every one of us without exception from the favelas or slums of Brazil’s cities to the mountain villages of the Himalayas to the delivery room of Southwestern Vermont Medical Center – we all enter this life with a story to tell.
How do we tell the story of Jesus? Besides Christmas time where we share it with Nativity Scenes and Carols and Ornaments and storybooks and cookie cutters, we tell Jesus’ story after the birth through our lives because his is a love story that shines best when we act it out in the way he lived – caring for the forgotten and seeing and embracing the dignity of every other person as having, like him, God within.
Connection. This long, hard year has been one where we’ve yearned to be connected to each other, especially this Christmas, when we may not be with those we love. But the story doesn’t cease to be important enough to share just because the world’s turned upside down. Christmas still comes. We need this story of hope because the world is full of pain and loss and grief and distance.
How will we tell the story with our lives?
What will be different because we know the beginning, middle and ending of Jesus’ story?
Will we pass on simple acts of kindness? Maybe in the next few days reaching out to someone who is alone this Christmas.
Will we be instruments of healing? Keeping others safe during these COVID days.
Will we not allow the powers and principalities to stop us from looking out for those who are voiceless or forgotten? Continuing or beginning to speak up whenever we encounter injustice.
Will we keep love alive even during those times we find ourselves among those hard to love? Especially then.
This is Christmas, my friends, the time as a wise colleague calls it, “When humanity and heaven collide.” Have we got a story to tell!
Let us meet God this night in the form of a newborn baby and take these words of Ann Weems’ to heart:
The Christmas spirit is that hope which tenaciously clings to the hearts of the faithful and announces in the face of any
Herod the world can produce and all the inn doors slammed in our faces and all the dark nights of our souls
that with God all things still are possible,
that even now unto us a Child is born! (from Kneeling in Bethlehem)
Amen.