The Rev. Noah Van Niel
The Chapel of the Cross, Chapel Hill, NC
December 24th, 2018 at 9pm
Christmas I: Isaiah 9:2-7; Psalm 96; Titus 2:11-14, Luke 2:1-20
We have a tradition in our house of going to cut down our own Christmas tree ourselves from a tree farm the weekend after Thanksgiving. It is a tradition we kept this year, even though we soon learned the types of trees you can cut down yourself in this part of NC aren’t quite the same as we were used from up north. This year we ended up with a spindly cedar rather than a robust balsam fir, but it has worked out just fine even if it took a little getting used to.
Now I can see some of you Advent purists out there shaking your heads at me for putting up the tree and lights so far before Christmas Day but I make no apologies, especially now that I have kids. And not because I don’t want to instruct my kids in the value of Advent and virtues of patience and hope and expectation. We’re working on those things too. But because this way, for a whole month, our house is filled with wonder. And call me an Advent sell-out, but in my opinion, there could be no better way to prepare for Christmas than that.
Children wonder at a Christmas tree, dazzling with lights and glittering ornaments.
And wonder, which comes so naturally to children, leads inevitably to the greatest gift of this season, which is joy, the kind of joy that just bubbles over into explosions of exuberance. If you came to my house this past month not only would you be alarmed at how early our Christmas decorations are up, you would also be a bit shocked by the amount of singing and dancing that has been taking place, led by our children, who just can’t keep from rocking around the Christmas tree. Spontaneous carols sung at top volume around the dinner table, instant dance parties in the living room, our house has been at peak joy for weeks now. Now I admit that may be due in part to all the sugar that has been creeping into their diet these last few weeks. In fact I’m sure that’s part of it. But the other part is just the ease with which a child’s joy comes tumbling out of them, evidence that they have been fully imbued with the spirit of wonder that Christmas creates. It truly is the most wonderful time of the year.
But joy and wonder, these are not just the purest manifestations of the Christmas spirit, they are the purest manifestations of the Christian faith. It is, after all, the pinnacle of our prayer for each person who is baptized that they might experience “the gift of joy and wonder in all God’s works.” To live in a state of wonder, to radiate joy, these are not childish states of being to grow out of, they are holy states of being to strive for.
And I wonder if we don’t work so hard to make Christmas an endlessly magical season for our children because we, as adults, know just how hard it will be to maintain those states of joy and wonder as they grow up. Somewhere along the way we lose our ease of wonder, our propensity for joy. This is tragic. And I think we know it. I think deep down we all wish we could live in a constant state of joy; deep down I think we know that there is no holier state for us to exist in than that of wonder. And so we slave away with our pageants and our presents and our carols and our candles because we are hoping to etch in these little ones such a potent, pure dose of joy and wonder that it echoes forward throughout their whole lives. That as they reach the “tedium and habituation,” and “blah” of adulthood they can, if but for a season, dip back into that reservoir of good feeling and remember, or recover what it is like to revel in the mystery and the majesty and the magic that is the glory of God in our very midst; the spirit of Christmas.
Because, after all, the great gift of Christmas resides in Christmases past. “The accumulated memories of annual emotion that get concentrated into great joy,” as TS Eliot put it.[1] The soaring melodies, the familiar stories, the festive feasts the piles of presents, at some point these experiences incarnated in us, the joy and wonder of this night—the joy that filled the shepherds to bursting so that they ran from the fields down to the manger; the wonder that comes from believing with all your heart that the universe cares enough about you to bring you a present you wanted. There will be time enough for this joy to be chased off by the hoof-beats of Herod’s henchmen; for this wonder to be eclipsed by the shadow of the cross, but for now, for this night, if only for this night, there is a baby boy, and there is joy, and it is unadulterated, and it is holy and it is what we are here for.
And so we seek to go back, back yes, to Bethlehem, but back also to the moments in our own lives when the joy and wonder of Christmas was real, when God was real, real as flesh and blood. And perhaps that is part of the reason the church is always so full on Christmas—not just cultural custom, not just a desperate attempt on the part of parents to fill these holy days with a Spirit their children will carry with them as they grow up. But a longing attempt on the part of all of us to recapture something of that magic, when the world seemed nothing but merry and bright. Because as much as I’d like to believe it, I don’t think people all of a sudden come to church on Christmas because they’ve developed an interest in exploring the theological significance of the incarnation. They come for the warm-fuzzies. But the warm-fuzzies are precisely the product of the theological significance of the incarnation. Joy is the byproduct of God coming to dwell with us. Wonder is the byproduct of the beauty of God’s love shown to us in this child lying in a manger. The stories and songs are meant to help incarnate in us an awareness of the amazing, incredible, inexplicable reality of God, the Creator of heaven and earth, becoming human, so that every inch of our humanity could be touched by his divinity. And so that in those warm and fuzzy moments we can, for a moment, let go of the encumbrances of adulthood and be transported back to the manger, back home, where the fire was warm, the pajamas were soft and the cookies were sweet. Where the joy was pure and the wonder was all around. To taste again but a morsel of those memories, is what we are here for; to step across the threshold of time and space and gaze with the shepherds in breathless joy on that magnificent baby, as a child gazes in wonder upon the dazzling Christmas tree, and knows, as well as they will ever need to, the true and lasting meaning of Christmas.
[1] TS Eliot, “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees,” 1954