Saint Luke 2:1-20
Without a doubt Christmas of 2020 is unlike any other we have experienced in our lives because those of us who are used to being at church are at home.
Every other Christmas we’ve had to decide what time we would have to get the family together so that we could get to church. Would we go to the earlier service and have dinner afterward or would we go to the late service and risk falling asleep during the sermon. Now it doesn’t matter because you’re at home. You can fall asleep during the sermon and I will never know. And all you have to do to remedy the situation is to hit the rewind button.
More amazingly even your pastor is at home!
Like many of you I can’t remember a Christmas Eve where I wasn’t rushing back and forth to church. Being an acolyte at one service, singing in the choir for another, sometimes doing both. It was glorious!
I’m sure you had the same experience. Some of you have been churching on Christmas Eve longer than I have been alive and, believe me friends, that is a very long time because I am old. But this year things are different – you’re at home and so am I.
It’s unlike any Christmas we have ever experienced because we’ve decided to “follow the Fauci,” as Shepard Smith says, listen to the scientists and the cooler heads and much as we would love to be together to stay at home.
That is quite unlike the first Christmas where, The Rev’d Calum MacLeud, who is the Dean of Saint Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh, observed nobody seemed to be at home.
He said in a sermon once:
Travel‑weary Joseph and heavily pregnant Mary journey away from their home in Nazareth to Bethlehem, the ancestral town of Joseph. Indeed, not only are they not at home, but they don’t even find proper shelter for the birth of the child.
The angels aren’t home either. They’re on the move from heaven—which I guess is their home—to earth to say and sing of the great good news, to share it with the shepherds that they might themselves share it with others; the angels are journeying, coming to earth, to what the theologian Philip Yancy calls “the visited planet.”
Shepherds—they’re not at home. Of course they’re not even in their usual place in the fields, ultimately. They, too, have to make the journey from the fields where they are keeping their sheep to find the baby in the stable after being scared out of their wits by this encounter with the heavenly messengers; they take their own journey.
And, of course, in Matthew’s Gospel, those mysterious magi, the wise men—they’re on the road away from home, being led by the star to find the new promised king. T.S. Eliot imagines these magi as grumbling in just the worst time of year for a journey and such a long journey, the ways deep, the weather sharp, the very dead of winter. Indeed we might say that the magi’s grumbling in that poem “The Journey of the Magi” could be true of any of those involved in the story except perhaps Herod and his advisors. They were very much at home.
And I believe that all this activity and movement and journeying is occasioned because not even God is at home on Christmas. God, maker of heaven and earth, creator of all that is, God whose nature and name is love is also on a journey at Christmas. God is journeying on Christmas to
where you and I are.1
That why people who we never see the rest of the year come to church at Christmas and Easter. On Christmas they come to hear that they are not alone. On Easter they come to hear that this life is not all there is.
You and I understand that we need to come to the place more often than a couple of times a year to be reminded that God’s great love for us is personal and makes a difference.
Those are messages we long to hear but they are not messages that are easy to hear. Sometimes we have to strain to hear them like one man did in one of my favourite Christmas stories. It was written so long ago that it appeared in The Chicago Tribune Magazine section which disappeared in 2009.
It is called “Jerry’s Last Fare” and was written by James F. Garner as a Christmas present for his wife.
It’s about a cab driver, working late on Christmas Eve, who decides to pick up one last passenger before calling it a night.
As luck would have it the guy wanted to go to the airport but first he had a request. He wanted to pass through Lincoln Park Zoo. Jerry was not pleased for he had promised his wife that he would be home for midnight Mass and now he was going to miss it.
To make matters worse his passenger wanted to stop and get out for a moment or two at the entrance to the Zoo. Jerry had never been robbed but he knew enough not to get out of his cab at the gate of a deserted zoo close to midnight.
“There is something I always wanted to try,” the man began with a sparkle in his eye. “There is an old legend about what happens to the animals on Christmas Eve. Have you heard it?”
Way back in his memory Jerry thought he had so, before he realized what he was doing, he was out of his cab and standing in the snow. His passenger reminded him of the legend that the only witnesses to Jesus’ birth were animals that gathered around the manger. What they saw was so miraculous that the animals were blessed with the power of speech.
“So on every Christmas Eve,” [said Jerry’s passenger,] “if you listen very hard, you can hear the animals talk again.
So they stood and they listened.
They listened for a very long time until Jerry finally said, “I don’t
hear them.”
“Listen very hard,” the man said quietly.
Jerry did, and replied, “Nothing.”
“No not nothing Jerry. There’s
the silence. Listen to the silence. You can’t hear the animals or any people, you
can’t hear the cars. Think of the
thousands of people who live within a half-mile of where we are standing right
now. You can’t hear a single one.”
Jerry paused to let his imagination take him around that half-mile, then
further, around the city, across the black lake to the shores of Indiana and
Michigan. He smiled, “It sounds like the
whole world is asleep.”
“Asleep?” asked the fare.
“No, not asleep.” [Said Jerry.] “You’re right. It’s like everyone is wide awake and holding
their breath.”
“That’s the sound of hope, Jerry.
It’s Christmas Eve, when the Savior of the world was born, but no one is
praying, not in the words they think of as prayer. Just hoping with their hearts at ease and
their eyes filled with wonder.”
“So Christmas Eve is the time when animals talk and the people shut up.”
Jerry said with a chuckle. “It sure is a
beautiful sound.”
Maybe tonight as the only journey you make is in your very own home. Maybe tonight as you wend your way from your computer to your bedroom you’ll hear the sound of the God of love creping in beside you, bringing healing and hope.
If you do, even for just a second, it sure will be a beautiful sound.
And maybe the sound of that silence will only be broken by your memory of the words and tune of the hymn as “The world in solemn stillness lay, To hear the angels sing.”
Happy Christmas.
________
1. Calum I MacLeod, “Christmas Eve Worship,” Christmas Eve Worship at The Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago (December 24, 2012).
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