Christmas Eve: December 24, 2020

From the tabernacle above the altar in St. George’s Chapel just north of the high altar. Both altars were created by Tiffany and Company in New York using an endolithic process of infusing paint into marble by heat. When the artist Caryl Coleman died, jealous mosaic artists, fearing that the process would replace their craft, destroyed the patent, and Coleman’s endolithic process was lost. The altars at St. Mary’s are two of his nine creations.

Christmas Eve
Luke 2:1-20
The Rev’d Charles Everson
St. Mary’s Episcopal Church
December 24, 2020

Dear friends, unto us is born this day a Savior.  Therefore let us rejoice and be glad.  There is no place for sadness among those who celebrate the birth of Life itself.  For on this day, Life came to us dying creatures to take away the sting of death, and to bring the bright promise of eternal joy.  No one is excluded from sharing in this great gladness.  For all of us rejoice for the same reason: Jesus, the destroyer of sin and death, because he finds none of us free from condemnation, comes to set all of us free.  Rejoice, O saint, for you draw nearer to your crown!  Rejoice, O sinner, for your Savior offers you pardon![1]

That is an excerpt is from what is by far my favorite Christmas sermon, preached by Leo the Great, a fifth century Italian bishop.  It has always brought me such joy, year after year.  But this year, I read it through a different lens.  Like all of you, my life has changed significantly since March when the pandemic began.  Beyond seeing some of you from time to time with masks on from a safe distance, Jay and I have generally stayed home.  This pandemic has been cruel, not only in stealing away our loved ones such as Dcn. Gerry, but in forcing us to isolate ourselves from our friends and family.  As sad and depressing as this year has been for me, I can’t imagine what it has been like for those like my grandmother who have literally been alone for most of the pandemic. 

This year, when I read that old sermon by Leo the Great, I really wasn’t in the mood to rejoice and be glad.

This year, when I re-read Luke’s telling of the birth of Christ, it wasn’t the latter half of the story with the all the joy – the part with the multitude of the heavenly host praising God – that caught my attention.  It was the beginning of the story, with seemingly mundane details about a census.  The emperor of the Roman Empire, whose name was Augustus, published a decree requiring that everyone in the Empire be registered as part of the census.  The name of the local governor is given, as well as the names of several cities – Nazareth in Galilee, Bethlehem, etc.  These were actual people in history, and places you can go visit to this day.

Likewise, the Christmas Proclamation that we heard chanted before Mass captivated me with its poetic dating of the birth of Christ from nine different events.  It situates the Incarnation within the context of salvation history, making reference not only to biblical events but also to the secular histories of the Greek and Roman worlds.[2]

The specific time and place where Jesus was born was, quite frankly, a very dark period of human history.  We can think of the Roman emperor the Dark Emperor in Star Wars, with Quirinius the governor as Darth Vader.  Jesus was born into what you and I would call a police state that tortured people and denied most people basic human rights.  It was brutal unless you were a wealthy, male, Roman citizen.  The Jewish people suffered greatly under the heavy hand of Roman rule, and the trip that Joseph and a very pregnant Mary had to make from Nazareth to Bethlehem was arduous and fraught with danger and fear.  Jesus was born into a world covered by a great cloud of darkness.
On the one hand, it makes no sense that the God of the universe would enter into our world by such ordinary means in such an awful place and time.  St. Leo the Great’s sermon helps us here.  He continues, “For the time has come when the fulness of time draws near, fixed by the unsearchable wisdom of God, when the Son of God took upon him the nature of humanity, that he might reconcile it to its Maker.  The time has come when the devil, the inventor of death, is met and beaten in that very flesh which has been his means of his victory.” 

Jesus took upon himself our very nature in time and history so that he could reconcile us to his Father – to begin to undo the damage done when our first parents chose to eat of the forbidden fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in that garden so long ago. The ordinary, mundaneness of it all is why Christmas isn’t a fairy tale.  It is only because God chose to enter our world in history on a specific date, with other people who lived, and in places we can go visit that any of this makes sense at all. It is only after the ordinary details placing this story in its historical context that we hear the extraordinary story of the birth of Christ. 

This Christmas, you and I live in a world covered by a great cloud of darkness as we are in many respects at the worst point yet of this pandemic.  Just as he met Mary and Joseph in their suffering and hardships on this day so long ago, God meets us here, at [TIME] on Christmas Eve in the year 2020 in Kansas City, Missouri.  The extraordinary birth of Christ in all of its mundaneness gives us every reason, no matter our mood, to “rejoice and be glad.  There is no place for sadness among those who celebrate the birth of Life itself.  For on this day, Life came to us dying creatures to take away the sting of death, and to bring the bright promise of eternal joy.  No one is excluded from sharing in this great gladness.  For all of us rejoice for the same reason: Jesus, the destroyer of sin and death, because he finds none of us free from condemnation, comes to set all of us free.  Rejoice, O saint, for you draw nearer to your crown!  Rejoice, O sinner, for your Savior offers you pardon![3]”
 
[1] Leo the Great, Sermo 1 de Nativiate Domini, slightly altered by me.

[2] https://www.ncregister.com/blog/how-to-understand-the-christmas-proclamation.  Accessed 12/23/2020

[3] Leo the Great, Sermo 1 de Nativiate Domini, slightly altered by me.

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