Sermon Christmas Eve, 2008
“Welcome the Child of the Mother God”
Yes, the Mother God. My message tonight has a serious tone to it, as well as joyful. As I look about our world both religious & secular, I see that we are a world divided, & our own nation divided at times. Christmas “Christ’s Mass,” is, by it’s very nature, a Christian celebration, but God never meant for us to be so strict in our understanding of what divine love means.
God’s love is meant for us all, whether we are Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, or maybe even no religion at all. Christmas can be a way
for all of us to share our joy with everyone, even those we have been sadly taught to call our enemies. It is a time of peace, a time to set aside differences & celebrate our diversities. Christmas is a time of joy & also a time of sadness. It is a time of looking forward with hope & a time of looking back with longing for times that were—or times that never were.
I would like to begin this evening’s message with something I wrote years ago about the loss of the dreams of being young.
It’s called “Stolen Innocence” & begins with a quote from William Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality"--
"There was a time
when meadow grove and stream,
The earth, and every common sight
To me did seem Appareled in celestial light"
”When I was a child I used to walk with Jesus.
We would walk through paths in the woods
that had always been there.
Sometimes me and Jesus and Saint Francis
would sit by the trunk of a favorite tree for hours
just listening to the water go by in the brook,
watching the minnows in the little pools
and delighting in penny-doctors skipping and skimming
across the clear water.
We would build tiny villages out of twigs and dead grass
and trace tiny irrigation ditches with pointed sticks.
Sometimes we would climb the nearby hill to the meadow.
Jesus liked it there, and Saint Francis liked it there,
and I liked it there.
We would chase after grasshoppers and hold them in our hands
and then let them go to see how far they would jump.
We would eat stolen rhubarb stalks from the garden.
We would roll down the side of the hill through the tall grass
to the rutted tractor tracks below.
.............................
And then one day they were gone.
Jesus was taken by the adults and put into a golden box.
Jesus was changed from a man into a wafer and something in a golden cup.
Jesus had to stay in the Church and the only way I could talk to him
was through the prayers we learned in Catechism
I don't know whatever became of Saint Francis.
I saw him once a few years later at a Retreat I went to with my father.
He was sitting on a stone bench in a formal garden;
He looked like he was part of the stone bench.
There were stops all along the path in the garden that showed
how Jesus was stoned and whipped and nailed to a cross.
Saint Francis didn't look happy anymore.
He looked sad. It was a sad place
all filled with flowers and silent men.”
Our Christmas stories, our Nativity scenes as we call them, are tales of the miracle of birth, which will always remain a miracle no matter how much we learn about the process. I think that it is no stretch of the imagination to say that every birth is a miracle. Our Christmas stories are tales of Nature stepping aside allowing the miracle characters of God to step onstage.
Matthew tells us of a miraculous star that suddenly appeared in the Heavens
to guide wandering Magi to the Holy City of Jerusalem. Heaven & Earth touched each other as never before. Angels, no longer restricted to Jacob’s Ladder, now have wings & filled the skies with messages of joy—& they also found ways to enter into our dreams as well. Luke tells us that these messengers entered the dreams of Joseph, of Mary, & of her cousin Elizabeth. Even Matthew’s Magi found themselves just as affected by these angelic figures as that mysterious fleeting star.
These people listened to their dreams. Our dreams are our angelic messengers & we should pay closer attention to our dreams & visions than we do. Listening to & heeding dreams is becoming a lost art, sad to say. Where would our Christmas stories be if Mary refused to listen to the Angel Gabriel, or if Joseph & the three kings chose not to heed the warnings in their dreams? We certainly wouldn’t be here tonight celebrating the answer to all of our unconscious dreams, the Messiah among us.
Have you ever noticed, though, that aside from the brief appearance of Elizabeth as the mother of John the Baptist & the obedient manner of Mary in response to her Guardian Angel & her God, that all the major characters in this Nativity scene are male? The authors of our two birth stories, Matthew & Luke are male. The poor shepherds on the hillsides tending their flocks by night are all men as are the obviously wealthy kings bearing gifts
fit for yet another king. And were you aware that the angels all have masculine names like Michael & Gabriel? Even God is considered by many to be male. As a young Irish-Catholic boy growing up in Connecticut, I knew that Mary was the Mother of God, but I was never sure about Joseph. What confused my young mind was the phrase “Holy Family.” There was also a statue inside Saint Francis Church that showed Mary & Joseph looking over the crib of Jesus, looking very much like what we call a “nuclear family.”
Over against all of this was the complex story we heard in Catechism about the Virgin Birth occasioned by the Holy Spirit. In the spirit of Christian mysticism, the Sisters of Mercy never really explained the whole story & how Joseph & the Holy Spirit both seemed to be fathers of Jesus—& of course, none of us dared to question ‘Sister’ this mystery!
Ever since I became a Protestant, & fairly soon afterwards, a minister in the United Church of Christ, I wondered about the feminine aspects of Christianity. As a Catholic, Mary was revered & elevated to a high position in our understanding of God’s family, but here in the Protestant way of looking at things, the Trinity holds sway.
So, where do we find the feminine? I remember one theologian who came to speak at the Seminary said that since the Logos in the first words of the Gospel of John refers to Wisdom, known as “Sophia” in Greek, then Jesus must be the bearer of the feminine as well as the masculine energy that calls us all to be fully authentic human beings. “In the Beginning was the Word (Logos, Sophia) & the Word was with God and the Word (Sophia) was God.” This is about as close as the mystical writer of the Fourth Gospel was willing to come to a birth story!
I really do like the feminine aspect of Christ being found in the Wisdom aspect of God that we find in Proverbs. It presents us with a well-rounded divinity that isn’t trapped in a masculine persona. These fully developed traits are symbolized in the candles we lit tonight; hope, a spirit of faith
to live in the here & now & into the future; peace, a sense of connectedness
with the all; love, the stuff that holds us all together; joy, the warmness we project to all we meet; & the Christ Candle, especially the Christ candle
which symbolizes the constant & continual birth that gives usa centering prayer-place, & lights up that divine spark in all of us. Let us pray that these lights burn continuously & illuminate any dark days that may come our way.
We ask this in the name of the newborn Jesus & the Risen Christ. So be it.
