Merry almost-Christmas, everyone! On Christmas Eve, divine wrath and the book of Revelation somehow feel wildly wrong-themed. Here’s one of my favorite Christmas Eve messages that I preached, inspired by Sikh activist Valarie Kaur’s “Breath and Push” viral video. The next Revelation installment will arrive next week.
Listen, feel, breathe.
The holy is making her presence known in a tender visit between two expectant mothers, Mary, and Elizabeth, and in the tender excitement we share with friends and family.
The holy is making her presence known in an animal feeding trough, otherwise known as a manger, and in the uncorked wine and just-baked pies of our holiday feast.
The holy is making her presence known in fields, at night, to bleary-eyed shepherds, and in snowball fights and kids wobbling, first time, on skis.
The holy is making her presence known in spite of angel-induced terror, and in the midst of our deepest fear, sorrow, and shame.
New life arising, new life pushing.
It’s a silent and holy night. And not only because Mary says yes to divinity in all its cuddly, cosmic glory. It’s a wondrous, weighty night because reality asks us this night, and every night, to bear God. The Christmas question lunges towards us every year, whether we are ready for it or not: “will you, too, give birth to God in your life? Will you, too, birth love in the world?”
Listen, feel, breathe.
Is that a baby’s kick? John the Baptist, leaps, no—the Greek says frolics—in mother Elizabeth’s womb. And I imagine Jesus, who always turns worlds upside down, responding with a somersault, much to Mary’s discomfort.
The holy is making her presence known.
Then again, the holy’s arrival requires consent, and the holy might not make her presence known, after all. We could, and many will, fly by the whole holiday season and utterly miss God’s visit. The essence of Christmas is pregnant as God-breathed possibility in the midst of our festivities and failures, but Christmas is usually more than we prepare for, requires more space than we, the overly-filled, have to give. That’s why the ancient hymn sings out, of Mary, “Hail, space for the uncontained God.” God needs space to expand and contract, just as does the universe, and yet there’s so little space to breathe in our days.
Christmas is about a baby, sure, but it’s also about the soul. Mary mirrors the soul’s “Yes” to God.
Christmas is about the soul, sure, but it’s also about peace. Christmas is about peace, sure, but not the comfortable peace of the privileged, or the sappy peace of holiday cards and, even churches, but peace as wholeness and healing of the seeds of violence.
Christmas is about peace, sure, but it’s also about justice, and not justice cloaked as the oppressive abuse of power on the right, or justice as righteous license to tear down every group but your own on the left, but justice as compassion enacted in protection for the poor and vulnerable, which we still must believe is possible. After all, once John and Jesus finish their in utero gymnastics, Mary sings a song, and as speaker Rob Bell suggests, it’s more Rage Against the Machine than “Away in a Manger.” Mary magnifies God, and her heart exclaims: “He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly, filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”
Christmas is about justice, sure, but it’s also about intimately personal and transcendently cosmic birth. God as breath, or Spirit, hovers over chaotic waters in the beginning and creates a world. And yet God waits for us to birth Christ, as the poet Denise Levertov says, because we are free to accept or free to refuse, because choice is integral to humanness. Even if we choose death.
Mary says, “Yes,” and in saying “Yes” becomes the mother not only of Christ, but of all who say, “Yes” to birthing God. And yet Mary is not a caricature of a submissive woman, giving into the male God’s wish for a son. That’s not what’s happening here. Mary is a revered mother and prophetess of Israel. We’ve turned this story into a trite tale about a woman who has a baby without having sex. But this reveals more about us than it does about Mary, because Mary exercises full-fledged agency in her own right. Mary is a mother, yes, but she is also a fierce leader of justice in the Hebrew prophetic tradition of Moses, and Jeremiah, and Isaiah.
The Holy Spirit will come upon her, Luke tells, but this is more than a winking nod towards divine-human impregnation. Luke’s Greek verb for “to come upon” is used to describe the coming and going of people and things, such as ships, says scholar Elizabeth Johnson. It is an active verb about how God lovingly moves, about how God is born, and about how we participate in God being born in the world. Mary’s “let it be unto me according to your Word” is Mary allowing God’s Living Word to flow, move, and come upon her own life, as effusive praise, as love and justice, in her own time.
To paraphrase the modern prophet Valerie Kaur: Listen. Feel. Breathe. A great transition is underway.
This new birth occurs not only in our lives, this night, not only in Mary’s life, on that night, but through the evolutionary unfolding of the universe itself. Spirited matter expanding, contracting. God’s momentous, uncontainable birth manifests in no less a space than existence.
John, the gospel writer, throws us under the waterfall of mystery. He says: “The Word was with God, and the Word was God in the beginning, and all things came into being through him…and, a little later, he drops his zinger: this Word, that very same Word in the beginning, has [now] become Flesh.” The lofty word incarnation, from the Latin caro for flesh or meat, is a way of describing how God shows up, how reality and religion are not separate, and how Spirit is perpetually enfleshed.
John’s gospels’ Word is a way of articulating something we all know but rarely utter aloud: that whatever of the holy is born this night has to be born on other nights as well. The only reason this night is holy is because we create the space to pay attention and allow it to be.
The same vital presence birthing the universe, which in Genesis speaks night and day and separates stars from sun, is the same vital presence pulsing within Mary, is the same vital presence arising in our hearts as we gather, is the same vital presence we desperately need to dream and enact a new future together. On this holy, silent night, God the Mother initiates us as mothers, too.
Listen. Feel. Breathe. Push.
Christmas Eve Sermon, First Church Williamstown, 2017
A Christmas Blessing.
THIS. IS. BEAUTIFUL. Thank you for the reminder, Mark.