The Nativity of Christ (Christmas Day)

In the name of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, One God. Amen.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

A most blessed a joyous Christmas Day!

So as I thought about what shape my sermon would take, the theme of surprise came to mind.

Take, for instance, a Christmas surprise I had… yesterday!

I was in the church office yesterday morning, printing, preparing for our services, when I went to use the restroom. I opened the door and gasped. Strewn all throughout the floor, on the toilet seat, on the counter was… dirt. So much dirt! And a broken ceiling tile.

I immediately panicked and thought, oh my God, the roof is leaking from the rain and the ceiling tile got wet and collapsed and we just replaced the roof. What are we going to do?! So I got a ladder, and poked my head up into the sub roof. Everything was dry. The broken tiles were dry…

And then I saw a shape behind the toilet. And, my friends, much to my surprise - there was a CAT. A cat somehow got into the subroof and stepped on the tile which collapsed. When I tried to collect the aforementioned cat, it screeched away from me, and climbed the ladder and hopped back up the hole it fell through and disappeared.

Needless to say, I was surprised at this little Christmas interruption. And then I went on to St. Philip’s in the afternoon to support the children’s Christmas pageant as the narrator - with angel wings and a halo of course - and I enter my office and lo! The ceiling tiles had fallen out because the roof was leaking and my desk was covered in water, as was my carpet!

Christmas, as it turns out, can be surprising!

But truly, I think that sometimes we forget just how absolutely and wonderfully surprising and even shocking the birth we celebrate today is.

Today is, from the Christian religious standpoint, the inflection point of human history. Everything is changed with the birth of Jesus Christ.

Because the true surprise of Christmas is that the One who created the cosmos, who hung the stars in the heavens, who breathed life into all that is, who created us and loves us and sustains us - this Creator becomes creation, being knit together in a woman’s womb.

The jaw-dropping, awe-inspring reality of Christmas is that God moves from eternity to temporality, from infinity to finitude, from immortality to mortality, from all power and all knowing totally independent to… a helpless, weak, dependent, fragile, human baby born of a woman named Mary in the backwater colony of ancient Israel, an occupied land by the Roman Empire.

A beautiful and artistic Instagram account I commend to you, “Swordandpencil,” posted about the birth of Christ with a lovely art piece which read: “Contained within her womb, her uncontainable creator.”

This is the fundamental paradox and surprise of Christmas, that Blessed Mary brings forth God in the form of a baby. This is why the oldest traditions of Christianity have so honored and venerated Mary - because without her assent to carrying the Christ-child, when she tells the Angel Gabriel, “be it done unto me according to thy word” (Luke 1:38), we would have no Jesus, we would have no God-human who breaks into the world.

This is why Mary was, from the beginning of Christian history, profoundly honored, and why she becomes known as the Theotokos, the God-bearer.

The surprise of Christmas continues beyond the birth of Christ.

Today’s Gospel invites us to “receive Christ” and, through Christ, become children of God born of God.

As the divinity of the eternal Son, the second-person of the trinity, assumes the nature of humanity a profound paradoxical relationship begins with humanity. Because as the divine nature of God takes on the nature of humanity - we are then able to take on the nature of divinity. We become, through baptism, children of God born of God.

The incarnation of God in Christ, begins the saving work of humanity entering into the life of God ever more fully. The profound surprise of Christmas is that God does not merely descend from the heavens in the form of a baby; but also God lifts us up to ascend into the divine life of God.

And this means that we - like Mary - are invited to become bearers of Christ in our hearts. We are invited to follow her faithful leadership and assent to the call of Christ in our lives. As that same instagram account, Swordandpencil, notes, we are invited to “contain the uncontainable” in our very selves.

And just as Christ, who is the eternal Word, is the light which lightens the world, which the darkness cannot overcome, we become beacons of that same divine, transforming, astounding light.

Not through warmongering, as we shall see in the life of Christ, but through compassion, and healing, through prayer and presence, through feeding the hungry and helping those most in need. Supporting the widow, the orphan, the alien as the Prophets of old continually call us to do.

All this is brought about by the profound reality that God became human, so that humanity may become divine.

Our souls and selves, on this Christmas day, are healed as we bear witness to the birth of God as a helpless babe.

This is the surprise of Christmas.

And it is a much better surprise than cats or water falling through ceilings.

Because it is God falling through creation to love us all the more proximally, all the more wonderfully as one of us.

May we, then, be joyfully, wonderfully, beautifully surprised, at the birth of Christ this day.

And a very, merry Christmas to you all.

Amen!