Christmas Eve Candlelight Mediation

Rev. Kristi Denham
Congregational Church of Belmont
December 24, 2008

Welcome
Welcome to this night of anticipation and celebration. Christmas is almost here. We know that the Christ child is coming. May our hearts be ready and open to receive the renewal that this birthday represents.

Lighting of the Christ Candle
During the Advent Season we have been lighting candles. Our children lit the candle of Hope, then Joy, then Love, and last Sunday, I lit our Advent candle of Peace as the children prepared our best ever Christmas Pageant. Now it is time to light the Christ candle – a reminder that the Spirit of the Christ is truly in this place and we are opening our hearts to that Presence, that power, and that love. May it be so.

Reflection
Our first reading is from the words of the Prophet Isaiah who lived at least seven hundred years before the birth of the Christ child. For seven hundred years the people of Israel had been waiting for these words to come true. They were expecting a powerful king to bring justice to the world.

Isaiah spoke of the Prince of Peace with the expectation that he would arrive any minute now. Twenty-seven hundred years later we are still hoping for the Messiah to return to transform our crazy world into a place of justice, compassion and peace.

Now we know that God’s Messiah did not come as a powerful warrior. He did not come with violence to change the world. He came as a baby to an unwed mother betrothed to a carpenter. So the story goes. This Wonderful Counselor, this Prince of Peace, began life in poverty, traveled as an itinerant preacher with a handful of followers, died an early death at the hands of an oppressive empire, and yet…His authority continues to grow and his call to peace and justice continues to inspire a wounded world.

Our second reading from The Gospel According to Luke was written toward the very end of the first century. It tells the story of Jesus birth with details found in no other gospel. The miraculous details are vaguely similar to the stories told in Roman mythologies about the birth of Ceasar Augustus who was supposedly the grandchild of Venus (Goddess of Love) and the son of Apollo who drove the Sun across the sky.

We don’t know whether the story is literally true, but the details invite us into the mystery of the sacred meaning of Christ’s birth in symbolic ways. I invite you to think of this story as Luke’s way to express the inexpressible meaning of Christ’s coming. Hear these words as a parable rich with meaning, rich with content. Then put yourself somewhere in the story to see how it feels.

Jesus was Mary’s first born son, the angle Gabriel had foretold his birth. He was a son of Dave, the King of Kings, and yet…There was no room for him at the inn. His first bed was a feeding trough in a barn. We hear this story so often over the years that it loses its impact.

The most transformative man who ever lived was born into poverty. Do we, like the people of Israel, so long ago, still expect a triumphant King of Kings riding on a cloud to declare God’s will? The Spirit of the Christ comes to us as a baby, to a poor mother, in a place that has no room for her. Do we have room for this child in our lives? In our hearts? Do we recognize this Christ this holy night in our midst?

Now the shepherds got a serious heads-up as to what to be looking for. If we got that kind of sign we’d know for sure, right? What is significant in Luke’s story here is the fact that shepherds were the first witnesses, besides Mary, Joseph and the barn animals.

Shepherds spent al their time out in the rocky hill country with the sheep. Their lives, their work, their position in the culture made them the lowest of the low. It would be like saying to us that angels appeared to farm workers or a handful of homeless people waiting for work at the side of the road.

When the story was first told Luke’s audience was shocked by the fact that shepherds were called to celebrate the birth of this child. They were the nobodies of their day. And yet…God called them to witness the most important event in human history. God’s vision for our world turns the status of the rich and powerful upside down.

Later it will be kings who fall at the feet of a baby bringing their gifts in honor of his birth. But that story isn’t found in Luke’s Gospel.  It is found only in the Gospel According to Matthew. We link them together in our Christmas Pageants but the early church would have heard one story or the other or perhaps neither. They would have known of Jesus of Nazareth’s life and teachings and perhaps the story of his terrible death. But now we celebrate his birth as has been done for many centuries. We remember the angels and the shepherds and the kings. Let us sing!

But Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart…If this story is true, it comes down to us because a mother watched and wondered and shared with her dearest friends all that she had experienced that night. She remembered…She had known  since she first conceived this child, that he would be amazing. Now others begin to acknowledge his importance. Clearly this was a child who would be raised with deep faith and with the assurance from his family that he was born to do great things.

What would our world be like if every child were raised with this assurance of God’s grace and presence? What difference would it have made in our own lives if we had taken seriously from our youth the teachings of this Prince of Peace, that we were called to follow a path of justice and love and service? Would we be different if our parents had treated us as if we were the son or daughter of God?

However well our parents loved us or not, can we imagine ourselves so loved this day that we are transformed by that love into a new creation?  Jesus called his followers his friends and told each one of them that they would accomplish more than he ever did. It was their faith in their teacher and his insistence that God was truly a God of love that gave them the courage to share what he had taught them and in turn to change the world. We would know nothing of this infant Jesus if they had not shared his story with others and passed it down to us.

We do this Christ child an injustice if all we do is idolize his birth and remember him without responding to his teachings. He challenges each one of us to realize that we actually are a child of God and we are called to do great things as well.

Finally, we hear these words from the Gospel According to John, written at the very end of the first century. By now the church had been established in the far reaches of the Empire, from North Africa to Western India and into Western Europe and Great Britain. Persecutions had come and gone. Christianity was a new faith with a new name Jesus would never have imagined for it. For Jesus was a Jew and lived his life with a vision for transforming Judaism, not for founding a new religion.

The earlier gospels had been written with an expectation that the Second Coming of Christ would happen “any day now.” But by the time of John’s Gospel that immediacy had been replaced with a more philosophical and poetic point of view. Christ had become the essence of Wisdom as portrayed in the ancient texts of the Hebrew Bible as sitting at the right hand of God.

John’s Gospel looked at Jesus’ life in the light of all that god had ever taught whether through Hebrew Scripture, early Christian teachings, or through Greek philosophers. John saw Jesus as one with God and with us since the beginning of time, as friend and guide, who gives us all the ability to become children of God.

In the beginning was the Word, the Logos of Greek philosophy, is the essence of reality. In Hebrew scriptures God speaks the world into being. Now we see that this baby Jesus is Emmanuel, “God with us,” who became human in order to teach us how to live out our full humanity. With God all things are possible.
Jesus, this child born in a manger, is now our teacher and our friend. He called himself “first born” among many sisters and brothers. He said we would do greater things. Are we living up to our birthright as children of the Most High? There is a challenge in these words of course, but also a comfort. We have been created for love and in love, just as was the baby Jesus.

God’s angels are there to celebrate with us and with every child who acknowledges their sacred calling to live for love and justice.

We may take baby steps as we follow our hearts toward home, but we are all being cared for and guided by a loving God who celebrates this day with us in the birth of a child as precious as an only begotten son of a father. Each of us is precious to God as if we were the only one. When you allow yourself to realize this, perhaps you will give yourself a moment of quiet respect and loving acceptance.

If you can love yourself, your love for others and for God is possible. They all three go together. May the birthday of the Christ be a birthday of renewal of the light of the spirit in your life. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it. This is a promise. Christmas is our season to remember. May it be so.

Let us pray.  Loving God, we come before you remembering Christ’s words, “You must be as little children to enter the kingdom of heaven.” We wait with the shepherds and with kings and with people of good will everywhere to honor the birth of a baby. We long this night to renew our hearts and our lives with the wonder, the beauty, the sacred miracle of simply being fully alive.

We bring before you all our worries, our cares, the loved ones we are missing this Christmas season, the hunger of children, the wars in our world and in our own hearts. We do not call them gifts for a baby, but we know you are a God of compassion and long for us to place all our concerns in your care.

We bring before you our joys and excitements, the celebrations of lights, the laughter of children, the abundance of friendships and family in our midst. These we bring as gifts to the baby from our hearts. We ask that you might use them to renew the Christ child within us. Help us to live the hope, joy, love and peace to which you call us. Amen.