Christmas Eve

Lessons for Christmas

Isaiah 9:2-7
Psalm 96
Titus 2:11-14
Luke 2:1-14, (15-20)

It had been a horrible year. Those who lived through it will recognize it as soon as I start the roll call of the year's news events. If you were born later, or too young at the time to remember the events when they happened...a short history lesson might put our current situation in perspective.

It was in April that year that Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis. Almost immediately, riots broke out in Washington, Chicago, Baltimore, and over 100 other cities around the country. Relations between black and white Americans ran the gamut from tense to deadly. In June, Bobby Kennedy was killed while running for President. Students were taking over university administration buildings across the country in protest of a war on distant shores. and at SC State University, students...students... were killed during a protest.

The Black Panthers and police engaged in shootouts in various places. At the democratic convention in Chicago, the police and political protesters fought violently in the streets. The increasingly unpopular war took over 16k lives that year, the highest yearly total for the war since US involvement in Viet Nam began. The North Vietnamese launched the Tet offensive in January. The My Lai massacre in March further hardened American opinion against the war. That year, that horrible year, a presidential administration ended in a train wreck of malaise and mistrust.

And the problems, the wars and rumors of war were also out beyond the sphere of direct American influence as well. The Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia that year, reasserting authoritarian control, as authoritarian types always do, reasserted control and brought to an end the reforms known as the “Prague spring." There were terrorist attacks in 1968...in Germany by The Red Army Faction. In Northern Ireland, as "the troubles" between good Christian folk--between Protestant and Catholics-- terrorism in the name of Jesus...escalated as it continued to do for a couple more decades.

To co-opt old blue eyes--it was a very bad year. for 17 year olds...for 21 year olds...for 35 year olds...for those in the autumn of the year. From the brim to the dregs, it was a very bad year. And yet, on Christmas Eve of that very bad year...1968...we received the gift of a new vision of ourselves...a new perspective that no one had ever had before. In the words of one journalist...it was on the day before Christmas in 1968 that three astronauts, Frank Borman, William Anders and James Lovell, cruising 69 miles over the slate-rubbled surface of the back side of the Moon, having ventured farther from home than any humans in history, looked up and saw their home world, again, for the first time, as a planet, a blue oasis in the void, rising over the dead gray moonscape.

They took a photograph of it. One that is familiar to most of us, even if we weren't aware of when it was taken. A photo of the earth rising over the surface of the moon. Earthrise it’s called. And I can't pray the words of our Eucharistic Prayer...the one we call Prayer C, without seeing the photograph in my mind's eye that those astronauts brought back with them to earth. When I hear…At your command all things came to be: the vast expanse of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile earth, our island home. This fragile earth, our island home. When I hear those words, I think of that photo.

It wasn't until that Apollo 8 mission, until Borman, Anders and Lovell got that view that we humans were able to grasp the incredible beauty of the gift we have been given...the gift of our fragile earth, our island home. In their message from the space craft, as they hovered above the moon on that Christmas Eve 40 years ago, they included a reading of the first verses of the creation story from the first chapter of Genesis...each of them taking a turn until it ended with--And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good."

Remembering the experience years later, Frank Borman said he thought it was fantastic, looking back on Earth on Christmas Eve. Everything dear to me, he said, was down there on Earth. Borman imagined that's how God must see it too.

And I would imagine that’s how God must have seen it 2000 years ago as well. That year, those years leading up to the birth of the baby Jesus. It had been a bunch of bad years really… for the people of God anyway. For decades, they had been kicked around by one empire or another. Kicked around by the Romans. Sold down the river by the religious officials who were supposed to be watching out for them.

And yet, it was those people…those shepherds…those people living on the edge of things…the widows, the orphans…the poor unmarried girls…looking for a place to have a baby…it was those people who were as dear to God as anyone could be. And it is to those people first…and then to all people…that a savior was born

Year after year, in good times...in bad times...the Christmas message for the past 2000 years is that the whole created is order is beloved of God, so beloved in fact, that the divine presence came to dwell among us in this world as one of us. That to all people, not just the powerful and influential, but to lowly shepherds...and peasants...and sick people...and poor people...sad and lonely people..a king was born...a new kind of king. A king who would turn the order upside down…who combined all that is good in us…in the human animal…combined that with the spark of the divine …

Horrible years come and go. This past one was not the first. It will not be the last. But what endures…what calls us forward…what gives meaning to our lives…is the realization that God is with us…always with us…not to fix things…but to call us to our better selves.

I hope this coming year, we…you and I…the Episcopal Church…Christians far and wide.. can be the people God knows us to be. And so…perhaps this time next year…or the next…we can say together…now that…was a very good year.

Not because the stock market rebounded, or because the housing market stabilized…or because the church budget got huge.. No…whenever we finally say, now that was a very good year..…let it be because we got a few steps closer to the reign of God. This is the work of the gospel and that is our calling…now and until it finally happens..