Getting to Christmas Eve always seems as though we have been running a marathon (or gauntlet, depending on how one feels) full out, and now, finally, we have arrived at the finish line. We have survived endless piles of catalogues delivered daily to our doorsteps (though moving in November is a great way to eliminate that!), a zillion Christmas carols in the stores, concerts and pageants well before the moment, and all the demands and underlying craziness that the season so often brings on. If we’re not feeling a bit out of breath by now, we must have been living in some other place and time.
By the time we get to this holy night, we may have forgotten why we’ve been running so hard. Certainly it’s difficult to recall that we’re remembering the birth of Christ when even today with the slow economy, the prevailing messages have been: ‘Buy two for yourself and one for someone else.’ Perhaps even harder to grasp is that this entire feast centres upon the greatest mystery of all, the Incarnation, the fact that God became human, and lived and dwelled amongst us… by divine choice and desire.
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When I say ‘mystery,’ I suspect many think of those pot-boilers we read to while away the hours. I will make the true confession that I, too, will read mysteries when I need to let up a bit — they are good to haul in a backpack when walking the Long Trail. I’m not crazy about the ones with psychopathic killers — Patricia Cornwall’s wolfman has gotten a bit out of hand for my tastes — nor am I really interested in all the gore — some of the work of forensic pathologists get a bit graphic. I prefer those stories that explore the human soul, as the protagonist tries to piece together what events transpired to make someone overstep the boundaries that most of us respect.
Several years ago Stephen Kendrick, a Congregational minister, wrote in his Holy Clues: The Gospel According to Sherlock Holmes, ‘Not all is as it appears on the surface. It never is, in a proper mystery.… As Albert Schweitzer said, “Whenever we penetrate to the heart of things, we always find a mystery. Life and all that goes with it is unfathomable….”’
Kendrick continues, ‘[One] wonders why clergy are attracted to detective stories, which are always, so unlike our own experience, neatly solved by the last page. Perhaps… it is because clergy ‘spend most of their time with sinners of every conceivable variety.’ He hones in one reason: ‘Some years ago, several people in one week of counseling had asked me, “Where is God in all this pain/mess/hopelessness?” These are not easy queries, and it is easy to be weary when too many questions pile up on your soul.… Maybe people read detective fiction for the same reason they adopt religious doctrine. We all desperately crave both internal order and cosmic understanding: a sense that there is a hidden force operating through and beneath us that makes life not only sensible and just but, more importantly, reveals compassion at the heart of creation.… There are important mysteries beneath the surface of [our] lives, and that does not even include the more traditional questions of faith that people normally think to bring to their pastor: What is the meaning of life? Is there a God who cares whether I live or die? Is death the end of my story? And so we gently ask, “How are you doing? How are things going for you?” because the divine secret within each of us is indeed the greatest detective story ever written.’ (1)
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We’ve always known that life is a mystery of sorrows and joys, birth and death, questions and answers, change and stability and all those other combinations of emotions and experiences we share. So much of our faith journey is spent asking the questions: Does God love me? Does God care? Why is there suffering in the world? Why is there war? Why do people have to die? Why are we, as human beings so cruel to one another, when we also have the capacity to be so loving to one another? And on and on. Lastly, what does it mean that as humans we are created in the image of God?
Herein lies the greatest mystery of life—that we are created in the image of God and that it is a good thing indeed. Each one of us is a walking tabernacle or temple to God. Each one of us holds in our person the Holy One, the Christ.
Several years ago in another congregation, we baptised and welcomed as Christ’s own for ever two young men — cousins, one of whom had lost his 25 year-old brother in a mountain bike accident earlier that year, both of whose grandmother had died on Christmas Eve morning many years before. Maybe it was a paradox on Christmas Eve to enter into the Easter mystery that baptism so symbolises, yet it was fitting because it reminded us that Christ became one of us and walked with us. With Christmas, we remember Jesus’ first birth, so that we might have a second birth that comes with baptism and the ultimate birth that comes with the resurrection.
Between that first birth, which is biological, and the second birth, which is spiritual, ideally we spend our lives remembering what it means to be made in the image of God. Nelson Mandela said of us, ‘We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s within everyone. And as we let our light shine we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear our presence automatically liberates others.’
Why do we look again and again for the Christ child? For what do we seek in him? To have our burdens lessened? To come close to the Holy not because we understand why but because we are drawn in year after year because our souls instinctively yearn for mystery?
Do we come here because the pains of the world are too much to bear and we need to find some place to drop them, or some place, a larger reality to make sense out of them?
Do we come because we know that this yearly journey on this holy night is essential to our well-being?
For these reasons, for any other reason, know that you are God’s dearly beloved, too. Know that God holds you and cherishes you. God incarnate has many faces and yours is one of them.
This night when the veil between heaven and earth is so thin, as we inhabit that holy place of mystery, that space between the here and now and the unspeakable, the ineffable, let us give thanks for the encounter with God-made-flesh, Jesus the Christ. Linger for a moment in this holy place of wonder and beauty. Let those wordless and unspeakable aspects of God’s love touch you as so often the rays of sun bathe us. And remember the most awesome mystery of all, that God has loved us from before the beginning and always will.
END NOTE
(1) Stephen Kendrick, Holy Clues: The Gospel According to Sherlock Holmes (New York, Pantheon, 1999), 3, 13-14.
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