New Eyes

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

12.24.12;  Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lessons:  Luke 2:1-20; Isaiah 9:2-7

How we see things changes.  They don’t change, but our way of seeing them does.

Oh, I know we like to think they’ve changed, in the way that when we reach a certain age we notice that for some reason publishers seem to have started using smaller and smaller fonts, and everything we look at is for some reason printed in eight point Times New Blurry.   But that’s us changing, not the text.

And it isn’t just our eyes that change.  We do.  And that changes the way that we see.

Just the other day, I was wandering through an exhibit at one of the museums downtown, and I found myself standing in front of a painting.  It was a pop art painting by Roy Lichtenstein, a recreation of a comic book image blown up large.  And suddenly, I was feeling the strangest sense of deja vu, most because I had deja vue’d that exact object before.  I realized that I had stood before that exact same painting thirty one years ago and three thousand seven hundred miles away, as eleven-year-old me wandered with a small herd of other sixth graders through the National Gallery in London.  

Then, I remember encountering the painting and seeing it differently.  I saw the fighter jets in it, and my eleven-year-old boy brain flagged them as a F-86 Sabre and a MiG 15.  I thought, cool picture and I’d love to have it in our house, but c’mon.  Art?  It’s just a copy of a comic book picture.  I remember that.  That was me, thinking that, standing there in front of that image.

And there it was in front of me again, the same image, on the same scale, although I was a few inches taller.  But it was different, because I was seeing it through different eyes, ones connected to a soul that has thirty one years more life.  I saw how much painstaking work had gone into painting each of the dizzying field of tiny dots that mimicked the background color of a pulp comic.  I saw the sharpness and boldness of the brushstrokes, and felt the deep patience that would have guided the hand that created them.  It was exactly the same painting, but it was a different painting.

But I still thought, cool picture.  I’d love to have it in our house.

What we encounter in life changes how we experience things, and how we experience things changes, even as those things themselves remain the same.  So here we are on Christmas Eve, encountering something familiar, an old story of angels and Mary and shepherds keeping watch by night.  

As we retell Luke’s wonderful story of that birth, the essence of it remains familiar and unchanged through the years.  Year after year, we hear of a young family journeying to Bethlehem, of the humble birth in the lowliest of circumstances, of the vision and message that came to the shepherds in the hills, we remember the possibilities that were born into that manger.  That moment brought hopes that would have gone well beyond the hopes of Mary and Joseph and the hopes of the shepherds.

And when we retell that story, we retell it along with some older stories, echoing it out across some deeper memories that sing in harmony with it.   Over seven hundred years before this humble birth, the prophet Isaiah spoke to those hopes.  When Isaiah proclaimed, war raged.  The poor of the world were oppressed and struggling.  War and loss and sorrow were all around, and yet he looked out into that darkness he was able to declare that there was a great light, the light of the dawn of hope.

Seven hundred years later, in that manger, the need for hope was much the same.  And if you’ve looked around lately, it’s much the same two thousand and twelve years after that.

Still, the intensity of that hope lingers, and it’s the intensity of our hunger for a particular sort of newness.  We tire of that old story of a world full of hatred, that old story of hunger and weeping and failure and sorrow.   We have always been tired of it.

In the story we recounted tonight, in the firelight flickering over the manger, in the impossible softness of those first breaths, we proclaim that a new thing has happened.  In the life of that tiny infant, we see things differently.  We see the promise of a human being would would give themselves over fully to the cause of God’s love.  We see how that child will change and grow into adulthood.  And in that man, we see the promise of our Creator.  In that child that has been born for us, in that life given to us, we can see hope for justice, and hope for righteousness, and for peace without end.  We encounter that in him, no matter where we are in life.

And because we are always new, the story is always new.

And that changes how we see the world, because if we hear it and embrace it, it becomes a vital part of the change in each of us.  We become different people when we stand in relationship to it.  It shifts the arc of our lives.  

In that change, the change in each of our hearts, lies the hope of this night, and tomorrow, and all of our days.

Let that Christmas hope live in you.  See the world through its eyes.   Let it be a Merry Christmas, for you and for me, AMEN.