Poolesville Presbyterian Church
Christmas Eve 2014; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Luke 2:1-20
It’s a bright and shiny season, this time of year is. My street, like so many other streets in the great sprawling American suburbs, is a festival of lights. I don’t know. Perhaps it’s that we’ve got more time on our hands, or that our expectations are different. Or maybe it’s that those factories in China are pumping out an endless stream of inexpensive decorations, like the huge boxes I saw being unloaded from a semi at our local Sprawl-Mart last month. “Christmas,” they had printed in block letters. “Made in China,” right underneath. Whatever the cause, it feels like there’s so much more decorating than there once was.
Not at my house, of course. There, our one decoration is what we’re calling our Hannukah Miracle Pumpkin. We set it out for Halloween, and forty eight days later, it’s still unrotted! It’s a miracle!
When I was a kid, I remember it being shiny. Just a little more...subtle. Lights on a tree in a window. A couple of strands of incandescent color, here and there. There’d always be that one guy, or two guys, who’d get into a yard decoration arms race, pulling down three to four megawatts of blazingly radiant Christmas cheer in what in the good ol’ days of the Cold War you might have called Mutually Assured Decoration. I both loved those houses, and was glad I didn’t have to bother with it.
But now? Now it’s extra double shiny plus. There are illuminated animatronic inflatables, waving Santas and Santas riding sleighs and motorcycles and ATVs. As I walked through my neighborhood last week, one house had smooth synth Christmas music playing, softly, almost subliminally, on an endless loop, which I’m sure is not going to be the best thing for the sanity of those that dwell therein.
Now, the nuclear option is the off-the-shelf computer synchronized display, with lights in the high tens of thousands, all playing along to music that’s broadcast locally on your very own radio station. If you want to absolutely dominate your neighborhood, victory in the decoration race is just a few clicks away. The WowLights Christmas Light-O-Rama 128 Package, yours for only $5,899.99, FM radio transmitter not included.
It’s so bright, so glorious, that recent visual spectrum studies of energy usage patterns by the NASA/NOAAs Suomi satellite’s Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite have shown that huge portions of our country get almost half-again as bright during the Christmas season. Those veins and speckles of light that mark our world as inhabited flare up, visible and measurably from distant orbit.
Were there angels on high, they’d be impressed with just how bright it’s getting down here.
And it’s lovely, and fun, and glorious, and as that old familiar story reminds us this evening, all that sparkle and shine almost entirely irrelevant.
Because while Luke’s annual recounting of the birth of Jesus has plenty of brilliant display, it’s also very clear what’s important.
It’s a very familiar tale, of shepherds tending flocks by night, of angels who are heard on high, and of a message conveyed.
What we do not hear from that messenger is a call to the shepherds to look to the skies, as angels up in the heavens do a synchronized dance to an Alvin and the Chipmunks version of Silent Night behind enough lens flare to make JJ Abrams blush. Although that would certainly have explained why the shepherds were so terrified.
Glory is not what matters here. The key words here are not “...and the glory of the Lord shone all around them.” It is, instead, something much simpler.
It is the simple birth of a child to poor parents in humble conditions. That’s it. A baby gets born, the sort of thing that happens countless times a day, as a new human person enters the world. Here, an event that every single one of us here has encountered, that most fundamental human act of being born.
But it is that human scale thing that matters, that is the heart of what this season is about. What is sacred and holy and transforming is not the shine of it all, much as we ooh and aah at it. It’s the more basic things.
A new life. The hopes of a young mother. And the fulfillment of a deep truth in the life of that new life.
Here in this season, all around us the world is radiant and buffed to a high-gloss shine. The spectacle of Christmas is fun, but as the story reminds us, this is not the point. The purpose of tomorrow, and the reason we gather to sing and to celebrate together this evening, is to recall that it is through the humblest things in life that we find the best expression of the season.
It’s in meals, shared with friends and family. It’s in marking the changes that come year to year, as we grow up and our children grow up. It’s in celebrating new arrivals, and remembering back to loved ones who have passed on. These things may not catch our eye, because they are so familiar that we almost forget they are there at all. But they are the essence of our lives here together, lives that are blessed by our Creator this season. We’re
In this evening, and the day to come, we’re asked to remember that those most fundamental parts of our human identity...life and breath, birth and death, everything that we are...are blessed with the presence of a God who is with us.
So take this time to give thanks for the simple blessings of life, of yours, and of all of those you love.
This Christmas Eve, may that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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