Readings, Isaiah 52:7-10 and John 1:1-14
Image, Mystic Nativity, Sandro Botticelli (1501)
 
At the end of that gospel reading, we hear the meaning of Christmas in brief: And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. Jesus, the eternal word of God, through whom all things came into being has come as a human being. Jesus, the light and life of all people, has been born among the people. Jesus, beginningless, now born, has a common beginning. Jesus, who held the world’s potential within him, is now in the world.
 
Christmas represents the loving convergence of divinity and humanity in the person of Christ. Christ united these two natures within himself, but he did not do it for himself, he did it for us, all of us, the great us of humanity (indeed, we might go further and say the great us of creation). Because in the Incarnation, the uniting of God and man, Christ takes up all of humanity, all creation, and unites it with God. It is this union, achieved by Christ, which inspire the wondrous words of Paul: nothing can separate us from the love of God.
 
All this is true, and serves as the bedrock of the Christian faith, but there is something more to emphasise here. And the Word became flesh and lived among us – as we have said this is the binding of humanity and divinity, the opening of salvation, the power by which we become children of God. But let us contend momentarily with all that living among implies. 
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Readings, Isaiah 60:1-6 and Matthew 2:1-12
Image, Eric Gill, Epiphany (1917)

I was reading Sarah Ruden's translation of this gospel passage earlier in the week, and she employs a beautiful sentence to describe the experience of the magi as they arrive at their destination.
           When they saw the star there, their joy was heaped on joy, in great abundance.
 
This is what it means to come into the season of Epiphany. Epiphany celebrates the manifestation of Christ to all people, the revealing of Christ’s glory on earth, the initial signs, wonders, and testimonies that this is the Anointed One of God. For this joy can come upon us all when we spot the light of the world in the darkest of nights and realise that nothing can come between his light and our hope:   
           When they saw the star there, their joy was heaped on joy, in great abundance.
 
This is what it means to come into the story of God from the outside. The magi come from beyond Israel, from the lands of the East. They see the star, consult their tradition, and head off in pursuit of the new born king. In this they foreshadow the reception of Christ by the Gentiles after the resurrection, the grafting of those beyond the covenantal people, onto the vine of Christ. They are our forebears, our ancestors in faith, those who by the graciousness of God saw the signs and came to behold and adore Christ as king. We, like they, know the feeling when - though far off in the far country - we discover the presence of Emmanuel, God with us.
           When they saw the star there, their joy was heaped on joy, in great abundance.
 
This is what paves the path to the true reception of Emmanuel. It is joy and hope which drives the magi on their journey, motivates their desire to bow before the new born king; to bring their gifts and pay him homage. The story contrasts the magi’s joy with Herod’s fear and agitation, their openness and wonder, with Herod’s sly plotting. For Herod cannot receive news of a new king with any joy or hope, for his only joy and hope comes from what already is. There’s nothing more threatening than a new star to those wishing to centre the world on themselves. The season of Advent and Christmas prepare us to receive the Epiphany of Christ with joy and hope. For the arrival of Christ is unsettling, it cannot help but upturn our worlds. But we pray that with the help of Spirit and saints, we will be able to receive and respond to the heralding of the king not as Herod, but as the magi.
           When they saw the star there, their joy was heaped on joy, in great abundance.
 
This is what strengthens them to defy the orders of Herod, to disobey the law of the land, and leave without revealing the location of Christ. They encountered something more truer than true and this exposed the falsity, the paucity, and duplicity of imperial rule, of Herod’s request, of Rome’s benevolence. Joy fuelled their revolt, emboldened their resistance, screwed their courage to the sticking place so they might turn their backs on the will of an earthly king, to hold open the future to a heavenly one.
           When they saw the star there, their joy was heaped on joy, in great abundance.
 
This is what allows us to not cling, or batten down, but keep moving on by another road. Like the shepherds before them, the magi are led to the nativity and then return to their homes. As will be the story for so many to whom the glory of Christ is revealed, they are asked not to stay, not to cling, but to go back or go on. It is joy and hope, it is the posture of one receiving an unexpected gift, that allows us to hold loosely and trust that even when we depart by another road God is with us still. The magi did not need to remain at the house, and we do not need to cling to places and practices just because they were once a place where we felt near to Christ. We are able to go out by another road in the trust that the star’s light blesses the whole earth and we will feel its nearness in new and yet more wondrous ways.
           When they saw the star there, their joy was heaped on joy, in great abundance.

Readings, 1 Sam 2: 18-20, 26, Col 3:12-17 and Luke 2:41-52
Image, Nativity. Sawai Chinnawong, Acrylic on canvas, 32 x 37 (2004)
 
There have been many a hero, legend, or leader whose upbringing was entrusted (either willingly or by necessity) to the care of others. Romulus the founder of Rome, was raised (along with his brother) by a She-Wolf. Quasimodo was raised (not well mind you) by Frollo in the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Batman raised by his butler Alfred, Sleeping Beauty entrusted to the fairies, Charles Foster Kane handed over by his impoverished parents (sans beloved sled) to the rich Walter Parks Thatcher. In Star Wars children identified as possessing the power of the force were entrusted to the Jedi Order for their raising and training.  
 
Sometimes these children are entrusted because they are recognised as special, set apart as vital to the future of a community or the plans of God, their upbringing too important to be left to their family. They are shielded, sheltered, moulded and made ready for the day to come when they will be needed. Samuel clearly fits this mould. Miraculously born in a time of great need, he is set aside so as to hear the word of God, overturn the exploitation and hypocrisy of the community’s religious leaders, and lead the people to a fruitful future.
 
In narrating the story of Jesus, the gospel writers deliberately evoke the heroes of their scriptures. And it is clear that Jesus’ miraculous birth resembles that of Samuel (especially in Luke who has Mary sing a song in the manner of Hannah). And soon after his birth, Mary and Joseph take Jesus to the temple to make their offerings… and soon after that Jesus absconds from his family to remain at the temple to learn from the priests and the learned of the day. If you’re an initiated, active listener, hearing this gospel proclaimed in the shadow of the stories of Samuel, you might be thinking, ah, yes, Jesus is going to stay at the Temple. This is the Messiah, the Anointed One of God, his upbringing must naturally be entrusted to the priests, he must grow in wisdom, stature, and favour in the household of God, the Temple, nearer my Lord to Thee.
 
But that doesn’t happen. Jesus is not like Samuel. He is not entrusted to the care of the Priests; he does not grow with God at the Temple. Despite these early stories evoking this possibility, Jesus returns to Nazareth with his family, it is there and with them that he increases in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favour. What do we make of this?
 
At Christmas we stress Jesus Christ is Emmanuel, God with us. We celebrate that in Jesus, God took on flesh and walked among us. That in Jesus we have a saviour familiar with our struggles. It is the immediacy of Jesus’ presence, the humility and mundanity of his earthly life, the identifiability of his tent beside our own, that makes the foundation of our faith and discipleship. And while there are those among us who have been raised by grandparents, aunts, uncles, family friends, adoptive parents, or any combination of such, I’ll hazard none among us were raised by priests, none grew tall in temples. Had Jesus, it would certainly have qualified the claim God with us, would have diminished the truth that he had really walked among us. Think of that early hymn preserved by Paul in the letter to the church in Philippi,
Christ Jesus
who, though he was in the form of God,
   did not regard equality with God
   as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
   taking the form of a slave,
   being born in human likeness.   
Would this not read slightly differently if, while emptying himself, Christ carved out a privileged upbringing amongst the community’s religious leaders within his Father’s house?
 
Jesus, like the bulk of his fellow humanity before and since, was not cloistered as a child, but raised in community among family. It was here he learnt of God and God’s way, here he practiced his faith, here he learnt to navigate challenges big and small, particular and universal while seeking to remain integrous to one’s values and responsible to one’s neighbours. And as those who follow after Jesus, we do the same. Christians are made in the power of the Holy Spirit and then formed in community. We increase in wisdom, stature, and years together as the church.
 
And it is for this reason that Paul’s words in Colossians are so important. As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Bear with one another… forgive each other; [and] Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts... Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God.
 
Christ (whose upbringing was not entrusted to the Temple, but to his family and community) in turn entrusts the upbringing and formation of his followers to the church (the new family/community made in his name). We are all set apart, chosen and commissioned, and so help raise each other. Through the fruit of the Spirit, the teaching of the Word, the wisdom of tradition, the delight of worship, the practicing of virtue, and the outpouring of love we create an ecosystem where we increase together in wisdom and in years, in divine and human favour. An ecosystem where we (like Christ before us), learn to listen to the word of God, rejoice in God’s wisdom, follow the Spirit’s promptings, and cloth ourselves in love.
 
Christmas, I remarked on the Day, is a beginning. What it launches continues to this day, but it does so not in isolation or insulation, but in communities, with families, friends, and strangers, seeking together what it means to respond to the presence of God, with us still.  

Readings, Psalm 96 and Luke 2:1-20 
Image, Bassmi Ibrahim, Awareness 30, 2014.
 
Christmas is such a long season of increasing anticipation (and perhaps rising stress) that sometimes you feel that when the day comes, you blink and miss it. You may have had the experience, when, after the excitement of the morning with presents, well wishes and church and the midday rush around to see family and prepare lunch, that all of a sudden, its 2pm and everyone is getting ready to nap. Surely after all the events, all the decorations, all the planning it should last a little longer. I remember last year, I popped into Woolies at 5pm on Christmas Eve and they were already taking down the tinsel, Christmas hadn’t even dawned and the signs of its approach were going in the bin.
 
I wonder if sometimes you’ve felt that with Christmas at church too? That you’ve come hoping that well-loved carols and readings should do something more. Perhaps you’ve come in Christmases past with the hope that the service might provide a long-sought sense of peace or long-elusive answer, that it should shake off that sense of weariness or grief, break down that wall of animosity or estrangement, only for the service to begin and end, and as pleasant as it may have been it didn’t achieve what you’d hoped and prayed.
 
Mary might understand this feeling. The months preceding and weeks following Jesus’ birth are filled with anticipation, wonder, and miracles. Angels visit, Shepherds barge in, Wise Ones trail behind, and Mary treasures these moments in her heart. Then, for 30 or so years, not much happens. The balloon deflates, the daily grind of parenting takes over, and one wonders if the memories of this birth get tinged with some disappointment, some doubt, some emptiness? Wasn’t so much more promised? Will it amount to much in the end?
 
There’s no simple or easy response to this experience. Perhaps all we can offer is the hope and truth that Christmas never ends. We’ll be back here next year and the one after. And even when this church isn’t here there’ll be another church and another remembering and celebrating the birth of Christ. Because Christmas is a beginning, not an ending. Mary eventually witnessed the awaited time when Jesus commenced his ministry, announced the coming kingdom, called disciples, and made a new family in his name. She saw him take up (in surprising and mysterious ways) the promises of God and the hopes of the people. Those things treasured in her heart may have laid dormant, subject to pangs of doubt, but the day came when they broke open the world with radiant hope. The coming of the Christ Child is a beginning and what began is ongoing; for Christ is Emmanuel, God with us, then as now.
 
The good news of great joy is that Eternal Word of God took on flesh and walked among us, and in the power of the Spirit walks with us still. And like Mary we treasure and ponder these words in our heart. They may not always do what we want, may not always blow back the cobwebs or bring about the end of the tunnel, but neither do these words depart or diminish. The birth of Emmanuel means God is with us: no more or less on Christmas morning as Christmas afternoon, no more or less today than tomorrow, no more or less in a Bethlehem cradle than a Forestville church, no more or less when we feel the fiery warmth of his presence than those seasons of doubt, despair and emptiness. The presence and promise of Christ is the great consistent; it the good news of great joy that is not only anticipated and remembered at Christmas, but shapes each day of our lives. For Emmanuel is the well of living water from which we draw to sustain and shape our participation in Christ’s ongoing and unceasing labour of hope, justice, mercy, freedom, and love.   

Readings, John 2:1-12 and John 19:25b-30
Image, Benny Andrews, Portrait of Black Madonna (1987)

These are first and last great signs of Jesus’ glory in the Gospel of John, and his mother Mary is interwoven in both. Indeed, we might say not only interwoven, but – as is the case with the first – integral to its beginning, and – in the case of the latter – foundational to what will follow. But let’s go back further to find a starting point.
 
Mary is Jesus’ first teacher. Like many a parent, she teaches the child those basic things of life, the elemental building blocks of being a person. And like parents who live religious lives, she would have also taught Jesus things basic to the life of faith, wrapping the rhythms of their daily life around God’s stories, festivals, and rituals. She would have imparted and impressed those basic building blocks of being part of the people of God.
 
And yet, she was also a parent with a specific commission. She was called by God to bear the saviour of her people, to carry Emmanuel in her body and lead him into life. And she was entrusted to instruct Jesus in this commission, teach him what she had been taught, make his what she proclaimed in song while he grew in her womb. It is she who would have imparted those words of the shepherds she treasured in her heart, those words of Simeon that brought blessing and dread, those words of Gabriel which reoriented her life.
 
Who better than she, then, to prompt Jesus to act – to bring about the hour at which his ministry began, the hour at which his glory shall begin to be revealed. Who better than she, to issue the imperative by which followers of Jesus shall live: Do whatever he tells you.
 
Mary is thus not only a paradigmatic disciple – one who receives with vigour the command of God and allows it to reshape the direction of her life. But she exemplifies the task of Christian teaching and instruction; especially of the young. She takes up eagerly the task laid before her to instruct her child in the wisdom of God, and the task and commission laid before him. And she takes this on with such enthusiasm and authority that she can take the prerogative to come before the world’s redeemer and say, it is time to begin.
 
From this beginning, until the bitter end, she remains by Jesus’ side. We read in that upon the cross he looks down and uses a few of his remaining words to say to his mother, Woman, here is your son, and to the disciple he loved, here is your mother. And while we can be moved by this as an act of filial devotion, to remain there lessens the lesson on offer.
 
Jesus, in both these stories refers to his mother as woman, signalling not the unimportance of her relation to him and specific role in God’s plan, but pointing through to the most important role one can play: that of a disciple. Who are my mother and brothers, Jesus famously asks of the crowds, Those who hear the word of God and do it… and while this is sometimes read as a rebuke to those who would pay particular attention to Mary, we are better led to recognise that who among the gospels characters more perfectly performs the word of God than Mary the mother of Jesus?
 
Such a lesson is repeated elsewhere, where a woman shouts to Jesus, Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that nursed you, to which Jesus responds, Blessed rather are those who hear the word and obey it. Again, the lesson is not to find here a dismissal of Mary in the shaping of our faith, but to direct the eye at where that significance is found.* It is not, as if, Mary’s womb is blessed in abstraction, that the breasts which nursed Jesus are holy simply for that act. No, Mary is to be celebrated and emulated, chiefly because of those traits which we might replicate. It is not her womb that we aspire, but the example she sets as one who heard the word and obeyed. Who said to the angel, I am a servant of the Lord, and took the risk of bearing the world’s scorn, in order to bear God. Blessed is she who heard the word and obeyed, who taught the saviour of the world, and accompanied him as sign by sign he revealed his glory.
 
Which leads us back to the foot of the cross, and those last words of Jesus. Here Mary, while remaining Jesus’ first family is also first in his new family, created by the Word to be his body, the church, a further sign of his glory. She receives a Spirit of adoption from the one she birthed. A mother given to a friend, the beloved to a mother and in this they become family to each other – not by blood but by the Word, bound only by commission and obedience. It is in this same way that we are given to one another as family in baptism – siblings of Christ, and kin to one another.
 
Mary, unlike so many of the disciples, does not depart from Jesus, even when there is so much risk and grief. It is this discipleship which is recognised, the same discipleship she displayed when the angel came, practiced when she taught Jesus, and exercised when she told him to make new wine. It is this discipleship that makes her favoured, blessed, and worthy of calling into the new family of Christ. For it is this kind of discipleship by which the church shall extend into all the world preaching the spirit of adoption.
 
Her discipleship, which we call blessed, is at least part (if not the significant part) of what we take from the life and witness of the first Mary in this series. And if we are to attempt to emulate her example, we must draw on the same strength on which she drew. She, like we, become disciples in the knowledge of God’s presence and promise to look on us as favoured, lift up the lowly and fill the hungry with good things. The strength to stay by Christ’s side through the glory and the bloodshed is built on the trust in the great things God has done. The humility and grace to become a family established at the foot of a cross is fed by finding in the simple things a holiness most profound. In Christ we have received a spirit of adoption, made children of God, and when we consider what it means to live in light of this great joy and responsibility, we take as an example Jesus’ mother; who heard the word of God, bore him in her womb, led him by the hand, and followed him all the days of her life.

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*My thanks to Dr Ali Robinson for this insight.

Readings Isaiah 26:16-19 and Luke 2:1-20
Image, Stone Nativity by Juan Manuel Cisneros, Ventura, California, December 2016 
 
Earlier in the month I was listening to a discussion on the radio about which not-explicitly-Christmas-music, do people nonetheless associate with Christmas. Time and again listeners justified their choices not by appealing to the content of the song, but because, to them, the song felt like the feeling of Christmas.
 
Christmas is a deeply feeling holiday. We have a sense of the temperature Christmas ought to feel. The feelings evoked by Christmas lights, shopping, and foods. The feelings of being with a particular group of people. We know the feeling of coming to church on Christmas, both like and unlike a service on any other Sunday. That Christmas is such a feeling holiday is what makes it all the harder, when things feel different. When those dear to us have departed, or our table needs a more modest setting, or time together grows increasingly sparse.  
 
And while the feelings of Christmas unsurprisingly result from the startling connection of sense and memory, the gospel accounts are themselves full of feeling. The shepherds were fearful on a fearful scale before hearing the good news of great joy. And everyone is amazed by their account. Even before this, the story of Joseph and Mary being forced by bureaucratic whim to uproot their lives has a certain feeling known to those who spent a morning at Services NSW. So too the feeling of Mary placing her swaddled child in a feeding trough, because there was no other place is comprehensible to all who have held or beheld a tiny new-born and all of a sudden gasped at how large the world feels.
 
At its heart though, Christmas is centred on feeling because we feel like we need Christmas. We walk into Christmas through the season of Advent, honouring the woe of our world while lighting candles for hope, peace, joy, and love. If our hearts are stirred by the good news of great joy, it because we yearn for good news! Because we feel that the restoration of the world requires nothing short of the impossible arrival of the God with us and for us.
 
In this way we share much with those in Isaiah’s day, who are likened to expectant mothers, writhing-in-labour and crying for deliverance but who cannot bring it about on their own. We feel their honest to God yearning for the radiant dew which brings new life, their palpable hope that those who dwell in the dust will, Awake and sing for joy!
 
So when the expectant mother, writhing-in-labour in a borrowed room, brings forth Emmanuel we are more than ready to receive good news of great joy. For the scent of the morning dew no less than the sound of the heavenly choir blows the dust off and proclaims a saviour has been born. At Christmas we awake and sing, joyful and triumphant, pushing ourselves into the story to greet the child born then in Bethlehem and today in our hearts.
 
Christmas is brimming with feeling because in this story (both familiar and strange) we get the sense that something is answered. As the song teaches, he appeared, and the soul felt its worth. The disquiet we feel about the state of the world and the hope we hold for its restoration, finds its response in the vulnerable infant swaddled in a feeding trough. Here lies love: love incarnate, love divine, love to shake and shatter sin. Let us open our hearts to the feeling of Christmas and may it transform us day by day into those ready to rise and meet a weary and worried world with peace, hope, joy, and love.