Christmas is a Beginning (Christmas Day)

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.