The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
December 24, 2007

Christmas Eve
Isaiah 9:2-4, 6-7
Titus 2:11-14
Luke 2:1-20

Christmas, St. Paul tells us, is “the grace of God that brings salvation now appearing to all mankind.”

In 1865, after traveling to Bethlehem, Phillips Brooks wrote these familiar words about the grace that brings salvation:

O little town of Bethlehem,
how still we see thee lie!
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep,
the silent stars go by;
Yet in thy dark streets shineth
the everlasting light;
the hopes and fears of all the years
are met in thee tonight.

God’s grace is not always found in the big things of life. Sometimes, perhaps most often, it is found in the little. The hopes and fears of all the years were not met in grand Jerusalem, but in a tiny town down the road a bit. Lots of folks were looking for big things to happen in Jerusalem, and certainly in Rome. But in Bethlehem? In tiny, insignificant Bethlehem?

How often we put our hopes in the large and the grand! As children, we can hardly wait to get big. In our language we disdain the small. We speak of “belittling” something or we call someone a shrimp. We spend lots of money building bigger houses and buying bigger cars, and we take big strides and make big news.

We even expect bigger and bigger Christmases, as if we can make Christmas bigger than it was in Bethlehem. We expect big things for the big bucks we spend on Christmas, but in doing so we sometimes create our own disasters, as reported in the Reverend Billy Talen’s Christmas film I saw last week.

In Advent of 2005, the Reverend Billy took his “freedom-from-shopping” message and gospel choir on the road to the malls of America and was rammed by a semi and arrested and jailed for his trouble. Now Reverend Billy has made a documentary of his experience entitled, “What Would Jesus Buy?” and he is offering it at local theaters for our consideration this year. We follow him from the Mall of America in Minnesota to Nieman-Marcus in Dallas to Disneyland in California to Walmart everywhere, and his message is that the hopes of all the years are not to be met there.

Instead, he insists, from the Mall of America to Disneyland we are simply charging our way into grinding personal debt and spending our way through an economic wilderness that bodes only a spiritual Armageddon Reverend Billy calls the Shop-ocalypse, all in a desperate, frenzied attempt to indulge ourselves and spoil our children with all the latest toys and gadgets, as if meaning and grace and Christmas can be found in the intoxication of supersizing everything from hamburgers to SUVs. (see revbilly.com)

And all year long, of course, we wait, wait, wait for big things to be announced by the big government in Washington, D.C. But what about in Colorado Springs and Manitou and Woodland Park? We need a sense of the importance and power of all things, even the small. “O little town,” with your dark streets and cold barns, God became flesh in you, as a little child. And not in grand Jerusalem or imperial Rome or Washington or Disneyland.

"For Christ is born of Mary," continues Brooks, "and gathered all above, while mortals sleep, the angels keep their watch of wondering love. O morning stars, together proclaim the holy birth, and praises sing to God the King and peace to men on earth.”

The holy Child was not born of a princess or a First Lady, or even of a mayor or a doctor or lawyer. God became flesh through the faith and hope of an insignificant girl, flesh of Mary’s flesh, and thereby brought Mary’s significance to light.

In 1909, H. T. Webster drew a cartoon to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln. Two frontiersmen in the backwoods of Kentucky in 1809 are talking. And one asks the other, “Any news down t’ the town, Ezra?” And Ezra says, “Well, Squire McClean’s gone to Washington to see Madison swore in, and ol’ Spellman tells me this Bonaparte fella’s captured most of Spain. What’s new out here?” “Nuthin’,” says his friend. “Nuthin’ a-tall, ’cept for a new baby down at Tom Lincoln’s. Nuthin’ ever happens out here.”

Might we not need to sharpen our sight and hearing for the importance of the little and the seemingly insignificant? For it is in such silence that grace happens, insists Brooks:

“How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given! So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of his heaven. No ear may hear his coming, but in this world of sin, where meek souls will receive him, still the dear Christ enters in.”

Mary the Insignificant, in Bethlehem, Tom Lincoln’s cabin in Kentucky, Colorado Springs, or Widefield or Security in 2007, a baby, and God.

“In just such a way....” That’s what Brooks means by “so.” “How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given.” In just such a way, silently. The fullness of God’s grace comes in silence, not with brass and fanfare. That’s how God imparts to human hearts the blessings of his heaven.

And it has always been so. We just forget. We forget that when God creates and sustains and redeems the world no ear may hear his coming.

In the beginning, God created the world in silence, “for the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.” It was in this silence that the earth and the heavens and the birds of the air and the beasts of the field and you and I were brought into being. How silently it all happened as ancient paramecia, ancient single-celled creatures slid through the slime and the ancient ponds, living their ways through God’s design of creation!

And the flowers! Have you ever heard anything so silent as a flower? And yet nothing, save the Creator himself, is more important to our life than the grace God gives in the silent flowers. Life as we now live it, you know, is impossible without the flowering plants, Loren Eiseley reminds us. The flower revolutionized the world. There was a time when the world had no flowering plants. But the agile brain of warm-blooded birds and mammals and human beings demands a high-oxygen consumption, and food in concentrated forms. And it’s the flowering plant that provides those things.

How silently the Creator worked his grace in the spreading vegetation, as the flowering plants spread from the mud and moss and ooze of the edge of the continental shelf to cover the earth with grasses and seed! (Read Loren Eiseley’s wonderful account of this in The Immense Journey.)

So it should be no surprise that when God chooses to restore his fallen creation, he chooses to do so in silence as deep as the silence of creation itself, in silence as deep as Jane Kenyon’s hope:

On the domed ceiling God
is thinking:
I made them my joy,
and everything else I created
I made to bless them.
But see what they do!
I know their hearts
and arguments:

“We’re descended from
Cain. Evil is nothing new,
so what does it matter now
if we shell the infirmary,
and the well where the fearful
and rash alike must
come for water?”

God thinks Mary into being.
Suspended at the apogee
of the golden dome,
she curls in a brown pod,
and inside her the mind
of Christ, cloaked in blood,
lodges and begins to grow.
– Mosaic of the Nativity: Serbia, Winter 1993

So, although “no ear may hear his coming,” in this world of sin, maybe even once again in Bethlehem, now occupied by Israelis instead of Romans, or maybe in Bangladesh, maybe even in some place like that, maybe even in Colorado Springs, “where meek hearts will receive him, still the dear Christ enters in.”

It can happen anywhere, anytime, Brooks continues:

“Where children pure and happy pray to the blessed Child, where misery cries out to thee, Son of the mother mild, where charity stands watching and faith holds wide the door, the dark night wakes, the glory breaks, and Christmas comes once more.”

There is a hunger in the darkness of our world, Frederick Buechner told us during Advent, a hunger for something that will make our lives bright and different, a hunger for Christmas to come once more, a hunger for redemption. And it is madness to hope that it will, he admits: “It is madness to hope [at all] in our grim and sober times, madness to peer beyond the possibilities of history for the impossibilities of God.” It is fantasy and madness, of course, to think that God should bother with the likes of us. “It is fantastic [enough] that in a world like ours there should be something in us still that says at least maybe, maybe, to the fantastic possibility of God at all” in our post-Christian age.

After all we live in an enlightened, rational world, a world without the expectation of God, so in our day we know what to expect, don’t we? And we know that “in a world without God we know at least that the thing that will happen will be a human thing [and not a divine thing], a thing no better and no worse than the most that humanity itself can be.” Which is the most sobering thing of all about our times.

But then, at its heart, religious faith is fantastic madness. So, again tonight, I commend the madness of the hope that Christ will come again, I commend it with Buechner’s hope that “maybe the very madness of our hoping will give [Christ] the crazy, golden wings he needs to come on.”

There is, as Buechner says, no way to make it happen, “no way to earn grace, or to deserve it, or to bring it about. A good sleep is grace,” he insists, “and so are good dreams. Most tears are grace. The smell of rain is grace. Somebody loving you is grace. Loving somebody is grace.” (Wishful Thinking, pp. 33-34)

Most tears are grace! And so, when misery cries out for comfort or guidance, when we can weep even as we walk the dark streets in search of a place to sleep, or even as we weep at the death of a friend or a husband or a wife or a child, or even as we walk the wilderness of the streets in search of our way back home, weeping over the lostness of our messed up lives, even then, whenever “misery cries out to thee, Son of the mother mild; where charity stands watching and faith holds wide the door, the dark night wakes, the glory breaks, and Christmas comes once more.”

Though grace does not come because we earn it or deserve it, God’s grace does come to us for a reason. God’s grace comes because God loves us and because we need him. In the darkness of our world, in our lostness, we need God to be born in us, so that hope and life can be sustained. Just as the energy and oxygen of the flower is necessary for our bodies, so the spiritual power of love is necessary for the health of our souls.

That’s why we cry out to God in the fantastic faith of Christmas, because, as Buechner says, without God we can expect no surprises, but with God you never know what will happen or where, and maybe in this dark world that hungers so for light and holiness, maybe, just maybe, light and holiness will come again, even among such as those who sleep and hope on the benches in the parks, or maybe this time born under a bridge somewhere to some young girl who has no place else to sleep. “Maybe holiness will come again as a child who has maybe already been born into our [dark] world and beneath whose face the face of Christ is at this moment starting to burn through like the moon through clouds.”

Or maybe holiness will come again in the silence of a kiss. Richard Selzer, a surgeon and a gifted writer with tremendous spiritual insight, tells of grace happening in his presence in a hospital room one day. The patient was a woman whose cancer had seriously disfigured her face, and her mouth was grotesquely twisted. The woman was depressed and often wondered if she was lovable any more.

Selzer says that he was in her room one day when her husband came in, and he watched, deeply moved, as the man bent over his wife’s bed and, twisting his lips so that his mouth conformed to her disfigured lips, he gently kissed her.

That’s the story of Christmas, and it is madness, fantastic madness to hope that God will once again twist himself into mortal shape, and kiss a world lost in its darkness and show us how to love again and so bring us peace and hope once more. So that even some young girl, as she huddles with tears in her eyes, homeless, in the corner of some dark doorway, hoping for sleep; or as she searches, cold and great with child, for some place to lay her head to bear her child this Christmas Eve; or as she lies in the grip of depression in some hospital room or walks her depression through the aisles of some gaudy mall; or as she waits in frustration in some bleak prison cell in a faraway land; or as she tries, during this dark December of 2007, to deal with her personal loss or grief or pain or sorrow, maybe even tonight, with tears in her eyes, she can say “I love you” to someone, because that’s what God has come once more this night to say to her, and to us.

With God, anything can happen. “God thinks Mary into being.” And – who knows? – just maybe, maybe tonight, somewhere, ”suspended at the apogee of the golden dome,” Mary is curling herself in a brown pod, “and inside her the mind of Christ, cloaked in blood,” silently is lodging and beginning to grow, once more.

O holy Child of Bethlehem!
Descend to us, we pray.
Cast out our sin and enter in;
Be born in us today.
We hear the Christmas angels
The great glad tidings tell.
O come to us, abide with us,
Our Lord Emmanuel!

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.