God's Party

Charlotte Collins Reed
Christ Episcopal Church
December 24, 2014

Christmas Eve 

When I was a child, one of the best things about Christmas was that our family traditions were the same every year.  Every year, the same friends hosted a party on Christmas Eve, and Santa came to the party and brought each child a gift.  My gift was always thank you note cards, which was a bummer but Santa got points for consistency.  Every year, my grandmother would give my sister and me each a velvet dress.  My sister's was red and mine was blue.  Every year, my mom prepared the same food: roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, and wild rice casserole, and essentially the same people were gathered around the table.  Every year my dad bought the tree and we decorated it with red glass balls, lots of tinsel, and lights.  And every year, we tried to leave something interesting out for Santa Claus.  Those traditions all began when we lived in New Jersey, and the year we moved to Arkansas, we took great comfort in carrying many of those traditions with us.  While all the world around us seemed to have changed, the Christmas tree had the same red glass balls, tinsel, and lights on it, my mom made roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and wild rice casserole, and even though the people gathered around the table were different, the festive atmosphere was still the same.  Part of the magic of Christmas was its sameness from year to year, which makes sense given that we celebrate the same Christmas story year after year.

While our traditions brought me a sense of comfort and security as a child, they also left me with the distinct but confused notion that we have control over Christmas. Christmas belongs to us.  Christmas comes when the decorations are in place and the food is prepared.  Santa comes because we have been good and because we left really amazing goodies for him.  Jesus is in the manger because we put him there.  Christmas is our party.  

Obviously, my adult self knows that nothing could be further from the truth.  For starters, Christmas~the birth of the Christ child~ is hardly under the power of family traditions.  Secondly, the comforting and sustaining traditions, are the way we celebrate what God has done for us.  Despite all the human activity that goes on around Christmas~the shopping, decorating, wrapping, cooking, cleaning, delivering, and as joyful as all that activity may be, Christmas is God's party, not ours.

The Good News, however, is that God invites us to enter the Christmas story and make it our own.  The story we heard this night, the beloved story of Jesus' birth, offers us three concrete ways to celebrate a birth that happened longer ago than any of us can imagine, and to celebrate not as outsiders looking in, but as insiders looking out.

First, Mary and Joseph are willing to allow God to act through their lives.  Last Sunday, on the 4th Sunday of Advent, we heard Gabriel say to Mary "Greetings, favored one!  The Lord is with you....you will conceive and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus."  After some initial, understandable questioning, Mary says "Here I am, the servant of the Lord.  Let it be with me according to your word."  While Joseph plays no active role in Luke's version of the story, in Matthew's account of the birth of Jesus, the angel appears to Joseph in a dream and tells him that the child Mary has conceived is from the Holy Spirit, and that she will bear a son and Joseph will name him Jesus.  Both Mary and Joseph are willing to allow God to act through them to bring Good News to the world, even when doing so is more than inconvenient.

Secondly, the shepherds, who are minding their own business and tending their flocks when the angel of the Lord shows up, are willing put away their fear and hear the angel's message.  Sometimes, when we are going about our everyday lives, the strangest things do happen.  But most importantly, the shepherds were willing to leave their sheep, travel to Bethlehem, and believe the angel's message that the tiny baby lying in a manger, born of poor parents with no place to stay, was indeed the Messiah, the Lord.

Thirdly, the angel announces the good news of Jesus' birth with no guarantee that anyone will listen.  The angel had no way of knowing how the shepherds would respond, and in fact the shepherds were the least likely  people to first to hear the good news of Jesus' birth, and the least likely to be believed once they began to tell the story.  The natural response of the shepherds would be  to act on their fear and flee further into the fields with their sheep.  But the angel's job was to proclaim the good news that the Messiah has been born in the city of David, without any guarantee that the shepherds would listen, and indeed, the angel delivers the message.

The Christmas story invites us into the celebration of Jesus' birth. We are invited to travel with Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem by allowing God to act through us, even when it is mightily inconvenient to do so.  We are invited to stand with the shepherds and recognize the Christ child in the most unlikely of places.  And we are invited to sing with the angels the joyful news of the birth of our savior and not worry about whether anyone will listen.  We are invited into this celebration tonight, and always.  God invites us to bring our traditions, our decorations and wild rice casserole, our hymns and candles, our Christmas trees and festivities and join in God's party as insiders...a party that celebrates the birth of the Christ Child and the claim of the Christ Child on our own lives, just as that child claimed the lives of Mary and Joseph, the shepherds, and the angel on that first Christmas night.                          
                                     
                                                                                            Amen.