Christmas Thoughts

December 22, 2012

I find that I cannot write to you about our celebration of Christmas this year without remembering those who will not be celebrating this joyful event with their family and friends. They will be in my thoughts and prayers throughout this holy season as I know they will be in yours. I am speaking, of course, of the 20 young children murdered at their school last week. In my own mind I have begun calling them the Holy Innocents of Sandy Hook since they remind me of the biblical slaying of children in Bethlehem by King Herod who feared the birth of a new king sent by God to be a Savior to all people. Far too often the innocent are maimed and killed by those whose lives are warped with hatred and fear and their loss leaves a hole in our hearts that will only be healed by God’s love. And that is what the Incarnation is about, God healing the holes in the world through love. One of the announcers on one of the many stations carrying news in the wake of the killings said that it was sad because “Christmas is for children”. What a silly statement. Christmas is for everyone but it is about a child and about children.

Though we adults often like to pretend that we are “self made people”, independent captains of our own fate, we are all children of God; to paraphrase an old saying, “no one is an island unto himself”, because every life brushes up against and impacts others as it traverses from birth to death in this world. And every life is a gift of God, important to God. And Jesus is clear that how we spend that life is also important. He said that “unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”¹ A fun little book I recently read features an interesting observation from a dog saying to a former human master, “You humans fascinate us. You spend so much of your lives trying to unlearn what you know.”²Of course, the dog means that we begin life as trusting children yearning to be loved and offering love in return, but then we “grow up” and forget how to do that. We even forget how to playfully rejoice in life as we force ourselves to be “realistic and serious”. Jesus says we must relearn the skills of childhood in order to live within God’s kingdom because the rules of this world don’t apply in the kingdom of God.

In the next few days we will celebrate the birth of the child who grew up to teach us everything we have come to know about our God. In fact, as we have come to understand, that child was and is God, come to love us into heaven. My grandmother used to tickle and hug me tight saying, “I want to hug you to death!” That used to scare me until I understood that she really meant she wanted to hug me into a life of laughter and fun. And that is what God has done by being born of a woman named Mary in a small village called Bethlehem some two thousand years ago as angels proclaimed to nearby shepherds that “unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.”³

The Gospel of Luke goes on to say that “the child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him”⁴, but unlike us, he never lost the innocence and the loving nature that children seem to have in such abundance. I suppose that is because that is what the very nature of God is all about, boundless joyful love and life! To become like him, to follow Jesus, is to become like a child again, trusting God even when times are hard, and allowing ourselves to laugh with God and one another as often as we possibly can.

Father C. H. Powers, Rector