Dec. 29-Is. 63:7-9, Heb. 2:10-18, Mt. 2:13-23
In all of their distress, God too was distressed.” Last week we had a blue Christmas service. One of the ideas of Immanuel, God with us, is that it means God with us in all of our circumstances. We rarely read of the aftermath of the visit of the Magi and their mistaken visit to herod.while they left gifts of Jesus, bloodshed followed in their wake.Mary Chapin Carpenter has a holiday album, Come Darkness, Come Light, and she captures the ambivalence of the holiday season better than the soft glow of sweetness that the church has allied itself with at this time of year. We avoid this Christmastide story as it places us right back into the world of abuse of power and violence.Bethlehem was a village, so it was what we would call a surgical strike instead of a massive bloodletting, a smaller version of our army attacks on Indian villages after the Civil War.
Our culture has told us to pack Christmas away, and we have seen christmas ads and decorations for a long time. For us in church, the trouble is that we are just starting christmas readings, and we have barely started the traditional 12 days of Christmas.So, I am so grateful that we have time to reflect on the meaning of the season through our reading from hebrews.
recall that Hebrews is explicitly concerned with people who are bone tired and weary and need some encouragement. They have that I cannot face another load of laundry after company, let the dishes rot in the sink, if I hear another christmas carol I am going to scream right at crazy Aunt Jean feeling.
Few passages in the New Testament speak so well to the Incarnation as this passage. Notice that it does not speak of strength and power, but the power of solidarity with the troubles of human beings. It almost sounds as if the passage indicates that God’s desire to be with us is so strong that god wanted to undergo what creatures move through.Both the isaiah passage and the section form the epistle/sermon speak to God’s presence not in an angel but a personal presence. For us, that presence is decidedly in Jesus born in Bethlehem in a time of distress.Again, God is with us in jesus christ in the good and bad times, in times of celebration and real trouble. God is with us during the Christmas blues, the post-holiday blues, or the brightest fmaily gathering imaginable, perhaps when you have the house to yourself again.
This is also a season when we miss our loved ones terribly. the Christmas blues are not only about disappointment with presents and being stressed from too many projects and activities and trying to make five new recipes turn out like the picture in a cookbook. Refreshed grief is a big component of Christmas In few places do we see the power of death being directed so closely to the Evil One. In facing death, in being crucified, dead and buried as the creed would say, Jesus went directly into its lair and exposed it for the nothingness that it truly is. When faced with the polarity of life and death, of light and darkness, God chooses life.
How can we avoid packing our Christmas spirit away with the tinsel? Maybe that is a symbol in itself. We toss away and set in the fireplace those things that we keep doing that cause us pain and harm our relationships.Perhaps one ways is to hold on to the idea of the new light and life of the Christmas season as we hurtle toward the New Year’s Day itself pictured as an infant.
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