St. John’s Episcopal Church
207 Albany Avenue, Kingston, NY 12401

Sermons

  • Don’t Leave Love In the Manger – The Rev. Michelle Meech

    December 25, 2023

    Merry Christmas!
    It’s always a delight to be gathering on Christmas Eve. To be sharing this night with you – this sweet night, this holy night. Thank you for coming to worship. As a matter of fact, I’m so delighted that I’m going to start off with a joke.

    What did Adam tell his partner at Christmas?
    It’s Christmas, Eve!

    [pause for sympathy laughs]

    It is, indeed, Christmas Eve. This night when we ponder what it means to give birth to Christ. What it means to make room for God within us, and to give birth to God incarnate – to birth Love in our world.

    I was reading a passage from a contemplative Christian leader named Thomas Keating the other day in which he talked about what it might mean for us to be open to God taking up space in our lives. What might it mean to prepare ourselves to receive such a gift. And essentially what Keating said was that we must be prepared to accept God in any way that God may choose. God may come as something we know to be a blessing. Or God may come as something that challenges us. God breaks into the world and we don’t get to choose how or when.

    And Keating goes on to say that this “disposition”… to be ready, to be awake to this possibility that is… is one that “opens us completely to the light.” I’m certainly not saying that when tragedy befalls us that, that is God’s doing. On the contrary. When tragedy occurs, there is usually something else going on. But I do know that God is with us through our pain and our suffering. Breaking into our world. Bringing love where, before, it felt too painful to bear.

    God’s inbreaking into the world is always a surprise. Because God’s first response is always Love. And Love so often overturns and confounds our expectations.

    One way this happens: We expect to be punished for our sins. There are whole religions devoted to this bad theology, actually. But God forgives all our mistakes. Another way this happens: We watch organic matter decay and we think of it as death. But then we discover that its molecules break down and give life to other plants and animals.

    And we also believe strength is demonstrated by pushing to get things done and requiring space from the people around us. But God demonstrates that true strength is about vulnerability. It’s about opening our heart and managing to keep it open in the face of all that the world can bring to our doorstep.

    I think that in order for us to truly be able to understand just what we mean by this vulnerability, our Gospeler Luke gives us something we can wrap our minds around. Something we humans will always, in every culture, in every time, in every place… be able to identify with. And that is that we humans will always have our hearts opened by a human baby. We will always be able to see a baby as vulnerability in its purest form. Life born anew in the most defenseless form we can possibly imagine.

    And, if this defenseless being is how God breaks into the world to bring about God’s reign of Love… if we can grasp this, then we might just understand what it means to leave behind our worldly desires for power and control. If we can truly come to understand that God comes to us, not as a tempest or as a Marvel superhero or as some kind of promotion that we’ve been hoping for, but as vulnerability itself… if we can understand that, then maybe we have a chance at giving birth to love, just like Mary did. Maybe we too can be god-bearers.

    At the very least, we can bear witness to and learn to kneel beside Love, in wonder and awe, and come to recognize that we, ourselves, are utterly defenseless in Love’s presence. For, in this we come to concede that we cannot control God, or control much of anything really. We are brought to our knees in this realization. Because in this lies the truth – the more we try to control, the more we are refusing the presence of Love.

    And the moment when we stop, the moment Love comes down, the moment when we finally see that there is nothing to defend against and no lines to draw in the sand, the moment when we peer into the manger and see love incarnate staring back at us… we are surprised. Our world has been overturned. Our defenses and tensions melt. Our heart opens. Our mind clears. Because that’s the moment when we accept Love.

    It’s such a mystery about us humans, that the biggest surprise to us is always that we are loved. And so it is that God’s inbreaking of love into the world is one that breaks our hearts open. It is through our hearts that God’s reign of love comes into being. It is through our words that Love Incarnate is born into the world. It is through our actions that Christ comes to be enfleshed.

    Author C.S. Lewis said: “Once, in our world, a stable had in it something that was bigger than our whole world.” Because this love that is God… is more vast, more deep, more complete than the entire universe because, in fact, it contains the universe within it.

    And we come, once a year, to reflect on this. To gather again and light our candles and sing our hymns and share a sweet and give a present. We come once a year to remember this love that is so big we have no mind to understand it. No ability to fathom its immensity and its spaciousness. Its completeness and its truth.

    We come once a year to this manger. This birth of love. This inbreaking of God’s grace and mercy and blessing upon the world. And it’s lovely. It’s so lovely, we don’t want to leave. We don’t want anything to break the magical spell. We want to stay at the manger where we can gaze upon the face of love.

    But I ask you, if I may be so bold on this Christmas Eve, I ask you: Don’t leave Love in the manger. There is too much need in the world for us to leave this realization behind. We can take it with us. Take this love with us. We can become god-bearers, love-bearers, in this world.

    The point of Christmas is really not some warm and fuzzy feeling that all is well with the world. That is denial, actually. The point of Christmas is that, as we meet this light of the world that comes to us as the most vulnerable, and we are brought to our knees in awe and wonder at God’s inbreaking, that our hearts are shattered. In a good way.

    That is to say that our hearts are shattered open to see beyond ourselves and recognize that this love is needed. That this love becomes ours to share and that as we do, this love intensifies for us. And that this love that we share is, in fact, the overturning of the worldly power that keeps all of us locked in systems and structures of pain at the expense of our own liberation. And therefore, at the expense of the liberation of others.

    So on this Christmas Eve. As we ponder what it means to make room for God within us and to carry God within us:
    Don’t leave love in the manger. Bring it with you to your everyday encounters and find ways to be grateful for the abundance of your lives.
    Don’t leave love in the manger. Take it with you as you consider how to offer your gifts in service to others.
    Don’t leave love in the manger. Liberate yourself from the tyranny of judgment and addiction and fear.
    Don’t leave love in the manger. Dedicate yourself to the commandments Jesus, who was Love Incarnate, gave to us: Love God. Love your neighbor as yourself.

    Let us all become god-bearers, love-bearers.
    So that God’s reign of Love may break into our world again and again and again.