Christmas: The Dream of Arrival
Luke 2:1-20; Matthew 2:1-23
When all was still, and it was midnight, thine almighty Word,
O Lord, descended from the royal throne.
Wisdom of Solomon 18:15
Antiphon, Christmas Vespers
And now we come to the hardest work of Christmas. What, you thought the hard work was done? You thought the hard work was finished in choosing the gifts, baking the cookies, cleaning the house, watching the diet and otherwise surviving what one journalist calls “our annual ordeal of fun.” You thought the hard work was getting yourself or someone you love through the loneliness of this season that is only magnified by its artificial gayety. You thought the hard work was re-assembling your family like a stubborn jigsaw puzzle in the hope that all the pieces would fit together and stay together if only for two or three days.
No, the hardest work of Christmas is believing that it’s all true.
It would be as if a great emperor should summon his son to his chamber. When the young man arrives, the emperor whispers a secret message in his ear and sends him on a long and perilous journey. But first the young man must traverse the anterooms and vestibules surrounding the throne and descend a great staircase, which is swarming with the comings and goings of lesser officials, servants, and supplicants. After that, there will be a courtyard and then another, followed by inner walls, and other staircases, all equally clotted with humanity, and still he will not have penetrated the outer wall of the palace. But the messenger is strong and tireless and bears on his breast the seal of the emperor. Now leaving the palace, he must fight his way through the teeming streets of the city and then across vast and dangerous landscapes toward his destination in a foreign land. How is it possible, you have every right to ask, that one messenger, bearing the secrets of the emperor, could ever pierce such an impossible density and come—to you? But you gather by candlelight with the midwinter wind howling and, against all odds, dream it to be true.1
We are the community of the dream, and this is our season. For at the heart of the Christian hope is the stubborn belief in the emperor, the son, and the message. At Christmas we insist that a message has reached us from the throne of God and, more than a message, a divine person. We also believe that the journey is perennial; not only does it happen every year for us, but it has infinite powers of extension to any person or community anywhere in the world. The dream is so real that we have erected great churches in which this message is taught and celebrated. And most important, each of us believes that, despite daily obstructions to the contrary, the divine messenger has found his way into our daily existence with word of hope. And so, with Mary, who “pondered all these things in her heart,” and the shepherds, who were willing to make their own journey to Bethlehem, we dream the Dream of Arrival and reflect on its meaning for us.
From a human perspective, it almost didn’t happen. The parents were so poor. They were living in an occupied region of the world. Only with great difficulty did they obey the government’s command to be registered. Their baby was born in a stable, as Luther wrote, “no crib for his head.” It’s almost impossible for us to penetrate the veneer of tradition to the abject poverty and rampant violence into which our Lord was born.
The Gospel of Matthew adds the story of Herod’s murderous intent and the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt. The Gospel reminds us that their roles were inverted. Herod was in his royal palace; Jesus and his family were on the run. The First Family was a refugee family. They were forced into refugee-status by the threats of a paranoid tyrant, who in his rage had his goon squads kill all the boy babies of Bethlehem. When Joseph and his family finally returned to Palestine, they resettled to the north for fear of the king’s son, Archelaus.
We can sharpen our imagination of the first Christmas by attending to the plight of refugees in our midst and around the world. Equally important, we can better understand the plight of contemporary refugees by meditating on the events surrounding the birth of our refugee Lord. Everywhere, it seems, in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and the Americas, people are on the move in dangerous migrations away from home toward unknown destinations. With the prophet, their cry rises from the camps, “O that thou wouldst rend the heavens and come down!” They too dream of an Arrival marked by peace and safety. They too dream of gathering their children around them and celebrating a holy time with their family. With them, we pray, “Bless all the poor children in thy tender care.” It’s not for nothing that the young people who were brought to this country as immigrants are called “Dreamers.”
Before the Christmas story can bathe us in its own warmth, we must see it for what it is, the story of a displaced family chosen and protected by God to redeem a broken world. The almighty God chooses to “arrive” by means of a poor baby. But as the preacher Frederick Buechner remarks, once you’ve found God in a manger, you can find him anywhere. We may speak of “the magic of Christmas,” but what we mean (and hope for) is the peace of Christ. It can happen anywhere.
More than a hundred years ago, on Christmas eve, British and German soldiers along the Western Front spontaneously put down their guns and crossed the lines to greet one another. They exchanged gifts and food and cigarettes and performed joint burial ceremonies. Some played soccer. The Great Christmas Truce, as it is called, lasted about a day until senior officers forbade the peace, and the killing resumed in earnest. The Great Truce teaches many things. It tells us how desperately we dream of peace and how demonically the powers of war oppose it. In our own moments of Christmas Truce, it reminds us how difficult it will be to keep the peace of this night, how easily it will slip away from us. That is, unless, after the wreaths are stored away and the tree has been discarded, the message and the Messenger are allowed to remain.
If not, there will never be enough Christmas to go around. The good cheer will fall short of holiday projections, the preacher’s words won’t measure up to seasonal demand, the new year will loom rather than beckon. December is the cruelest month, if what you wanted for Christmas was not a returnable gift, but something more closely related to what God intended to give. Which is peace and salvation. It’s hard to settle for a blender or a new sweater when you were hoping for a better friendship with your brother, or acceptance by your parents for who you really are.
Some of you can remember seventy-five Christmases or more—seventy-five Arrivals of hope. We evaluate our Christmases past by remembering how deeply the presence of Jesus penetrated our hearts or enriched our relationships. On a Christmas long ago, my wife and I had no gifts for each other but a new baby. So, we tied a ribbon round her ankle, put her in her carry cot, and placed her under the tree, our only present. In the absence of the things and obligations with which we have since cluttered up our holidays, this was one of our better Christmases, maybe the best: the gift of a child, and nothing more.
At times like these, believing in the Christmas gospel isn’t hard at all. It’s keeping it that’s the challenge. For the soldiers on the Western Front, it lasted a day. And for us? If believing in Christmas is only a feeling or a break in our schedule, it won’t last long. When the world and much of Christendom expects a powerful leader, the poor child will continue to arrive in his place. And Jesus will be enough.
Have you noticed how babies have a way of interrupting our very important lives? Their arrival changes everything. Old routines are set aside, and new ones take their place. Happiness gives way to joy, energy to fatigue. Incredible as it may seem, the Messenger has fought his way through all obstacles, including death itself, and has arrived. He has been born among you this very Christmas. The communion we’ve been waiting for is here. Soon we will taste it. There is enough to go around. Like a new baby, it’s a dream come true.
On Christmas day 1521 Martin Luther was too sick to go to church. So, a group of parishioners went to his house, where he preached the Christmas gospel with incomparable power and beauty. In it he retells the story in the idiom of his day, rendering Mary and Joseph and the shepherds as down to earth and ordinary as a group of German peasants. Then he deftly magnifies the simple scene and gives it cosmic significance. He asks us to imagine the Christ-child in a manager bathed in light at the center of an otherwise darkened stage. The manger is surrounded by enemies and the forces of evil. “All else is darkness,” he says dramatically, “save for this child.” Then, as if to pierce the veil that always exists between the storyteller and his audience, he leans into his listeners, including us, and issues a challenge: “Now, if this is all true, and it is true, let everything else go.” And you and I, yearning for such a promise, are sorely tempted to do just that.
What if it’s all true—the emperor, the journey, the baby, the arrival? What if? If it is, then for the dream’s sake, let everything else go.
1 With apologies to Franz Kafka, “An Imperial Message” in The Basic Kafka, Pocket Books, 1979.