The Gift
A Christmas Sermon
On Thursday mornings I lead a chapel service for our preschool children. For the past few weeks, I was telling them the story of the season of Advent; the time when we prepare for Christmas. Each week of Advent, I would light a candle – just like on our Advent wreath – and share a part of the story of Jesus’ birth to help us get ready. So, we had the light of the prophets, who showed us the way to Bethlehem; the light of Mary and Joseph who traveled there; the light of the shepherds keeping their sheep in the fields nearby; the light of the Magi who later arrived bearing gifts for the newborn baby.
Each week as the story developed, I would ask the kids, “Which part of the story do you think is the most important part?” The angels singing was mentioned, and there were a few nods to Bethlehem itself. The donkey was a big hit! One four-your old astounded me by saying, “The lights,” as he pointed to the candles, “because they help us get ready for the Mystery of Christmas” – “Wow!” I thought to myself – and then he gravely intoned, “And Santa Claus is coming!”
Well, he was almost there. Christmas is a great Mystery, but it is not Santa Claus we are celebrating. Not that there is anything wrong with Santa. He can help us get ready for the Mystery too. When their daughter, Olive, was three years-old, my friends Rhea and Joel brought her to meet Santa Claus. Olive wasn’t having any of it when they tried to get her to sit on Santa’s lap for a photo. She did, however, enjoy having Santa read her a story. It must have been a slow day at the mall.
Overall, the visit went pretty well, until they started to drive home. Olive became very agitated because she wasn’t sure Mom had given her wish list to Santa. What if Santa forgot her, or confused her list with someone else’s. Finally, Olive burst out, her voice as serious as a heart attack, “Did you tell him I want love!”
Love came down at Christmas, Love all lovely, Love Divine, Love was born at Christmas, Star and Angels gave the sign.[1]
The star and the angels and all the rest, these are lights that help us to get ready for the Mystery of Christmas. They are signs pointing to the gift that cannot be found in a stocking hung by the fire, or in a carefully wrapped box under the tree.
Worship we the Godhead, Love Incarnate, Love Divine, Worship we our Jesus, But wherewith for sacred sign?
Sometimes we worship God as if God were out there somewhere. We celebrate Jesus’ birth as something that happened back then and there. We look outside ourselves for the gift, or wait for Jesus to come again to bring it to us, like Santa. But the gift is already in our possession. We’ve had it all along.
Love shall be our token, Love be yours and love be mine, Love to God and all men, Love for plea and gift and sign.
Love is our deepest desire, God’s gift, and the sign of the birth of Christ. That desire, that gift, that birth takes place in us. Love is the sign that Christ has been born in us. This birth is the evolutionary breakthrough in human consciousness of universal wisdom, insight, and compassion. It is always being born in us from the depths of the divine life. Our heart is a perfect hologram of the divine heart. It receives this gift continually, if we are attuned to the right wavelength.
“Here, in time,” wrote the 14th Century mystic Meister Eckhart, “we are celebrating the eternal birth which God the Father bore and bears unceasingly in eternity, because this same birth is now born in time, in human nature. St. Augustine says, ‘What does it avail me that this birth is always happening, if it does not happen in me? That it should happen in me is what matters.’”[2]
Love is not a sentimental feeling. It is an intuitive realization of the deeper harmonies, continuities and meaning that underlie our experience of reality. It is a felt knowledge of our intrinsic communion with all of creation that brings us into alignment with the flow of divine mercy that binds everything together in this love. When Christ is born in us, we become manifestations of this unitive vision of reality.
It is wonderful that this birth took place in Jesus. But that it should happen in you is what matters. Jesus said to his disciples, “Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father . . . those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.”[3]
This is the mystic vision at the heart of Christianity: that the divine comes to dwell in us, and continues the work of love through us. Love is our plea, our gift, and our sign that Christ is born in us. Amen.
[1] “Love came down at Christmas” words by Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) in The Hymnal 1982, number 84.
[2] Meister Eckhart, Dum Medium Silentium, Sermon on Wisdom 18:14. See The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, trans. and ed., Maurice O’C. Walshe (Crossroad: 2009), 29.
[3] John 14:12,23.