Marilu Thomas “The Coming of the Day”
Welcome to this warm place where we can be together to celebrate the joy of Jesus’ birth Christmas morning. I have found that the people who come to Christmas morning services are my kind of people. Christmas Eve is romantic and mysterious-- but over now. Christmas morning is daytime reality. The Christmas wrappings are in black trash bags waiting by the door, the presents have lost a bit of their shine, and Christmas Eve food was rich and wonderful and the dishes may still be in the sink. I imagine that Mary and Joseph woke up to a new reality on Christmas morning. The shepherds had come and gone, after spreading the word that the Messiah had been born after many millennia of waiting. The star was still shining, but harder to see in the daylight. The cows were lowing and the poor baby wakes because they needed to be fed. The night has become day.
Jane Williams wrote, “There is a mixture of hope and fear in these motifs [of light and dark, day and night], as we both long for and shrink from the life-giving, revelatory light…The coming of the day is inexorable; nothing can hold it back, no one can delay it, and yet it comes so gently that it is hard to say at which precise moment the day starts and the night is definitely over.”
Christmas morning people want to know that there is faith after the darkness of night. How does Jesus Christ’s birth affect what we will do today, tomorrow, and all our lives? What draws us here on a very cold December morning? What has drawn people to Christmas morning for more than two thousand years? The answer is the baby. The mystery, majesty and magic of the birth of God, fulfilling eons of prophecy, brings us here. Christ is the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy, “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness- on them light has shined….For a child has been born for us, a son given to us;
The birth of Jesus Christ in the manger is the birth of God with Us, the Immanuel. This is not another form of human Intelligence but God as human, sympathizing with the human plight of birth, the hardships and joys of life and the fear of death. God is the preacher here.
One of my favorite pieces of nativity art is from the illuminated bible, commissioned by St. John’s University to mark the new millennium and presented to Pope Francis in 2015. The Benedictine monks were tasked with creating a completely handwritten and hand illustrated bible using hand-ground pigments, metallic elements and the Chinese ink stick used in the bibles of the early church. Gold leaf is always used for the divine and deep indigo for sacred mystery. In the illustration for the text from Luke today, there is a bold, wide bolt of gold leaf from heaven into the manger, surrounded by golden whisps of angelic presence in the sapphire blue of the night and shepherdess girls. The golden bolt illuminates the entire scene and carries divine gravity like a golden anchor tethering heaven to earth. This is what our souls long for and find on this Christmas morning. We have been irrevocably tethered to God through the being of Jesus Christ, God come to earth to be with us.
On the face of the illustration from St. John’s is also written Luke 1: 72, “He came to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death.” The darkness is the shadow of death is visible in our heartache of our powerlessness to save ourselves and our need for mercy from our regrets. The birth of Jesus Christ, God’s presence with us here on earth, broke the burden that death places on our every waking thought. The darkness of death is not just for our last breath but for all the ones in between that scare us and make us feel small and forgotten.
This might not make you think of Taylor Swift but maybe it could. You wouldn’t think she could feel small and forgotten. The woman is everywhere and seemingly at the height of her career. Overwhelming demand for her concert tour snarled Ticketmaster last month. Taylor described her most recent album Midnights as “the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life…We twist in our self-made cages and pray that we aren’t –right this minute- about to make some fateful, life-altering mistake.” Her song Anti-Hero starts off, “I have this problem that have this thing where I get older but just never wiser. ” I can really relate to that. She sings about her depression and how she is the problem in her life, an oversized monster who doesn’t feel human. Her fans want her to save them but she knows she can’t, she’s only human. Sarah Woodard wrote a great article on Mockingbird saying, “What [Taylor] really wants, like all of us, is one who will accept her as she is and expect nothing in return. In other words, she wants grace….We’ve heard enough Taylor Swift music to know how, well, complicated love can be. As great as it might be, there is only One who will never write a breakup song. A perfect kiss won’t save Taylor Swift or any of the rest of us, but grace from above most surely can.”
Taylor Swift is onto something. We are always on our mind and that makes us fearful. We are looking for love in all the wrong places. No one would expect a baby to be the one to save us. Too vulnerable, too small, not enough power or strength. But God chooses to come as a baby to show us that He wants to be with us in every way and will go to any lengths to do that. Jesus Christ is the embodiment of God’s heart, coming to be with you in your everyday life, your real life. In the light of day, God’s love for you was made a reality in a stable under a star. He is the light that dispels the darkness of fear and death. He is the light of the world.
Listen to these lyrics:
“They said the end is coming,
Everyone’s up to something,
I find myself running home to your sweet nothings,
Outside they’re push and shoving
You’re in the kitchen humming,
All that you ever wanted from me was sweet nothing.”
I think Taylor’s onto something. All God wants is your sweet nothing because that’s all a baby every wants. To be with you.
Amen and Merry Christmas.
