It’s hard to celebrate Christmas without being flooded with memories. I know every Christmas I can’t help but be brought back to Christmas the way it was when I was a kid back in Indiana, going to a big Christmas Eve party in a packed little house with my six Croatian aunts and five Croatian uncles and dozens of others, a house overloaded with food and presents and desserts. My Uncle Dan was a wiry little man, but every year at the climax of the evening he’d put on a faded and ratty Santa Claus suit, with no padding at all — really I should just summarize it by saying he didn’t look anything like the real Santa Claus — and he’d hand out the presents to all the nieces and nephews. Thankfully he would take the suit off before returning to the traditional uncles’ poker game in the basement. But despite its many imperfections it was the kind of evening you remember your whole life, for one night at least, there were love and good things everywhere, and all was right with the world.
I hope tonight you have some happy memories of Christmases past. But whether you do or you don’t those memories of the past are really not why we’re here tonight. It’s true that we come to mass on Christmas to hear ancient stories and sing old songs, but the stories and the songs are all meant to tell us about what is ours now, not what is past.
The first words we heard tonight in our readings were about “the people who walked in darkness.” And even on Christmas all these years later, those people in darkness are us. Sitting here tonight, you may be surrounded by a sense of security and companionship. But maybe not. It’s just as likely that this year you have found yourself in some darkness. Maybe you have been knocked for a loop by loss, or sadness, or illness, or you wonder what the ugly, endless violence and conflict of this world have to do with the message of the angels. Maybe your darkness is a sense of discouragement with your own life, or it’s wondering where you are headed and why. Or maybe you have come into this church tonight not at all sure that the presence of God is something you can experience yourself, you feel this presence is something that’s too hard to believe in to spend your life looking for.
All those forms of darkness are not something that God is unfamiliar with. It is all part of the life that Jesus came tonight to share with us. Even this story of his birth tonight has signs of how close Jesus’s life is to the one we live. He is born on the road, far from home, surrounded by strangers, in a heartless town where even a pregnant woman traveling was refused a decent place to rest for the night. We know that his life from tonight on was a life of great love but also brutal rejection, great faith but also great discouragement, and even tonight we have to remember that his life would end with a death that was unjust, and too early, and pointless. But his presence in the manger changes everything for us. Because with his birth we find out that God cares about this life, the world as it is tonight, we find out that God loves human life so intensely that he broke down the last barrier, trying to reach people like us, who still need light to find our way.
The message of the angels is God’s sudden closeness to us, as close to us as the people whose faces you see around you tonight in this place. Somehow a God who is the mystery who set this universe into motion and who is beyond our ability to describe, that is the same God who did something that still seems too good to be true. God came here as one of us to show us that it is good to be human. All God wants is that we will turn away from what does not satisfy us or make us whole, leave behind the things we think will give us life but don’t, turn away from all that, and embrace the God who is with us.
So Christmases past are great, but it is Christmas present and Christmas yet to come that really matter. Because God coming close to us in the darkness, being with us, coming to life in us, being with us even through death, that is happening tonight and every moment of our lives.
A great poet once wrote that what needs to happen at Christmas is that we should finally give up the idea that we need to spend our lives seeking God. Tonight we realize that we are the ones who are being looked for, and our job is to take down our defenses and allow ourselves to be embraced. May God give us all the ability to see the gifts that are all around us. Merry Christmas.