No, That’s Not All There Is! Isaiah 9:2-4, 6-7, Psalm 96:1-4, 11-12, Titus 2:11-14, Luke 2:1-20 Christmas Eve 2005 The Rev. William V. Livingston, Rector Church of the Resurrection, Starkville, Mississippi I remember a Christmas morning, several years ago, watching a young child tear through her Christmas gifts – barely pausing from ripping the paper from one before frantically grabbing the next. Without pondering what she had received, when she realized that she had opened all her gifts she cried hysterically, “Is that all there is?” Could this possibly be a metaphor for how we celebrate Christmas? Without pondering what we receive , often the Christmas culmination is a let down. Could it have really met our expectations? Could the good food, the gift giving, the time with family gone on indefinitely? Does reality ever match memory or fantasy? Because we all know the story so well and it is almost impossible to hear the Bethlehem story anew, I find preaching on Christmas Eve one of the hardest times to preach. I fear preaching on Christmas Eve, despite the uniqueness of this evening’s liturgy: the Christmas carols, the vestments, the beautifully decorated space, and hearing the story of the angelic appearance that as we make our way home in the dark we’ll lament, “Is that all there is?” Tonight, Isaiah could be speaking directly to us for we, too, have walked in the darkness. We come from all walks of life. Some of us are old, some of us are young, some of us are hometown people, some of us are transplants from another place, some of us are rich, some of us are poor, some of us have loved, some of us have loved and lost. Here’s what we all have in common – we have all walked in the darkness. Though it would seem that some of us have sinned in greater frequency or greater magnitude than others, we have all been born with something missing in our lives, a “God shaped hole in our hearts” as some people call it. Isaiah calls it darkness. This Christmas, I find many of us more aware of that darkness. Many have indicated that 2005 has been a difficult year: both in personal losses and simply seeing disasters in the world. A large portion of last week’s Time magazine was a collection of photos depicting the year. What caught my attention was that no photos captured joyful events. No, they were photos of corpses lined up under plastic sheeting and dry ice following the tsunami, Katrina refugees crammed into the New Orleans Super Dome, debris covered foundations of the Mississippi Gulf Coast, the body of a child pulled from an earthquake shattered school building in Pakistan, and the ever present images of wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine and terrorist attacks around the world. In this parish, we probably have had more burials than in any previous year. In the last twelve month I was personally involved in 10 funerals and attended others: of those who had lived long full lives, one whose life had only begun and every age in between. As 2005 passes, we moan, “Is that all there is?” The question of why God made a world in which such tragedy is possible never quite goes away. But Christmas does remind of God’s way of responding to suffering. God does not wave a magic wand from some cloud or descend briefly to clean things up and leave until they get fouled up again. No, we just heard in Luke, God arrives on earth as a human being who will change things simply by the completeness of God’s love. From the meek conditions of a manger to a host of angels appearing before a bunch of shiftless, rogue shepherds on a hillside, every thing Jesus is and does reveals the love of God, the divine source of his own divine life. The peace of Caesar Augustus and the Roman Empire and any other nation pales before the peace announced by the angels. The Messiah born under Roman oppression would overthrow the powerful and raise up the oppressed. This God who loved us enough to take on our flesh and blood offers nothing but the outpouring of that love, every moment giving of himself, regardless of the cost, to the purpose that we will be transformed into the image of God. After all the fancy wrappings of tonight’s liturgy are torn away, we are left to linger at the manger, to stand before a young mother and her new born infant. The truth be known, this baby, like every baby, is born to die – but this baby unlike every other baby is to die for the sins of all. The death this baby is born for is the answer to the outrage of all evil. This baby is God coming into the world to keep us company in the worse that can befall us. For we whose world is darkness, the world changes – even the physical world: death is overcome and the material world reveals God’s glory in its depths. Yes, tonight we wrap it up in a candlelight service and fancy vestments. We tie around it a ribbon of carols that elicit memories of great joy as well as awareness of voids in our lives. But no, that’s not all there is. No, we too are changed. Because of tonight, new things become possible for us, new levels of loving response and involvement. No, that’s not all there is because the answer to all the suffering is the story of a life begun in a manger in a small village in a remote, desolate part of the Roman Empire and ended upon a cross some 6 miles away. Yes, this past year has been difficult for many of us, however, in the crying of a small child whose life begins in risk and ends in suffering, God shows us how, by God’s grace and in God’s Spirit we can respond to the tormenting riddles of the world. Tonight, in our brokenness, in our shortcomings, in our darkness, we are privy once again to hear the angels announce good news. We, too, are invited to go to Bethlehem to see the baby lying in a manger and then to go and tell. We are invited to measure all time against this night so that everything that happened yesterday is before Christ and everything that happens tomorrow is after him. Tonight we live in the eternal now of God’s coming among us. Tonight, we are invited to meet God: not the God-up-There somewhere who answers our prayers by lifting us out of our lives, but to meet personally the God-With-Us, who comes and resides in the midst of our lives. Tonight we are invited into the eternal knowledge God does not abandon that which God makes; God becomes one with us that we may become one with God. This birth that we celebrate tonight is not just a birth in a stable 2000 years ago, it is a birth waiting to happen. Incarnation means change. It means God coming into our time and into our space and into our lives and into our comfort zone and shaking things up and making them be recreated in a new way and challenging us to be active in this re-creation, to be co-creators with God in the world around us. That’s not all there is because God came and was born among us, quietly but with every intention of stepping into our darkness. This is the night when we tear away all the wrappings and all the extras and find that simple things like a birth in a manger matter more than anything. This is the night when heaven and earth are joined in a glorious way, with human beings at the center of the joint. This is the night when “the hopes and fears of all the years” are resolved in a stable feeding trough. This is the night when we can truly sleep in heavenly peace, because we know that God has entered our world to reclaim it forever. You see, tonight we too are invited into God’s love, to be wholly and unconditionally pledged to that love. Tonight’s gift is the awareness that God cared enough to send the very best, and that God continues to do so in the gifts now given to us in one another. Tonight is the night we learn, that no, that’s not all there is; there is so much much more.