By Marek Zabriskie
On Christmas Eve, we will enjoy enchanting music, the flickering candles, and the families gathered from afar. We will huddle to warm ourselves against the cold evoke a sense of peace and joy as powerful as anything we know.
All of the packages will have been wrapped, and the Christmas cards will have been sent. The house will be decorated, and the church will radiant. The choir will be ready, and children will be anxious. Christmas is magical.
Thirty-five years ago, I spent a Christmas with my family in a wonderful Mexican town. I wanted to go to church on Christmas Eve, so I asked around and found where the midnight Mass would be celebrated. I found a white stucco church with red, yellow and green lights hanging from the ceiling.
The lights were tacky, and the church was almost empty, except for a few older women kneeling in prayer. Then others began to enter, one by one and two by two. Then came one family after another, until the entire church was full.
I was the only gringo, but it did not seem to matter. Four years of high school Spanish failed me that night. I could not understand what was said as the readings and the prayers were said. Then we drew forward like shepherds approaching the manger and received Communion.
Suddenly, I grasped what it was all about. We were a family sharing a deep belief that we held in common. We know the story so well that we can recite it by heart – the shepherds, the angels, and the baby. Yet it continues to penetrate our defenses and enter our hearts. Like Mary we ponder these words, and the Spirit changes us.
On Christmas Eve, we become actors in a play and are transported back in time to cold evening in the hill country of Palestine. The cave was warmed by animal bodies and animal breath. It was smelly and dark. A man and a woman wrapped their child in swaddling clothes and nestled him in the straw. His mother lay exhausted by the journey and the birth.
Her husband felt helpless. What could he do to warm his child and her? The door pushed open. Quietly, almost shyly, shepherds came in. They had heard from the angels about his mystic birth. They struggled to comprehend. This child, so ordinary, was the savior of the world.
If we truly understood the story, we might act more like Sharon, a five year old girl, who told her own version of the Christmas story and finished by asking her listeners, “And do you know who he was? The baby was God,” she whispered and leaped into the air, twirled around and dove into the sofa, where she covered her head with pillows.” It was the only proper response to such Good News of the Incarnation.
Long ago a woman came to see me to tell me that her life was falling apart and she wondered what she should do. She described her troubles, the work stress, the failing marriage and drinking far too much.
She had lost touch with the Christmas story and the way life was meant to be lived. We talked about her struggles, but the answer I gave her was the only answer I know how to give.
“You have to reconnect your story with God’s story,” I said, “and rediscover a deeper truth and meaning in your life. You will need some time for quiet and solitude, to listen and learn and let your restless soul seek some peace. You need to read the scriptures and listen to Christ’s teaching and see again what living is really about. You need to pray and ask God’s Spirit to enter you and provide the healing you desire.”
All of us do better when we reframe our lives with the Christmas story for the Incarnation has immense implications. It means that the Christian God can be seen and smelt, heard, tasted and touched. Jesus was God with human skin.
The Incarnation did not end with Jesus’ death and ascension for Christ lives on in our hearts and hands for we are the Body of Christ. The theist believes in God far off in heaven, whereas the Christian believes in a God not only in heaven but physically at work in each of us.
There’s no telling what the Prince of Peace can do to bring warmth and love to our homes, our jobs, our schools and our churches if we build a manger in our hearts where he may enter and find a place to rest.
The Kentucky novelist Wendell Berry has an old man say at the end of one of his stories something that seems to sum up what Christmas means. “We are members of each other,” he says. “All of us. Everything. The difference ain’t in who is a member and who is not, but who knows and who doesn’t.”
May you open your hearts to receive the gift that God gave so long ago so that this Christmas you might praise Him as the shepherds praised Him so long ago – Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, and Prince of Peace.
The Rev. Marek Zabriskie is Rector of Christ Church Greenwich.
