Christmas' Healing and Wholeness 12/24/19 Christmas Eve A

Rev. Dr. Rebecca L. Kiser

Christmas’ Healing and Wholeness

12/24/19      Christmas Eve A

Often in this world, we strive to know how to live - what’s right, what’s good, what’s helpful; what’s meaningful; what moves the world forward on a path that leads to good for all people.   We look to religion and Holy Scriptures to tell us about this world that God created, and what is just and what is our high calling, how to treat others, how to treat creation.  At Christmastime, often our convictions and hopes are rekindled, reborn just as the miracle of God born in flesh restores our faith and makes us remember the kindness and love in God’s invitation to us.  When we’re reminded again of all we hope for, all we so deeply believe, all we long for, we renew our determination, we rejoice in that deep good that we recommit to.     

Yet ….even with our highest and best motivations and remembrances, even with the echo of the angels in our ears, you know, its just downright difficult to stick to our intentions when life begins to pull on our time, our pocketbooks, our attention, our energy.  Even in the busy preparations for Christmas celebrations, we are rushed and preoccupied getting everything ready, packing the car for trips, wrapping just that perfect present, getting the meal on the table all together at the same time.  After Christmas, with the return of schoolwork, doctors appointments, the kids’ ear infections, demands of work, keeping healthy food on the table - these things take our minds away from the wonder of angels and shepherds, the prophetic obedience of Mary and Joseph, the wisdom of those wise men who came to worship and yet were saavy enough to avoid King Herod on the trip home.  Our vision of living a more complete life of faith falls lower nad lower on the radar screens of our minds, and finally scrolls off.

      This birth of God in the baby Jesus calls to us at a deep, spiritual level of wholeness, of promise and fulfillment, of purposes transcending the everyday hectic pace of things, of a peace that wants to pervade and encompass our daily living. It may have been a historic moment, yes, but it speaks to us of an ongoing and continuous awareness of God in our midst, God being born among us day by day...if only our minds grow still and our eyes see.  In this baby Jesus, who grows in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and with people - in this birth, we see the coming together of Divine and earthly flesh, of spirit and matter; we see the hopes of the past pushing into the present and future.  We yearn for that kind of wholeness in our own living, that our goals and our actual living would match, that our faith and our actions would be consistent.  We long for the various pulls in our heart to be connected; that we would live in touch with all parts of ourselves… isn’t that what we wish we could do?  To not be distracted from our inner values by the insistent calls on our attention from daily activities and demands - or perhaps that we move through those daily demands with an ongoing awareness of the presence of this larger picture, this larger frame of human existence; that this experience of God’s transcendence would underlie all the rest. That we, too would know this wholeness and completeness of inner self with  outer self,  mind with body;  intellect with feelings; faith with the physical, unity with diversity, the resolution of all paradox.

    The promise that is Jesus Christ says this wholeness is possible, says that this vision can be reality.  In Jesus, the Christ, the Messiah, the one anticipated and hoped for, the answer to generations of longing and promise -  all these aspects of life meet together and hold out the promise of a new reality for humanity.  .  

     See, that’s God.  The resolution of the big picture held in this new individual. A culmination of humanity’s hopes for a world living as it was designed. No wonder the angels cried praise & people bowed & offered gifts!

      Tonight we let our hearts remember these highest hopes & be renewed. Tonight as we take bread (matter) and drink (spirit), let us celebrate that unity & wholeness that is in God. Tonight we restore our hopes & intentions for this often crazy world, and join ourselves in this praise. Amen.