Sermon: Christmas 2007

December 26, 2007

Christmas Eve 2007, Trinity Cathedral

Grace to you and peace, in the name of the holy infant of Bethlehem. I am grateful to be gathered once again with you late on this sacred and silent night, too late, in fact, to do much of anything else save wrap a last gift or add a final touch to preparations for the morrow. Too late, save, of course, what we have come here at last, indeed at the very last, to do together, that from which our work and culture and anxiety and insecurity have conspired to distract us throughout much of the season of Advent – to wait in patient and prayerful expectation for the coming of Christ into our world, into our lives, into our hearts.

Four Sundays ago, on the first day of Advent, quite early in the morning I was driving to a parish visitation at St. Andrew’s in Canfield, and I passed a church, perhaps in Austintown, with a portable sign out on the street, the kind to which you can affix plastic letters that spell out the message of your choice. This sign proclaimed simply: Another Chance – 9 A.M. Sunday. It may have been the clever simplicity of the message that caught my eye and made me wonder whether “Another Chance” was the name of a particular church program or worship service, or whether the sign just meant that if you missed church last Sunday morning at 9, you could catch it this Sunday morning at 9. But what most captured my prayer as I drove on to Canfield that First Sunday of Advent was the stark reminder that this is what we spend the first season of the Church year in preparation for: another chance.

It is as simple as that rental sign on County Road 109 and its brief proclamation: Another Chance – 9 A.M. Sunday. This is all about another chance. In fact, all of God’s salvation history is about another chance. Noah and the rainbow covenant, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and the ram, Joseph and his brothers, Moses and the promised land, Ruth and Naomi, and on and on to Jesus, God in the flesh, born to a broken world as another chance, crucified and raised to new life as another chance. What each of his disciples received, from Peter and Andrew to Martha and Mary, was another chance – another chance at knowing that they were beloved by God, another chance at living their lives in the love of God and the service of others, another chance at bringing the reign of God to earth in their own day.

I suspect that many of us are here tonight because somewhere along the line we got another chance. Perhaps it came through the healing of a deep hurt, the release from some destructive behavior, or the reckoning with a profound grief or loneliness. Maybe it came by way of a kindness received, the gift of a new direction in life, a restoration to health for ourselves or a loved one, or a longed-for freedom realized. Whatever form it took, some of us are doubtless here tonight because by one thing or another we experienced from God another chance, and that drew us deeper into God’s love and made us more whole. And I am certain that each of us here tonight is in need of another chance – in a relationship we are not handling well, in the way we care for or about others, in a situation we wish we had dealt with differently, in the way we cope with our own inadequacies – another chance at loving and being loved by others, another chance at accepting ourselves as God accepts us.

The Incarnation of God in Christ Jesus is both the assurance and the realization of another chance, two thousand years ago and every moment since. Without fanfare, in fact virtually without notice, the God who created the universe gave us another chance to get it right by being born as one of us, a divine and yet perfectly common baby, no different from any of us save for the capacity to love without condition. On this holy night we remember the gift of another chance in the human birth of divine love, because remembering gives us hope. It gives us hope that love can live in this broken world, and as outrageous as it may seem, hope that love can live through the human frailty of our own lives.

If you and I are truly to be the body of Christ, perhaps we will do well, at least on this night, to remember his birth and imagine what it may mean for us to be vehicles of another chance for others, precisely in the way the infant Jesus was for us: small and vulnerable, both an object and a source of love, not filling the room with either self-importance or self-focused need, but making room for all others, from whatever field or country they come to find the newness of life they most need and go home by another way. When we make ourselves small, as small as the infant Christ, we, like him, make room for the other. When we limit our own needs, tangible and intangible, we make room for the needs of others to be met, we awaken to what serves them best, and we become agents of another chance for them. In this way the humility of Jesus’ birth becomes the model of our own humility, that posture by which the world receives though us another chance. It is not passive. Nothing about a newborn is passive. From the moment of birth, every bit of a newborn’s body and spirit is actively coming to life and fighting to thrive. But it is humble. I sometimes wonder where Christendom might be if we interpreted St. Paul’s notion of growing into the full stature of Christ by the figure of the infant in the hay trough.

Like the holy infant Christ, you and I come to life to give life. That is at the heart of our vocation to be Christian. Time and again we receive the Body of Christ to become the Body of Christ. Time and again we receive the new life of Jesus to offer new life to others. Time and again we receive another chance to give someone else another chance: another chance to the one whose opinion of me is so threatening that I cannot help but demonize in return; another chance to the one whose station in life holds no chance of a future; another chance to the one who has squandered every chance I have given so far, perhaps because I have yet to offer the needed one; another chance to the one seemingly forgotten by all but God, the very one for whom the Christ was born.

Tonight, once more we gather at the manger-side to welcome the infant Christ anew into our hearts and to receive again another chance. May that chance be for each of us a new opportunity to offer the same to the world: another chance for peace, another chance for mercy, another chance for reconciliation, another chance for justice, another chance to bring heaven to earth, as on one still night in Bethlehem so many years ago it was.

Amen.

The Rt. Rev. Mark Hollingsworth, Jr.

Bishop of Ohio