Galatians 4:4-7
Luke 2:22-40
There was an image going around Facebook this week of a grown-up letter to Santa. In it, Santa asked the person what they wanted for Christmas, to which the reply was ‘a unicorn.’ Santa replied that was unrealistic, so what did the person really want? This time the reply was ‘five minutes of quiet time all to myself.’ And Santa asked, ‘what color unicorn?’
Now that Jesus is born among us, we’ve got all of these demands on our time. Babies cry when they’re hungry, when they’re tired, when they need a diaper changed, when they want to be held, and don’t even get started on when more than one baby is in the room, or they grow up a little bit and start to fight with each other. I love that tradition of singing ‘Silent Night’ on Christmas Eve, but whoever gave birth to a newborn without making any noise? Noise is the sign that the baby is breathing and alive and healthy!
And it hurts everyone involved to go through those birthing and growing pains. The baby is suddenly cold and out in the open and has to breathe differently in all of this extra space, the mother has just gone through labor, the father has had his fingers crushed by his wife in her pains, or had his heart break by hearing the cries and not being able to fix the pain. Then the rush of new emotions when that little life is suddenly right there to behold, and the sleepless nights, the diapers to change, the spit-up to clean up, baby-proofing everything. Well, except Mary and Joseph didn’t live in a time of baby-proofing. Or medical care. Mothers and babies died in the process of being born far more often than we see today. And even after all of that labor, the mother still had to stay away from the worship space for a time before going through a ritual purifying process to be able to access the temple again. Being created in the Image of a creative God, having just given birth, a woman still wasn’t allowed to re-join corporate worship until she had been cleansed. Which could be either seen as sexism or special care for the new mother, like a day at the spa. What a time of ups and downs this first month of new life can be!
So image having gone through all of that mess and mystery and then a random man in the temple approaches and sings about your baby! Just picks up the kid and worships God, declares that finally he can die in peace because he has met this child. Of course, he says, Mary’s heart will also break a thousand times for all of the trouble this child will have stirred up around him, but it doesn’t take a prophet to know that. This little baby will be all that the people of Israel are called to be - a light to the nations. And by living honestly and with integrity and love, Jesus will bring out our true colors, shine light on our dark places, reveal every insecurity and fear we have ever carried. For if the Truth will set us free, first it needs to be out in the open.
We know this well, we see and hear this when children remind us of the things we have said and done. When my home parish was in the call process for a pastor who admitted his past struggles with a pornography addiction, suddenly the adults in the room got very uncomfortable, and my kid sister, only 18 at the time, stood up in the midst of that church, and spoke directly to them all. She said, “you were my Sunday School teachers, and you taught me about forgiveness. Were you lying?” Because everything we do and say can be seen and imitated by the children around us, we learn from them the way our hearts are revealed in our words and actions. Even the littlest things, that we pay no attention to. Kids see and hear and learn. If you’ve not seen the new film “Into the Woods,” which is also a stage musical, that’s the point and theme repeated there, also.
We have a responsibility with these kids, with all kids, to live as we dream they might live. To love and accept them as we hope the rest of the big wide world will, too. And it can be exhausting to always watch what we say and do, to always pay attention to everyone’s behavior… which is why we have the reading here today from Galatians. Because we are, all of us, still children. We practice forgiveness every Sunday morning, because we don’t always get it right. We practice community together in worship by passing the peace, because we need to know how to make peace in the rest of our lives. We practice, following the example of Jesus, just like kids follow the example of adults, because we are still becoming who we might be at our best. And Jesus feeds us to give us love and energy for this practice, by welcoming us all to the Table of the Eucharist, where God’s love and forgiveness and welcome are tangible and where we take those gifts into our own bodies, just as Jesus took on a hungry human body, so that no matter how well or how badly our practice goes we can be made whole again and again to keep at it.
But just like children, we fall, we scrape our knees, we stay under the covers when it’s time to get out of bed, we are told to work when we’d rather play, then we get graded, then we take our grades home to God… Because we are God’s children, that makes God our parent. Of course I mean that the other way around - because God is our source and our life, our healer and our care-giver, that makes us God’s children. And what does a loving parent do with a weepy child who gets banged up at school or on the playground? What does a loving parent do with a kid who makes a mess of glue and macaroni to offer a piece of artwork? God scoops that child up in loving arms, God gleefully hangs the macaroni mess on the ‘fridge, God encourages the children and stands up to the bullies and loves them all. God sits down in the sandbox with us, climbs the jungle gym next to us, waits for the school bus beside us, even works on those algebra problems and gets shoved into a locker. God is a child among us, and we are also God’s own children, deeply loved and cared for while we learn how to walk and run and forgive and love.
Thanks be to God.
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