May I be the first to officially wish you a “Merry Christmas?” Before I begin a word of Welcome. We say welcome is one of our core values here at St. Michael’s, and we try to mean it. If you’re not sure what, or if, you believe, know you are welcome here. There are a lot of us in this church who are wrestling with faith. If you are here because your parent or grandparent or child asked you to come, good for you. It is good to build up political capital at home. If you are here in church for the first time, or the first time in a long time, really know, you are welcome.
In these last days of 2024, what does Christmas still have to teach us? Why do we come, on the third darkest night of the year, to hear these particular paragraphs of scripture, to sing these carols? What is it about this story that draws us in again and again?
I want to wonder with you this night whether our souls are made to hold light in the darkness, whether there is something about this story, the Christmas story, that talks about something fundamental about our being, about our very nature. The Christmas story speaks to us about the inner workings of hope and of joy.
There is something about holding a light in the darkness that speaks to the needs of our souls.
The souls that first Christmas were in need of light, of good news. The emperor Augustus mentioned in our story was the first true emperor of Rome. The great nephew of Julius Caesar, he swept away the last vestiges of democracy and reigned supreme. Mary and Joseph, in Luke’s story, are going to Bethlehem to be registered to be taxed. It took a great deal of cash to fund the emperor’s marble clad city, to keep his occupying armies on the march, so the far off territories were taxed to maintain their oppression.
You probably know the famous line required of the gladiators in the coliseum. As the fighters gathered from across the wide territory of Rome stepped in to fight to the death, they were made to shout: “Hail Caesar, we who must die salute you.” The poet W.H. Auden Auden echoes the line in his Christmas oratorio.
We who must die…demand a miracle.
How could the Eternal do a temporal act,
The Infinite become a finite fact?
Nothing can save us that is possible.
We who must die demand a miracle.-WH Auden Christmas Oratorio
Tonight the story we tell is exactly that: the Eternal doing a temporal act, the Infinite becoming a a finite fact,
But it is the line that follows that catches me this year. Nothing can save us that is possible.
I think we need Christmas in 2024. I think we come with longing to this darkened church to sing, to hear the story, to break bread together, because we need a glimpse this year of that which is not possible.
We have for to long lived under the tyranny of the possible. We live so much of our lives with what we can muster, what can pass congress, what is possible. And for many of us, all that practicality does not lead to much hope.
Our souls are made for more than can be calculated in a political season. Our souls are made for more than what can be plotted on a spread sheet. Our souls long for more than what is practical. Built within each of us is a longing for the impossible. It is part of who we are. Our longing is meant to be bigger, our hope is meant to be greater, than we can realize on our own.
Christmas is an interruption to the ordinary. More than that, it is an irruption of hope in the midst of despair, of joy in the midst of sorrow, of love under the thumb of power.
Christmas is not possible, and yet we gather, and yet we sing of Silent Nights.
In every church I have ever worked, we have shared space with 12 step groups. Alcoholics Anonymous was founded in an Episcopal Church. I’ve never known an Episcopal Church that didn’t host at least one AA group, often other 12 step groups descended from AA. I’ve had the honor of accompanying parishioners when they’ve received a token for 20 years sober, 30.
I mention AA tonight because the twelve steps begin with a two important steps. A 12 stepper first admits they have become powerless over alcohol, narcotics, or you can fill in the blank. They admit that their life has become unmanageable. The second step is that they come to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
Nothing that can save us is possible. The story we tell tonight, the story we hear from Luke’s Gospel, you will probably read or hear at least two news reports this season about how it didn’t happen, it couldn’t happen. It isn’t possible. I’ve heard these reports every year of my priesthood.
And every year, the church fills with faces, lit by candles.
The story of Christmas is the story of God choosing to do the impossible, to bring hope to a hopeless people, to bring the power of love into a world of loveless power, to announce good news to the outcasts. God chose to come to us, and God did not arrive at Caesar’s palace, or Herod’s, or Quirinius’ (whoever that was). God arrived on the edge of town, to a couple who were forced from their village by a government order. God arrived among the animals, because there was no room in the inn.
One of the most meaningful liturgies for Christmas I’ve ever attended involved a long walk. Almost twenty years ago I was living in San Diego, California. A college friend invited me to the Border Posadas. Church groups from San Diego and Tijuana met on either side of the fence, just a few yards from the Pacific Ocean.
That December the air was cold, well, cold for California. The Border Patrol, knowing of our plans, had locked down the parking lot nearest the border fence. So those of us who wanted to participate had to walk about a mile on the sandy beach down to the border. Some of our fellow travelers carried gifts. They were headed down to reunite with family members through the fence. For lack of a visa or immigration status, crossing the border was out of the question this Christmas. Hugs were impossible, so they touched fingertips through wires. They passed little gifts and treats through small gaps, if they could do so when the guards weren’t looking. These families sat on picnic blankets and smiled at our group of pilgrims there for the Border Posada.
Many of you have probably been to a traditional Posadas celebration. They’re almost as common here in New Mexico as they are down South in Mexico. A procession forms, singing, reading bits of scripture and prayers and moving from house to house through a village. The congregation, like Mary and Joseph, ask for room in the Inn. They are turned down at home after home, and so the procession continues until it comes to the church, where at last the party begins.
In the border posada, the last stop is omitted. The holy family never finds a place to rest. Instead, at the end the night we pray for all the people who are still looking for room, still waiting for mercy. We pray these prayers to try and re-orient our hearts, to learn to trust that, though our government policies grow less and less humane, with God there will always be room. In the days around my trip to the border posada, George Bush was beginning to abandon his plans for a “compassionate conservatism” toward immigrants. We prayer because we believe God looks down and sees one people, and weeps that we are not able to build more bridges and fewer walls.
Dorothy Day, a Catholic saint who dedicated her life to living in community with the poor, said the Christians should live in a way that doesn’t make sense unless God exists.
Nothing that is possible can save us. So we need impossible stories like the one we tell tonight. The story of God’s love, so pervasive that it erupts on the edge of town, on the edge of an empire, beyond the edge of respectability. We need impossible hope, impossible love, impossible justice to break through. We need impossible communities to form, bringing people together across language, and the full spectrum of gender, and sexual orientation, across age and culture and neurodiversity, across respectability. We need impossible communities to respond to our days of cruel division. So we gather. We pray. We light candles in the dark.
Because we need this hope. We need this story. Our souls are built to yearn for that which is beyond what we can possibly imagine. No god who is reliably explainable will do. No god who neatly follows the rules of our party or our religion, no god who predictably excludes the people we want to exclude will suffice.
The only One who can save us is impossible for us to contain. The only God worth adoring is the One who chooses radical vulnerability, improbable self-offering, gratuitous love. The only Savior worth having is the one who calls us out beyond what we could imagine if left to our own devices. Left to our own devices, we are doomed. Nothing can save us that is possible. So demand a miracle.
You were built to long for miracles. We are created to long for more than is possible. Let your heart yearn for God to be born in ways that astound, in ways that push you beyond what is comfortable. Only there, only when we are out beyond our usual borders, can we encounter the One who can save us.
That’s why this night matters, because tonight is not only about remembering something that happened once long ago. Tonight is about tuning our hearts to watch for the ways that God still can break through, in the most impossible ways.
Merry Christmas.
Mike Angell 