Pondering in Our Hearts
Christmas Eve 2005
John Wilkinson Third
Presbyterian Church
December 24, 2005
Merry Christmas.
First, a word of welcome to you all. Whether long-time members,
first-time visitors, single-time wanderers, long-distance family
members or any number of other possible demographic categories,
we are grateful for your presence. For whatever reason, the
story that we rehearse this holy night has drawn you here, and
you are most welcome.
I would be negligent in my duty if I did not let you know that
you are always welcome. In fact, in just a few hours, we will
crank this thing up again. We typically worship on Sunday mornings
at 8:30 and 10:45. Tomorrow we will do so at 10:45 and the same
on New Year’s Day. Come back – you will find much
in this community to engage your faith and your living, and
companions with whom to share the journey.
***
It is a familiar story to us, and yet each time we are drawn
to it, we encounter another facet, something we may have missed
every other time. It is a sequence packed with action: exhausted
travel; rejection upon rejection at inn after inn; a parade
of visitors – shepherds, livestock, angels, unrecorded
onlookers.
At the end of it all, we find Mary. Her anxiety, exhilaration,
fatigue, all must be topping the charts. What she has experienced
and what she will yet experience stands at the very center of
human history and God’s history.
And Luke tells us that she treasured all these words –
the words of the shepherds reporting the angels’ testimony
– she treasured these words and pondered them in her heart.
That is most likely an understatement of the highest proportion,
but it is also an invitation, a Christmas invitation to all
of us to emulate Mary’s treasuring of the story and the
deep pondering of its impact and implication.
It suggests a certain humility. “How silently, how silently,
the wondrous gift is given,” a favorite carol suggests.
Quiet, gentle, humble pondering may be the order of the day
– in our own lives, in the life of the church (this church
and the whole church), in the life of our city and nation and
world.
As we approach the stable, such heart-pondering calls us to
examine our own lives. The holy event we celebrate this night
calls us to ponder our own expectations and the expectations
others place upon us, to ponder the choices we make and the
paths we follow, to ponder the ways we interact with the ones
we love and the ones we don’t even like, our hopes and
fears, our joys and disappointments. We ponder all of these
things in our hearts and realize that this is a night for new
beginnings.
And as we ponder the impact of the story in our own lives,
we cannot help but ponder what we will do with this story, what
difference it can and will make. This has been an odd Christmas
season – “Christmas wars” is a newly-coined
phrase that I am not quite sure what to do with. We’ve
worked so hard to de-commercialize Christmas within the broader
culture. Now that it’s happened, we’re not so sure
that we like it.
I heard a pundit very critical of the “happy holiday”
movement, insisting that stores were profiteering from the birth
of the Savior without properly acknowledging it. That may be,
I thought, but I do not necessarily see a straight-line connection
between a new Old Navy Polar Tec fleece or a Scooby Doo Chia
Pet and the sacred event we remember this evening.
We who have been given the gift of this story know something.
We know what all “the Who’s down in Whoville”
knew – that the true gift of Christmas can be celebrated
with no gifts at all.
This is not a night to debate the proper role of religion in
American life, or Christianity in particular. It is a night
to ponder, however, the difference that religion can make in
the life of the world, the impact – quietly, humbly, gently
– that this story can make.
Rock singer Bono speaks of his faith often as he lobbies political
leaders regarding African debt relief.
It was the deep faith of one Rosa Parks that led her first
to sit down and then to stand up at the birth of the civil rights
movement.
Writer J.B. Phillips says that “what we are celebrating
is the awe-inspiring humility of God, and no amount of familiarity
with the trappings of Christmas should ever blind us to it.
God’s intervening into human history,” Phillips
writes, “came about with an almost frightening quietness
and self-effacement, and as millions will testify, he will come
again with the same silence and the same devastating humility
into any heart ready to receive him.”
Perhaps that was what Mary was pondering, the awe-inspiring
humility of God and the quiet intervention into human history.
A tiny little baby. The Word of God incarnate, full of grace
and truth.
We know the story well. Let us hear it again this night, as
if for the very first time. And let us ponder in our hearts
for a little while, before that very same story invites us to
take it to every corner of our living and every corner of the
world.
“No ear may hear his coming,/ But in this world of sin,/
Where meek souls will receive him still/The dear Christ enters
in.”
May it be so. May your Christmas be blessed. And may we know
peace on earth and joy in all the world. Amen.
