A Sermon for Christmas Dayt
The Rev. Patricia A. Gillespie
Isaiah 52:7-10
Psalm 98
Hebrews 1:1-12
John 1:1-14
I love Christmas trees. Sure. I know it's a pagan symbol. I'm afraid to ask Cynthia to have us sing in worship something as liturgically inappropriate as "O Tannenbaum.."
But I love watching the change – beginning with the beautiful evergreen that God created, then all the people gathered around to decorate, and finally the multicolored, brightly shining, sparkling Christmas tree. It's still the same beautiful tree, suddenly revealed as something new.
Perhaps tree decorating day should be the Feast of the Transfiguration. (Let's see – the August 6 feast might just be early enough to beat the department stores to the Christmas preparation season.) So we'll have the Transfiguration Tree. Like Moses or Jesus: the same old thing becomes radiant; we see it anew and yet it is still the same. It's still an evergreen, but we see a new kind of beauty in it.
"And the Word became flesh and lived among us..." transfiguration in reverse. The brilliant radiance of the divine, so bright and so holy that one may not look at it and live, is muted to ordinary human tones.
In the baby Jesus, we see God anew – and yet God is still the same. It's like having the fully decorated tree stripped down to it's natural evergreen beauty. Perhaps, then, a better symbol of the Incarnation -- of God's becoming human might be Twelfth Night at the end of Christmas when we "undecorate" the tree. The radiant Christmas tree becomes the ordinary evergreen. The Word becomes flesh. God becomes human.
We too are born like that baby in Bethlehem – ordinary and undecorated. (Though all perhaps trailing hints of divine glory.) And then the decoration begins. Our ordinary lives are decorated with accumulated stories: stories of celebration and painful stories.
The transfiguration, whether in our lives or in a Christmas tree, is not instant, but gradual. Sometimes it takes nine hours to decorate our Christmas tree. Each new light is tested and carefully placed. Ornaments go on one at a time ... collected over the years, they are a life time of memories. There's work in the decorating, and often in the process treasures get broken. It can be a slow process ... but then there is that moment when the transfiguration seems stunningly sudden: when the light switch is flipped and everything lights up.
That's the possibility this baby in Bethlehem brought us. The Word became flesh, without ceasing to be the Word. God became an ordinary human baby, without ceasing to be God. That turns the world upside down, and allows the possibility that ordinary humans might become divine, without ceasing to be human. Or as the early church fathers said: "God became human that we might become gods."
Transfiguration – that without losing what we are, we might be revealed as something more. Like an ordinary evergreen transfigured into Christmas glory. We ordinary humans might become radiant with divine light
"The true light, which enlightens everyone was coming into the world..... To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave the power to become children of God, who where born .... of God."
That's you: ordinary human and child of God. With the birth of one tiny child far away and long ago God began a great decorating party: swaddling you in divine glory.