Christmas Eve B2023
Luke 2:1-20
Poet Robert Hayden writes in his poem “Those Winter Sundays”:
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
The story told in Hayden’s poem is a story every parent knows: of putting a child’s needs before their own, of working every day, tirelessly, to provide for a child who cannot appreciate the sacrifice, of loving a child even when they call you names and say they hate you and tell you you never did anything for them. And meanwhile, the parent asks themselves or maybe their partner, in wonder: I never did anything for them? It’s almost comical, it’s so ironically inaccurate.
I was that child, and you might have been too. The first few weeks I was in college, my mother called me each Sunday evening on my dorm room landline. As a rule-following eldest child, I had no problems with my mother; I was never in trouble. We weren’t close, but we did enjoy games of Scrabble and Sorry. We worked up music to play in church, me on piano and singing, her on flute. Both of my parents came to all my concerts and theater productions. My parents made sure I got piano lessons and voice lessons and supported me in every possible way. But in the 18 years I spent in my parents’ house, I heard my mother sigh before picking up the phone each and every Saturday morning. I heard her say, “Hi, mom. How are you? … it’s snowing here, and Glen had to get out the snowblower. What’s it like in Minneapolis?” A conversation about the weather every Saturday. Until my mother, with another sigh, would hang up the phone. “Why does my mother call me every single week to talk about the weather?” I remember her asking time and time again. And now, here she was, doing the very same thing to me, calling me every Sunday evening when I had books to read, papers to write, and a life to figure out. The last Sunday she called, about 4 weeks into my first semester of college, I told her, “Mom, if I have something to tell you, I’ll call you.” And then, I hung up the phone. Ouch. My father told me later I made my mother cry.
Love’s austere and lonely offices, this is exactly what parenting is, a mother trying to connect with her young adult daughter, the daughter still hopelessly unaware that she is her mom’s life work, her pride and joy, her favorite person in the world alongside her partner and other daughter. Parents may be weary but are not sorry to spend their lives and their money and their energy raising and loving a child—just because that child is their child. Just because the child is.
This Christmas, love’s austere and lonely offices drive God to the manger. Love drives God to the manger, to the austere and lonely offices of Bethlehem, to the austere and lonely offices accompanied by Mary, Joseph, animals, and strangers. Though the Christmas story has been told and re-told by sweet young children donning angel wings and carrying shepherd staves, the Christmas story is not actually very sweet. A government mandated census for the sake of taxation. The long, difficult journey to Bethlehem. A friendless birth, apparently, in the elements. A young woman suspiciously pregnant before marriage, at risk of being stoned, certainly bringing shame upon herself, Jospeh, and their families. The first visitors, shepherds, some of the lowliest folk of that day. Christmas has no better description than that, austere and lonely. God could have entered the world any way God wanted—in majesty and splendor, with great wealth and power, in comfort and coziness such as we would like to believe about that first Christmas. That God chose the austere and lonely speaks of God’s desire not to rule but to love, to love truly, in this daily, ordinary, I’ll-drive-across-town-to-pick-you-up sort of way, as maybe only parents understand.
God our heavenly parent enters the world in Jesus, and love’s austere and lonely offices are ones in which God eagerly dwells. When I imagine the love of God for me on Christmas, it’s my mom’s face that comes to mind, my mom’s voice that echos in my head. My mom who forgave me for hanging up on her when I didn’t even realize I had been foolish. Who keeps her opinions about my life choices to herself unless I specifically ask for them. Who happily drops me off at the airport, brings me food when I’m sick, and will help me do whatever is necessary at any time—even if I fail to do the same for her. It’s in her generosity and care that I glimpse the One who meets us tonight in the manger. Even if we are as petulant as a whiny child, continue to triangulate or grumpily complain about others, or spend our lives ignoring the goodness and provision of our heavenly parent, God enters the world to love us as only a parent can. Because we are God’s life work, God’s pride and joy, each one of us God’s uniquely beloved children.
This Christmas, love drives God to the manger. Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas! Amen.