Born in the Manger of the Heart

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on Christmas Eve by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean & Rector.

What a strange, baffling picture this manger presents us with. How many nativity scenes have we walked past over the years without actually treasuring and pondering in our hearts like Mary the wondrous thing the creche is pointing to, I wonder? I remember as a kid we would make the yearly pilgrimage to the front lawn of the church where the manger scene was set up. We’d park in the lot and trudge over through the snow to stand and stare. It had a rather dutiful feeling to it, like this was something you were “supposed to do,” another box to tick off. As kids we’d stamp our feet and blow into our hands and huff and sigh and silently wonder when it was all going to be over so we could go play hockey. 

Just then, from the hustle and bustle of St. Clair Avenue–clogged with bundled up dog-walkers, weaving taxis, clanging streetcars–a candy bar wrapper blew into the carefully arranged, rather prim and antiseptic scene. It fluttered around the shepherds, danced past a stern-faced Joseph, brushed an angel’s shoulder, and settled right on top of the baby Jesus. I perked up. “This is getting interesting,” I thought  as my daydream of being the Maple Leafs defenseman Börje Salming evaporated in an instant. As that Coffee Crisp wrapper lay there–magically still at the centre of the manger on a bitingly cold slate grey afternoon–something shifted in me. Like the Prodigal Son, I “came to my senses.” Like Moses I” took off my shoes,” and something of the mystery of the incarnation came to birth in me.

Somehow, that manger–back from the street, at a careful remove from the hubbub, the car exhaust,  the dogs squatting to do their business on the sidewalks pocked with rocksalt–came to include everything. One candy wrapper was all it took. And suddenly I saw that quaint little creche for what it truly was/is–a schmaltzy depiction of a world-shifting proclamation: God in all things and all things in God. I looked around at the assembled crowd of people–an unruly cross-section of drippy noses, watery wind-stung eyes, all different shapes and sizes and colours–and for a moment I got it. All flesh–the good earth, the bracing air,  wheezy car horns,  scrappy starlings, each and every one of us standing there–held, precious, perfect, loved beyond measure in the wordless wonder of God’s great I Am.

What starts to emerge is a picture, no, a reality, so stunning that words fail. Even St. John Chrysostom–whose name means the “golden-mouthed” given for his exquisite sermons and brilliant oratory–was at a loss for words on Christmas Eve in 386 A.D.: “What shall I say! And how shall I describe this Birth to you? For this wonder fills me with astonishment.”  Why is this master orator, one of the great saints of the Church struck dumb? Because in the incarnation this very place is revealed to be God’s dwelling place. Not God up there, or out there, or back then, or in some distant future. The whole world is revealed as it truly is–an edgeless manger with no one turned away–angels and archangels, the holy family, sure, but also the sun, the moon, and the stars, mountains, rivers, stinky shepherds, and yes, each one of us just as we are gathered, swaddled, caressed, accepted, grace-soaked and mercy-drenched. Augustus and his bogus control freak decree up in fussy smoke. 

John’s prologue reminds us that the Word became flesh. Not just human, but flesh. All things came into being through Him. And without him not one thing came into being. We’re woven into a pulsing, dancing, sacramental tapestry. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God./It will flame out, like shining from shook foil,” writes Gerard Manley Hopkins. Like a candy wrapper blown into a manger scene to startle a bored, pimply teenager awake from his hormone-fueled fog to see, to live, to be, to love and serve and give. Love kicks. God prods. And right here in the muck and the straw of our ordinary life–with sweaty shepherds and caterwauling infants, steamy oxen breath and dung-crusted donkey hooves–Christ is born.

Over the years, reflecting back on that uncanny manger scene, I came to see that not only is the whole outer world held in the tender compassion of the dawn from on high that breaks upon us, but our inner world as well. Paul Tillich says that the whole enchilada boils down to “accepting our acceptance.” But we aren’t that “practised” in accepting our acceptance. We always want to put perceived conditions on God’s unconditional acceptance–we think that we need to be just a little bit better, a little more together, a little more spiritual, a little more Episcopalian, and then, after we’ve prettied up the picture and made ourselves into perfect little peaches, then God will love us. It’s as if we get word from the Shepherds that the Christ-child is to be born in the manger of our hearts and we call a contractor to do a last minute remodel.

We’re like those foolish virgins who, having run out of oil, try to borrow some from the wise virgins, and when that proves a dead end rush off to Trimmed and Burning Lighting Supply Co. What they miss, what we miss, is that God’s love has absolutely nothing to do with whether we have enough oil in our lamps. Having enough oil, and looking down on those who don’t have enough, or not having oil and feeling badly when you compare yourself with those who do is just another work; it’s another way we try to take credit for, or claim ownership of, free unmerited grace. It’s just another way to think those with oil are the goodies and those without oil are the baddies. The oil of gladness is gifted, is given–it’s not some human-created commodity of which we can have more or less.

What if, instead of frantically fracking for the oil of gladness, we just left ourselves alone in loving letting-be?  What if we didn’t try to pretty up the picture? What if, instead of shooing away all the messy bits of our human life–our pain, our grief, our temper, our difficulties–we just let them be held in the manger of the heart with Christ? What if we stepped off the gerbil wheel of self-improvement and thinking we have to earn free grace and learned to relax back, to float in God’s boundless love, to let it all be held in the loving, accepting, oil of gladness embrace of God? What if we stopped the war with ourselves, stopped trying to get the animals to stand still for a posed portrait at the Pottery Barn catalogue manger and saw that it is already perfect just as it is?

The whole deal is for Christ to be born in the manger of the heart. The truly miraculous thing, the astounding thing, is that actually he’s already there. “The love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit that has been given to us,” Paul tells us. It is done. Accomplished. Finished. The only thing left is to live from this reality–to accept it, and be that effervescent, forgiven, freedom for apparent others. The only thing is to accept that each and every one of us, just as we are, is swaddled up, snug, and tight in God’s love. And guess what? That means that every so-called “other” is swaddled up, snug and tight too. That means, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning puts it, “[that] every common bush [is] afire with God.” That stranger? An angel whose feet we’re called to wash. That good creation that “generations have trod, have trod, have trod/and… seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;/ [that] wears man’s smudge?” The very Tent of Meeting! The whole world a manger and every night the Silent Night when the peace that passes understanding waits to be born in us so as to be shared with others, poured out oil of gladness.

Barrett Browning continues, “But only he who sees, takes off his shoes/The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries/And daub their faces unaware.” Taking off our shoes, we see that every bush is a burning bush in the manger of the cosmos, no longer as mere dead matter, something to be trod upon, used, consumed, exploited, profited from and polluted. Taking off our shoes, we see the stranger no longer as a feared inconvenience, but as Christ himself. Taking off our shoes we begin to love even ourselves–no longer chained to the grinding story of “not enough,” we come to know ourselves as beloved children of God from whom nothing can separate us. And taking off our shoes we glimpse God beyond our little boxes, no longer as some distant judge winding up a clockwork universe, but closer to us than we are to ourselves. God in us, God with us, playing in ten thousand places. Playing too in that candy bar wrapper blown into the manger scene. Nothing left out, no one left behind. Swaddled, all of it, in God’s wild, crazy love. Take off your shoes–stop, drop your stories and projects, be still–and you never know what God will use to nudge you awake to that Good News that Christ is born not just in a manger 2021 years ago, but in you, now. “What shall I say! And how shall I describe this Birth to you? For this wonder fills me with astonishment.”