Christmas Eve Sermon

A sermon preached by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on December 24, 2023, Christmas Eve.

One of my very favorite books as a child was called Flat Stanley. It tells the story of one Stanley Lambchop who is squashed flat after an unfortunate run-in with a bulletin-board. Paper-thin, but otherwise uninjured, Stanley soon discovers that his newly acquired slenderness has its advantages. He gets mailed to California to visit friends for the cost of a single postage stamp, ducks and swoops through the air as a kite, and helps apprehend art thieves by pretending to be a painting on the museum walls. And lest you despair of what became of poor Flat Stanley, fear not as the angels say to the shepherds. At story’s end he is restored to the original fullness of our beloved pre-bulletin board Stanley Lambchop by means of a bicycle pump.

Why, you ask, am I talking about Flat Stanley on Christmas Eve? Not with Tertullian, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” but, “What has Flat Stanley to do with the incarnation?” Ever since I was a kid, those lines in the synoptic Gospels, “Strive to enter through the narrow door,” have prowled about, haunted, my spiritual life. You see, being a self-reliant, perfectionistic, do-gooder who knows how to “shake hands and look Mr. So-and-So in the eye,” I conceived of the Christian life as an exercise in becoming flat enough to slip through the narrow gate. I know lots of other people, especially here in Utah, who have been taught that only the highest degree of moral purity (flattening ourselves by our own efforts) will lead finally, maybe, one day in the future (if we keep our guard up and eschew all entreaties from the bicycle pump) to slipping through to the love of God. Then, then, then we will finally be loved.

The casualties of this sado-masochistic picture of God are real. Mother Holly and I have stood at their gravesides and watered the ground with our tears. Never being enough–smart enough, straight enough, faithful enough, moral enough, skinny enough, white enough–that grinding claustrophobic hell of always being a day late and a dollar short is death-dealing. That the Christian life–“I came that they might have life and have it abundantly,” or “The glory of God is the human person fully alive,”—gets framed in such a way turns the Good News of God for us in the person and work of Jesus Christ into a deadly poison. Not just do we have a merciless, score-keeper God whom only the flattest of the bunch can appease, but we also have a model of salvation as entirely the work of our own efforts. As if union and communion with the living God, resting in our adoption as children of God, were something we could achieve in the same manner in which we work our way to a record time in the 100 meter dash. Over the hill and still recovering from surgery, I’m quite certain that whatever “enough” I’m supposed to be, it ain’t happening. If this depends on me and my efforts, I’m most certainly lost. 

Perfect peach performative perfection in all its various tempter guises–intellectual, spiritual, moral, liturgical, musical–is an ever-receeding horizon. The more we “try,” the more we attempt to strive, earn, win, gain, storm heaven by force of will, the further away we get. And this applies to human beings as a whole, too. I take Robert Capon’s zinger as axiomatic– “If the world could have lived its way to salvation, it would have, long ago. The fact is that it can only die its way there, lose its way there.”

The whole scandalously beautiful and prodigal point of the Gospel, God becoming human in the person of Jesus, is that God comes to us here, now, as we actually are, not as we ought to be. God in the person and work of Jesus journeys prodigally to the far country of skin, blood, bone, of sin and death, to draw us home into the easeful enjoyment of the Father’s running-out-while-we-still-far -off gratuitous good pleasure. God comes down—God Flat Stanleys for us—into the narrow gate of a feed trough in a stable to meet us in our need for a Savior. God in the person and work of Jesus assumes the entirety of our human nature in order to draw us back to Godself, to participate in God’s very life, to become partakers of divine nature. We’ve spent all this time climbing church-sanctioned ladders, trying to win, earn, accumulate, and merit our way to grace, when all that’s required is the simple, trusting, child-like and faithful recognition that Jesus has passed through that narrow gate. Our salvation–worked mysteriously since before the foundation of the world by the Lamb Slain-and-Standing–has already taken place. Jesus in the skinny guise of Flat Stanley has slipped into that narrow slot and busted the heavy iron doors of heaven off their rusty hinges. Hidden to Caesar’s eyes in a squirming little baby slotted in a feed trough reeking of dirty nappies and curdled spit-up in some off-the-beaten track shanty God has come to us to draw us home. This is sheer, extravagant, unearned, unmerited grace and gift sloshed over everyone and everything. An amazing grace that “works without requiring anything on our part. It’s not expensive. It’s not even cheap. It’s free.” Paul’s Letter to Titus, in its once-per-year cameo at Christmas riff, puts it this way:

When the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of any works of righteousness that we had done, but according to his mercy, through the water of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit. This Spirit he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that, having been justified by his grace, we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.

Our mangering, pants-pooping God comes to meet us where we are, as we are, just like this in order to draw, to drag, us startled heirs into the divine life, to reveal this ordinary rubble as much fine gold.  Not because we earned it, or were nice, or performed perfectly, but because poured-out-for-all homeward-turning gracious mercy is who God is. Gregory the Theologian writes, “He who gives riches becomes poor, for he assumes the poverty of my flesh so that I may assume the richness of his deity. He who is full empties himself… that I may have a share of his fullness.” Or, in St. Irenaeus’ terms, “Our Lord Jesus… through his transcendent love became what we are that he might bring us to be what he is.” What a wondrous exchange!

How strange, if rather dully predictable, that we turn the stunning, history-pivoting event of God come to us, unearned, unmertited, and undeserved, into some work we have to imitate: “God gives gifts and you should too.” How quickly the gospel of free grace gets bent towards another tedious form of law we inscribe on ourselves and others as we tap our toes waiting for the thank you card. Receiving, after all, is not something we’re practiced at. We know how to do lots of stuff. And we think we know how to give–even if it’s often just visiting ourselves on others. In his book Between Noon and Three, Capon offers this powerful prayer of our deeply entrenched and delusive need to earn, win, gain–anything but the receptivity of faith alone and grace alone and Christ alone. It gets me when I live every time:

Lord, please restore to us the comfort of merit and demerit. Show us that there is at least something we can do. Tell us that at the end of the day there will at least be one redeeming card of our very own. Lord, if it is not too much to ask, send us to bed with a few shreds of self-respect upon which we can congratulate ourselves. But whatever you do, do not preach grace. Give us something to do, anything; but spare us the indignity of this indiscriminate acceptance. 

If we’re honest, this manger is a stinging, and stinking, rebuke of our bootstrapping ways, of our desperate need to secure some private territory of our own that makes us think we’ve actually earned our salvation, that we’ve won the victory, not Christ Jesus who has won it for us. Spare us the indignity of this indiscriminate acceptance… spare us the indignity of coming to us in the muck and straw of this manger to draw us to yourself. Give us a ladder to climb, a program to follow, a theological puzzle to solve, a prize to win, a carrot to chase, a stick to run from…  give us anything, anything, but this free gift fashioned just for us in human form so that we have to receive him colicky and squirming, nuzzling against our breast.

Here, now, this night, amidst the chaos and brokenness, the bombs and the rubble, the grief and sorrow of the longest, coldest, darkest night, God mangers in/with/for us, to set us free, to sprout shoots of unconditional belovedness from the dead stump of a heart worn out by so much working and earning and striving and gaining. And so we kneel and hymn this God-come-to-us on this silent, holy night. We let fall all the not enoughs. We let God be God for us and let God’s love do its homeward-turning work. And so we open our cramped, grasping fists and make of our palms a humble, wrinkled, trembling  narrow gate of a manger to receive the Flat Stanley host–Christ’s very body–as a token of trust, as the proclamation that we without exception are called, “Sought Out, A City Not Forsaken.” O blessed indignity! O delicious affront! O holy ordinary! Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors.

Amen.