Christmas Eve: Two decrees. Two visions of who we are and who we are called to be. Which will we heed?
A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Christmas Eve, December 24, 2019 by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty.
“In those days,” our Gospel begins, “a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world be registered.” So used are we to hearing these words—perhaps in the voice of Linus from Charles Schultz’s Peanuts—that we forget that what we actually get in St. Luke’s narrative is a powerful depiction of two ways, two decrees: one that stamps our names in the book of worldly power and domination, and one that scribes our names in the book of love.
Emperor Augustus wants money for his coffers. He needs people to register so they can be taxed to maintain his regime of conquest, domination, and keeping people in line. He demands obeisance. Groveling. Deference. His decree is that the Emperor—empire, power, control, and orderliness enforced at the tip of a spear—be the axis around which the world turns. The Emperor’s decree comes from the perceived center of the powers of this word and is executed by faceless bureaucrats, nameless cogs in the wheel of Empire who see numbers, not people, dollar signs not faces, who hear the clink of coins in the purse in place of stories.
We all know this decree. It tells us to buy, consume, hoard, and tear down those who don’t share our point of view. It tells us there’s not enough to go around. It speaks of fear, scarcity, and lack, of walling ourselves up against our neighbor whom it only recognizes as threatening other.
But, there is another decree that goes out in our Gospel for this evening. It comes not from the Emperor’s hand, but from the lips of an Angel. It’s received not by fawning governors in their mansions eager to do the Emperor’s bidding in order to curry favor, but by humble shepherds, “living the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night.” This decree comes not from the center of power, but from the very edge of things—what the poet Malcom Guite calls, “The edge of town, the outhouse of the inn,/The fringe of empire, far from privilege/And power….” “Christmas,” he writes, “sets the centre at the edge.”
Unlike the Emperor’s decree, the Angel’s decree doesn’t want something from us—no, the Angel’s decree wants to announce that something astounding has been given to us. In a world on fire with getting and spending, in a world driven by fear of the other, in a world whose bloody peace is maintained on the backs of innocent scapegoated victims, the Angel’s decree announces the culmination of a new way for humanity to be for and with each other. The axis of the world has shifted. Power, domination, fear, exploitation are shown for what they really are—counterfeit versions of who humanity is called be, which is nothing less than love.
Two decrees. Two visions of who we are and who we are called to be. Which will we heed?
In another poem, Guite writes, “They sought to soar into the skies/Those classic gods of high renown/For lofty pride aspires to rise/But you came down./You dropped down from the mountains sheer/Forsook the eagle for the dove/The other Gods demanded fear/But you gave love.” That’s what Christmas, the Incarnation, the Nativity of our Lord announces—a God unlike those imposter gods like Emperor Augustus—who forsakes the lofty heights to come among us as love, to save us from ourselves, to save the world from itself, and show us new way to be. Where Emperors demand fear, God in Christ at the outskirts of town comes as love that that love might be born, not just in a manger, but in our hearts.
Christmas is the journey to the manger of the heart that we might run there and unswaddle by grace those bands of fear and exclusion and Christ live Christ’s life in and through us. That’s the trouble, I think, with hearing the Gospel solely through the lens of history and science. We start asking questions like, did that really happen? Do Angels really exist? What did these shepherds look like and what was their average life-expectancy? Do you see the problem? We turn the invitation to love, to make the journey to the manger of the heart, to have the axis of our own lives shifted, into a rather dull, antiseptic, and academic, affair. We use our so-called intellect to dodge the invitation and then harrumph around wondering why nothing changes. And perhaps it’s not a lack a faith, so much as a failure of imagination, wonder, and awe; an incapacity to open ourselves to something other that what we already know, the stubborn insistence that the way things are is way they’ll always be.
Two decrees. Two visions of who we are and who we are called to be. Which will we heed?
I look around at the world, people say, and I don’t see that Christ has made a difference. Well, I say, stop looking at the world and look to the baby in the creche, look to those awestruck shepherds, look to Mary pondering these things in her heart. The Gospel, and the Church as the always faltering attempt to live it out, shows the world the dead-end nature of its way of operating. The world, left to its own devices will never be a just place. It will forever be the stronghold of power, domination, and registering people in its book. It will forever be the place that sees numbers instead of people and hears the clink of coins instead of stories. That’s what God in the person of Jesus comes to set right.
Only when that little creche in the outhouse of the inn is the axis around which the world turns will our world start to resemble God’s dream for it rather that what is so often our human-created nightmare. The Gospel, as the unique disclosure of God in human form in the person of Jesus shouldn’t accord with how the world turns. God has come into history to throw into sharp relief the way of Emperor Augustus and its nasty habit of making a meat-grinder of human beings. So don’t fret that we only get glimmers of the in-breaking Kingdom on the daily news. That, sadly to say, is to be expected. Only strive, with all your heart, with all your strength, and will all your mind, to have that other decree, the one that’s turned the world upside down, the one that’s announced on the edge of town to scruffy bunch of shepherds, take root and grow in you.
God comes among us to show us in flesh and bone and blood what love looks like in the world. In Jesus we get, once and for all, the example of life wholly united to God by nature in a way that we are to embody by grace. And what do we see? We see boundary-crossing love that touches the untouchable, that gives name, and face, and voice to those who have been rendered nameless, faceless, and voiceless. We see self-emptying love that comes to serve others instead of been served. We see one who comes as bread to feed, water to wash, oil to heal, and wine to slake the thirst of the parched. We see Love giving itself away in love that we might become that love for others, that Love might make a home in us, that Love might tabernacle in our hearts. We see that each of us is a beloved child of God that “in you and you, and you, without exception, God is well pleased.”
That decree, that call, that invitation to love went out to the Shepherds, but if you get quiet, if you get still, you can hear it whispered this night from the depths of your being. That’s the new song God is singing in Christ Jesus. And the only question that remains is will we give it heed? Will we let it sing us away from ourselves? Will your life be that cradle for infinite love made flesh, the placeless place where time and eternity kiss?