Christmas 2013

Even though I wasn't able to celebrate with you this Christmas, I want to share a homily from a few years ago.

First of all: take a deep breath.

And here we are again, gathering in the deep darkness of winter to praise the light, like so many generations before us.

In the spirit of all who came before us and are gone, the family of all people everywhere, of loved ones who are not with us tonight, or who may never be with us again,

tonight we call forth the spirit of Christmas, and pray that this spirit may live in our hearts the whole year through.

The spirit of Christmas.

We hear that phrase a lot this time of year.

Speaking only for myself, I don't think I ever really feel it until this very night, when the work is finally done, and there is only this delicious timeless waiting in the dark.

This feeling doesn't come from shopping, it doesn't come from parties, it doesn't come from cards, it even doesn’t come from watching Christmas specials with the possible exceptions of The Grinch and Charlie Brown.

The feeling we seek, the spirit of Christmas, comes only from our hearts, if we can find it and court it and bring it forward.

I really don't quite know how to describe it, other than to say that when I feel it, suddenly I am a child again.

The spirit of Christmas is the spirit of a child.

Tonight my prayer is let us all be children again.

Children of hope, children of change, children of vision, children of God.

For a child's wondering eyes there remains nearly infinite promise and possibility.

Her imagination has not yet fallen asleep to our culture's lullaby of wealth and habit, or to her own fears and insecurities, to her certainties about love and life and death.

For a child magic is real.

He asks, "Why not?" "Who says it can't happen — whatever it is?

Who says you can't be who you were meant to be, who says you can't break down walls with the power of your love,

who says you can't forgive and be forgiven,

who says you can't start all over again, like the sun already making its slow way back to bright light of summer?"

What does your heart, your Christmas heart, say is truer?

The world whose creative possibilities and unifying beauty and wondrous power have no end,

or the world of boundaries and limits and certainties and opinions that we adults choose to live in most of the time?

Jesus of Nazareth, whose birth we celebrate tonight, was very clear where he stood on this matter.

He said: "I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven."

Here was a teacher who found the truth not in the powers of the world, not in the well-trod ruts of his culture, but in seeds, in trees, in lilies of the field, and in the real lives of the poor and in their daily work.

He drank wine like a badly-behaved teenager.

He told his truths in strange mind-bending stories.

His spirit of giving was so great it called for giving everything away if it was asked for, a coat, a cloak, a cheek.

He saw no limits — for Jesus even the mountains would move for us if we only knew how to ask, and there was room for everyone in the great mansion of creation.

Everyone!

Out there in the adult world, it is so easy to dismiss his vision as childish and naive. Childish, yes.

Naïve?

Only if we can't find the child within our heart.

Only if we have given up — and I know we haven't because we're here.

So let us celebrate his beautiful childish vision of a just and loving and peaceful world.

Let us pledge ourselves to bring it about.

For tonight is Christmas eve, and the spirit of the child is among here, and for just a moment everything single thing you dream of, everything, really is possible.