December 26, 2021 – 1st Sunday after Christmas

Let us bow our heads in prayer.  Gracious God, we give you thanks for the gift of your presence, within us, in this place, and in all the places we are gathered in this time.  We give you thanks for the gift of your Son, Jesus Christ.  Help us to open our minds, our hearts, our bodies, our whole lives, to receive the gift of your living word for us this day; and may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.

Less than 48 hours ago on Christmas Eve, we read Luke’s account of the birth of Jesus, with Mary, and Joseph, in Bethlehem in Judea.  And Luke’s account is a highly visual account.  There’s an inn, a stable, a manger, bands of cloth (or for some of us used to the traditional wording – ‘swaddling clothes’), shepherds in the fields at night, celestial brightness of angels praising God and announcing to shepherds – then the visual sign of a newborn-son in a manger, in a stable in Bethlehem.  So there is much to see in Luke’s account.

And for us, thanks to Luke, we have now been able to see this same birth, at least indirectly.  I want you to take note of the unique particularity of what took place. If you think about it, this is how - this birth story – this is how the Christian faith, the Christian way of life, Christianity as a religion, began.  It did not begin as a moral or ethical code.  It did not begin as a new and attractive philosophy.  It began as a person, and a particular person whom people had to recognize in a particular way.  They had to “see” Jesus of Nazareth for who he really was – the Son of God, the Messiah.

Now certainly, not everyone saw this Jesus for who he really is – either then or now.  It requires a certain kind of “seeing” in order to recognize who he is, and to come to terms with the transformative nature of that “seeing” – of that understanding.  This is what today’s Collect Prayer is describing.  We prayed, “Almighty God, you have shed upon us the new light of your incarnate Word.  May this light, enkindled in our hearts, shine forth in our lives.”  There are a couple of things going on here.  Our ‘eyes’ have to be open to fully seeing the reality and the significance of the birth of Jesus, the Christ, both in our life, and in our world.  But there’s more than simply reading the text.  Those of us who are able-sighted take the function of sight for granted, don’t we?  The art of seeing, though, is probably 10% to do with your eyes, and 90% to do with your minds and your hearts.  Every time you see something that you’ve never seen before, you automatically try and describe it in terms of what you do know – what you have seen before.  You don’t consciously think to do this.  You automatically try to attach meaning to the visual image your eyes send to your brain.  This is why at night, or in subdued lighting, we say that your eyes “play tricks on you” when you see something and don’t recognize what it is.

But that doesn’t only apply to physical seeing.  In the Collect Prayer we prayed that God “had shed upon us the new light your incarnate Word.” – that in some way God had helped us to grasp the significance of Jesus of Nazareth coming into the world.  It’s not unlike, in our present context saying, “I was against getting vaccinated against Covid-19 until I talked with my family physician.  And in speaking with her about it, she ‘shed a new light on it for me.’, and now, I’m vaccinated and I see the real value in it.

Two things had to happen for that person.  First of all, they had to open themselves to receiving the information – the truth about getting vaccinated.  And then, they had to allow that truth to change their understanding so that they changed their behaviour – the way they were living.  And, as many of us have frustratingly discovered, the “company of the vaccinated” is not created in a general, en masse kind of way.  It is made up of individual persons, each opening themselves, receiving the truth about vaccination, and then allowing that truth to manifest itself in them by choosing to become vaccinated.  It happens one, by one, by one.

It is the same with “seeing” (or reading, or hearing about) the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem two thousand years ago, and having its truth ‘enkindled’ in our hearts, such that we recognize Jesus as God’s Son – literally coming to love us and empower us as God’s children.  And then, to live our lives in the light of that loving reality, such that others see and experience that loving truth in us.

So just like the phenomenon of visual sight, there’s two parts in this kind of sight – recognizing what you’re looking at, and then allowing what you’ve recognized and named to then direct your behaviour.  And like the vaccine example, you can’t ‘affiliate’ in a general sort of way. You can’t simply ‘blend in’ with those “whose hearts have been enkindled” by the reality of the birth of Jesus being the gift of God to bring them new life; anymore than you can simply hang around with people who are vaccinated and thereby think that you’ve joined with them – in a general sort of way – without actually being vaccinated!

It is this “living in the reality that the birth of Jesus is the gift from God of new life for me” that the author of today’s 2nd Reading, from Colossians, is trying to describe.  So when we accept the ‘new light’ of God’s incarnate Word in the birth of Jesus, and allow that loving truth to be “enkindled in our hearts” – this is what our lives should look like – individually and corporately as Christ’s Church: “Clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.  Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.  Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.  And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body.  And be thankful …”

It is not that we ought to, kind of, try and live our lives like this in the hope that God might notice us and come to us, anymore than hoping, some how, that we won’t become infected by Covid by, not getting vaccinated, but by hanging around with vaccinated people and trying to live the way they do.

The personal recognition of the birth of Jesus as the gift of God’s reconciling love for you and for the world is the only way to have that love enkindled in us – and to have it shine forth to others.  Open yourself to the truth of the birth of Jesus.  Have that truth kindled or re-kindled in your heart, and let God shine it forth in our lives – yours and mine.

Amen.