The Rev. Kristin Krantz, St. James’, Mt. Airy
Deceber 24, 2021
Isaiah 9:2-7, Psalm 96, Luke 2:1-20
Merry Christmas everyone.
Amid this latest surge of Covid cases and hospitalizations, tonight we are not able to gather together the way we anticipated and hoped. The last 24 hours have felt reminiscent of the earliest days of the pandemic when things were changing so rapidly we could barely keep up.
I know there are many of you are now joining us online either because you’re sick, you or a family member have experienced a Covid exposure, or from an abundance of caution. For those of you here, I’m guessing that you, like me, feel the absence of familiar faces and a yearning for Christmas Eves of years past when it was standing room only.
While I wish we could all be together here in our beautiful church, I trust that God’s grace is shining down on us the holy night wherever we are.
But all of these changes and chances of life are why I have to tell you that I came into church at 2:00 this afternoon to rewrite this sermon. What I had planned just no longer fit where we are tonight. And so instead I want to share an essay that I happened to pull up and read this morning from a theological blog I follow.[1] It was the word I needed to hear and I hope it speaks to you as well.
It’s called Christmas and Distance, and while I’m drawing heavily from it, I’ve also woven in my own thoughts and reflections throughout.
Christmas, we’ve been told, is all about closeness.
“Being together” with loved ones for the holidays. Taking a break from work to connect with family and friends. Gathering for worship. Even Jesus’ celebrated name, “Emmanuel,” means “God with Us.”
And yet this year the opposite seems true. The very idea of togetherness can now seem fraught, even dangerous. Best laid plans for family get-togethers are falling apart, and trips are being cancelled.
It’s the opposite of closeness, the opposite of Christmas.
Or is it?
Harrowing and heartbreaking and annoying as these circumstances are, they can also call our attention to dimensions of the season we might otherwise overlook. On second thought, maybe Christmas is about distance after all.
The stories themselves are full of spans and separations.
The angels call to the shepherds — but they do so out on the open hillsides, across a grand distance on a cold winter’s night.
The Magi notice a star a long, long way off, and set out to follow it. The vast majority of their journey isn’t about closeness, but rather about longing for closeness, seeking out something far away.
Moreover, according to Luke, Mary and Joseph are far from their native town, holed up in a makeshift shelter; no doubt they felt isolated and homesick.
God has come, incarnate in the flesh — but hardly anyone knows! In a way, the “with us” in “God with Us” is a kind of whispered promise in these stories, something yet to come.
In both Matthew and Luke, then, Christmas is a time of yearning across distance. It’s a glimpse of a coming closeness, and at the same time, it underscores the current separation, the journey yet to be traveled. Jesus comes to bridge the distance, to reconcile, to show us the Way.
Over the years, the popular music of the season has intuited this underlying longing. The best-selling Christmas song of all time is Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas,” first performed in 1941 — a melancholy song many associate with soldiers pining for home across an ocean. Indeed, many Christmas songs bring with them a kind of sadness, sometimes unbearable, as we miss loved ones we’ve lost in one way or another.
Even solstice teaches us about distance. On one hand, the light is indeed returning: each day will now be a couple of minutes longer than the day before.
But on the other hand, even so, the reality remains that these are among the longest nights of the year. It’ll be a good while before the luxurious days of late spring come back around. The Messiah’s birth marks a turning of the tide, but there’s still a long way to go.
And so if Christmases past gave us glimpses of the togetherness and intimacy at the heart of the Gospel, this year’s Christmas, like last year’s, may give us a glimpse of another set of indispensable ideas.
There is distance, too, at the heart of Christmas.
It takes many forms, but it most often comes down to this: yearning across a span of space or time. Calling out good news to people afar off, from whom we’re separated by the brisk air of a cold winter’s night — or by health concerns, or pixels, or miles. Noticing an encouraging sign, like a distant star, and resolving to make our way toward it, step by step by step.
Togetherness will come. But in many ways, Christmas begins with distance.
It’s still a season of joy, of course: “God with Us” really is born this day, and the nights really are getting shorter. But it’s also a season of yearning for what’s to come, mourning for what we’ve lost, and renewing our trust that God is with us in the distance, with us in the longing, with us this night as we once again gather to celebrate Christ’s birth. Amen.
[1] SALT Project: https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2020/12/24/christmas-and-distance