Preached on Christmas Day, December 25, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Phillip Lienau.
Isaiah 52:7-10
Hebrews 1:1-12
John 1:1-14
Psalm 98
Detail from Nativity, by John August Swanson
I invite you to rest.
Whatever is happening in your life, in the past year, or the past month, or yesterday, or even this morning. Whatever you expect to happen this afternoon, or tomorrow, or next week, or next month, I invite you to rest.
For the next half hour, together, I invite us to rest in the Christmas season. I invite us to rest with Mary and Joseph and Jesus — poor, maybe sometimes on the run, of a people oppressed by empire.
Perhaps that doesn’t sound very restful. So let me be more specific. I am not inviting you to a rest in physical, financial, or political security. While I do wish those things for you, and for all, I am not naïve about these things. I read the news. I walk this neighborhood. I have some idea of the sorrows and suffering in this very room, past and present.
And yet, I invite you to rest. I am inviting you to a spiritual rest in Jesus, and more specifically, in Jesus the child, Jesus the infant. I am inviting you to a rest in Jesus at his most vulnerable, with the possible exception of his last hours on the cross.
This invitation to vulnerability is surely paradoxical. I propose that this paradox is part of the mystery of the Incarnation. In the coming weeks and months we will hear all about the life of Jesus. As we do every year, we will hear about Jesus the miraculous, Jesus the wise, Jesus the shepherd, Jesus the Son of God who always seems to be two steps ahead, to know unknowable things, Jesus resplendent in glory, “full of grace and truth.”
But this morning we encounter Jesus the infant, Jesus the vulnerable, Jesus decades away from the wedding at Cana. And the astounding, surprising, perplexing Good News of Christmas is that even in the vulnerability of Jesus the child, we are invited to a spiritual rest.
This is because the spiritual rest to which I refer is not freedom from circumstances that worry us. It is rest from our illusions that we are in control. We aren’t. Whatever control any of us thinks we have over our lives at any time, it is passing, illusory, a castle in the sand. The truth of our existence is that we are all vulnerable, about as vulnerable as Jesus the child, all our lives.
I grant you that many of us do a fair job of keeping up the pretense of control, of knowing what we are doing, or at least looking like it for a moment or two. But if you’re like me, it is incredibly hard work to keep up that act.
I am inviting all of us, for the next half hour, to drop the act. I propose that we agree all together, right now, to stop pretending to each other, and most of all, to ourselves, that we are not vulnerable.
And then, I am invite us to rest in our collective vulnerability, in the faith that Jesus is Emmanuel, God-with-us. Jesus is not just a man born two thousand years ago, half a world away. Jesus is the Christ, the anointed one, and Jesus is also the Logos, the Word of John’s Gospel. Jesus is the vulnerable infant, and Jesus was in the beginning, was with God, and was, and is, God.
Jesus is the navel, the spine, the beating heart of all the Cosmos, for all time and beyond time. And we are members of the Body of Christ; we are connected, even in this moment, with God in time and beyond time. We can access at all times and places the infinitude of God, through Jesus, and yes, through Jesus the vulnerable child.
God does not need us to be strong to connect. God is with us at all times, and it is a well-attested phenomenon that we are often best able to realize our connection with God when we are vulnerable. Sometimes the changes and chances of this weary world forces vulnerability upon us. But we can also access that vulnerability anytime we want, by doing the spiritual work to let go of our ego, to let go of our illusion of being in control.
This Christmas season I invite us rest in the will of God. You might well ask me, okay, what is the will of God? As always, I have two answers for that. First, I am trying to discern that myself, to listen, in prayer, to hear the will of God. So in that way, I don’t know any better than you. Second, the life of Jesus teaches us that the will of God is most often that we care for each other.
This immediately creates another paradox. If, as I propose, the will of God is that we care for each other, that may not sound very restful. But remember that I am not inviting us to a rest from labor, or even from suffering. I am inviting us to the spiritual rest of doing God’s will above our own. Caring for each other, as best as I can tell from the Gospel, is the surest way to rest in God’s will.
Caring for each other does require us to be vulnerable. It works both ways. To care for someone else requires, at least for a moment, to stop obsessing about ourselves, and that can be vulnerable. To be cared for requires us to admit that we need help, and that is most certainly to be vulnerable.
But that is the invitation – to rest in the knowledge that we are vulnerable, that we need help. And it is important to rest in the sure knowledge that however vulnerable we are, we are still, in the midst of that vulnerability, capable, and called to, care for each other.
I received a wonderful gift yesterday, on Christmas Eve. I met a neighbor here at the church who has been going through some very hard times. Yet her face was shining with light, in the midst of her troubles, because earlier in the day she had met a man who asked her if she wanted to hear some poetry. She had said yes, and then he had gifted her with what she described as excellent poetry. She didn’t memorize it, so couldn’t share the poetry itself with me, but what she could, and did, share with me, was her gratitude for the gift he had given her. She then gave that gift to me, by radiating joy. I was awash in her joy, and it was the best Christmas gift I could imagine.
I believe that the source of her joy was her experience of that connection, that love between people that can happen anytime, anywhere. I suspect she might agree that she is vulnerable. Her circumstances are still extremely challenging. Her connection with the poet didn’t solve her worldly problems. Nor did the joy she gave to me solve mine, nor can my joy solve yours.
But in that moment she and I shared, she and I found rest. That is the rest I wish for you, and for all, this Christmas morning, and as often as you can manage it henceforth.
As we turn now to our prayers, and then gather around God’s table, I hope you can find some rest, in the faith that God is with you, God is with us, God carries us, and always gives us the strength and courage, if we dare accept it, to be vulnerable before God, and each other.