Close to God

Homily for December 24, 2024
Christmas Eve
Luke 2:1-20

Tonight’s Gospel lesson is the familiar Christmas story from Luke chapter 2.  In it we hear of a decree going out from Caesar Augustus, of no room in the inn, of “swaddling clothes,” of shepherds keeping watch over their flocks, and of Joseph and Mary, and the child lying in the manger… The familiar Christmas story is all there.  

And I want to get back to tonight’s Gospel from Luke chapter 2, but first, Luke chapter 5.  In chapter 5 Luke writes about a dynamic that is true for all of us and that pertains to the Incarnation.  From Luke chapter 5:

[Jesus]said to Simon, “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.”  Simon answered, “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing.  Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.” When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to burst.  So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them.  And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink.  But when Simon Peter saw it,he fell down at Jesus’s knees, saying, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!”  (Luke 5:4c-8)

Peter resisted Jesus coming close:  “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!”  Like Peter, we all have within us a tendency to resist God; to resist God is human nature.  And we resist God, suggests Peter, because we know we are a sinful, and our shame does not want to allow Jesus near.  “Go away from me, Lord,” we with Peter say,“for I am a sinful human being.”

But the truth is that we were created to be with God.  We were created to dwell with God in perfect union, to be “tight” with God, to let ourselves come close to God and to let God come close to us.  Our first memory as humans, suggests Genesis,is of being held by God and seeing God’s face inches away from ours, having just breathed life into us.  It is in our "ancestral memory” that God used to seek us out in the Garden simply because God delighted to be with us, and that God would walk with us in the Garden at the time of the evening breeze (Gen 3:8). We remember that we were “the apple of God’s eye.”  

And we remember, too, how we disobeyed God, how we listened to the serpent and took the apple and ate.  We remember the shame we felt when next God came to us in the garden.  Instead of going out to meet God and delighting in God’s presence, we instead hid from God (Gen 3:8).  

The Bible tells how our human tendency to resist persisted when God called Israel to be his own people.  It tells how they were “stiff-necked” when they followed Moses through the desert, how they resisted obeying the commandments, and how (as Jesus would later put it) [how] they killed the prophets and stoned those sent to them (Luke 13:34). Over generations, suggests the Bible, we humans became first-class resisters who tried to keep God at bay. “Go away from me, Lord,” we with Peter say, “for I am a sinful human being.”

Nevertheless, God persisted.  Even though we, like Adam and Eve, may want to hide from God, and even though we, like Peter, might wish Jesus would go away,yet God has never given up on us.  If the father of the Prodigal passively waited for his son to return, God instead actively seeks us out.  And to short-circuit our tendency to resist, God came into our world as an infant.  

Several years ago on a Cape Cod beach, arguments and even shoving matches took place over the limited number of parking places.  The town had been hiring beefy, bouncer-type guys to try to keep things in line but to no avail.  So that summer the town council hired instead a diminutive, soft-spoken high school-aged young woman, and… Problem solved – no more arguments!  The town council had banked on people not becoming defensive and aggressive when the parking lot attendant was a quiet, diminutive high school student.  And it worked.

Similarly, at the first Christmas, in order to circumvent our defenses, God came to us as an infant.  “For in this weak unarmed wise,” wrote the 16^th century poet, Robert Southwell, “The gates of hell he will surprise.”  In the Incarnation God came to us not in a show of force, but in weakness.  This infant in no way will force us to do anything, but only will invite.   As the hymn puts it:

He came as Savior to his own,
The way of love he trod;
he came to win us by goodwill,
for force is not of God.  (F. Bland Tucker, The Hymnal 1982, #489)

Tonight’s lesson from Luke chapter 2, the familiar Christmas story, tells of the culmination of centuries of God’s desire to be with us.  God knows the shame that deep-down we, like Peter, feel. God knows how we tend to resist his drawing near.  And so God comes to us in weakness, not making demands, but instead helpless and inviting our care.

God’s desire to be with us has not diminished.  As much as God wanted to walk with Adam and Eve in the garden, so does God want to be close to us today.  God is aware of any shame we might feel, but know that that shame is one-sided, for God is not ashamed of us.  Indeed, whenever we turn to God, God welcomes us as the father welcomed home his Prodigal Son.  

Writing in the 4^thcentury, Gregory of Nyssa said that all of us, deep-down, whether we are aware of it or not, throughout our lives strive to get back to that first memory of being held by God, God’s face inches away from ours, God’s eyes looking into our eyes, having just breathed into us the breath of life.  If it seems right, I wonder if, during this Christmas season, you might want to pray something like this:

Lord,I want the love, I want the peace, I want the joy that, deep-down, I know I can find only in you.  Will you please work with me in my tendency to resist you?  Can you please work with me as I may still be under the sway of old shame or guilt?  Please let me know, in a way I can feel in my body right now, how much you love me.  For I want the love, the joy and the peace that I know I can find only in you. Amen.

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