Let me welcome each and every one of you on this holy night of quiet joy and contemplation. If you are visiting among us, please know that you are welcome into this community of faith, love, and prayer and I hope you will stay to greet each other at the end of the service. We're happy you're here and we hope you'll return again.

I don't know about you, but one of the most difficult parts of the Christmas season is just how hectic it all becomes. With all the housecleaning, meal planning, gift buying and basic running around, by the time I get to tonight, I'm usually exhausted. Not only that, but worst of all, I find myself living through much of the season as if I were only partially there, my mind scattered and fragmented, sometimes wondering if I really am there at all. In short, with all the preoccupation of the season, its difficult, I think, just to be present. There's a lot wrong with all that, but primarily, it seems that I really miss out on what's really happening. I'm not really living. Well, I don't want that to be the case tonight if we can help it. So, take a second with me and just let your body, mind and spirit join us in this moment. Put away all the stuff from today, or yesterday, or plans for tomorrow, or even what's coming up in a few minutes, and let us just be present with each other in this beautiful place and moment.

As I was thinking about our distractions, I became very aware of another level of realities that prevent us from being present that is important for us to name. Christmas is such a powerful cultural event with so many overlays of meaning, importance and conflicting intentions that it often seems difficult, if not impossible to focus upon the rich spiritual textures of this night in a meaningful way. We know, for example, that for some if not many of us, this night invokes all sorts of memories of the past; perhaps former loves and lovers, family members or loved ones not with us here, old memories of childhood or home both cherished or painful, perhaps old losses, griefs or bitterness that for most of the rest of the year we carry well protected and hidden in the protective vaults of our soul, but which somehow have a way of escaping, rising to the surface and crowding their way into our consciousness when we're emotionally or spiritually vulnerable. My suggestion is that, if that's happening to you, you can just let them all be here with you. Don't try to fight them off. If there are tears to shed, what better place to do it? You're among friends here. Those powerful memories are here to be healed tonight and I pray that you will allow them into the light to be healed. Try to be present with all that you bring with you because tonight we pray that the light and peace we invoke will shine in our darkness and bring joy to heal our sadness. Tonight is a holy night.

Tonight we intentionally fill this sacred space with great and powerful symbolism. We use candlelight, incense, music and beautiful things to fill our senses. We gather at this deepest part of this winter night, when our world seems stilled, dark and chilled with death and silence. It is a stillness that could easily speak of the coldness and darkness of our hearts and our deepest yearnings for warmth, light and peace. But for us this night, the silence and the darkness are not forbidding but give way to images of pregnancy, new birth and the mystery at the heart of the universe itself. The harvest seeds have fallen and have gestated in the cold earth. Yet, they are about to spring forth in new birth. In the midst of this darkness shines the light and in that light we see can begin to know the hope that is the heart of the universe beating and throbbing. We fill this sacred space this night with the smells, the sounds and the sights to fill our senses with richness. We want to respond to the deeper, more mystical more profound world that is always with us but of which we are usually unaware. We want to enter into an encounter with the divine itself-- the mystery of incarnation-- of the divine world penetrating and infusing our mundane and diffused realities.

We all know this story of Christmas so well that many of us can quote it by heart. It's a simple story at one level, a story filled with quiet mystery and hopefulness. At its core, the story of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth is the churches' way of proclaiming our most radically profound conviction: that the divine source of all life has entered and engaged this material world in a decisive way for us, to heal us and to make us at-one with that divine life. This is the meaning of the word salvation: to be made whole, to be healed!

At a political level, the narrative of Jesus' birth does not present a confrontation between the imperial powers of the world-- symbolized by the Roman Emperor Augustus who was claimed by the Romans as God's son, and the birth of a Jewish peasant child named Joshua which we translate as Jesus. No, what we are invited to see in our story is the contrast between the vain expectations of the world that runs on its own destructive values, and true hope; between short lived caesars whose political promises cannot be fulfilled, and the dependable promises of an eternal God; between the peace of Rome, and the peace of Christ. We are asked to turn our eyes to see the one in our story who will bring true peace to us and to all humankind. The Christmas story is not just about changing hearts and personal healing. Christmas is the partial fulfillment of God's promise to remake the whole world for peace and good will by remaking the human spirit in oneness with the divine.

Thus, the birth of the Christ child displays the true character of the divine life who is caring and compassionate of us and of our world. This encounter with the divine gives light to our life and brings us into oneness with God. Incarnation, the enfleshment of the divine, God truly with us, is what we celebrate tonight.

What is crucial about this night is that the divine source has engaged us not with rules, moral principles or even with timeless wisdom by which we are encouraged to live. Christianity is about our meeting, our actual engagement and encounter with the awesome power that creates and sustains the universe. And what we encounter is nothing less than a real human being. We are challenged to see the divine as we enter this story of a peasant child born in an out of the way place to a nobody people. The mystery of the incarnation is that the extraordinary points to the ordinary and says, "See, God is among you."

Amid the myriad distractions that usually blind us to seeing what is plainly before our eyes, that the divine is ever surrounding us, we are therefore urged to reawaken to this most radical claim of Christian faith. We must rekindle our capacity to see God at work in our midst.

We must also see that what we celebrate is not simply some nostalgic rehearsal of an historical event that occurred 2000 years ago. Meister Eckhart, a 15th century mystical preacher said it well when he said that people think that God became incarnate there-- then-- in his historical incarnation, but that is not so-- for God is here in this very place. Eckhart meant that we make a grave mistake if we do not understand that Christmas is about what God's divine love is calling forth in our own hearts and minds. He asks, if this birth is always happening and it happens not in me, what does it profit me? We are being urged tonight to open ourselves to the possibility of our being deeply present as this other world of the divine life floods into this one with meaning, with glory and above all with hope. Tonight we are called to be truly here, to make our whole selves available- to allow ourselves to give birth to that dream made really human reality that we see in the coming of the Christ child. What, I suspect, we all yearn for is that something be born in us tonight as well. The Christ was born this night to bear other Christs for our world. We too are to become the Christ for that is what we already are.

Francis of Assisi said it well when he said that we are the mother of Christ when we carry him in our heart and body by love and a pure and sincere conscience. And we give birth to him through our holy works which ought to shine on others by our example. We are invited to be awake, aware and in touch that in every setting in which we find ourselves throughout the year, there is the opportunity to meet the newborn Christ in another-- the one, human as we are, who is helpless, fragile and in need of our care and our compassion. Each time we respond in that way, we live out of the compassion and love of Christ. So tonight we are bidden to do nothing less than to consent to birth the Christ within us. What Christmas means for us is that we are by God's gracious love, what Christ is by nature-- God's daughters and sons.

This church, this congregation of Christian people, is then the community of God's sons and daughters that exists to keep this vision of this divine reality present in and for our world. Tonight we focus on the place where the divine and the human worlds meet-- the incarnation of Jesus the Christ. Tonight we proclaim that out of the darkness of our world, the divine light has shined upon us and called us to live lives worthy of that light. Tonight we know ourselves called to share that light of the glory of God that we see in the face of Jesus Christ. May this light and joy be healing and peace for you and those you love. I pray that this healing and peace may spread over all the entire world this night. May that light of the newborn Christ shine forth in your life as you leave this holy place this night that the world might see and know that the divine Source wills us well, that we've found favor with the Source of the Universe. For unto us a child is born, unto us a Son is given. Thanks be to God.