All Saints’, Dorval
Christmas Eve, Year C
December 24, 2024
The turkeys.
I recently ran across this passage from the well-known spiritual writer Joan Chittister, in her book In Search of Belief. It’s a longer excerpt than I usually quote, but I think it’s worth hearing in full.
“Christmas is a strange season. When you are a child, it is a season of presents. When you are young, it’s a season of parties. When you get your own home, it’s a season of preparations. But when you get older, Christmas changes color drastically. Suddenly, out from behind the advertisements and big dinners, through the haze of old carols and soft candles, past the dazzling altars and sumptuous crib scenes, we begin to see what Christmas is really all about. Christmas is about finding life where we do not expect life to be.
Every year of life waxes and wanes. Every stage of life comes and goes. Every facet of life is born and then dies. … Every hope dims and every possibility turns eventually to dry clay. Until Christmas comes again. Then we are called at the deepest, most subconscious, least cognizant level to begin once more to live newly again.
Christmas brings us all back to the crib of life to start over: aware of what has gone before, conscious that nothing can last, but full of hope that this time, finally, we can learn what it takes to live well, to grow to the full stature of soul and spirit, get it right.
There is a child in each of us waiting to be born again. It is to those looking for life that the figure of Christ, a child, beckons. Christmas is not for children. It is for those who refuse to give up and grow old, for those to whom life comes newly and with purpose each and every day, for those who can let yesterday go so that life can be full of new possibilities always, for those who are agitated with newness whatever their age. Life is for the living, for those in whom Christmas is a feast without finish, a celebration of the constancy of change, a call to begin once more the journey to human joy and holy meaning.”
I like this image, that the essence of Christmas is about finding life where we do not expect life to be.
Certainly, at Christmas, we often have expectations – and those expectations are often frustrated. We expect particular people around the table, we expect good cheer, we expect picture-perfect moments. And then someone’s flight is cancelled, everyone comes down with gastro, the toddler pitches a tantrum; tempers flare, the perfect picture in our head falls apart, and accusations start flying about who ruined Christmas.
That kind of expectation is the expectation that we would do better to dispense with; everyone will be happier in the long run.
But what if we changed our expectation, and started expecting precisely to be surprised? What if we looked for life in the places where we do not expect life to be?
Every year, All Saints by the Lake puts together six Christmas baskets for families in our neighbourhood who are having a hard time getting by at the holidays. We collect canned goods and gifts and cash contributions. Our fearless volunteers, led by Outreach Coordinator Darlene Scott, buy the turkeys and hams and perishable produce. We write holiday cards and include them with the packages. It’s a remarkable logistical effort.
This year, the Christmas basket team finished up late on Wednesday morning, and triumphantly carried the baskets out to the cars for delivery to Dorval Community Aid. Just a few minutes later, I was passing through the narthex on my way to Laura’s office as I do a dozen times a day, when I looked out the window next to the front door and realized there was a giant pile of canned goods sitting on the pavement outside.
We had no idea where they came from or who left them there. They were eventually brought inside and stashed under the tables at the back of the church, where they’re still awaiting delivery to Community Aid sometime next month, when food bank shelves are bare in the post-holiday slump.
We thought that was the end of it. But on Friday morning, after the temperature had dropped twenty degrees, I arrived at work and did a double take as I realized that in front of our outdoor Nativity scene, eight frozen turkeys were lying on the equally frozen ground. Laughing in disbelief, I called Community Aid. They verified that they would be delighted to have the turkeys, and so a few hours later, off they went, hopefully to help eight more families who needed some Christmas cheer.
Finding life and hope, indeed, where we do not expect life and hope to be.
“How beautiful upon the mountains,” sings the prophet Isaiah, “are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation.” Or, how beautiful upon the lakeshore are the feet those who come bearing frozen turkeys and cans of vegetables.
And we don’t receive these blessings because we are particularly good or virtuous. We are saved, as the letter to Titus reminds us, “not because of any works of righteousness that we had done, but according to his mercy.” We don’t feed people at Christmas because they’re special or meet a particular standard of deserving-ness; we feed them because they need to be fed. And when God became flesh and dwelt among us, it was certainly not because we were particularly worthy, but because we had such a crying need for a Saviour.
And the more we can let go of our ideas about what we deserve and what other people deserve, the more open we’ll be to those moments of surprise, the moments that defy expectation, the moments that show us life in places where no life was thought to be found.
To remind ourselves of Chittister’s words: “Life is for the living, for those in whom Christmas is a feast without finish, a celebration of the constancy of change, a call to begin once more the journey to human joy and holy meaning.” Joy and meaning to which we are all invited, whether we’ve been naughty or nice.
Chittister is right to emphasize the constancy of change, the fact that we will find much more joy in those moments of delighted surprise if we do not try to hang on to them too tightly, if we accept that nothing in this mortal life can be expected to last forever.
And yet. If Christmas means anything, it means that behind those moments of delight, behind those glimpses of joy and holiness, there is something more than a fleeting and transient pleasure. There is a divine reality, a joy eternal and inexhaustible, of which these moments are only the tiniest foretaste. And that joy, that reality, became flesh among us at Christmas, was made human and cradled in his mother’s arms and wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger.
And because that is so – because Christ came to us, because Emanuel is God with us – amid the waxing and waning, the coming and going, the birth and the dying, the sudden sorrows and the unexpected delights, of our human lives, we have the assurance, unalterable and absolute, that God is joy and love and salvation, and that that joy and love and salvation are ours for the having. All we have to do is have eyes to see, and hearts to come and kneel at the manger.
Amen.
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