December 24, 2009
Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ
Christmas Eve 8:00 & 10:00
Isaiah 9:2-7; Psalm 96; Titus 2:11-14;
Luke: 2:1-14 (15-20)
Merry Christmas!
I am fortunate to be part of a group of clergy that corresponds about many things, our parishes, our faith, our lives, even our dreams! Recently, one of my colleagues in this group, a priest from Texas named Ken Kesselus, wrote to the rest of us about a dream that he had. It was haunting him, and since he told us about this dream, it has been haunting me too. I think there is something quite powerful about the dream, and I thought tonight would be a good time to share it with you. It contains within it a remarkable image, one, I think, essential to Christianity, and one I have a difficult time trying to figure out a way to paint or capture in some artistic way. So, I will try with words.
The dream begins when a person walks into the room carrying two dolls. Immediately the person is recognized by my friend the dreamer as someone very special, although he didn’t know who it was for certain as the face changed often as faces do in dreams. It could have been Gandhi or Archbishop Tutu, or perhaps even Mother Theresa. The person was all these people and more, but recognizable, someone my friend knew and honored. And all those with my friend in the dream who saw the person were in awe, quiet, and reverent.
Then my friend’s eyes were drawn to the dolls the person was holding. Instinctively my friend knew these dolls were the “opposite of voodoo dolls” (you know, those dolls that people who practice witchcraft, make in order to stick pins in to cause harm to others – a sort of “negative” doll?) So the opposite of that must be a “positive” doll, although my friend did not know until that moment in the dream that such dolls existed, nor to this day if they really do. But he thought of it as a “love” doll, a “wishing good things for you” doll. Of course my friend had never heard of such a doll as this and, frankly, neither have I!
But imagine there they were two such love dolls, one in each hand of this commanding, special, known but not identified person.
And then it became apparent to the dreamer that the dolls were alive in some way, human in some way, they moved or something about them was enlivened. And the person held them tenderly and then did a very surprising thing, he took the heart out of each one and invited the other to hold the heart tenderly in their hands. Of course the dolls were still alive, but with this movement of holding the other’s beating heart in their hands they were inseparably intertwined and connected. And they were tenderly caring for each other.
I have had, as I said, a hard time figuring out a way to capture the tenderness of this dream and the idea of holding each other’s hearts in our hands. It is an image that is filled with compassion and love, without any gore, of course, for there wasn’t any in the dream – somehow the thought of a red Valentine heart does not quite capture the profound gift of holding another’s heart and being responsible for it, in a way profound enough to tell the story of the gentleness, interdependence, and even the awareness of taking the responsibility for another by holding their heart so tenderly as this dream conveys.
And so I have been haunted by trying to capture that image in a way that conveys all the love and tenderness and responsibility which my friend conveyed to us that the dream held for him.
And then, in my reflections I thought of a baby lying in a manger. And we can all imagine many of those. We have seen many of those, all of us, in our lifetime, at this time of year. And there is one right here this evening, a manger holding a baby, with shepherds and sheep and cattle around it. That image, for me anyway, begins to capture the intertwined connection of two living love dolls holding each other’s hearts in their hands.
It seems to me this image of baby Jesus in the manger is the embodiment of God trusting us with God’s heart. It is placing his own heart in our hands and trusting what we will do with it, trusting that we will do with it as God does with each of our hearts, protecting them, honoring them, loving them, giving them life in every imaginable way.
There are those who say that Easter is the Christian celebration that makes our faith. And while I love Easter and am grateful for it, for the Resurrection of Christ, grateful every day of my life and consider myself an Easter person one hundred percent of the time no matter the church season, today it is Christmas. Today this humble beginning of a specific human life gives me the deepest joy, the clearest understanding of God’s love for us human beings. For Christmas says to me that God loved us enough to be one of us, loved us, all of humanity, enough, to trust us with his very care and upbringing. He trusted human beings to hold his heart tenderly in their hands.
Most of us are savvy enough to realize that that is not always a wise thing to do, trust humans, that is. And I am certain God knew that then. God knows that now, too, but he did it anyway, because God believed in us, believed in human beings to tenderly care for his heart, for his life, to feed and clothe him, to nurture him and teach him, to encourage him to grow into adulthood and to become the man who could face Easter and the horrible reality that led up to it. But he could not have done it without human parents, siblings, friends, followers, buddies, women who provided sustenance and substance, women and men who gave up their ordinary lives to be His followers.
Tonight, this special night of Christmas, we celebrate that intertwined, mutually interdependent, tender, holding of God’s heart in our hands as God holds our hearts in his. I think that is why it is my favorite of all Christian celebrations because Christmas, the birth of the babe in the manger, surrounded by his parents and shepherds, and later the kings, Christmas, is so filled with the very essence of who God is, that holy Trinity of eternally tender love, and it invites us into that eternal love as bearers of God’s heart.
Christmas is, of course, only one day in a full year of days, one season in a year full of important seasons, but it seems to me, just as we are always Easter people, we also always need to be Christmas people.
We need to hold the hearts of everyone we encounter in our hands, on God’s behalf, all the time. To see each person we encounter through that image of intertwined mutual interdependence. Or in the wisdom of my friend’s dream, we need to hold each other’s hearts in our hands, deliberately, tenderly, patiently, passionately, just as the holy unknowable person did in the dream, just as God does.
Imagine that with me if you will. When we see any of the Christmas images that are so familiar to us, mangers, Joseph, Mary, shepherds, even royal kings and camels, imagine with me even more. Imagine that image of holding another’s heart, another’s very life and soul, in your hands. May that image hold us tenderly with each other and keep us warm, intertwined and blessed in the coming months.
Amen.
The Reverend Dr. Gale Davis Morris
Church of the Good Shepherd