What Love Looks Like
December 24, 2021
Rev. Dr. Timothy Hart-Andersen
Isaiah 9:2-7; Luke 2:1-20; John 1:1-5; 14, 16
We all come to Christmas looking for something.
The shepherds come looking for a child wrapped in bands of cloth, lying in a manger. The angels come looking for “the Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” The Magi come looking for a king.
The Holy Family is much more practical; they come looking for a room in the inn where they can have the baby.
What do we come looking for this Christmas?
We have made it through the night to get here, to this sanctuary or to the sanctuary at home, through the literal night as well as the one we’ve all been in for nearly two years. Maybe we come looking for signs of the dawn, for the light that shines in the bleak and broken places and does not go out. Will it ever come?
Maybe we come looking for a moment of rest. For peace. For healing. For respite from the multi-layered trauma that is our time.
Or perhaps we come looking for sacred space where we can find safety and shelter from the cruelties of the world outside.
We all come to Christmas looking for something.
Some of us come looking for things we will not find. Take Joseph, for instance. In the story, Matthew seems to think the Bethlehem scene is all about Joseph. The gospel writer devotes eight verses to the whole Christmas story, and about seven and a half of them focus on Joseph and his need to work out the fact that he’s not the biological father of the child. I think Matthew is working something out for himself. He concludes by mentioning, almost in passing, that “she bore a son” – not even using her name.
It’s the mansplaining version of Christmas. In Matthew’s version, Joseph comes to the story needing to be at the center of it and in control. They will never get to Bethlehem that way. We will never get to Bethlehem if we’re looking only to ourselves, for ourselves. If we think too small and too close, we will miss the point entirely.
Christmas offers an invitation to look beyond ourselves, to see what love looks like. We can expect to find it in surprising places.
A good friend of ours died this week after suffering for months with an acute illness. He had served for many years as Executive Director of the Parliament of the World’s Religions, the oldest and largest interfaith organization on the globe.
Two weeks ago, I led a prayer vigil for him in a zoom call with more than 100 participants from all around the world. It was as if we had convened the Parliament of the World’s Religions. They were all there: Hindus, Jains, Muslims, Humanists, Jews, Sikhs, Buddhists, Roman Catholic and Protestant Christians, Unitarians, Bahai’s. There were several Zoroastrians, the ancient religion of the Magi who followed the star in the nativity story.
I have been doing interfaith work for 40 years, but I’ve never encountered anything like that global prayer vigil. People tuned into the call with lit candles symbolizing our shared hope. Every religious community seeks the light. I invited them to offer words from their traditions.
They prayed for our mutual friend’s health, but they didn’t stop there – which would have pleased him. They prayed for our entire wounded world. They asked for peace, for wisdom, for healing across the planet, for justice, for an end to strife, for relief from the pandemic. For 90 minutes, different faces from all over the world appeared on the screen with their candles and prayers. As I listened and scrolled through the images, I became aware of the presence of a love that transcends any single faith tradition and binds us together in one human community.
And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory.
I had not gone to that interfaith gathering looking for Christmas, but there it was, staring me in the face, in a way I had never imagined. It must have been something like what the shepherds experienced when they looked in and saw Mary’s baby. God’s love in the flesh, but how could they ever have thought the Messiah would look like that, so tiny and helpless?
At Christmas we come looking for love, and it will show up, even in the most despairing times and places, because the light shines in the shadows. We have only to look within, and into the heart of our neighbor to find it. If we love one another, John says, God lives in us. After all, God is love.
The incarnation demystifies the unapproachable transcendence of God. No longer a distant deity, God comes to us at Christmas not only as one who loves us from afar, but who, as an infant, needs to be loved by us.
Theologian Meister Eckhart is reputed have asked way back in the Middle Ages,
“What good is it to me that Mary gave birth to the son of God fourteen hundred years ago, and I do not also give birth to the Son of God in my time and in my culture? We are all meant to be mothers of God, for God is always needing to be born.” (https://www.azquotes.com/quote/528756)
We may come to Christmas with our limited imaginations, but others did not, and God certainly does not. A poor, unwed couple bearing the child Jesus, Savior of the world? Shepherds, lowest on the social rung, sent by angels to be the first to find him? Foreigners with a different religion being the next to see him?
The signals are there from the start: wherever there is love, wherever there is hope, wherever light flickers in the gloom, there is the God whom we worship and serve. Christmas intrudes into the madness of the world, refusing to be shunted aside. It disrupts the way things are and proposes that love would be the guiding force in all we do.
Maya Angelou writes in her Christmas Poem,
Into this climate of fear and apprehension, Christmas enters,
Streaming lights of joy, ringing bells of hope
and singing carols of forgiveness high up in the bright air.
The world is encouraged to come away from rancor,
And come the way of friendship.
A group of us recently visited with Pastor Alika Galloway and lay leaders of Liberty Church in north Minneapolis, a Westminster partner since it began 25 years ago. We were invited to come learn about their community ministries. They serve 300-400 people a week in various ways: 21st Century Academy, an after-school program preparing students for academic success; Northside Healing Space, a center providing support to women and girls who have been trafficked; and other programs and ministries offering meals and training and healing to individuals and neighbors living in a traumatized community.
They’re in the midst of a capital campaign, and the printed materials were not finalized for us. “I’m sorry things are not how we would like,” the Rev. Dr Alika Galloway said, “But when we have to choose between getting the papers right or feeding the kids, we always choose the children.”
And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory.
We weren’t looking for Christmas on that snowy morning in a church in north Minneapolis, but there it was. We learned that day what love looks like.
What do we come looking for this Holy Night in a troubled world?
We are a people divided, a people living in fear, an angry people, an exhausted people, a despairing people. A friend of mine said to me this week, “If I were Jesus, I might think twice about being born right now.”
But Christmas happens precisely because of the shape the world is in. We’ve been looking for all the wrong things – power that comes from putting others down, privilege that leaves others out, material things as sources of comfort and happiness, and hostility that breeds hatred and tears us apart.
The love that comes at Christmas expects us to do better. To stand up for what is right, especially when someone is being hurt or excluded. To speak up when others cannot do it for themselves. To resist falling into those patterns that keep dividing us. To respect the God-given goodness in every human being. To steward the earth.
Let us go to Bethlehem this year, with the angels and the shepherds and the Magi, to see what love looks like, to find an alternative to the animosity and injustice depleting our souls, weakening our communities, and hobbling our nation.
We all come to Christmas looking for something.
If we’re like Joseph – at least as Matthew tells it – we might need to shift our sights beyond ourselves.
When we look out, and peer into the night, joining others in our community and around the world seeking the light of love, together we will see the coming dawn.
Thanks be to God.
Amen.
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