A Christmas Sermon for 2024
The Rev. Robert Fruehwirth | St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church in Hillsborough, NC
Opening
If you ask my children, they will tell you that I am overly fond of wordplay — of puns, outrageous metaphors, and especially making up rhyming songs while we are going somewhere together in the car.
And so it’s nothing unusual for them that, when I'm at home, I change the words of one our favorite Christmas hymns, Hark, the Herald Angel Sings. In my version of Hark, the first line becomes Hark, Harold the angel sings! Hark! Harold the angel is singing! Listen to Harold hit the high notes! I find this perennially amusing; my kids not so much.
It’s simple wordplay, but it touches also on something more poignant for me.
Harold the Angel
Back when I was in England, and was a therapist in Norwich, I got to know a man named Harold. The Norwich Constábuláry brought him to my attention. Harold was never a harm to anyone but was not quick-witted. He was perhaps a little “off in the ‘ead” as they would say in Norfolk. He lived on the dole, on disability.
I got to know Harold from the thing that made him infamous in the city. One winter, he was riding his bicycle on the ring road around Norwich, his orange and yellow safety vest flashing like wings behind him, when he saw this hugely bright streetlamp, 1000 watts of halogen too bright, over a parking lot behind a Poundland. (Poundland is the English equivalent of our Dollar General).
Harold got curious, so he went around the back of the store where the light was and found a dog there tethered on a string. Following the string, Harold found a woman, in some pain, slumped between the bins, the dumpsters. She didn't speak English and she was terrified of Harold, as Harold was of her.
Harold, as I said, was not the brightest penny in the bucket, but he eventually cottoned on to the fact that she was giving birth, so he got on his bike and sped off to the pub nearby, legs pumping, out of breath, safety vest flying behind him. The closest pub was one of those garish imitation pubs that you see in England tucked into one quarter of a roundabout, sort of a combination pub and truck stop with bad food, lots of ale, god-awful bathrooms, and all sorts of characters tucked in the booths.
Inside, Harold roused a couple of the guys who were still there drinking, a nurse just off her shift from the Norwich and Norfolk hospital, and a couple random others, and they went with blankets and towels and warm water to help the woman, piling together in a tiny Fiat.
After an hour or two, the baby was born, Harold watching, the streetlamp flickering. “Oh My God, the baby is purple! Purple! Oh Christ, O God, Oh my God!” was all Harold could say, for hours, after the police brought him to me.
The woman disappeared but Harold had heard the baby was delivered healthy. And the thing about Harold, what made him famous, is that every year, about that same time of year, he would go to the shed of the housing estate he lived on, and haul out a plywood cutout he had made of the woman, and the baby, painted in deep purple and gold as best as he could. He'd carry them to the bus, ride the bus to the ring road, and drag them to the back of the Poundland, between the dumpsters.
Then he’d go to the same pub he’d gone to on that first night and he'd gather whoever was there at midnight in winter. Most years there would be another nurse off her shift, an executive from Aviva (the global insurance company located in Norwich) drinking alone because this was the first year after his divorce and he had no family. Harold might get a couple of Norwich lads in their Norwich Canaries gear, likewise drinking away their gloom following a bad season, and a kid back from “Uni” who had fled his home wearing only socks after his father started to beat sense into him, again, for not being a man. Sometimes there was a lady from an escort service whose date hadn't shown up. Whoever it was, they would pile into one or two of their cars and go to Poundland, the back parking lot, under the halogen streetlight that shined in the darkness and which the darkness never conquered, and they'd hold hands: banker, escort, nurse, local lad down on his luck, and they’d sing.
Silent Night, Holy Night. All is calm. All is bright.
Harold the Angel, singing. They’d do this every year.
Transition
Likewise, every year, brothers and sisters, we come here to church, and we kneel down before the creche, at least in our hearts, and we sing just as Harold did, but to this baby, this miracle that Jesus is. We sing songs that seem woven into our DNA: Hark, the Herald Angels Sing, Silent Night, and, my personal favorite Adeste Fidelis, O Come Let us Adore Him.
Adoring and Adored
It’s kind of amazing how we are all carried into this singing and adoration in spite of our skeptical selves. Thousands of years of Christian custom and family memory and a blind yearning for something better for our world, and for ourselves, a yearning for a love that meets us in the tenderness of flesh and with all the authority of God, overcomes us.
Adeste Fideles laeti triumphantes,
Venite, venite in Bethlehem.
Natum videte, Regem Angelorum;
O Come, let us adore him.
Child, for us sinners, poor, and in the manger,
we would embrace Thee, with love and awe.
Who would not love Thee, loving us so dearly?
O come, Let us adore him.
This is beautiful. This commands. We can’t help but adore.
But there is a Mystery here, sisters and brothers, a mystery we discover only after we have really given ourselves over to adoring. The mystery is this: in adoring him, we find ourselves adored! Adoring this child, we find ourselves — fiercely, everlastingly — embraced and adored.
This is what we have been seeking our whole lives, without having known it, and here it is, all at once revealed and given to us. God does not adore us because we made it into church, or because we have been good, or upright, like Santa Claus having decided we’ve been more nice than naughty, and so given presents. God’s adoring of us is just something that God decided to do, and to pay the full cost for in Jesus, and it has always been there, at the heart of who we are. It takes us giving our hearts away in adoration to the Christ child to find it for ourselves.
And this mystery is true for us at any stage of life, whether we are in the plate-spinning act of middle age, or seeing our vigor ebb in old age and fearing isolation, or if we are young folks anxious about what the world is becoming.
God does not solve the problem of our lives or of this world, anymore than Jesus solved the problems of hunger or illness or injustice or death, or even taxes. What God does, and Jesus does, is put his loving here, with strength and knowing and great tenderness, right at the center of who we are, right at the center of our pain, our fear, our vulnerability, our yearning. This is where God is enthroned in you with great joy and great strength - joy like light on a river, strength like a mountain. This anchors us all the way into the eternal and feeds us with new life.
A Community of the the Adored
Now, the funniest things about discovering ourselves totally known and adored by this Christ child, is that, after a moment, you realize the same thing is happening for the person next to you, and the person next to them: dim-witted Harold, the drunk lads from the Norwich Canaries, the insurance executive, the nurse, the escort, the kid who fled his father’s punches wearing only socks.
The child that speaks such love and adoringly into us is speaking it into them as well. And that realization, not only of God’s adoring, but just how indiscriminate and unconditional it is, flooding this world, is the beginning of Christian life. It means, it calls for, the laying of our lives down for his service, for his glory, surrendered to his desiring so completely commanding is this love.
In the midst of a hostile and frequently cruel, self-indulgent, and nihilistic world, it’s the beginning of conversion, of prayer, of intimacy, of tenderness, of compassion in deep care for turn and others’ wellness.
It’s the beginning a a community who have been undone, unstrung, unmade, and blessed in the Beloved.
It’s the beginning of a religious approach to life.
Conclusion
So let us come, sisters and brothers, and let us adore him.
With Harold the Angel, let us adore this child. With Mary his mother, and grumpy Joseph, let us adore him. With the uncouth Shepherds, and the Zoroastrian Magi, let us adore him.
Let us all have the courage this year to discover the tenderness and strength of God put right at the center of our human lives. Let us have the courage to be undone by this, and once undone, to clasp each other’s hands with joy. We have found our home.
God bless us in this Holy Nativity of Jesus, and for all 12 days of this holy season. Amen.