Christmas Eve - Seeing and Being Seen

Lester Holt shared a story on the NBC Nightly News a few weeks ago that had me thinking about Christmas and what I knew we’d be up to tonight: celebrating that Jesus was born, in the flesh, so that the world could see and feel and experience the power of God in a way they hadn’t before. Check it out…

For my money, this artist – Tomás Bustos – does for people who can’t see the beauty of visual artwork, something like what God did at Christmas – and what God does, still – for anyone looking for the Divine in the world and in their lives. They bend the rules – God and Tomás. They do the unexpected. They go out of their way to let their work be seen by those who have a hard time doing that. They bring beauty and love to life – to be “seen” in new ways that matter for whoever’s looking, and sometimes for those who thought they’d never see it.

The gift of Christmas … what theologians call the Incarnation … the revelation of God in the person of Jesus from Nazareth … is about God re-imagining everything we think we know – or ever thought to look for – in our quest for understanding what makes God, God; and why that changes everything for us and for the world.

What I mean is, until Jesus showed up, God was off-limits, relatively speaking. God was around, and present, and active in the world – and always had been – don’t get me wrong. But in Jesus, God came close in a new way.

As Scripture tells it, before Jesus, in the story of creation, God was like a spirit of some sort that moved over the face of the waters. In Scripture, before Jesus, in the Garden of Eden, God was like the sound of the evening breeze. Before Jesus, God was a burning bush. Before Jesus, God was a pillar of clouds or a pillar of fire. Before Jesus, God was like the untouchable ark of the covenant. (The ark itself was, literally, not to be touched by the average bear.) Before Jesus, God was like the sound of sheer silence – whatever the heaven that means.

In Jesus, though … at Christmas? … God got even more creative than all of that – pillars of clouds, burning bushes, and evening breezes, I mean. Like Tomás Bustos, the artist in that news story, God opened up a whole new world for the world as we know it. What once seemed unknowable and off-limits and untouchable had shown up precisely to be touched, to be felt, to be embraced, and understood differently altogether – in Jesus.

(Think of the sick woman who touched the hem of Jesus’ cloak – as though she were running her fingers along the embroidery of Mona Lisa’s dress – and was healed because of it. Or the other who washed Jesus’ feet with her tears and dried them with her hair – like maybe she was seeing the Mona Lisa smile with her fingertips for the first time ever. Or that disciple whom Jesus loved so much he reclined against him at the Last Supper, like maybe he was resting under Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” sky in a way he never could have appreciated before.)

In Jesus, the beauty and peace and hope and presence of God was no longer out of reach. God wasn’t to be kept in a frame on the wall, or behind a curtain in the holy of holies, or safe and secure from the trials and troubles of life as we know it.

And, while that’s good news – great news, really – it’s nothing many of you haven’t heard me say in one way or another before, especially on Christmas Eve, over the years. So, I thought I’d kick it up a notch and dig a little deeper and take all of this a bit further this time around.

Because way back in the Hebrew scriptures, in the book of Genesis, there’s a story about Hagar, a poor young girl, who was enslaved and forced to carry and to bear the child of her enslavers – Abram and Sarai – when they couldn’t conceive a child of their own because, as the story goes, Sarai was believed to be barren. When Hagar became pregnant she fled, out of fear and contempt for her master and mistress. And she had a run-in with God somewhere in the middle of the desert. And God told her, “You have conceived and shall bear a son and you shall call him…” (Sound familiar?) “…and you shall call him Ishmael, for the Lord has given heed to your affliction.”

And the cool thing about this story – and why it came to mind for me tonight – is that Hagar, this poor, lowly, enslaved young girl with about as much status, credibility, and value in her day as the desert sand beneath her feet, is known for being the first person in all of Scripture to have had the nerve to give God a name – something you just didn’t do way back when. (You didn’t come near... You didn’t touch… And you didn’t speak the name of the almighty.) And the name Hagar gave to God – the God who met her in her darkest hour of deepest need – was “el Roi.” And “el Roi,” according to smarter people than me, means “the God who sees me.”

“The God who sees me.”

So, just as I always imagine and celebrate and give thanks that Christmas is about God coming to live and move and breathe among us so that we might see God differently… in the flesh… for a change. Hagar – and Jesus – remind me that God always sees us differently, too. That God shows up even and especially in our darkest, most desperate hours some of the time, and sees in us something the rest of the world – and maybe even we, ourselves – don’t see or refuse to look at.

Like, where the world sees a worthless slave girl, God sees a bold, brave, beautiful force for and source of life.

Where the world sees a Republican or a Democrat; or an “L” a “G” a “B” a “T” or a “Q”; where the world sees an Israeli or a Palestinian; a Russian or a Ukrainian; a Jew, a Muslim, or a Christian – Jesus sees a child of God.

Where the world sees a sinner, God sees forgiveness.

Where the world sees war, God sees the possibility for peace.

Where the world sees despair, God sees hope.

Where the world sees death, God sees new life.

Where the world sees a grudge, God sees grace.

And where we – and the world – look at ourselves and each other and see, too often, the worst thing(s) we’ve ever done, Jesus sees, instead, the beloved children we were created to be – and always are – in the eyes of our maker.

And in seeing all of it, God, in Jesus, gives up his life so that we would know what love looks like, and so that we might live differently – on this side of heaven and the next – in response to that deep, abiding, everlasting gift.

So Merry Christmas in the name of the God who came so that we might see LOVE in all of its fullness and in new ways, every day. And so that we might know that we are seen, each of us – in our joy and our sorrow, in our grief and our gladness – by the fullness of that LOVE, just the same… and just in time, perhaps… and just because we’re worth it, always, in the eyes of our creator.

Amen

Sea Turtles and Christmas Day

John 1:1-14

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God. And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

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As you know, a couple of weeks ago – for the first time since Oprah – I took a vacation during Advent. Christa and I went to Key West to celebrate a friend’s 50th birthday. It was lovely – and warm – and sunny – and all the rest.

And in addition to eating and drinking and biking and walking a lot, we took a boat ride and snorkeled some. And the highlight of that little excursion was that – in addition to a lobster, some sponges, a couple of very small fish, and some refuse from the recent hurricane – we saw and swam with a sea turtle, which is a relatively rare treat, according to our guide, who seemed as genuinely impressed by it as the rest of us were.

When we began our three-hour tour, our boat’s captain asked if any of us had ever snorkeled or scuba-dived in places like Bali or the Great Barrier Reef, only to warn us that no matter what we were about to see in the Florida Keys, it wouldn’t be anything nearly as cool or beautiful or colorful as any of that. And he was right. It was all pretty gray and dead-looking and lacking in life, even, to be honest.

But there was that sea turtle who – as noteworthy as he was – wasn’t much to look at. I tried to find a picture to show, but every picture I could find online – from the turtles to the water they were swimming in – was too colorful and too pretty and nothing like the one we saw. He was as gray and lumpy and as colorless as the rest of that underwater seascape. And, when he kicked up the sand around him or if you took your eyes off of him for to catch your breath, he could be hard to find again.

He was camouflaged pretty well by his gray, barnacle-covered shell and his slow motion paddling that kicked up the dust and muck beneath him to hide him from view every once in a while. He basically looked like a rock that could swim.

But he did have to come up for air which – according to Christa and our friends – is when you could see more of his true colors. (I missed that part, because I was back in the boat having a beer by then.)

But the whole time I wondered if that sea turtle knew or cared that we were watching him. He didn’t seem to. He just did his thing down at the bottom of the sea, moving rocks around with his nose – looking for a lobster dinner, according to our guide – without any indication that he knew there were nine human beings floating and swimming and pointing and splashing on the surface, less than 6-10 feet away from him the whole time.

So I wondered how risky it must have felt for him to come up for air – to rise to the surface with all those people surrounding him – and to trust that he’d be okay. To expose himself – and whatever colors he was hiding – to the people who were watching. And how could he be sure he’d survive to snoop for more lobsters in the end.

And it made me think of Jesus – and God’s choice to be born; to come to life in a new way; to come out of hiding, you might say; to rise to the surface, as it were; to be seen without the camouflage of so many generations and so much history; and to just live and move and breathe all of a sudden, in the person of Jesus.

Of course we know what a risk that was and how all of that turned out to be – it wasn’t safe… our sin did him in… which was only a surprise to the likes of you and me.

But on Christmas morning … at the beginning of this new day … as we start to retell the story and wonder again about what it means to look for God among us – now that we know how it all panned out – I think our call and joy and blessing is to look for and to see the colorful parts more readily and to notice the good news more often.

Our snorkeling guide gave us some clear instructions before we jumped into the ocean that day – long before we ever saw a thing. She said that if and when we spotted anything noteworthy – and especially if we came upon an octopus or a sea turtle – we were supposed to shout to tell the group what we were looking at, call them over to our location, and point to where the rest of us could see it too.

That seems like a simple, sacred charge for Christmas morning and the days to come … that we keep our eyes peeled for evidence of God’s unhidden grace, rising to the surface of this gray, murky, messy world where we live … that we shout, sing and share that good news with whoever will listen … and that we point others in the same direction so that they’ll be blessed and better for knowing what we know about God’s love, beauty and grace in our midst.

Amen. Merry Christmas.