Nothing New to Add

Luke 2:1-20

Christmas Eve Year A

December 24, 2013

First Presbyterian Church Clarksville

The Reverend Dr. Robert Wm Lowry

            In 1994, Ursula Askam Fanthorpe was the first woman appointed as Professor of Poetry at Oxford University.*  The professorship is more honorary than academic.  The office holder is expected to lecture just two or three times per year during the five year appointment.

            Fanthorpe is best known for a volume of poems for two voices co-written by her lifelong companion Rosie Bailey.  Most of her poetry is a reflection on life in England and themes of the cultural changes since her war-time childhood and the subtle shifts in British national identity. 

            One of Fanthorpe’s lesser known poems is titled simply BC:AD.  It is a short simple poem that seeks to capture a moment in time when nothing was happening…

            …and when everything happened.  It reads:

            This was the moment when Before

            Turned into After, and the future’s

            Uninvented timekeepers presented arms.

            This was the moment when nothing

            Happened. Only dull peace

            Sprawled boringly over the earth.

            This was the moment when even energetic Romans

            Could find nothing better to do

            Than counting heads in remote provinces.

            And this was the moment

            When a few farm workers and three

            Members of an obscure Persian sect

            Walked haphazard by starlight straight

            Into the kingdom of heaven.

            Once we clear away the holiday add-ons, the holly and the ivy, the wrapping and the tinsel, what is left is a rather ordinary night in Bethlehem when nothing was happening and everything happened. 

            To say that life in that first century Roman province was not exciting is probably an understatement.  Now to be sure, there were problems and life was not easy, but compared to the excitement of Rome, things were pretty calm and quiet and, well, boring.  Things must have been relatively quiet for the Roman authorities to be bored enough to order a census.  Surely there were easier ways to raise money for Caesar.  But, here in this quiet backwater town of Bethlehem, that is exactly what they do.  They decide to count everyone.

            Outside the city, a few shepherds watched the flocks under their care.  It was a day like any other- nothing special at all.  As day gave way to night, the only thing they really had to look forward to was night yielding to day again. 

            Coming to town with her new husband for the mandatory census, a young mother, her time finally arrived, gave birth to a baby.  Despite what the hymn writer would later say, my guess is that like every other baby since the beginning of time, this one did some crying make.

            There in Bethlehem, it was just a night.

            Like any other night.

            Boring.

            Mundane.

            As pedestrian as a night could be.

            It was just a night.  And that, Fanthorpe observes, is the paradox because it was into this entirely unremarkable night that God became human.  Haven to earth came down.  Eternity intersected the daily. 

            Before gave way to After. 

            It was that night, in that moment, when history came to a point- God’s whole relationship with creation came together in one moment.  In his letter to the Galatians, Paul would refer to the event of the birth of Christ as “the fullness of time.” 

            All of the years- the generations- led up to that moment…in the fullness of time. 

            On the pulpit at St. Salvator’s chapel at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland there is an hourglass.  There are all sorts of legends about why it is there, but the likely culprit was a longwinded bishop.  It is placed so that it is just at the bottom of the preacher’s field of view so that no matter where you look from the pulpit, that hourglass is there.  Before the sermon begins, an usher walks up and rather unceremoniously flips the glass, gives the preacher a knowing look, and returns to his seat.  I can say from experience that hourglass is intimidating.

            It did not dawn on me until I was working on this sermon that in a way the hourglass is not just a warning to longwinded preachers.  It is also a pretty accurate symbol of that first Christmas night.

            In that moment when a new baby took his first breath and a newlywed couple became a holy family, the fullness of time that came together in that moment, began to expand again.  Before became After.     

            The miracle of Christmas is not found only in its own specialness, but in what this extraordinary moment can teach us about all the other ordinary moments we live each year.  Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canerbury and now Master of Magdalene College at Cambridge University, frequently speaks about finding the extraordinary in the ordinary; how even in the most pedestrian moments, God can do extraordinary things.  Williams writes:

"here we are daily, not necessarily attractive and saintly people, along with other not very attractive and saintly people, managing the plain prose of our everyday service, deciding daily to recognize the prose of ourselves and each other as material for something unimaginably greater — the Kingdom of God, the glory of the saints, reconciliation and wonder."

            The birth of Christ in the midst of such an ordinary night gives us a glimpse of what God can do with the ordinary circumstances of our lives; this moment that happened in the fullness of time opens our imaginations for the extraordinary work of God.

            After all the parties are over, the gifts are exchanged, the eggnog consumed, and the last bars of Silent Night are left hanging in the air, life for most of us will get back to ordinary.  No more hectic shopping, no more caroling, no more last minute gift wrapping, just the normal everyday stuff of everyday life.

            The birth of Christ reminds us that it is just such ordinariness that provides the building blocks for God’s unimaginably greater work in our midst.

            If God can work such miraculous things in such an ordinary night, imagine what God can do in the everyday of our lives.  Even the most mundane winter night can be the place that God does wondrous things.

            As I sat in my office doing my best to stare down the blinking cursor on the blank screen, my frustration finally got the best of me and I declared, “Linda, this is my 15th Christmas Eve sermon and I have no idea what to say.”  Linda, who serves dually as our church secretary and the resident sage of wisdom, gave me a wry smile and said, “Nothing new to add, huh?”

            It dawned on me when she said those words that in fact, no. I don’t have anything new to add.  And in truth, there isn’t anything new to add.  This story, in all its miraculous simplicity, says it all. 

            Even in the most ordinary of moments, God can, will, and does do extraordinary things.

            Friends, my prayer for us all is that in this night and every night to come, we may know what it is to encounter the extraordinary in the ordinary and, in the fullness of time, walk haphazard by starlight straight into the kingdom of heaven. 

            O come, o come, Emmanuel.  Amen.

*The connection between this poem and the nativity as well as the Williams quote was made by a writer whose essay I read a few years ago. My notes did not include the writer’s name or where I encountered this helpful insight.  Although this sermon is entirely my own, I want to give credit where it is due.