Have Yourself a Holy Little Christmas

Christmas Among Us, Despite Everything

Merry Christmas, Beloved! Or maybe I should say: Holy Christmas. For the first time in 22 years, I am the first one up on Christmas morning despite being the last to bed, Santa-ing the stockings at 1am after getting home from late church. 

My Christmas Eve homily is below. Or you can also watch it here if you want the whole moody-midnight-sanctuary vibe (and oh! Then you get to see nearly everyone in the full sanctuary carrying their prayers to the Holy Family, ouchy beautiful. AND a big reveal by Rev. Kelly!).

Homily is a little maudlin, existential? But lands firmly in the “glad to be alive camp.” I’m here–when I might not have been. So are you. So is the boy referenced in my homily, and not only is he here despite the prodigal years when I worried so much he wouldn’t make it, whatever that means–he got into college last week! He’ll be taking his community college degree and going to Cal Poly Humboldt up in the redwoods of truly northern CA in the fall. 

There’s so much pain, terror and suffering in the world, loves. And yet: we persist. I have a 17 year old with COVID but who still managed to leave Santa a love-note, a family who truly loves each other despite our differences, a giant bowl of mandarins that were picked nearby just days ago, the love litter (like leaf-litter, like love-letters, get it?) of a long and rich life stretching around the world, chosen/family in Mexico and Denmark and Boston and Hawaii and and…

Santa Letter, 2023

Placer County Mandarins, 2023

It sounds like I’m on the second manhattan my 17yo left Santa, but really I’m just: grateful. What is making you feel the Christmas among us today, loves? Please drop it into the comments. 

May you have a holy, feeling Christmas. 

Love,
Molly

~

22 years ago I on this night, I was so pregnant that I could not fit behind the communion table when it came time to serve the bread and juice. My congregation laughed and I did too as if I were in on the joke, but I didn’t feel like laughing. It was no laughing matter to me that in my body I held another growing body, one that would soon be too big to fit anywhere except out in the world.

3 and a half months earlier when the planes hit the towers and nobody knew what was going on at first, if it was terrorists or aliens or worse (although what could be worse?) or when and how it would all end, I knelt and prayed. 

My prayer was: God, I want to meet my child. Let me meet my child. Then I can die, I guess, or preferably both of us can die together. But then again, if you let us live until his birth day, knowing me, I will just ask for more. And still more. More living, more breathing, more baby head smells, more diapers, more of all the miracles and mess that being human offers.

I prayed this knowing God had precious little say over whether anyone lived or died. 

The mystic Christian essayist Brian Doyle wrote of that day that there was a couple who took hands and leaped together from the South Tower. He said, “their hands reaching and joining are the most powerful prayer I can imagine, the most eloquent, the most graceful. It is everything that we are capable of against horror and loss and death. It is what makes me believe that we are not craven fools and charlatans to believe in God, to believe that human beings have greatness and holiness within them like seeds that open only under great fires, to believe that some unimaginable essence of who we are persists past the dissolution of what we were, to believe against such evil hourly evidence that love is why we are here.”

They leaped, and because of that leap and so many others, our government took its own leap right into 20 years of war in the Middle East. We needed a scapegoat. We needed revenge. We know how that went, and how many mothers’ children died. 

It’s 22 years later and there’s another war, mothers pleading to see their children again or meet them for the first time. The world feels very fragile right now–a Jenga game where one false move could bring it all down. Everything matters a little too much. 

In the midst of this, arrives a baby, a savior, a willing scapegoat. His ancient name is Immanuel, God With Us; his nickname is the Prince of Peace. He is one of the best humans that ever was, and possibly the son of God, or God Herself, depending upon who you ask. He is Jesus. 

Jesus made a choice to come, even knowing us as we are, weak-willed, moderately to majorly selfish, definitely short-sighted. Doomed dreamers. 

And yet he came. And still he comes, every year, as sure as Santa. Every year he knows exactly what’s going to happen and every year God chooses to come back and join us in our lot. Maybe he’s forgotten what it is like—it’s been a long time since Good Friday–maybe he forgets, like the pain of labor. He still thinks the best of us. He still loves us, after all. And he also might be drawn by all the wondrous things about human living: butterfly kisses, bread hot from the oven, faces lit by candlelight, Christmas carolers. Maybe he thinks: I wouldn’t miss it. I wouldn’t miss any of it, all that these wild, unreliable, inventive, hopeful humans do. So he comes. 

They are saying that in Bethlehem tonight, Christmas is cancelled. But of course, it’s not cancelled. Jesus was born, Jesus will be born. Revelry in the face of their neighbors’ suffering is cancelled. Celebration while terrorism and oppression reign is cancelled. Christmas will happen, but solemnly. The baby whose life was threatened from the moment of his birth, a baby whose parents went on the run to Egypt to find safety so he could grow into an adult who would preach an end to human violence forever–that Christmas will be remembered, honored, and may mean even more this year than it usually does.

I’m not suggesting you cancel your own Christmases because of war in Gaza and Israel and the West Bank, all the places Jesus walked peace. I’m saying: God is inviting us all to a deeper Christmas here because of what is happening there. Snuggle into the sacred truth that whether on the floor of a rubbled hospital or into a household waiting for hostages to be returned or in the quiet peace of this sanctuary and the private pain in some hearts in here, God is born again and again. God refuses to abandon us. God wants to meet us as much as we want to meet Him. 

The boy that ballooned my belly so many Christmases ago is almost 22 years old now, ⅔ of the way to his Jesus year. We’ve been through a lot; but these days he never leaves the house without saying I Love You. Sometimes he says it twice. Most of us who once thought the world was surely ending have discovered that life persisted. And to some degree, we get to choose how we persist within it: we can be Christmas and Easter people every day, persisting in the perilous, beautiful task of living and loving as well as we can. 

A wise 14-year-old girl recently said to me “Christmas isn’t something that comes to us–it’s something that happens among us.” She might as well be Mary, winking from the stable, grateful she got to meet her child, holding him tight. 

Beloved, this is Christmas. Strangers smiling instead of scowling. An electrical current between two lovers, leaping. Parent and child locking eyes for the first time in an oxytocin glow. A confused Joseph, choosing this hectic holy family. Christmas is the heart-light flicker that happens among us if we choose it. If we choose, like God, to be here blessedly with each other. 

Holy Christmas!