What Child Is This?
A Christmas Eve Homily by Rev. Dr. Patrick T. O’Neill Delivered at First Unitarian Congregational Society in Brooklyn, NY on December 24, 2008
Somewhere tonight, at this very hour, right here in our city – indeed, chances are in every city the world over – an expectant mother has just gone into labor. Somewhere tonight at this very hour, as we assemble in song and candlelight to mark the birthday of the historic Christchild, other babies are about to be born. Many thousands of them.
And their parents – their long months of waiting and dreaming and anxiety about to come to fruition – are about to see for the first time the faces of their newborns come into the world.
Some of these births will be easier than others. Some of these babies will be healthy and whole, their nutrition and nurture having begun months before, their welcomed arrival prepared by loving extended families, their cradles prepared and decorated, made warm and comfortable, safe and secure.
And other births will be less than easy, their labor troubled, their care foreshortened by poverty or malnutrition, by less than healthy conditions, into families already overburdened with a struggle for meager existence.
These less fortunate babies, with no less precious a claim on the affection and love of their families, these babies – thousands and thousands of them born everywhere tonight – these babies who will share the same birthday as the Christchild of 2,000 years ago, these sons and daughters born tonight embody everything that is best and most worrisome about the state of our world.
We worry about their future in a world where war is commonplace on virtually every continent, and seemingly without end. We worry for their welfare in a world where wealth and resources are so unfairly and unjustly divided, a world that will relegate the vast majority of the babies born this night to a life of poverty, a life lacking in education, lacking in dignity, lacking in freedom, lacking in opportunity.
We worry for the less fortunate babies born into the world this night, (into what the poet calls, “the faithless coldness of the times”) and for their millions of brothers and sisters, for their cousins growing up in countries where peace and goodwill, idealism and faith, are but distant, near-forgotten dreams.
It is no small thing to take Christmas seriously; it is no small thing to seriously engage the teachings of the Prophet whose birth we mark this night in ceremony.
It is no small thing to enter into the paradox of the Christmas season. The carols call us to rejoice and the gospel tells us be not afraid. But it is no small thing to open one’s heart to the Christmas message. It is no small thing to proclaim Joy, to stand for Peace, to insist on Justice and Equity in a wounded world. It is far easier, far less threatening to us, to distance Christmas and objectify it, than it is to own it and bring it into our lives.
It is perhaps too generous a metaphor to say that in the birth of Jesus we celebrate the birth of every child. Yet it is in the context of every child’s birth that the story of this particular child becomes unique and symbolic. It is in relating to the miracle of every birth – a miracle that every family is near enough to touch and be touched by in return – that this miracle story in far-away Bethlehem can be felt.
This is indeed a special baby whose birth we celebrate tonight. This much we know of him: he would grow up to become a great teacher, a healer, a prophet to his people. The quality of his spirit, the depth of his religious insight, his manner of moving through the world calling those around him to lives of greater compassion and faith and ethical integrity, led many to see in him the highest possibilities of godliness in the human soul.
He would be called Emmanuel, meaning, “God-with-us.” Others would call him the Prince of Peace, the Son of God, “A Man of Sorrows and Acquainted with grief,” the King of Kings, the Light of the World. When he walked the dusty roads of his countryside, crowds would line his way and reach out just to touch the hem of his garment as he passed.
All that, he would become in time. But tonight, here in this story, he is the baby asleep in the straw, and like every baby ever born, an unspeakable miracle in himself. In a sense that is more than symbolic, he is all the babies who will be born this night in all the rude huts and unlikely places of the world.
What unique child is this, that we should celebrate his birth and sing his arrival? Worth remembering that this prophet’s birth was closer in circumstance and in fact to the poor of the world than to the more fortunate. Tonight he is every child, and every child come into the world is Emmanuel, “God-with-us.”
I suspect this is what calls us out on a midnight hour to church, to sing in the silent night, to touch hands and light a candle against the dark and cold. Christmas has come, again this year, with its awkward, magnificent timing, to proclaim its tenacious expectancy that this world still has preposterous, divine possibilities for us all, even in the most trying of years – even if we have failed properly to prepare for the arrival of such a babe, even if we have failed to get our earthly house in order, even if we have failed to end war and remove all the weapons of mass destruction – even our own.
The Christmas babies have come again – all of them, all over the world. And we pray that at least some of them might grow to become prophets and bringers of Peace. This is our never-ending prayer and our eternal hope. Merry Christmas to one and all.
Amen.
