It wasn’t supposed to happen today. Not on Christmas Eve, anyway. The James Webb Space Telescope that launched this morning has been in the works for decades. But its launch has been delayed so many times over the years that many believed it would never happen. Someone on Twitter even joked that we needn’t fear the Webb Telescope colliding with Santa’s sleigh during liftoff, because “the James Webb launch is just a story we tell children, it’s not real.”
That’s some astronomer humor for you. And I should know because I’m both the daughter and the mother of astronomers. Of course the stories we tell children, particularly the one you just heard Deacon Kathey read from the center of the congregation, are sometimes more real than history. We continue to tell them, from generation to generation, because they communicate something so very true—about both human nature and divine goodness—that we really can’t live without them. Bless you for being here this evening. Bless you for choosing to listen to this ancient story, and for letting it shine its peculiar and sacred light on our gathering this holy night.
We are creatures attuned to look for ancient light. My father, who passed away just two months ago, is an heir of shepherds and wise men. He spent his distinguished scientific career researching the origin of stars via the light emitted from a supernova that became visible in 1987. The Hubble telescope supported his work, but my son reminded me that the Webb telescope—its scientific successor—works on a different spectrum. It measures waves on the infrared range, which allows it to look for even older objects in space. And it’s designed to look at galaxies, rather than individual stars. Because—who knows—maybe what we need to learn about ancient light doesn’t come from a single source. Maybe the glory of the Lord actually shines all around us. Maybe we just need eyes to see and stories to hear.
Stories are, of course, our Biblical legacy. But in addition, they serve to remind us that we live in a meaningful history, in which our human choices matter. The Judeo-Christian tradition distinguishes itself from other ancient world religions in understanding time as linear and directional. Western culture inherited that perspective, so that it’s easy for us to forget that most ancient cultures (and many contemporary ones as well) think of time as cyclical. After all, that’s the easiest explanation, no? Seasons change, but return in similar fashion year after year. So too the night stars that our telescopes watch. In a cyclical world view, neither our decisions nor God’s action make much difference: we’re just passengers on the revolving wheel of time.
Or are we? Biblical history represented a radical break from the cyclical understanding of time. From the first pages of Genesis, something new and unprecedented happened every day of creation. And new things continued to happen throughout our scriptural story. From Exodus we learned that captivity pointed the way to freedom. From the prophets we learned that God never tires of sending messengers to clarify God’s intentions. From the Exile we were taught to anticipate return. Long genealogies set the stage for an unexpected birth. Shepherds might even see a strange cosmic light breaking through the normal astral cycle, illuminating something entirely new.
Even if seasons and cycles do repeat—as they surely tend to—our tradition insists that God remains sovereign over time. And God is free to break into history at any point. Which is why we humans pay attention to the lessons and the light of ancient things. We who dwell in linear time want to know about origins, and about the normal patterns of history, so that we can recognize the extraordinary. That is, the radical newness that God always longs to give us.
For unto us a child is born, a son is given. This ancient Christmas story of God’s coming to earth in human form teaches us an essential truth about ourselves and about God’s good intentions. Just as surely as ancient light from the stars teaches us about cosmic creation. Peer deeply into the spacious tales of Jesus’ earthly birth, and I assure you that there’s always more light to be found, year after year. For millennia. But here’s a few things I can see from where I stand right now—
From the Christmas story, we know that God comes among the ordinary, and makes it extraordinary. God surely has the capacity to show up with a royal court or an army or five million followers on Instagram if God so chooses. But that’s not what the Bible teaches. Instead, God came to humanity by way of a human birth, among humble people living in a colonized territory. The kind of risky birth that still happens every day. Which leads me to wonder: are we looking for God in the right places?
We also know from this ancient story that God’s appearing interrupts the predictable cycles. An unplanned pregnancy, for example, that does not result in shame and exclusion for the mother. Women who speak with a power normally not afforded to them. Uncanny nighttime brightness that startles shepherds out of their routines. Which leads me to wonder: are we willing to follow the light when it appears at the wrong time?
Christmas also teaches that—even when the predictable cycles look bad—God stands ready to make all things new. But God always makes things new through people: priests and prophets and even a very young woman and her confused fiancée. They listened to heavenly messengers and they did brave things that were mostly not what they planned or wanted to do. Which leads me to wonder: are we willing to welcome the new when it requires that we ourselves change?
That’s not a rhetorical question, most especially for all of us who are living in the midst of a long ugly cycle of pandemic, and a country fraught with dangerous political discord. We’ll get through this: of that I am utterly certain. But whether we get through with few losses or many, or get through it with schools and churches and democratic institutions intact, depends in large part on how we live into the lessons of Christmas. Never forget for a moment, friends, that 2000 years of Jesus followers have survived the hardest of historical times by remembering this ancient story. By choosing to find God fully present in the ordinary, by watching for the unexpected light, and by being open to transformation.
No, it wasn’t supposed to happen this way. At least not if it had gone according to our best laid plans. Not the coincidental Christmas Eve timing of the Webb telescope launch, on its quest for ancient light on the very anniversary of the birth of the Light of the World. Not the unprecedented coming of God to a vulnerable family in a backwater town two millennia ago. Not the pandemic, not the distancing and masking, not the timing of our return to work or to church services. You name it: whatever we’re currently living through, we mostly didn’t want it. But if we take a deep breath and listen to the voice of a special silent night, we might just find that both our sorrow and our hope point us to a persistent and holy light. The light that shines through everything from the first words of creation to the sky surrounding the baby of Bethlehem. The light that shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it. The light that illumines the pages of our ancient stories and guides the direction of our history, which inevitably leads us home to God. Be safe and be merry, people of Christmas.
