A Celestial Blanket That Covers Us with ‘Peace on Earth and Goodwill Toward All’

Merry Christmas friends…

You do know that there are 12 days of Christmas right?

As long as we are counting let me offer some other numbers. 10 days ago, on December 24th, I celebrated my 5th Christmas Eve in Jersey City with you as your new priest…new because I was just received as an Episcopal Priest 30 some days ago, after having served 22 years as an ordained Lutheran Pastor. 

Now, after the numbers, a story.

After the Christmas Eve Service I got on a plane to visit my wife’s family…One could say we were invoking the tradition of running from despotic rulers. 

More on that in a moment. 

But first to the stargazers; the 3 Magi, the Wisemen, the Kings.

I come to those holding telescopes through a vision I first shared with our friends at All Saints Episcopal Church in Hoboken at a late service on Christmas Eve. I said there that I envisioned Christmas in August while I was at the Hayden Planetarium in Manhattan. 

Truth be told my vision, like Joseph, of Mary and Joseph, came during a dream. As the lights went down in the observatory; my two-year-old daughter snuggled on my lap and I fell asleep…My 6-year-old son; who loves all things space; was wide awake. While he sat in rapt attention I began dreaming.

In my vision it was dark. 

Would you help fulfill this prophecy with me. 

Close your eyes. 

Yup, see…it was dark. 

Ok. You can open your eyes now. 

This next part of the dream will probably not be fulfilled. But I’m going to tell you about it anyway. There was in our church a machine or perhaps many machines pointed at the ceiling. They illuminated the space as if we were outside beneath the stars…the vastness of the galaxy stared at us…and in the words or Carl Sagan, the cosmos made earth look like a Pale Blue Dot. 

If you’re a high church Anglican; and not into your sanctuary being an observatory; I wonder if even you might admit; whether you’re faithful or faith-seeking; that a dark space with lights on the ceiling might be…kind of amazing. 

I say this with a certainty that is not a hunch, because; as his father and sister slept in the cushion of a chair my kindergartener—who is never without words—had only this to say of the lights at the Hayden planetarium came back on, “wow.” 

Maybe, if we do try this Star Adventure next year, it isn’t enough to simply fill this space with specks of light …it would need sounds too.  And between the hush of silence; and the hum of an organ; there might be hymns.

Friends. Do the lullabies of Christmas; even when sung poorly contain magic? As if singing them is reciting them and if reciting them means God is closer to us than ever before. Are hymns ancient talismans that cover you; cover all of us in a kind of celestial, star filled; heaven holding blanket…

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson doesn’t wonder the same thing; not by a long shot. But in a Baccalaureate address at St. Paul’s Chapel (once upon a time an Anglican Chapel) at Columbia University he did say and I quote,

“My inspiration to speak actually came on a mountain top. In the Andes Mountains in Chile, at the telescopes of the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. I obtained my thesis data over the course of two years here. And it is there as the stars shone down that I reflected on my life’s path through time and space…”

Neil addressed his reflection to fellow graduates; their families; their friends; and finally he addressed it to wonderers. 

I borrowed this sense of wonder. Ok. I outright stole this wondering when I was the assistant University Chaplain at Columbia University. I tried to help other students imagine their walk to the library not as solitary students. But as people called to do something big. As pilgrims preparing for their calling. I did this by name checking other students who had also walked the paths of the Ivy league university. 

Students like Lou Ghering;  “I am the luckiest man on the face of this earth…” he said that when he diagnosed with a terminal disease. 

Of course I talked about Thomas Merton; maybe the most famous religious graduate…

But I also talked about Lauryn Hill. As I named their classmates I had students recite that thing… 

…the most well-known words of Columbia and Barnard students who had gone on to make their mark on the world. I had them act out and read stories of students because we need real people as guides. 

I blame. I mean I credit St. Francis in part with this tradition; especially at Christmas. 

Francis is said the have invented the modern nativity by asking townspeople in Italy to be shepherds and angels and the holy family.  By pretending to be Angels, and shepherds, and Magi and the Holy Family, the Saint imagined we become them and part of God’s story. 

Modern people like to think we are so much more sophisticated than those who believe or act out Bible stories. 

Are we though?

Don’t we celebrate and honor people who create elaborate dramas with light and colors that we watch in the dark.

We call these dramas movies. 

We call the academy awards they give, the Oscar’s. 

One year a big movie star took his opportunity presenting an Oscar to say something provocative. He said, "If something miraculous and really kind of movie-like could happen here, where we could all kind of send love and truth, and a kind of sanity to Deng Xiaoping right now in Beijing that he will take his troops, and take the Chinese away from Tibet, and allow these people to live as free independent people again."

Later the star clarified what he meant.

“I don’t mean to harm this evening’s awards…I do mean to harm anger. I do mean to harm exclusion. I mean to harm human rights abuses, But I try to stay as close to where His Holiness comes from… that everyone is redeemable and in the end, everyone has to be redeemed or none of us [are]."
Brave words. Or utopian. They sound to me like something a heroin addict who had a religious epiphany might say.

In fact it is something John Coltrane; buried from a Lutheran church in Manhattan (the same one by the way as Jean Michel Basquiat was buried at) said, “I want to be a force for real good. In other words. I know that there are bad forces, forces that bring suffering to others and misery to the world, but I want to be the opposite force. I want to be the force which is truly for good.”

It doesn’t take a sophisticated theologian to know that this is not a Gospel of just movie stars or musicians.
St. Matthew says as much. 

So does my wife. 

My wife loves Christmas almost as much as she loves Thanksgiving…She says I don’t love Christmas or Thanksgiving enough. If I did, I wouldn’t spend so much time watching the news. She doesn’t absorb bad news. Instead, she curates her Instagram and social media feeds with pretty things. 

Once while she was blissfully baking cookies and I was not joyfully coordinating a Christmas pageant she casually asked me:

Are all the children going to run or just the fastest?

What?
That was always my favorite part of the pageant, the run.

Umm Dear I don’t think that’s part of the Christmas pageant.

Oh yes it is… 

…right before they kill all the babies. 

So it is. That’s Matthew’s version.

That’s maybe appropriately called a Haitian Pageant, or it could be any pageant —composed under a dictator. Our circumstances inform our telling of what we see. And our circumstances this year; demand that our telling of the birth of Jesus be told with appropriate awe. 

I suggest darkness as a starting place. 

In silence; 

then hymns. 

Our telling of, God is with us, also demands that we not give into the darkness of our own curated newsfeeds; nor the superficiality. 

Here’s a bigger truth You don’t need to know any of that to know how to care for a baby. 

Clint Smith wrote a series of poems for his unborn son called Above Ground.

One has stuck with me. It’s called, Ossicones. 

“My son tells me his favorite animal is the giraffe.

 Yesterday, it was the hippopotamus. 

The day before, it was the zebra. 

Last week, it was the beluga whale, 

but today, it is the giraffe.

We watch videos of this tall, gangly creature, with its long neck, black eyes, and horns, unlike any horns we have seen before.

My son asked, " Why the giraffe has horns?" I tell him, "I don't actually know." 

When I was his age, I thought that the giraffes must have had just an extra pair of ears. 

My son says, "Giraffes don't have four ears, daddy, that would make them aliens,"

 and of course, he is correct. Of course, these could not be ears.

Of course, the idea of a four-year creature is reserved for extraterrestrials we imagined when we look up at the stars, 

but on the giraffe, they're called ossicones, 

Sometimes we decide to call them horns anyway.

It turns out they don't do much of anything but exist as an heirloom passed down from ancestors who had more use for these protrusions of cartilage than their long-neck descendants. 

I look at my son and think of all the things I might try to give him that he will one day have no need for, the things that serve no function, other than being ornaments of a time that came before. 

The things that continue to make us who we are, long after they have served their purpose.”

Friends I think the lullabies of Christmas contain magic; ancient talismans that cover you; cover all of us in a kind of celestial, star filled; heaven holding blanket.
I invoke that music and I bid you all a very happy Christmas.