Early Christmas Eve, 2012

Even if we haven’t heard the story for a long time, we at least vaguely remember the characters– Mary and Joseph, the shepherds, the kings or the Wise Men (we rarely remember the word "magi"), and the angels. Then, of course, there’s Jesus, the one whom all the fuss is about.

You can Google all these characters and spend hours and hours reading all kinds of interesting and crazy stuff about them. But then, you’d miss the point of the story.

Because the point of the story is not just about Jesus, certainly not about "facts" about how he was born. The story is too important and too true for "facts." The point of the story is that God, or whatever you want to call the Life Force, the Energy that lights and runs and radiates through everything that is, was, and ever will be, your Higher Power, Love, with a capital "L" or Light, with a capital "L" –God came to inhabit human flesh, most clearly and fully in Jesus of Nazareth, but that was to make the point. God lived not only in Jesus but God lives in you and me and all around us. The fact of the matter is that lots of time we’ve got so much stuff and baggage and fear and busyness built up around us that we don’t even pay attention to the God who was born in us. Children often have less accumulations built up in and around them, so we see God more clearly in them. But just as we keep searching for God-- somewhere, out there, in the sky and stars, in holy places-- God in fact is searching for us, poking us gently from the inside sometimes, sometimes knocking us over to get our attention.

The really good news is that nothing–all our silly searching in all the wrong places, all our wanderings in the wrong directions, no failure or flaw, not even death itself–nothing ultimately can separate us from God, whose love and light we know in Christ Jesus. That Love and Light is being born–in us and all over the world–this night, this moment. Glory to God in the highest and on earth. Peace. Amen.

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