Like many families, we spend Christmas Eve doing last minute errands: the trip to the store, the stop by the church to make sure everything is ready for the evening’s services, wrapping those last packages.
My racing around is always accompanied by a special soundtrack: the live radio broadcast of Christmas Lessons and Carols from King’s College in Cambridge, England. Hearing Christianity’s sacred stories — from the Garden of Eden through the birth of Christ, and listening to the beautiful Christmas hymns and carols — helps set the mood of the day for me.
Or usually it does.
But on this day, the announcer signed off with these words, “And so ends the broadcast of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols. The people are now preparing to leave this lovely chapel, warm with the presence of God, to go out into the cold world.”
Those words stunned me.
Leave the presence of God behind in a church? Really?
Certainly I believe God is present in church — in that Cambridge chapel that morning, and in worship services around the world tonight.
But I don’t believe for a minute that God stays behind when we leave church and go into the world.
Ironically, we heard those words as my family was headed to a Christmas Eve service at Woodruff Park with members of Church of the Common Ground, an Episcopal ministry with downtown Atlanta’s homeless population.
It was cold. No lavish flower arrangements graced the makeshift altar. The music was not well rehearsed. Much of the congregation was not particularly well groomed. At least one person wandered into the service after being released from the nearby Fulton County Jail.
But I can assure you that God was present in that place.
Over the last year, I have found myself reflecting on that announcer’s words. I think he missed the point of Christmas. So have news commentators who every year wonder how we can celebrate Christmas with any joy in the face of whatever tragedy has just occurred, as if Christmas can only be celebrated in a perfect world. The truth is just the opposite.
The world into which Jesus was born was not perfect. He was born in the darkness, the cold, into a land occupied by a foreign empire. He came in poverty and vulnerability, to a world filled with violence and evil.
Tonight, we celebrate Christ’s coming again into just such a world, one that desperately longs for God’s justice and peace, for a God who identifies not just with our joys, but with our deepest fears and sorrows.
Tonight, parishes like mine open our doors and invite any and all to come celebrate the birth of a child who we believe is God’s Word made flesh. We’ll worship in churches aglow with candle light and beautiful flowers and glorious music. We’ll rejoice in God’s being with us there.
And then we’ll go into the cold world again, knowing that God is there, too.
That is the real meaning of Christmas.
The Rev. Patricia Templeton is rector of St. Dunstan’s Episcopal Church in Atlanta.
