The Rev. Austin K. Rios
24 December 2022: The Eve of the Nativity

According to the United Nations, 385,000 children are born each day.

385,000 first breaths.  385,000 new lives waiting to unfold.

Unless you are personally connected to one of those newborns, it’s probable that in a world of 8 billion people, those births simply fade into the haze of statistical data.

2000 years ago, when Augustus was Emperor and Quirinius was governor of Syria, the human population was considerably smaller—about 170 million.

And yet, here we gather tonight to remember and celebrate a newborn from that era, a seemingly ordinary birth that was anything but.

We remember Jesus’ birth because of the way he lived, and mostly because his birth, life, death and resurrection resonate with the call God has always made to us.

From the dawn of creation, when the Spirit of God moved over the face of the deep, this ordinary matter has been infused with God’s original blessing and holiness.

We humans enjoyed an abundant garden in which all creatures were connected and we understood ourselves to be caretakers of the wonderful world God had made.

But ever since we began to believe the original lie that we were not enough—that we needed something else to distinguish ourselves from the rest of creation and each other—we have lived under the illusion that the ordinary and the holy were divided.

As the Tower of Babel rose and fell, as the waters of the flood rose and fell, as Abraham’s vision of unnumbered stars gave way to sons vying for a blessing and brothers sold a brother into slavery, God remained faithful and asked us to remember who we were called to be.

And when another empire built its monuments of distinction through slavery, God freed the people by   reminding Moses that he was both enough to serve as God’s agent, and that the ordinary ground of this very earth was holy because God made it so.

Even when we forgot what life in Egypt was like, what a life of total reliance upon God in the wilderness was like, and we began to fall back into the grips of the original lie once more, God sent prophets to remind us that a life of original blessing requires “loving justice, doing mercy, and walking humbly with our God” and one another.

When Jacob dreamed of the ladder uniting heaven and earth and exclaimed, “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it” he spoke for all of us who long to wake up to the reality that the only divisions between heaven and earth, between God and humanity, between one human being and the other, are the ones we erect and insist upon.

The reason we remember the baby born to a Jewish girl who said yes to God even though the consequences of that yes were great—the adopted child of an ordinary son of David named Joseph—is because in him, the fullness of God’s continued call for us to return and remember was expressed.

The unbreakable link between God and humanity that had only been obscured by our own human blindness and preference for illusions became flesh and called us to leave behind the lie once and for all by serving and loving one another.

To remember that the reign of God is among us and that in the ordinary stuff of life is also the seat of heaven.

It is a call that we still have to answer today, as the planet groans from our lack of care, as wars and rumors of wars rage, and as so many still seek distinction and separation instead of shared destiny in community.

As 385,000 newborns come into our world today, we come to Bethlehem with those ordinary shepherds who heard the angelic multitude saying, “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors.”

We look into the heart of the dark night for the light of the world that echoes through the ages and we renew our commitment to live together as children of God who recognize the inherent divine blessing of our diversity and ordinariness.

We gather around the manger once more to see love’s incarnation take his first breath and allow the mystery and wonder of life’s genesis to wash over us.

And we pray that as those 385,000 new souls take their first breaths and we take ours, God’s grace might finally give us the strength to live into the life of mutual blessing and holiness to which we’ve always been called.