The Rev. Austin K. Rios
25 December 2022: The Nativity of Our Lord
A couple of years ago, I read a story about an especially meaningful Christmas gift.
During Advent 2020, that year when the world first began grappling with COVID, and our collective sense of isolation and separation was especially acute, a neighbor chose to reach out to a fellow neighbor in one of the few ways he could.
As he was stringing up Christmas lights on his house, knowing that face to face contact was dangerous and that his neighbor was suffering from loneliness and depression, the man decided to run a string of lights from his home to hers.
This small gesture was the man’s way of communicating that he and his neighbor were connected—that even though the pandemic had forced them apart for safety’s sake—he and his neighbor were united by hope and a strand of twinkling lights.
When other neighbors saw this sign of solidarity, they decided to give the same gift to one another.
And soon what was a neighborhood of isolated houses became a bright network of Christmas cheer.
One neighbor even chose to make a phrase with the strings of lights connecting the houses, writing out the phrase, “Love lives here.”
By sharing the gift he had with another, in love and concern for her mental and spiritual health, this man unwittingly set off a chain of giving that led to a wonderful community response.
And where before there was isolation, separation, and despair— love, hope, and possibility arose.
Each Christmas we celebrate the gift of God’s Son by giving each other gifts.
We do this because we are aware of the way in which God has reached out to us in the Incarnation.
Like that neighbor stringing Christmas lights to his neighbor’s darkened home, God reached out to us who wandered in great darkness through the Light of the World.
For this gift to come into the world, Mary had to agree to a kind of pregnancy and motherhood that would put her in jeopardy with her fiancé and her community.
Joseph had to agree to adopt both Mary’s story and her miracle child in order for that gift to come to full term.
And once Christ was born, while the affairs of the empire dominated headlines and the powerful plotted in their palaces, it took simple, ordinary folk like the shepherds sharing the news for the gift of God to spread out in the world.
We who have been blessed by that gift, and who gather in the name of the one who taught us to be connected through love and service instead of slavery and domination—through his own life-giving blood instead of merely our accidental human bloodlines—we are charged with being gift givers and connectors in this divided world.
To allow the light of this Christmas day to illumine our hearts, minds, souls, and wills and to allow that light to pass from us to our neighbors.
When we receive God’s greatest gift, and we commit to sharing his love and light with the world, the places we inhabit begin to change.
The church goes from being a cold and impersonal building to a community of care and a sign of grace and blessing.
Our neighborhoods become havens of peace and mercy instead of battlegrounds of competing opinions and ideologies.
And even this wide world, which can oftentimes feel so mired in darkness and despair, can begin to resemble a connected and abundant garden of blessing for us and for all.
In a few moments, we will once more share communion and remember who we are called to be—the gifts of God, for the people of God.
May we take them in remembrance that God first saw fit to reach out to us in love and join heaven and earth as one in Christ forever, and may our lives be so transformed by his life that our hands and homes and church become constant channels of light and blessing for the whole world.