24 December 2022 – Christmas Eve
A Voice Rings Out, by The Rev. Tammy Hobbs Miracky
Sermon preached by The Rev. Tammy Hobbs Miracky
Below is a DRAFT text of the homily. It may vary considerably from the recorded version. Please excuse typos and grammatical errors, and do not cite without permission.
This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger. Amen.
Merry Christmas, everybody! It is so good to be with you all this evening. This is my third Christmas at All Saints, but it is the first year that I am here in person with all of you. It’s good to see your faces…and Merry Christmas!
My first Christmas at All Saints was December 2020. So we missed that one. Last year, since I hadn’t experienced Christmas here at All Saints before, I was speaking with some parents who were describing the service to me. One mom said, “and when that voice rings out from the back of the sanctuary, ‘Once in Royal David’s city,’ I cry every time.”
So, after that description, I couldn’t wait to be here last year. Instead, though, I found myself quarantined with a houseful of sickness. So, I found a quiet space at home, and I watched online. As the service began, a clear voice rang out from the back of the sanctuary: “Once in Royal David’s city / stood a lowly cattle shed / where a mother laid her baby / in a manger for his bed / Mary was that mother mild / Jesus was her little child.” And when last year – even over livestream – that voice rang out, I started crying, too. And I cried again tonight.
Because there is a magic and a beauty to this night. Every year we have this opportunity – amidst the hustle and the bustle and the presents and the parties – we have this opportunity to be reminded of the Sacred, the Eternal. Every year we get to be enchanted by the story of God who, in an act of self-revelation, squeezed God’s very being into the form of a baby, to live and walk among humans, to speak with human tongue, to reveal flashes of God’s essence to us. Tiny and fragile and ordinary, and yet the most amazing miracle ever. This baby.
There is an unusual porousness to this season. Our attention is drawn outside ourselves as we retell this story of our faith, and we open ourselves to these stories in a special way.
I’ve been thinking recently about what it means that we are a people of the Book, the keepers of stories. In church school and at My Grown-up and Me Eucharist, we’ve been talking about the cycle of the church year and the colors of the church year, and how, each year, we remember and retell our stories. We learn, we preserve and enliven, and we pass on our stories. And we do this because our stories are beautiful, and true, and sometimes entertaining. We do this because our stories point us toward the Holy. They point us toward Awe.
And we create rituals around our stories in ways that become part of the story that is passed on into the future. A few days ago, I had the pleasure of placing the creche on the altar. And as I did, I noticed the cracks, and the broken places, and the dog that’s lost much of its fur and the donkey that’s lost an ear. And I noticed the intricacy and the care and craftsmanship invested in creating each piece: the sack the shepherd wears at his waist, the sandal straps criss-crossed up the legs of the magi, even the decades-old waxed cardboard in which the pieces are stored, tied together with a rope. Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas at All Saints without this beloved, bedraggled, Roald Dahl-esque nativity scene. A Saints Alive article written by Marianne Evett in 2016 reported that this creche was here when the rector Rev. Louis Pitt arrived – in 1954. It has been part of the All Saints story for well over 68 years!
This community is rich with rituals that have become part of the All Saints Christmas story: a recipe passed down from a beloved friend, lovingly prepared and shared with others each Christmas; a parent whose children now participate in creating this Christmas service for all of us marveled at how, years ago, they used to admire the older children and now, their children are here doing the same; a mother who, many years ago was the first clear voice to ring out from the back of the sanctuary singing “Once in Royal David’s City” – that mother is able to witness her daughter do the same these many years later. Each time we travel around the liturgical calendar, the grooves of our experience grow deeper and deeper, layering more and more meaning into our experience of Christmas, even as we become part of the story that we preserve and enrich for those who come after us.
And with each turn of the year, with each deepening groove in our memory, our stories point us more and more in the direction of the Divine. Though we see only flashes of that Truth, this day of all days we catch a glimpse of God come down to our scale. As Evelyn Underhill puts it in a selection of her writings that were arranged for Advent, “The depth and richness of [God’s] being are entirely unknown to us…and yet the unlimited Life who is Love…so loved the world as to desire to give…the deepest secrets of [God’s] heart to this small, fugitive, imperfect creation—to us…And then the heavens open and what is disclosed? A Baby, God manifest in the flesh” [Source, 57]. A baby. Concrete and ordinary, and yet a miracle. God with us.
And so, tonight, as we observe / and remember / and join in this central story of our faith, may we catch a glimpse of the magic and mystery of the Holy. May this baby help us see the visible and the invisible, the Beauty, the Truth, the Pure, the Eternal in human scale. This Christmas, with the shepherds, may you dare to approach the Divine. May you travel alongside the magi, offering your gifts to the Holy One. May you open your ears to hear the voices of the angels ring out, and may the beauty of that sound bring tears to your eyes.
Amen.