Christmas Eve
Jack Hardaway
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Magic.
Christmas magic.
I can still feel it.
The wonder of being a child in a world full of enchantment and miracles.
It does become more elusive as we age, doesn’t it? But, it also grows deeper.
Christmas re-enchants a world that is always losing its spark.
The awe and the wonder of living in a world where we encounter God, where we are touched by the holy, where sacred communion causes our hearts to erupt in praise and adoration.
A mysterious and mystical presence that takes our breath away.
The magic of Christmas.
Sometimes I think the Episcopal church exists solely for this night, to hear the story, to proclaim the story of the birth of messiah. We do it well.
Emmanuel.
Incarnation.
The Holy night.
The infant Jesus.
And the Angels Sing.
And Mary ponders all these things in her heart.
The almighty God wrapped in swaddling humanity.
The magic of Christmas re-enchants the world.
Luke’s Christmas story is a story of being overpowered and overwhelmed by awe and wonder.
That is the thing about praise and adoration, they aren’t really choices, they aren’t something that we do, they are what happens when we encounter God. The Catechism teaches that God’s Being draws praise from us.
In other words: Praise happens.
It is evidence of God’s presence.
It is an overwhelming thing, a loss of control, like being in labor, or caught in a flood.
The Christmas story is like that.
Mary is overcome in labor, birthing the messiah.
The Shepherds are overcome in fear, and then by praise.
The Angel and the multitude of the heavenly host are overcome by praise, exploding and filling the night, in a storm of mighty wings, flapping and stirring the night.
For the world to be re-enchanted is to be overwhelmed, possessed, possessed by a Holy Spirit. We lose all control, and we are moved by goodness, and love, and song, and praise.
God owns us, and rather than bondage, the magic of Christmas sets us free.
That is the paradox of obedience to the Lord who has marked us and claimed us.
Praise is pure freedom.
Christmas in Luke is to be overtaken by events.
Praise happens, and we are carried away and washed ashore in a strange new world.
A world inhabited by the holy.
It is like in the Christmas Carol Good King Wenceslas, where we walk in the deadly cold night and are saved by the warmth of walking in the footsteps of the Saint, where “heat was in the very sod that the Saint had printed.”
The magic of the holy filling the world, warming the frozen sod.
Venite Adoremus Dominum.
Come let us adore the Lord with the shepherds and the multitude of the heavenly host in their storm of swirling wings.
For the one who is wrapped in bands of cloth, laid in a manger, because there was no room in the Inn, is also the one who is wrapped in linen cloth, laid in a rock hewn tomb, where no one had yet been laid.
The Manger and the Tomb fill this holy night and they overflow into the holy terror of Easter where death loses its sting, where hell is put in an uproar because it is done away with.
The darkness rages and fades away.
This night is the turning of that tide.
The world is no longer disenchanted, the world is inhabited by holiness.
Let us make haste.
May praise happen.
Magic.
Christmas magic.
The world is sprouting wings, filling the night with the multitude of the heavenly host in song. The mighty storming swirl of flapping, that moment when a flock takes flight, the sudden silent whoosh.
Venite Adoremus Dominum.