December 24 2024, Christmas Eve

Lisa Wiens Heinsohn

All Shall Be Well

Homily for St. John’s Episcopal Church by Lisa Wiens Heinsohn

given December 24, 2024

Christmas Eve: Luke 2:1-14

Merry Christmas!

There are times I think I have the best job in the world, and today is one of them. All I have to do is two things: rejoice and celebrate Christmas with all of you, and keep my comments significantly under 10 minutes. In all seriousness, I do love the immense and sacred honor of walking with all of you through the beautiful and tragic and fun parts of your lives. I love that we get to explore an incredibly expansive and intellectually robust vision of God as love, a God who welcomes and affirms the myriad rainbow of beautiful human beings across the spectrum of age and race and gender and orientation. I love that we cultivate a community that does its best to take care of each other. And I love that every year, at Christmas, we celebrate that in the very darkest time of the year, light is born anew, over and over and over again.

At Christmas we celebrate the birth of Jesus, but let us remember that no matter how cute our nativity sets might be, Jesus was not born to a perfect family living in a beautiful house with 5 bedrooms and a perfectly manicured lawn. Jesus was actually born to a poor peasant family in the backwater of the Roman empire. Jesus became a refugee just like the millions of refugees all over the globe today. Jesus was born in a barn, to an unwed teenage girl, to people who were oppressed.

These central  parts of the Christmas story remind us that this light that shines in the darkness, the love of God, is meant to be embodied in real people who live in real circumstances that are difficult.

What does this mean for us today?

It means that we can come here, just exactly as we are, in the actual reality of our lives. It means that God intends to meet us as we are in messy reality and not only in a beautiful church. Every one of you here tonight is here with a very particular set of life circumstances. Perhaps you feel different from everyone else, in a way that makes you feel alone. Maybe you look around this room and think, I don’t fit in here at all, or maybe you look around the room and think, this is my family. Some of you are really enjoying life right now and your Christmas is full of joy and gratitude. Some of you are grieving right now, even as you get up every morning and try to continue to live in your unwelcome new normal. Some of you feel really anxious. Some of you are just fine.

Regardless of how you come today, I know that overall, most of our lives are complicated. Things in this world are in upheaval and the future is unpredictable at best. It is often disheartening and alarming to read the news, and we have a lot going on in our personal lives also. But in the end there are only a few things that matter. Loving each other. Offering our unique gifts to care for the common good and this beautiful earth. Savoring the beauty and joy and laughter that come even though they are often accompanied by pain and loss. We can keep it simple. We must do our part, and then let go, because we do not and never did have control.

We can come to trust that and experience that the one important thing, to love each other, is based on the love of God which is truly a force stronger than any other power on earth.

When my daughter Carly was baptized in a Sunday morning service, she was four years old, and the priest who knew her well actually invited her up and held Carly on her hip as she gave the sermon. It was a really sweet picture. The priest knew that Carly’s favorite thing was water, splashing and playing in it. So she told Carly that following Jesus’ Way of love was a lot like swimming. Sometimes the best thing you can do is to stretch back with your arms out and just allow the water to hold you up. She told Carly that you could trust the love of God like you can trust water to hold you when you swim.

Today, this holy night, I invite you to imagine leaning back into the love of God, trusting that God holds you exactly as you are in all your imperfections and in whatever state you are in – whether you are joyful, or immensely sad, or angry or content or however you come. Imagine this feeling, this leaning back, as the ultimate foundation of all the rest of your life. Yes, we are called to do many things, and we will do them. But the birth of Jesus reminds us what is truly important. It is OK to trust that the love of God is a stronger and deeper reality than all that is wrong. That what we have in common is much greater than what divides us. That the love of God is meant to be embodied, just as Jesus embodied the divine and just as we carry divine light within us.

Julian of Norwich was one of the great mystics of the Christian tradition, a woman from 13^th century England, and was only six years old when the bubonic plague began. It was a pandemic that came in waves for years and is estimated to have killed about 40% of the population of Europe, and more across the rest of the world. In the midst of this terrible time, Julian is said to have had a vision in which she saw a hazelnut held in the palm of her hand, and God saying to her that just as the hazelnut was held, so too God held the world, and that everything existed because of love and through love. She heard the message that “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” This message shook Julian to her core, and she spent the rest of her life deepening her experience of the love of God.

It may be very difficult to believe that all shall be well. What I do experience deep in my bones, is that everything and everyone is ultimately made of divine light. I experience that God is love, that love is the mysterious force that binds us all together. This is what makes it possible to keep it simple, to focus on the few things that are truly important. If these things are true, then even people who do terrible things are made in the image of God. If this is true, I can focus on seeing the divine light in myself and in you, and serving that light, above all that would otherwise divide and destroy. If God truly is love, then we know that our loved ones who have passed away are in some mysterious sense embraced and unified with that love.  May we, with Julian, know and experience that all truly shall be well because love and sacred light are deeper than all that is wrong. Joy to the world. Merry Christmas.

10am Service