I was told, by a member of our parish who works in retail, of the response of a customer a couple of days ago when our parishioner had rung up the purchase, handed the customer her bag, and pleasantly wished her “Happy Holidays.” This customer did all but grab our parishioner by his labels to inform him loudly and with a kind of vicious smugness, “It’s Merry Christmas – you know – Christmas as in Christ’s birthday.” O.K., O.K. Whoa. I can just imagine this customer, leaving the bookstore and hauling out of her parking space at the Friendly Center, and then getting into an altercation with the whistle blowing crossing guard, still in midst of her “Jesus is the reason for the season” Christian huffiness.

Also at The Friendly Center (by the way the most fertile place for sermon illustrations outside of Harris Teeter), I got into a long conversation with the gals working the cosmetic counter at Belk. These gals know that I’m an Episcopal priest, and they were telling me how incredibly conflicted they feel when customers, not in a very good mood, come in needing to get a stupid present for stupid Aunt Martha, as if an expensive gift is going to smooth over what is clearly not a very warm or happy relationship. The girls at the cosmetic counter said the hungry people of Guilford County could be fed with the money that people drop on extravagant gifts given grudgingly out of a sense of obligation rather than love or thankfulness.

E. B. White, the British author of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, is quoted as having said, “To perceive Christmas through its wrapping becomes more difficult every year.” We understand that. Christmas gets wrapped up for us in a crazy and complicated calendar of things to do, which includes shopping, running errands, making travel arrangements, wrapping gifts, baking, cooking, cleaning, decorating, entertaining, and writing Christmas cards.

If you work in retail, it’s not difficult to be sick of Christmas by the second week of December. The background music that you can’t tune out, impatient customers, and the sheer volume of merchandise wrap Christmas up in tired feet and forced politeness. If you work in a hospital, for the police department, in a funeral home, or as a therapist, it’s a known fact that you are going to be busier from Thanksgiving to New Year’s than at any other time of the year. The wrappings and layers of Christmas can be so stressful for people that they get sick or lose their temper and lash out. Old griefs comes to the surface, past losses seems brand-new. December “hurts” for a lot of people.

If you are a teacher, you resign yourself to the fact that not a whole lot of actual instruction can take place in the classroom from Thanksgiving on. Kids are likely to be positively overwhelmed with excitement and anticipation. Christmas gets wrapped up in Secret Santa gift exchanges, holiday concerts, and holiday parties.
Maybe you are able to glide through the weeks of Advent staying focused on the reason for the season. God love you if you that is so. Or maybe you are like me, who struggles to keep a spiritual perspective and not get wrapped up in the not-so-spiritual trappings of Christmas. Every year, it seems, Christmas becomes a race to the finish line, which is tonight.

But if the finish line for you and me, in the wrappings and trappings of Christmas, is to be here tonight, then we’ve come to the right place and we’ve done all we really need to do and must do to celebrate Christmas. For me personally, as soon as the opening chords of “O Come, All Ye Faithful” are sounded in the processional, everything else falls away, I can claim calm, and I am ready to celebrate once more and with great joy, the birth of the Christ child.
“And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.” The words of the King James Version are even more beautiful, “And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.”

I never really knew what swaddling meant until I had children of my own. Let me show you a blanket that has accompanied my family in our moves around the country for 24 years. This is the blanket our daughter, Lauren, was swaddled in, in the first weeks of her life in Advent 1980. Lauren was four weeks old her first Christmas. She also wore this cute little T-shirt that says, “Bring on the Presents” – but that’s another story – and probably not appropriate right now! This little blanket, a gift from the Carswell Air Force Base Hospital in Ft. Worth, Texas, where Lauren was born, has swaddled two other daughters and a lot of baby dolls over the years. It’s a cheap blanket that’s been washed a zillion times, that’s not worth anything at all, but it is very precious to me.

If you’ve ever seen babies swaddled, you know that there is a peaceful comfort for them in being tightly wrapped up. Rather than feeling confined and constricted, to be swaddled is to be wrapped in bands of love. The mother of Jesus wasn’t given a layette for him at a baby shower in Nazareth, but she had with her, as she rode on a donkey, hanging on for dear life and trying to breath through her labor pains, the bands of cloth with which she would swaddle her newborn son.

At Christmas we celebrate the Incarnation of God. It is overwhelming to think that the Creator of the Universe, God Almighty, would so love the human beings he has created that he chose to come among us as one of us. While for human babies to be swaddled provides a sense of comfort, security and well being, I can’t imagine that God Almighty would feel the same sense of well-being, choosing to limit himself – to be swaddled, clothed, with human flesh. What a precious love, then, the Incarnation of God as the baby Jesus shows to us, that God would wrap himself in the limitations of human flesh so that we might more clearly feel wrapped in his love and passion for us.

Our Presiding Bishop, The Most Reverend Frank Griswold, wrote in his Christmas message: “With Jesus’ birth, the boundless love and all-embracing compassion of God became real, immediate, and concrete as a human life. Love is, therefore, the heart of the Incarnation. Through God’s insistent and enduring love the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Love alone gave Jesus the ability to hope all things and to endure all things, even the pain of the cross. And, through the love of God poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, the Incarnation continues to unfold in and through our lives.”

You and I are swaddled not just as newborns, in the blankets our mothers once wrapped us in, but we are swaddled throughout our lifetimes by the love of God in Christ Jesus. Jesus, as God incarnate, came to wrap us in his loving embrace. That is the only gift truly worth unwrapping this Christmas and every Christmas.

Tonight we’re ready to greet the newborn baby, lovingly swaddled in bands of cloth by his mother, the baby who will grow into the man who swaddles us close in his love, and whose Spirit now wraps us in peace and comfort. Tonight we’re ready to open the gift, once again, of the love that knows no bounds or limits.

If the trappings of Christmas for us may sometimes seem a burden, what we unwrap at Christmas are not just the gifts we’ve been given by those we love, but the gift of God himself to us, for us, and within us. Bishop Griswold goes on to say in his Christmas message, “To celebrate Christmas is to open ourselves to what is happening within us. By virtue of our baptism, Jesus continues to be born and grow to maturity in us.” As we open ourselves, literally unraveling and unwrapping ourselves to the very power and presence of Christ, we are given the only gift that truly keeps on giving – the gift of God himself.

On this holy night, we remember that Christmas is only and all about Love. God’s love for us; made plain and clear in human form, in a human body, in a newborn baby. May our celebration of Christmas, beginning tonight, be about Love; the love of God for us, and our love for God. May love, then, rule our hearts, rule our thoughts, rule our behavior, and rule our relationships. May the Love we receive as pure gift in Christ Jesus be the Love that we give – in thanksgiving - to the world.

Amen.