On an evening in early December, the first really cold night we’d had, I was obsessing about the Christmas decorations in my living room – moving things around, thinking about where the tree would go and what I had to move out of the way to make room for it. Quite honestly – I was really having fun - I was enjoying every minute of my obsessing.

I was listening to the Christmas CD’s, and in particular one that was recorded in St. John’s Cathedral in Denver a number of years ago. There’s an arrangement with brass to “Angels We Have Heard on High” that brings me to my knees every time I hear it. Next year, James, we’re going to do that very arrangement.

So there I was, on that cold winter evening, thinking about the living room and the tree and, of course, what all that signified in terms of having our three adult daughters home tonight. Oh joy!!! Welcome home, girls!!!

And so I got to thinking ahead… to planning the music for my funeral… Now just stay with me here - my mind works in ways mysterious even to me… I got to thinking about how I’d love for my funeral to be all the things I cherish; all the things that have fed my heart and soul all the years of my life; all the things that help me express and grow in my love for Christ. Like, for example, singing “O Come, All Ye Faithful” as the processional hymn, with choir and brass descant, then “Angels We Have Heard on High” as the gradual hymn before the gospel reading from Luke. And then singing “Silent Night” in the darkened church illumined only by candlelight on our knees (Well, I guess it will be your knees instead of our knees, since this is my funeral, after all…)

And then, of course, we’d transition to “Jesus Christ is Risen Today”, and bring up all the lights as the poinsettias are taken away and the lilies are brought in. We’d have to sing, “Alleluia, Alleluia, give thanks to the risen Lord” following the sermon and invite the children and whoever else would like to join in to flower the cross here in front of the church.

Then, of course, we’d have to get to John Rutter, my favorite Anglican musician and composer. I used to think that my funeral just ought to be a Rutter sing-along, but we’ve got to add the great hymns of Christmas and Easter also. Or maybe my funeral should just be a hymnal sing-along – going through the first verse of every hymn in the Hymnal, like a choir we were a part of in Ann Arbor, Michigan did as a fund-raiser years ago. I suppose by now you’re praying that I don’t die right away, since this is beginning to sound like a very, very lengthy funeral!!

In all seriousness, however, in this season of Advent I’ve been more aware than ever of the emotion that is at the center of our preparations for Christmas. I remember hearing on National Public Radio years ago, in a broadcast about grief and sorrow, that “every new loss makes every loss new.” I think what I realize more and more as the years go by is that every new Christmas makes every Christmas new.

What I mean by that is that the very heart of our faith; the very heart of who we are, is wrapped up in the ways we worship; what we do, the decorations we use and where they are placed, what we say, what we read, and what we sing. We bring to this night every memory of every Christmas Eve service we’ve ever been a part of. We bring to this night all the people we love who are now in heaven. On this night, we remember Christmases past.

On this night, of all the nights of every year, we are completely open and vulnerable and perhaps just a little unsure of ourselves. If this isn’t our home church – if we grew up somewhere else – we still need very much for there to be signs that this is a Christmas Eve like the ones we remember.

I remember when we moved to Miami in 1996 how completely crazy it felt to be wearing short sleeves on Christmas Eve, and to see Christmas lights on palm trees. But then I knelt behind the altar during the singing of “Silent Night” with the Rector and another assisting priest – the three of us harmonizing alto, tenor and bass – and suddenly it was really, really Christmas – even in Miami.

Why is there so much emotion wrapped up in Christmas for us? Partly, I think, it’s because as human beings we are so bound up with each other – other church families we’ve been a part of, the St. Andrew’s family some of you remember from long ago, and our most cherished relationships - our parents and grandparents; our brothers and sisters and children. But at the center of all the emotion, all the tender feelings, all the vulnerability, all the human relationships is the child born tonight – the baby Jesus.

On Christmas Eve, the Almighty God changed the course of time and of human destiny, becoming incarnate as a human being; vulnerable like us, helpless and needing a mother’s care. We remember the life-changing gift of God coming to be with us, in Jesus, through all the days and years of our lives, in the good times and in the bad, and to be within us as the very heart of our hearts; the very soul of our souls.

In our EFM groups, some of us are reading Church History this year. During the fall, we were reading about the first five centuries of the church, and about how Jesus was to be understood in relation to God, because the gospels only give hints and not a full-fledged explanation, or doctrine, of the Trinity. Was Jesus fully divine, and if so, how could he be human also? Was Jesus on the same level with God, or a kind of lesser, secondary-god?

For a couple of hundred years, people wrestled with how Jesus was both God and man – fully human and fully divine – very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, through whom all things were made. Those statements from the Nicene Creed were not composed easily, because people’s faith; their actual experience of Christ in their lives and through their worship, was at stake in the words of what came to be creed.

Early in the second century, a bishop by the name of Irenaeus (who eventually would be killed by the Roman empire for professing faith in Christ), cut to the spiritual heart of who Jesus was and how Jesus was related to God and to us when he said, “He became what we are so that we might become what he is.” It bears repeating: “He became what we are so that we might become what he is.”

And that’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.

The emotion and the stress we feel in the Advent season leading up to this night, the desire to have things always as they have been, with the people we most love and cherish, has to do, finally, with the vulnerability of not just God coming among us as one of us, as if that isn’t overwhelmingly wonderful enough, but with the real, ongoing question of our response.

Will we open our hearts tonight so that Christ might be born in us? Will we let our most private selves and souls surface so that we might tonight, this very night, be reborn and made new? Will we trust God enough to submit to the ongoing operation of dying to our own selves so that Christ might grow in us? Will we look at each other and look to see Christ reflected there?

The good news of Christmas is that the baby Jesus was born in history, in time, once upon a time, and that, even more miraculous, in every Christmas since, he asks to be born in us anew.

Every new loss makes every loss new. Every new Christmas makes every Christmas new. On this new Christmas, may Christ be born in you so that you might become what he is. May you become a Christ-bearer, like Mary, bringing love and light to the world. That is surely God’s dream for us on this Christmas night.

Amen.