Year B Christmas Eve Candlelight Service 2017

Year B Christmas Eve Candlelight 2017 

St. James the Less Episcopal, Ashland, VA 

“Tis a Fearful Thing” 

“Tis a fearful thing…” by Yehuda HaLevi 

Tis a fearful thing to love what death can touch.  A fearful thing to love, to hope, to dream, to be –  to be, And oh, to lose.  A thing for fools, this,  And a holy thing,  a holy thing to love.  For your life has lived in me, your laugh once lifted me, your word was gift to me.  To remember this brings painful joy.  ‘Tis a human thing, love, a holy thing, to love what death has touched.  

Scripture puts it this way: 

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.[John 3:16] 

God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loed us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. [I John 4:9-10] 

That is what it all comes down to isn’t it? Freud said that the two greatest needs of the human psyche is to know that we lovable and capable of loving. And the message of Jesus, the grown up version of this babe we celebrate was just that, God loves us and enables us to love one another. So simple it seems foolish...  

A thing for fools, this, And a holy thing, a holy thing to love.  

Tonight we stand on the brink. We stand on the brink of time, awaiting the Arrival.  

We wait in hope.  

We wait in want.  

With bated breath, we wait... 

We wait because we desire the comfort and the joy that can only come from above.  

We long for the vindication of the weak against the strong, the impoverished against the powerful, the child against the oppressor.  

And we wait.  

We wait for the Christ. 

We wait in the Dark awaiting the Dawn. 

Rarely do we think of God’s perspective.   

Through the Fullness of Time God has waited. Through millennia like seconds on our clocks, God has ticked the way through history, His Story, galaxies coming and going, all for this moment, all for the culmination of the hopes and fears of all the years meeting in this singular moment, the Incarnation. And God the Father is wanting and has declared that the moment has finally come.  

And what of God the Son? 

What is being asked of him? 

To live, to breathe, to love, to die.  

The Jewish mystic Yehuda HaLevi expressed the reality of life, of love, of the Christ if you will, in the poem I started with tonight: “Tis a fearful thing…” by Yehuda HaLevi 

Tis a fearful thing to love what death can touch.  

And here we are, the only animal that knows that its going to die.  

Tis a fearful thing to live.  

Tis a fearful thing to love. 

With bated breath we wait, but of God the Son, with bated breath he chooses Love. 

With bated breath the Infinite becomes the Infant. 

Can you get a glimmer of the fear that becoming finite would bring?  

All heaven above and all creation below awaits in silence. Time has reached its fullness. 

God the Son chooses to step into our skin and become one WITH us, he chooses to move into our neighborhood, and become one OF us. 

He chooses Pain. The first tooth, the skinned knees, the loss of kin and friend, the heartache of love, the heartbreak of life. He chooses to be Emmanuel, God-with-us. 

And, he chooses Death. 

Tis a fearful thing to love what death has touched.  

And to love us, he became one of us, to taste the sweet and the bitter fruit of life, the fruit of love, the fruit of death. 

For God so loved the world.  

Tis a fearful thing to love. 

Tis a fearful thing to live.  

But despite the fears he chose to live, to love, to be one of us. 

For God so loved the world. 

A thing for fools, this. 

A thing for fools, and a thing for God. 

A holy thing.  

‘Tis a human thing, love, a holy thing, to love what death has touched.  

But for love, God did not count the cost. 

Thomas Merton, from "Raids on the Unspeakable" 

"Into this world,  this demented inn,  in which there is absolutely no room for him at all,  Christ has come uninvited.   But because he cannot be at home in it,  because he is out of place in it,  and yet he must be in it,  his place is with those others for whom there is no room.  His place is with those who do not belong, who are rejected by power because they are regarded as weak, those who are discredited, who are denied the status of persons, tortured, excommunicated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in this world."  -Thomas Merton, "Raids on the Unspeakable"  

For God so loved the world, that he gave and gave and gave, even his Beloved, his only begotten Son… 

For God so loved you. 

For God so loved me.  

Tis a fearful thing to love what death can touch. A fearful thing to love, to hope, to dream, to be – to be, And oh, to lose. A thing for fools, this, And a holy thing, a holy thing to love. For your life has lived in me, your laugh once lifted me, your word was gift to me. To remember this brings painful joy. ‘Tis a human thing, love, a holy thing, to love what death has touched.  

And yet he did it in the eternal Now we call Christmas. Merry Christmas. 

Amen.