Merry Christmas...and Happy Holidays. There is an interesting phenomenon that goes on this time of year: people do not know what to say, particularly to a priest, in regard to a holiday greeting. Before I was ordained, I always found it interesting to observe who had trouble deciding what to say: Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays. Some folks are real clear, stick their hand out and say Merry Christmas, others are as clear with Happy Holidays, and then there is the vast middle ground where people start with Happy Holidays, now see my collar and get to Merry Christmas. It is kind of like a HapMer Holmas.  

I wonder if that uncomfortableness has more to do with not really understanding, or a fear of embracing, the Incarnation of God we celebrate tonight and instead is a co-opting to the secular culture in which we live. It is important to recognize that this is a momentous event we are celebrating tonight: God taking human form, as a baby in a manger, and living and being among us. This is just monumental in scope and is cause for great joy. This step by God, to live a human life with us, is done in a way that is totally unexpected.

We are all so familiar with the story we just heard as recounted by Luke. This is also such a normal, mundane situation in which a pregnant Mary and her erstwhile husband Joseph find themselves: schlepping to their home town for a tedious bureaucratic event, a census. This is all very normal, perhaps disappointingly so: should not God's entrance into the world as human be something more, well, spectacular? These kinds of expectations are how we misunderstand what this Incarnation really means. You see, by God choosing to be born in a stable and not in a palace, this Prince of Peace is saying from the outset: "change your expectations of what is about to happen, of how the world operates." And by our celebrating Jesus' birth into the world, we are allowing ourselves to upset those normal expectations.  

Jesus' birth in this manner announces a new normal. This is not some otherworldly experience. The Incarnation of Jesus, of God come among us, is an announcing of the Kingdom of God that has come among us. The kingdom is here among us, now, in the day-to-day grittiness of our lives here on earth. Jesus has not come to take us away from that grittiness, but to live with us in the grittiness and to give us a new normal, a new way to see and be in the world.

Jesus is here to transform our relationship to the world and to each other. And by affirmatively putting ourselves into that transformation is to love the world as Jesus does, to do good in this world as Jesus did good. We can bring hope to the hearts of those whose hearts are frozen in this world. By becoming involved in a connectedness to the world, we change the world in which we live. Through that connectedness we find a bond not only with one another, with those with whom we live and know, but a connectedness to everyone, everywhere. And we find a bond with God in this connectedness.