A Covid Christmas

 

Luke 1: 26-38
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
December 20, 2020

Of all the holidays we would need to comfort us in a pandemic, it is the winter holidays. Hanukkah is spent with family and visiting friends, cooking yummy foods like latkes and donuts, playing games, opening gifts, singing, and lighting candles each night. Christmas is spent much in a similar way. And yet this year it is as if the world has been turned upside down. 

It is the fourth Sunday in Advent, when we light the candle of Love. This is the Sunday when we would have a Christmas play, when we would view the Christmas story from another perspective. Love is like a prism: there are an infinite number of angles from which to view the light, the colors that come from it, and the Christmas story is no different. 

The Christmas story itself is a comfort. It’s the syntax, the flow of the words, the otherworldliness of it all, immortalized by Linus for his friend Charlie Brown. It’s the dozens of Christmas pageants and live Nativity scenes we’ve seen over the years, with children of all ages and adults and live animals, sometimes an infant or rampant toddler in the role of baby Jesus, that has transformed a story of an obscure birth into folklore and church legend.







The Christmas story can lull us into forgetting that for Mary and Joseph their world was turned upside down, by an angel and an unplanned pregnancy, not to mention an empire occupying their homeland and the hardship of traveling about 70 miles with a pack animal. 

What if the Christmas story took place in this way?



In those days, a decree went out from Dr. Fauci and the CDC that all the world should stay home, wash your hands, and wear a mask. This was the first pandemic any of us had lived through while John Carney was governor of Delaware. All went to their own homes. Joseph was supposed to go to Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David. Instead, he got a Zoom room with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child. While they were trying to sign on, the time came for her to deliver her child. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, but it was in a breakout room, because there was no place for them in the main Zoom meeting.

In that region near the McDonalds because it had good wi-fi, there were shepherds on their laptops, keeping watch over their flock by remote video. Then an angel of the Lord Zoom-bombed them, and the glory of the Lord ruined their screen resolution, and they were about to call IT. The angel tried to speak, but the shepherds couldn’t hear them so they cried “You’re muted!” The angel unmuted and said, “Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth, lying in a Zoom breakout room.” And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom God favors!”

When the angels had left Zoom and signed off, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go now to get the Zoom link and passcode and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.” So they signed on with haste and remained in the waiting room until Mary and Joseph let them in, and they found child lying in the breakout room. When they saw this, they tweeted and posted on Facebook and Instagram what had been told them about this child; and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds went to their homes, wearing their masks, washing their hands, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.

Granada nativity scene

Christmas has never been simple or easy, rather it has always been on the side of radical, risky, irrational love, for those who need to hear the good news that we are not alone. We stay home, we wash our hands, we wear our masks because we love each other, because we love this world, because love isn’t love until it asks us to do something we’d rather not do. Meister Eckhart, a 13th century mystic said, “We are all called to be mothers of God, for God is always waiting to be born.” This birth, the Christmas story, isn’t limited by a pandemic. What are the stories, mundane and amazing, that we will tell from this time? We get to love each other in this way. How marvelous a gift we get to give to each other. “How silently, how silently the wondrous gift is given; so God imparts to human hearts the glorious love of heaven. No one discerns God’s coming, but in this world of sin, where yearning souls long to be whole, the dear Christ enters in.”



Merry Christmas, Church.



Benediction – Marty Haugen

Rejoice, rejoice, take heart in the night
Though cold the winter and cheerless
The rising sun shall crown you with light
Be strong and loving and fearless
Love be our song and love our prayer
And love our endless story
May God fill every day we share
And bring us at last into glory