Merry Christmas, one and all.  You may have heard me say it before, but, Christmas is not a day.  Christmas is a season.  If you want to read more about that idea, you can do that here or here.

This year, I have decided to follow my own advice (a rare occasion I might add), and focus on a practice of reflection and writing for these important days.  I cannot complain that others ignore these days if I myself do not engage them.

As my guide on this journey, I have chosen Bruce Epperly’s The Work of Christmas, his own reflective journey  spent in dialogue with the works of Howard Thurman, the great African-American churchman and theologian.

Epperly’s theme for the first day of Christmas (December 25) is “The Character of God.”  And as his focus texts he uses John 10:30,38 (cutting out the difficult argument that occurs in 31-37) and these words of Thurman:

God is and [God] is love, as I believe most profoundly and if in Jesus there is the projection of this central affirmation in concrete flesh and blood, then in such a person there are inevitably precious clues as to the meaning of God and the meaning of Life. His way of life, then, becomes the way of life at its highest and best. (Thurman, The Mood of Christmas, quoted in Epperly, 26).

This is is the season when, over and over again, we pray and sing the word Emmanuel, the word become name that we believe tells us of the sending of God’s son.   And I can remember in my bones the day that I found out the meaning of that word — God with us. It was a moment in my life when I really needed to know that, to experience the feeling that God was always with me.

I’m sure that many of us have spent the Advent season singing the familiar, “O Come, O Come Emmanuel,” but how many of us have paused to think about just what these words mean, or should mean, in our daily living? What does the idea that God is always with us have to say to us, as Thurman says, what “precious clues as to the meaning of God and the meaning of life” do we find here?  What does the creation of this word as flesh, this Emmanuel, this “God with us,” have to say to us about our own lives and the lives we share with the rest of creation?

I must admit that, on this first day of my journey through Christmas, I have more questions than answers.  Although, I have that felt sense, that bodily, incarnated knowing, that says to me that Thurman’s words speak a deep truth, a truth that just might save us if we can better understand.  I carry that sense that something is new again, and that I must learn it over and over.  Epperly says so well that with which I still struggle:

God rejoiced when you were born and delighted in your moments of achievement and spiritual transformation. God’s power is love, not coercion, exclusion, or violence. God changes the world by living in our midst and inviting us to care for the lost, lonely, and forgotten, for that is where we will find this little Child (29-30).

Perhaps the call of Christmas, the call of this first Christmas, is to be yet again like a little child, so that we can be immersed in the journey of this, another little child born to us so long ago, and yet born in us each time we remember that the nature of God is love, a love that we can’t quite describe but that we can experience.  Perhaps that is the true nature or our shared incarnation with God’s love.  We always think that Love incarnated so that it could understand us and our state; perhaps that is the other way around.  Perhaps living an incarnated existence with all its problems and pain is the only way for us to glimpse the love that is God.  “Love came down at Christmas,” wrote the poet Christina Rossetti, but we often forget the last stanza of that beautiful poem: