The Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee



Christmas Eve, December 24, 2011, Christ Church Cathedral Nashville

“To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord” (Lk. 2:11).

The land had languished long under an evil spell. The kingdom had been defeated by a foreign empire and its people were now ruled by conquerors and their cronies. Taxation and tyranny were the order of the day, and hard times imposed by folk from a distant land. Rebellion and war blighted the countryside under a bloodthirsty regime. The ancient ruling house had petered out, lost its vigor and disappeared from history, leaving a political vacuum. It did not seem that things could get any worse. At just such a time the rumor went out, that the heir to the throne had been found, that a new king had arisen who would restore the old dynasty and bring peace and prosperity to all. Just a rumor, mind you, but enough to set things in motion, to bring hope and to kindle once again the fire of an ancient faith.

No, this is not the dust jacket blurb from the latest edition of The Lord of the Rings, or even the cinematic trailer for Peter Jackson’s new Hobbit movie. But it does have some resonance in the mythic world of J.R.R. Tolkien and others, because these writers are tapping into an old, old story of the rise and fall of empires, the destruction of hope and its revival at the very last.

The rumor of renewal is an ancient one. This old, old story is common to many peoples, to different cultures in all sorts of times and places: a story of rebirth and reclamation. What had been torn down will be raised up; what was once lost will be found again. Tolkien was tapping into a perennial human hope. It’s an old, old story, but no less fresh for that; it continues to echo with folks, drawing upon our imaginations and our collective memory, and the proof of that is box office success for those who draw upon it.

The story laid out for us tonight, of course, is the story of ancient Israel, and the story of Jesus Christ, the heir to the throne of David the king. The political machinations of the Roman Empire and the working of its military might had laid low the People of God, and these were but the latest successors to a string of empires that had run roughshod over the Promised Land and sent the People into slavery and exile. David’s line had run out, but now there is the rumor of something afoot, a rumor that comes to shepherds in the field “keeping watch over their flock by night” (Lk. 2:8). It’s a rumor borne by angels, by messengers from on high, who bring “good tidings of great joy” (Lk. 2:10). “To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord” (Lk. 2:11). It’s a message that comes at the very worst of times, when hope is all but lost, to bring renewal and rebirth through the birth of Mary’s son.

It’s an old, old story, but what is absolutely key to Christian faith is the extraordinary idea that in the birth of Jesus Christ we are not dealing with a myth as popularly conceived, the repetition of a story of rebirth that simply conforms to a common and familiar pattern, one that is explicable in human terms, but that we are dealing with the reality of redemption itself. We long for this story to be true, to be something more than “just a story”, and the astonishing thing that stretches our imaginations is that in this case, in the city of David, in little Bethlehem, it might just have happened. The human hope for renewal, repeated in many cultures and in many times and places, simply prepared us for the incredible reality, wearing a well worn path from where we were, sunk in despair, to the manger in Bethlehem. Rather than a myth, we encounter flesh and blood, the bone and marrow business of birth in a stable from a human mother. We encounter the historical person Jesus Christ, the true heir of David’s line, come to set his People free from the power of sin and death. Here is the Word made flesh, the hope of all the nations, come down in time to redeem all times, including our own.

Tonight our hearts must speak to us, telling us that hope can be fulfilled. Our imaginations must be enlarged to encompass truths that lie beyond our merely human capacity to believe. Heart and mind must be responded to; they must be answered, and God has done this in the birth of Jesus Christ. The joining of earth and heaven explodes our reality, our world view that tells us that such things are impossible. Our view of things is simply too narrow and constrained for human beings who know what it is to live in hope and to have faith in what is beyond us; that is, for human beings who know what it is to be truly human. Love and longing for redemption, another part of being human, are not meant to be unmet by God. That too is part of what we learn and experience this night. The old, old story has come true and come home to us in the birth of Jesus Christ.

- The Rt. Rev’d John Bauerschmidt, Bishop of Tennessee

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