The birth of a child—any child—is a mystery. I don’t mean an intellectual mystery. We know about the biology of it, the physiology of it, the medical aspects of it. It’s a personal mystery—one that goes to the heart of our humanity. A new human being has just joined us. A blend of maternal and paternal inheritances. A fosterling of the mother’s body. A new link in our human community. And that’s something that makes each of us a little different, too. Circumstances permitting (it’s been a problem of late!), relatives and friends will come thronging to see the new baby. If they can’t come, they demand photos. They come because they want to see for themselves—and to worship the mystery. 

I’m not using the word “worship” lightly. Every true mystery draws us to worship. Our meeting with the new infant is replete with hopes and concerns, with thanks and with questions about the future. What will this new human being turn out to be like? What will the baby grow into? What will this new human choose for its own life? We have little to go on. We all inherit much of who we are—but not all. We are all unique, no two of us exactly alike—not even (at least in my own limited experience) identical twins, who tend to grow each into their own persons. And we come to contemplate the new mystery early on. Our own lives, after all, are involved in this new life, whether as parents or relatives or friends or simply members of the community where this child will be growing and maturing. 

The mystery of human life, starting afresh in this new child, draws us to contemplation. We may have the opportunity to help this child flourish, but we can’t dictate who it will become—or even foresee it with any confidence. Mary of Nazareth was not the first person to “ponder all these things in her heart.” She certainly wasn’t the last, either.

And we bring all this worship with us this evening to this festival of the Nativity of Christ. We come with the shepherds to see the baby resting on a pile of hay in the cattle’s feed trough, because so many people have flooded into Bethlehem for the census that there’s nowhere else. And we find him a mystery, like every newborn, like every new human being. Of course, we know more of the story than Mary or Joseph or the shepherds could know: who he is to become and what he will do and what he will suffer. But at this moment, we allow ourselves to be grasped by the mystery of birth. And we worship.

But there’s more, of course. Not every birth gets announced by choirs of angels. Not every birth is announced first to a bunch of shepherds—strangers from the margins, quite literally, of their society, who wind up taking the place of eager relatives and friends and become the first to worship at this makeshift crib. This birth is news not just for the baby’s family and townsfolk, but for the universe, from its loftiest angelic inhabitants to quite ordinary human beings—and to the cows and sheep and goats. Maybe a donkey or two. Probably some birds perched in the rafters. And no doubt a spider or two in the corners. It’s the whole gamut of creation—the creation that God so dearly loves and longs for. 

This new birth is for the world. It’s destined to change the world. It brings us and God face to face with each other in the greatest of all mysteries.

From earliest times, Christians have tried to speak about this—and always we stumble, precisely because it is the greatest of mysteries. Christians took three hundred years producing the formal “definitions” of Christian orthodoxy. But abstract theological statements can’t fully capture such a mystery. They can only point to it. But the shepherds sensed that they were seeing a world-changing event. And, later on, when people met Jesus, they sensed that they were meeting not just a great teacher and healer. They were meeting the love of God, the power of God fully present in a human life, overflowing with love for all that God has made, drawing close to us and drawing us close, too. God has dared to become one of us, to live our life from “inside.” God takes on all the possibilities and all the risks that every human infant contains, and it didn’t all go well. But our human mystery has now become a divine mystery, too. What will God be for us? What will we be for God and one another? The mystery is still unfolding. 

What we worship here is the mystery of humanity and God together in this world, of creature and creator in one. It is the mystery of love, the love that made this world and holds it together still, however strained the bonds sometimes seem to become. 

There’s no understanding it. But that’s not necessary. What’s important is to be present alongside the other creatures—to acknowledge the mystery—to worship. And to catch the hope that this moment brings and hold it close. Even, perhaps, to find ourselves being changed and strengthened and renewed by it.

L. Wm. Countryman Good Shepherd Berkeley

Christmas Eve, 2021

Year C: Isaiah 9:2-7; Psalm 96; Titus 2:11-14; Luke 2:1-14(15-20)