Peter embraces Andrew. Iconographer unknown.
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I want to be with family this year. You likely understand this feeling. My father died less than a month ago, and while his death was a holy one — he was full of years, and he died with great dignity and serenity, despite a grave illness — I am grieved by his death; and though the great St. Francis rightly teaches us to greet death as our graceful sibling, and though our faith rightly teaches us that death has lost its sting, it is still … well …
I want to be with family this year.
And so I had a quick reply when my sister Sarah texted me and my younger sister Elizabeth the other day. She wrote, “Anyone interested in an afternoon or evening at my house, in my front closet, going through Daddy and Mother’s correspondence box?” I answered instantly, with two words: “for sure,” except of course I’m still relevant and hip, so I spelled them “f-o s-h-o.” Fo sho, I’ll be there in that front closet, with family, looking through old letters.
It is instinctive, the desire to be closer to my kin, not just to mark the departure of my father, but for other reasons, too. This is a bone-wearying hard time in the world. This is a scary time. I’m in personal grief, but you and I, I think all of us, can feel how rough everything is, everywhere, right now. I want to be with family this year. And so, for the fourth time since mid-November, on December 26th (the feast of Stephen), I’m traveling to Minnesota to see them, in the land where the snow lays roundabout, clean and crisp and even. I’ll miss my family here, though. I’ll miss you. I want to be close to everyone, you included.
Drawing close to family: this is not just the plot of a holiday movie. Our faith holds ‘drawing close to family’ at the center. The incarnation — the revelation of God’s presence and power; heaven torn apart by angelic cries of joy; the nativity of Jesus Christ; God’s mighty, cosmic arm contained in the little space of a baby’s tiny limb, reaching for the face of their mother: in all of this, family draws close together.
Joseph of Nazareth essentially gets a notice in the mail: register your family, by orders of the emperor. So he helps his fiancée get everything packed, and they move south-southeast, from the northern hill country of Galilee to a southern suburb of Jerusalem, where his extended family lives. North moves to south: I think of Psalm 133, the one where Aaron’s beard drips with fragrant oil — Aaron, that great sibling in our faith tradition who loved his younger brother Moses, breaking the violent tradition of sibling rivalry begun by Cain and Abel, continued by Jacob and Esau, and then Jacob’s twelve contentious sons. Aaron embraces his brother — Aaron draws close to family — and Psalm 133 says that this is “like the dew of Mount Hermon falling on the hills of Zion.” Mount Hermon is in the north; Zion is in the south. North and south are reconciled: family comes together.
This north-to-south journey taken by the Holy Family — by Mary, Joseph, and their infant — is still possible to take today. You could start in the Israeli city of Nazareth, and travel south-southeast to Bethlehem. Hermon to Zion. Except there’s a problem: as you likely know, today, Bethlehem is in the West Bank, behind a huge concrete wall. So north reconciling with south is … fraught, in our time. Maybe we should stick with vague metaphors and assume that Christmas isn’t about modern Nazareth and modern Bethlehem.
But no, we really shouldn’t do that. Christmas is exactly about Israel and the West Bank, and Christmas has always been about such things. Remember, Aaron was noteworthy because he did something the rest of the siblings in the Hebrew bible didn’t do: he embraced his sibling. And if you like you could pray before a Christian icon of sibling reconciliation, an icon of Peter and Andrew, the two fisherman siblings, embracing in sweet peace. That icon is noteworthy because it symbolizes western Christianity in Peter, who went west to Rome, and eastern Christianity in Andrew, who went east into Syria, perhaps as far as the Black Sea. Their embrace guides our prayer that west and east, divided for a thousand years, might one day reconcile.
If Christianity is not about this — if Christmas is not about reconciliation, about siblings embracing, about family coming together, about Peter and Andrew, about Aaron and Moses, about Israel and the West Bank and Gaza, about Russia and Ukraine, about all the families on earth driven apart and driven insane by war — if it’s not about this, then Christmas isn’t worth celebrating.
When my father was first hospitalized and it became clear that his condition was serious, two memories flashed in my mind: the two or so years of family schism and angst that followed my mother’s death, in 1996, and another disruption in the wake of our uncle’s 2015 death. Both times, when a close member of the family died, the family struggled. As I flew to Minneapolis to see my father, I steeled myself with a resolution: not this time. I even shared this resolve with a few of my siblings. “If this is leading to his death,” I told them, “I am not permitting myself to fight with anybody.”
Sure enough, there were a few moments when I stood at the brink. Death is wrenching and even traumatizing. Tempers wear thin. Eating junk food in a hospital lounge doesn’t help. But so far, so good: it’s still early, but I’ve held to my resolution pretty well. (Thank you for your prayers.)
We celebrate Christmas, then, for two reasons: first, God calls us to come together as a human family, in a bond that runs deeper than clan and nation, deeper certainly than social constructs like race or religious identity, deeper than all the myriad reasons we humans invent to make wretched war with each other. God becomes flesh in the land of the Holy One to build a just peace, from south to north. God calls the west to embrace the east. God gives me wisdom to embrace my siblings, of course, but ultimately God calls everyone in the world to stop killing each other, for the love of God. (Really: for the love of God.)
So that’s the first reason to celebrate Christmas — that God comes in Jesus to teach us the way of justice, the way of peace, the way of that beautiful sibling in the faith, kind and good Aaron. And second, we celebrate Christmas because all of this is exceedingly difficult. Sometimes reconciliation simply can’t happen. Other times, when someone simply cannot be safe, or simply remains unwilling to reconcile, it shouldn’t happen. It’s difficult! I have to resolve not to get into quarrels with family as we cope with grief together. I can’t just wing it. And a cursory glance at the news will tell you how hard this is, writ large. And so, at Christmas, we are not naïve: we do not celebrate perfect reconciliation everywhere. Sometimes what is broken stays broken. And sometimes that’s the healthiest path. But we celebrate that God still comes to us, faithfully, to teach us how to embrace one another.
It’s difficult, but it’s not complicated. Christmas is about God breaking into our conflicts, our wars, our easy habits of destruction and violence, but God in Jesus breaks in with a straightforward, uncomplicated mission: Jesus simply teaches us how to be kind. Sometimes we call it lovingkindness — in Hebrew, the word is chesed. Lovingkindness is the very nature of the one God. Jesus teaches us how to be kind, for that is how we find justice; that is how we make peace.
I want to proclaim a portion of a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye, a Palestinian-American poet. Here is the final stanza of one of her poems, the one she titled, simply, Kindness. In her poem, Nye does not lie to us: she knows kindness and sorrow are siblings; a daughter of a Palestinian, she surely knows the cost and cruelty of war; she knows how difficult everything is. But she sings a hymn to kindness, all the same. Here are her words:
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
***
Preached on Christmas Eve, December 24, 2023, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
Isaiah 9:2-7
Psalm 96
Titus 2:11-14
Luke 2:1-20