Christmas Eve lullaby
A silent night reflection
**Shared at the Christmas Eve candlelit service at Edgecomb Community Church**
Good singing! Good reading! Good songs! Good story!
Don’t you love a good story?
And what is it that makes for a good story?
What are the elements of a compelling story?
High stakes. Surprising characters and character development. Nefarious plot twists and near misses. Journeys full of obstacles. Encounters with implausible messengers. Fate. Purpose. Urgency. And of course, the emergence of new possibilities.
Good stories don’t leave the world the same as it was when the story begins.
Good stories are full of transformation—the characters change, the more central the character usually the more radical the change they experience; and their world changes too.
Good stories don’t leave us the same either, when we hear them, read them, witness them, take them to heart.
Good stories invite us to change, right along with the characters.
In good stories we find ourselves identifying—in big ways or small—with the characters.
Just like the characters in good stories:
We’ve also been asked to carry more than we sometimes know how to carry.
We’ve also been turned from time to time away in our moments of need.
We’ve looked to the heavens for answers and guidance.
We’ve longed for someone to come to our rescue.
Some of us have carried children—and know what is, through the children you’ve carried, to touch the divine.
Everyone of us was carried in someone’s womb. And since God Speaks Through Wombs, every one of us is a unique utterance of the divine.
Good stories invite us to be God-bearing; to bear God in our hearts— carrying and experiencing change in our own aching, angsting; curious, courageous; swooning, soaring; thirsty, weary, wandering, wonderful hearts.
And good stories invite us to be midwives, birthing new life into every conceivable—and perhaps especially into every inconceivable—corner of this world.
Don’t you love a good story?
Don’t you love a good song?
Early in her pregnancy, Mary sings this song that we call the Magnificat.
In it she sings:
“God has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; God has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”
The poet, Drew Jackson, has a poem about this called “That Girl Can Sing!” It goes like this:
Watch out! The sound of her voice
will cast them down! Way down!
No doubt they will try to quiet you,
soften you, make you into
a domesticated maiden,
but we’re gonna play this song.
Go on, Mary!
Bless our ears with your sonic theology.
Lift us up with your melodic doctrine.
Magnify! Magnify!
This voice is magnificent.
You can imagine this magnificent mother, Mary, singing lullabies to the little baby Jesus with that voice of hers.
Lullabies full of grit and glory.
Honest lullabies. Powerful lullabies.
Lullabies that echo the heartache of living through hardship, and yet that resound with melodies of possibility.
Can you imagine Mary’s lullabies ringing through the night, stirring the spirit and soothing the soul. Can you hear her singing?
The light shines in the darkness…
Can imagine Mary singing to her baby? Her baby still splotched with blood from birth, wrinkly and hungry and wet, vulnerable as all get out, surrounded by the sweet stink and warm breath of barnyard animals, right there in the middle of their poverty, and displacement, and her justified uncertainty about the future—you can hear her sing, nevertheless:
The light shines in the darkness…
That’s the voice that was there to meet Jesus when he was born. That’s the voice of the mother and the message that helped to make Jesus into the man he became. That’s the voice that echoed in and through all that Jesus was and did and became and inspired.
The light shines in the darkness. And the darkness does not overcome it.
That’s the message that echoes through the lives of all of us who are compelled and inspired by this good story of a mother—against all odds—giving birth to a child who would change the world.