Fear not, and drop the blanket

Christmas Eve Sermon:

Grace to you and peace from God our creator and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, born to us this night, amen.

Congratulations! You made it! Christmas eve has finally arrived, after a month-long mad dash of present-buying, concert-attending, house-decorating, and holiday merry-making. Or rather… a month full of stress-eating, online-shopping, over-tired children-wrangling, and tired-of-dealing-with-the-traffic anxiety. And how many of you are tired of hearing Christmas songs on the radio or in stores? Come on, don’t be shy! I swear, if I hear “Baby It’s cold outside” or “Mary did you know?” one more time… it’s not going to be pretty. If this earns me the title of Christmas Grinch, Scrooge, or Charlie Brown, I’ll accept with gladness.

Do you remember the classic Charlie Brown Christmas Special that comes on every year? I think poor Charlie Brown speaks for many of us when he admits to his friend Linus, “I think there must be something wrong with me. Christmas is coming, and I’m not happy. I don’t feel the way I’m supposed to feel.” He sounds a bit jaded… perhaps he too has heard one too many overly-happy Christmas songs that have been playing everywhere since Halloween.

His friend Lucy – in her famous “the doctor is in” booth - tries to help by attempting to diagnose and label what he MUST be afraid of.  After all, if we know what fear he has, we can fix it, deal with it, and make it go away, right?

She starts to list all kind of weird phobias – fear of cats, stairs, oceans, crossing bridges, fear of everything… I’m surprised she didn’t include “fear of Christmas” in her list, which is “Christougenniatikophobia,” in case you were wondering.

But Lucy might be on to something about Christmas. Rather than the perfect scene in hallmark Christmas cards, we find that even the characters in our most beloved story have plenty to fear.

The shepherds watching their flocks on the night shift had a thing or two to be afraid of…. Not including a singing army of angels. They were working class people, having no secure place in their society. Their livelihood depended on defending the vulnerable sheep from predators and thieves, which involved lots of risk for not much pay.

That Christmas night, as Mary labored in the darkness, far from home, in a place where animals were kept, she had a lot to fear, too. Whether or not she would make it through the birth. If she would know how to be a good parent. How people would treat her as being pregnant before she was married. If Joseph would stay by her side. What the future of this child would be.

Joseph had some fears on his mind too. How helpless he must have felt as Mary went into labor and gave birth. How was he going to take care of his new soon-to-be-wife and child, a child born from God, when all he had to offer at the moment was an animal feeding trough to put him in?

Fast forward two thousand years… and not a whole lot has changed. Our top fears, according to a poll by Chapman University, are things like: not having enough money for the future, high medical bills, threats of violence and war from other countries, worries relating to the future of the environment, anxiety about the economy and the government, worries about identity theft, and for the health and safety of loved ones.

The future seems very uncertain, with so many things in our lives that we have little or no control over. The world feels like it’s spinning faster and faster every day, and we are on the verge of flying off. So maybe Charlie Brown’s friend Linus has the right idea, of carrying around his blue security blanket with him everywhere he goes… even to Christmas pageant practice… even when everyone gets on his case about it. After all, he feels like it’s keeping him safe in a very scary and chaotic world… Something for him to hang on to in a world where nothing feels secure.

Including the Christmas play he’s in. When play practice goes haywire, Charlie Brown, at his wits end, yells, “isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?”

Linus steps forward, trusty blanket in hand, and then something astonishing happens. Everyone remembers the part where Linus recites this part of the Christmas story: “And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.”

But this is the part that is easy to miss: when Linus gets to “Fear not,” … he… drops… his blanket.

We too are sore afraid. Where do we turn when the bottom threatens to drop out on us at any moment, when our worst fears threaten to come true, when white-knuckling feels like the only way we can keep ourselves together to make it through the night anymore? What will protect us from what we fear most?

The good news of Christmas is that in those moments where fear keeps us prisoner, God breaks in – sometimes with a singing angel army… sometimes in the voice of a kid who carries a blue blanket around with him everywhere…. Just when the night is at its deepest and most hopeless, God breaks into our lives and tells us to fear not. There is good news of great joy, in the form of a baby born to save us from what we fear.

This gift comes to us as God with skin on – as the embodiment of love itself, as someone we can hold on to. Our savior came into this scary world so that we would know that we are not alone.

Jesus came to be born just as we are, to grow up, to laugh, to cry, to comfort and to challenge…. To feed the hungry, care for the ignored and those on the margins, heal the sick and suffering, to point out injustice, and to defeat fear and free us from it - fear of power, of failure, fear of death itself.  

This gift comes to us, not as a powerful kind or a mighty warrior, to be yet another power to control us and make us afraid. But instead, this gift was born to separate us from our fears, in the form of a helpless baby born to a teenaged girl, born to regular folks just trying to get by, like you and me, who are imperfect and make mistakes, who struggle to feel Christmas-y on Christmas, like Charlie Brown.

Toward the end of the Charlie Brown special, Charlie feels he has goofed up yet again – since he has failed as a director, he is given the simple task of picking out a Christmas tree for the play… but he picked out exactly the wrong kind – a small and unimpressive looking tree that others laugh at…. And yet… Charlie Brown sees something in this tree that the others don’t.

While it is true that Linus DID pick his security blanket back up as soon as he was done with his speech from Luke 2…. He doesn’t hang onto it for long. In the end, Linus wraps his blanket around his friend’s little Christmas tree, and declares, “maybe it just needs a little love.” And together, Linus, Charlie Brown, and the other kids make the tree into what it was meant to be – a beautiful shining, Christmas tree.

Sure, some days I don’t feel exactly at the “transformed Christmas tree state” quite yet.  But I know that God is not done with me, and will keep wrapping me up in that love through all the hands of all the people who love me.

And sure, some days feel like I’m not are quite ready to give up that security blanket… and you might not be either, maybe not even tonight, despite the music and the sermon and the candle light. The thing is, none of us ever really get there – not completely, not in this life. That’s why Christmas comes around every year, no matter what.

Every year, we celebrate that this small and unimpressive-looking baby stopped fear in it’s tracks, and made it shake in its boots. Fear may not be gone, but Jesus has it on the run. Tonight, the hopes and fears of all the years are met in Jesus… Tonight, Jesus meets US, a God we can hold, and who holds us always. Thanks be God, Amen.