Sermon for the Feast of the Nativity at Midnight
"Heaven and Earth shall flee away when He comes to reign."
The baby is born, and nothing seems to happen. The baby is born, and Heaven and Earth remain unmoved and indifferent. The baby is born, and the man on the street says, "so what?" before putting his turkey in the oven. Heaven and Earth take no flight but remain as they always have.
Has the baby come to reign?
God becomes Man, so His Eternity is still there and hidden. His vast power concealed in His flesh. His crown covered by a baby's soft skull, vulnerable and small. His Kingdom is already here but obscured by the day-to-day business of the flesh.
At this instant of birth, Heaven and Earth cannot be the same again. Here at this birth, God's Creative power works a miracle that spreads back and forth through all Time and all Space. Here the cracks in Existence caused by the Fall are cleansed so that, from the pinnacles of Eternity, God still looks on all He has made and declares it, "very good".
The birth of this baby restores a link to the Divine that we had lost. As one umbilical cord is cut, another is reconnected, supplying the constant stream of the grace of God back into a humanity slumbering in a degradation of its own making. In this Birth and in His later death, our life begins again for all who will be stirred and admit themselves to be shaken into that life.
Heaven and Earth do flee away. They flee from the perception of souls who awaken to the Divine light and the Divine smile. They flee away from the lives of those who let them go so as to grasp the Hand of God which has become flesh precisely so that we may indeed grasp it. They flee away, because He comes to reign, not in that poor, lowly stable, but in the hearts of those who dare to have their hearts broken just so that He may enter.
His birth is the hour of our creation and, behold, it is very good.
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