You came! You always come!

I have been blessed to have family friends who have known me since before I was born. The father worked with my father, and the family lived in the same apartment building as my family when I was born. The families got together periodically during my childhood, whenever we could, and we always had a great time. The kids were around the same age as the kids in my family and we got along famously. When I was 14, my father became very ill, and those friends came to see him every day in the hospital. They brought him homemade soup in a thermos. They came to my wedding, they rejoiced when I had children, they came when I was ordained. Just this fall, my mother had a stroke and was in the hospital. So, the mother of this family, and one of her daughters, drove three hours from Massachusetts to visit my mother in the hospital, and then drove back again. When they walked into the room at Benedictine Hospital, all I could think was, "You came! You always come!"

That is how I feel when we get to this night of the year, and hear the story of Christ's birth again. "You came! You always come!" As some of you know, I spent many years as a non-believer, an avowed atheist. Maybe because of that, I am always a little afraid in the weeks before Christmas that I will get lost in the externals of celebrating Christmas-the shopping, decorations, parties, sweets and gifts-and will somehow miss the inner experience of Christmas. Maybe I will get to the manger and God won't be there.

But the story of Christ's birth is in some ways so ordinary, so grounded in the reality of human life, that it disarms me, and draws me in year after year. After all, babies are born to poor unwed parents every day, all over the world. They are often born without a proper roof over their heads-I think of the shanty towns all over the world where people make shelters out of cardboard and sheets of corrugated metal. They are often born without access to doctors or hospitals, without even a midwife in attendance.

Jesus was born during the Pax Romana, a time of "peace" established by the imperial Roman government. But that so-called peace came at the cost of ruthless oppression, wars and occupations, and a tax system that left many people unable to feed themselves or their families. Although we live in a different era, which we like to think is more progressive, we still live with wars, occupations and wide-spread poverty and hunger.

In other words, Jesus was born into reality-our reality. God came to be with us, not God as an abstraction, a doctrine or a creed, but God as a flesh and blood human being, with all that that entails. God chose to be born in rough circumstances, circumstances that unflinchingly expose the dark side of our human experience. He was born in our poverty, not our wealth; into hardship and struggle, not our complacency. He had no status, or political power-when he was barely more than an infant, he had to flee for his life from Herod's murderous rage.

And he was born among the animals, a creature of flesh and blood like them. By taking on our physical life, Jesus accepted the human vulnerability and the dying that goes along with it.

This story, as I mentioned, disarms me-in Jesus' story we come face to face with our own humanity, in all its messiness, pain and struggle. God did not come in power and glory, for people who have it all together, and are healthy, wealthy and wise. He came for ordinary people, with ordinary struggles. He came for the lonely and broken-hearted, the lost and confused, those who fear they are unworthy or have failed in some way. He came for those who long for justice and true peace. He came for all of us, who are poor in spirit.

He came into our darkness as light, into our poverty as blessing. He came to give us cause to hope because God loves us and has come to be with us. And God is sovereign over this world, no matter what forces are at work in it today. Jesus' birth into the world is our sign that the powers of this world will someday be overcome by the power of love. The pax romana will give way to true peace, with justice for the poor and oppressed.

Through his holy birth, Jesus illumines our lives and reveals that all births are holy, and every life is sacred. Jesus' life and teachings reveal our own holy calling to love with all our hearts. To be a true human being is to spend yourself for love, and not just for friends but for enemies as well. Jesus shows us that our path is to forgive one another, seek reconciliation and peace, and work to end injustice and oppression.

God believes in us, or he would not have entered into our darkness or taken on our humanity. God believes in our capacity for goodness and love. The great Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner says that "Christianity is indeed an optimism about human beings such as only God could conceive."

If we trust that God believes in us, perhaps we will begin to believe in ourselves. If we keep our focus on Jesus who came and who always comes, we will find that we have the strength to love, as my old friends do, steadily, faithfully, humbly. Maybe we can extend that love to strangers as well as friends, those who hate us as well as those who love us. Maybe we can live as God's beloved, shining Christ's light into the darkness of the world. Trust God, trust your life. The light shines in the darkness, Christ's light and our light, and the darkness did not overcome it.

Once again, I find my faithless fear is unfounded. Here we are at the manger, and he came. He always comes.