Henry Van Dyke wrote "Are you willing to forget what you have done for others and to remember what others have done for you -- to stoop down and consider the needs of little children. If so, then you can keep Christmas, and if you can keep it for a day, why not always." If you can keep Christmas, if you can be peaceful, loving, generous, etc. for one day of the year, why not keep Christmas for the other 364? Of course you know why. Nobody could live like that. Christmas is fine, but part of the fun of our Christmas celebrations is that they take us out of the ordinary, the routine, the expected. Though we hate to part with Christmas, isn't part of us glad to be headed back to the ordinary, the routine, the expected?
The Scripture passage is Luke's account of Mary, Joseph, and the babe returning to Galilee, to their hometown of Nazareth, after presenting their child Jesus at the temple in Jerusalem. The holy family is going back to business as usual.
Among the points that Luke wants to make in his account of the holy family's journey back to their rather ordinary town is that Jesus is new, but he is also part of something that is very ancient. Simeon and Anna, the old man and the old woman, waiting at the ancient temple, clinging to the ancient hopes of Israel, represents the best of what has gone before.
There is a rhythm, in this story of Jesus, of continuity and discontinuity, of change mixed with tradition, intrusion and resumption. Your life is like that too. Oh, if we could we would like it all to be new. We Americans love change, the new and improved model, the latest fashion, the newest craze. We tend to dislike sameness, habit and tradition.
But I don't care how spontaneous you think you are, none of us live without habit, ritual, sameness, pattern, or repetition. This is the glue that holds life together. Such ritual, sameness keeps life manageable.
Ritual orders life. Every religion tends to do certain things over and over again because there are some things that are too important to be left to change.
If every day at church were like Christmas Eve, then nothing would be like Christmas Eve. Show me a church where everything is happy, upbeat, joyous every Sunday, and I'll show you a place out of touch with life. Life is a rhythm. If your religion is only a faith of Christmas Eve and Easter Sunday, it isn't much because life has a lot of low times, too.
The Christian religion is not simply about warm, spontaneous feelings surging up within you, or about miracles that overwhelm us with their strangeness. It is also about the keeping of the faith, about the habit of prayer, of Bible reading, of doing what you are supposed to do like Simeon and Anna -- of quiet waiting, of going to church the first Sunday after Christmas even though you know it's more likely that you'll meet a preacher than an angel.
Continuity amidst change, the ordinary returns after the extraordinary and everyday life resumes. This scripture passage says that God is with us. God is with us NOW -- going to church, doing what we're supposed to do, obeying the rules, returning home after the holidays, getting the pine needles out of the living room rug, dragging a dead tree to the curb, turning back to the pots and pans --as much as God was with us in Bethlehem.