Imagine the scene.   There’s a little family — a tiny infant, quietly gazing up at his gentle mother’s face, as she kneels beside a cradle lined with hay. There’s a father standing protectively over them. 

Off to the side are two, maybe three, shepherds.  A couple of sheep are lying nearby.  A lazy cow is chewing its cud.  A star, high in the heavens, is shining a single bright beam of light down upon the bucolic birthplace.  And all around, candlelight twinkles in the windows of straw-thatched houses. The streets are empty, and a darkened sky covers the world with a hush.

That’s how we want it to be. When it finally arrives, we want Christmas to be a respite from the trials of daily life and the troubles of the world. Christmas seems like an invitation to disengage  — a brief break from our everyday grind.

You probably don’t get that many quiet nights or days in real life. 

Maybe your life is something like this. The alarm wakes you up like a scream.  It’s earlier than you want and later than it should be.  The kids need to be dragged out of bed, fed, dressed, taken to school.  Everyone is tired and irritable. 

You get into the car and realize that the gas gauge is riding the red E.  There’s a fender bender on the highway and traffic turns into a parking lot.  At work your inbox is bursting with 34 emails, and four urgent phone calls, and someone is pinging you often enough that you're wondering if you spaced out on an appointment or if they're just trying to hijack your time.

Later, the school calls because your kid melted down, and you spill your double vanilla nonfat latte on your shirt.  You arrive home weary and order pizza on the one Visa card that isn’t maxed out by the Christmas shopping for things no one needs.

Your phone rings but you can’t find it in time. When you listen to the message it’s from your mom, alerting you that your dad might be sick, but they don't want you to worry, so don't even think about calling back.

Dinner's scarfed down so you can taxi one kid to soccer practice and the other to a school play, crossing your fingers that the play wraps up before soccer does so the first kid doesn't stew in the dark. Of course it doesn’t, so you’re late to pick up your athlete. as you drive into the parking lot the assistant soccer coach and a Perfect Stepford Mom are waiting angrily in the parking lot with your tired, cranky, and embarrassed kid. 

You get home, get them to bed, and then toss and turn because that last cup of coffee you drank at the play is still partying in your veins, and you can't shake the nagging thought of the three emails you didn't answer and the pile of dishes that still aren’t done.  And then the alarm goes off.

Maybe your days aren’t like that.

Maybe you have just read the news once too many times, or doomscrolled, spinning through the cycle of outrage and despair unendingly, like a clothes dryer with a heavy load.

Or maybe you’re heading into Christmas with a sackfill of broken relationships and a sleigh loaded with regret and anger.

Life, right?

We all want a quiet, glistening, Christmas, like a Hallmark card.

We think we want that oasis because we're crazy busy or buried under responsibilities.

But here's the real deal: While we often blame work, our homes, the kids, our parents, or our partners, it's not any of those things, not even all of them combined, that leave us aching for peace.

We are longing for peace and quiet, a silent night, because every one of us, every single one of us, walks around with a God-sized hole in our hearts. 

Each of us is navigating the chaos and noise of life while carrying that void, the emptiness waiting for the kind of serenity, peace, and joy only God can fulfill.

But let’s be honest: most of the time God seems very far away.  Even if we tell ourselves that  God is in the birds and the trees and the ocean, it can feel like God’s on that St. Thomas vacation we’re hoping for. 

And how many of us wonder whether the cranky children and the spilled coffee and dad’s illness and the empty gas tank and the accident on the road aren’t just that same faraway God’s punishment for some long-forgotten sin?

God, way out there as frustrated and withholding as any fed-up parent.

We aren’t the first to feel that way. The Israelites didn’t have the alarms and car problems, but they cried out incessantly, “when will God stop being mad? Where is that God who promised to stick around?”

So imagine the scene. Mary is 9 months pregnant when Joseph gathers her up to walk from Nazareth to Bethlehem, about 70 miles as the crow flies.  Four days to a week on her feet. 

Mary and Joseph and all of the land of Palestine lived under the thumb of an imperial power that had its grip on the nation's military, government, and economy. 

Every person in Israel had been told to leave their homes and return to some place a lot of them had never actually lived in—think modern-day Dreamers--like Bethlehem, in order to be counted for tax purposes and military conscription. 

Our scripture tells us that this was the first time the Romans had implemented this plan. Imagine the mayhem as an entire people hit the road. 

Mary and Joseph arrived in Bethlehem, and all the places to stay were taken.  Every room in every home, every inn and hotel, every nook and cranny was bursting with people who had come from days of travel on foot, and every road was full of people passing through to get to wherever they needed to be.  

Are we surprised that Joseph’s distant relatives, the ones who still lived in his hometown, just didn’t have room for this man and his nine-month-pregnant fiancée?

You want to talk stress?

So Mary and Joseph find a place. In a cave, probably, since that’s where animals were herded at night to keep them from being stolen. 

And there, in the middle of the chaos and the fear and the strain and the rejection, Mary goes into labor and has the baby, wrapping him in torn strips of fabric, and laying him in the animals’ food trough.

Outside the cave, on the roads, in the towns, while this is happening, the whole world is just rolling along, caught up in their own fears and chaos, toting around that God-sized hole in their hearts.

But on that night, God was suddenly not so far away.

That night, God stopped being some distant figure their ancestors had known.

Suddenly, with a labor pain and a push, God was right there. In the flesh, with them. Among us. 

The God who showed up that night wasn't there to punish. No fingers wagging, no condemnation. No peeping into your room or the recesses of your mind.

God showed up, in a baby.

Vulnerable.

Trusting those parents to do the right thing.

Trusting us humans to do the right thing.

The arrival of God was so powerful that shepherds, out there in the rocky desert night, felt it. God's presence was so magnetic that those who had a moment of peace, just a split second of undivided attention, responded.

When the shepherds converged on the cave, they didn’t find some serene Christmas card Christ.

Jesus, God incarnate, was a real, live, ordinary, crying, cooing, sleeping, eating, wetting, pooping human, just like any other of the how many babies being born that night?  

And like any other baby, what did he need? Jesus needed to be held, touched, and comforted with human love and care.

God needed to be loved on that night.

God so loved the hole in our hearts that God came to us in a form we could love. God came as a baby born into disarray and despair.  No silence, no stillness. 

Simply a moment of sheer holy grace.

Christmas is not about trying to find some distant God out there somewhere, nor is it about disengaging. 

Christmas is about God coming here, into our midst, to interact with us.

God is born on Christmas among us, right in the middle of us, just like us-- to get us to come running in from out of the rocky desert.

God is born on Christmas to help us leave the responsibilities of our sheep or our kids or our jobs or our parents or our partners for just a moment to pick up and hold the baby Jesus in our arms as close to our longing hearts as we can get. 

Christmas is the chance to wrap our arms around our faith and to open our tightened-down pain-wracked hearts to the love and sheer grace of a God who was not content to watch from afar, but came to earth to love and be loved. 

And so here we are, with Mary and Joseph, and the shepherds and Gabriel and the angels, gazing at love incarnate, God with us. 

This Christmas, wrap your arms and your life around love. And may your heart be filled with joy, and hope, tonight, and every holy night.  Amen.