Sermon: Hope’s Gem – 24 Dec, Rev. Dr. Katherine M. Lehman

Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Christ (fresco), 1477.

Christmas is a mystery. It’s the mystery of the incarnation. It’s not that it makes no sense. It’s more that it makes an uncanny kind of sense. Or perhaps, the nonsense that it makes continues to arrest and engage us, until we are more capable of ambiguity and ambivalence, more open to multiple meanings. To entertain the mystery of God’s relation to humanity requires a willingness, to venture into what Yeats calls the land of unlikeness (H 464), and as John the Evangelist says, there to find ourselves at home (John1:11).