Christmas Eve 2024

I’ve played the piano for most of my life. My mother, a nationally certified teacher of music with a master’s degree in piano performance and pedagogy, was my piano teacher all through high school. One teaching tool she would use she called “finger rides”. When she was trying to describe what the motion of your hand or fingers should be, and words just couldn’t communicate what that motion should feel like, she would sit down on the bench next to me, put her hand up on the keyboard, and say, “hop on”. And I’d put my hand on top of hers and feel the motion. And I’d get what she wanted me to do in a way that no amount of explaining would have accomplished.

I thought this was just a fun trick that my mom did - kids often don’t recognize their parents have actual expertise or notoriety. I love the stories about big-name celebrities’ kids being thoroughly unimpressed with them. And then I was in college and my piano professor was helping me with a jump and trying to explain how to roll my hand into it, and I wasn’t getting it quite right. It was still not fast enough. So he sat down next to me, put his hand on the keyboard, and had me put my hand on his, to feel what he was talking about. And then it made sense. It turns out, “finger rides” weren’t just a cute thing my mom did, they were real pedagogy, and a reminder that sometimes just explaining or telling a student how to do something isn’t enough. Words can only get us so far before we need to experience whatever it is we are trying to learn done right.

For thousands of years, God told us how to do it right. God communicated to His people through prophets, sages, and judges how we were to live. We would hear from a prophet and, when we listened to the prophet, get it right for a while, and then gloriously screw up and be sent another prophet to speak to us on God’s behalf, kicking off the same cycle again.

As many of you know, this Christmas is my first as Rector at St. Matthew’s. In the Diocese of Nebraska, when a priest applies for an opening, one of the first things you do is have a conversation with Bishop Barker. And in my conversation with the bishop, he asked me, “what is it about Jesus that is especially meaningful to you?” And my answer was, and is, the incarnation. That God loves us so much that He became us in the person of Jesus. He lived and grew up and worked and loved and mourned and suffered and died as one of us. And in doing all of that, he showed us how to live a life of perfect obedience, of complete love, as one of us.

The incarnation begins with a baby. Human babies, compared with other mammals, are underdeveloped at the time of our births. It takes us a whole year to learn to walk when a fawn can walk within an hour of its birth. We nurse for more than a year when cats are completely weaned after four months. And bear cubs leave their mothers within 18 months when we typically start to move out at that many years. So our savior comes to be in the humblest of humble beginnings - at the bottom of the human food chain, the child of Galilean peasants, as one of the feeblest of newborns - a newborn human.

As my own children have grown, I think about that feeble, tiny savior and about all of the basic human things he would have had to learn in his childhood. At my oldest daughter’s first Christmas, she was a little over six months old and she had just started having tells for some of her…bodily functions. I texted some friends that I wonder if Mary could tell when Jesus was filling his diaper by his making a face, like I could with my daughter. And my friend responded with an earthy paraphrase of the reading you'll hear from John's gospel if you're here tomorrow morning: from “the word became flesh and dwelt among us” he amended to, “and the word became flesh and made poop face among us”. Jesus became one of us from the basics of toilet training to the celebrations of attending a wedding with family and friends in the wedding at Cana in Galilee to his weeping at the tomb of his friend Lazarus. He made his home among us to show us how to follow where God is calling with perfect obedience and complete love.

Sometimes it’s not enough to describe. You have to put your arms around the little leaguer to get the motion of swinging the bat, use the rolling pin with the new baker to get the feel of how little force you have to use on the dough, or have your college piano students put their hands on yours, so that they can take these skills, hone them, and make them their own.

The gospels show the incarnate Jesus not as a military leader or political king, but as a prophet, miracle worker, and teacher. The most important thing Jesus teaches us is how to love. And he loves you. Sacrificially, perfectly, and completely. Amen.