A Prayer for the First Sunday of Christmas

Dear Jesus,

And then it was no longer your birthday. The first Christmas elapsed, and the ordinary rushed back to hide the miracle. So, to all appearances, you were exactly as precious and inconvenient as the other newborns. To all appearances, your mother adored you for reasons no deeper than other mothers’ reasons for adoring their sons. The census ended, counting you or not counting you, and across Bethlehem, people packed up. They went home. 

Put another way: you reordered the world by being born, but the world didn’t much show it. We can look back and call it strange, which it is. But no stranger than the fact that we, too, lose sight of you. That we too, who know so much more of the story, sometimes do and sometimes do not count you. 

No stranger than the fact that we spend Advent on tiptoes, waiting, and Lent decluttering altars, but feel relieved, packing up after the holidays, after the holy days, to let the ordinary rush back. It isn’t that we want to feel Boxing Day and Easter Monday as a relief. And it isn’t that we want to feel your presence as occasional. 

Somehow, though, we have learned to look forward to you—to your birth, to your return—at the expense of learning to look for you. Somehow, without meaning to, we have relegated you to the past and future tenses. We’ve read about the road to Emmaus and ruled out the possibility that you would walk beside us too. We’ve read that you left the disciples with the words “Lo, I am with you always” but still gotten in the habit of singing “O come, o come, Emmanuel” as if to summon you from a vast distance.

We pray, then, that our eyes would be opened. Let us remember that we call you Emmanuel not just because once you graced this beautiful, ruthless world, and not just because you have promised to return. We call you Emmanuel because it has never been otherwise. You were God-with-Adam and Eve, and you will be God-with-the last native earthling. And in the meantime, you are God with us. Teach us to look for you beside us. 

O come, o come, Emmanuel: reorder the ordinary, and let the world show it. Amen.