 Now is the moment of magic, when the whole round earth turns again toward the sun. And here's a blessing, the days will be longer and brighter now even before the winter settles in to chill us. Now is the moment of magic, when people beaten down and broken with nothing left but misery and candles and their own clear voices kindle tiny lights and whisper secret music. And here's a blessing, the dark universe is suddenly illuminated by the lights of the menorah suddenly ablaze with the lights of the kenara and the whole world is glad with winter singing. Now is the moment of magic, when an eastern star beckons the ignorant toward an unknown goal and here's a blessing. They find nothing in the end but an ordinary baby born at midnight, born in poverty and the babies cry like bells ringing make people wonder as they wander through their lives what human love might really look like, sound like, feel like. Now is the moment of magic and here's a blessing. We already possess all the gifts we need. We've already received our presence, ears to hear music, eyes to behold lights, hands to build true peace on earth and to hold each other tight in love. We invite you to light a chalice or a candle at your home. In the winter season of the year dark and chilly, let us come into Christmas here. Let this light and warmth brighten our lives and our world. Let us find in the dark corners of our souls the light of hope, a vision of the extraordinary in the ordinary. Let us find rest in the quiet of holy moment to find promise and renewal. Let us find the child in each of us, the new hope, the new light, born in us. Then Christmas will come. During this Advent season, First Unitarian Society has included lighting candles on the Advent wreath in our services. Each light was a step into the darkness toward the turning of the year, leaning in expectantly into all that is being born within us at this holy time, when the unknown lies before us rich with possibility. Tonight, we light the Advent candles for the final time. We light the candle of hope for that which is best in us to rise. And to enliven our souls and our relationships. The second candle we light is for peace, for the courage to soften what is rigid in our hearts to find the soft spot and stay with it. We light the third candle in the name of joy, joy in the shape of gratitude for all that is our life and joy in expectation of the world that we are building and creating with one another. The last candle is lit in the name of love as the creating force in our lives. And finally, we light the central candle, the light that shines in the darkness with the full power of our faith. We know, says the Reverend Bill Sinkford, how real the brokenness of this world is. But we will not give brokenness the last word. May this light bear our hopes, as well as our faith in love, in goodness, in compassion, and in justice. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness will not overpower it. To tell the truth, the ox thought it was just a little unfair. I mean it wasn't as if they had a lot of extra room in the stable as it was. The stable already housed not only the ox, but also a cow, a horse, a donkey, and a variety of chickens. Still when you get right down to it, folks have to sleep somewhere. And so he didn't mind much, moving over and leaving his stall space to the man and the woman, especially seeing as how she was so far along. Of course he had no idea how far along until later that night. Before the ox could turn around, which there really wasn't room to do anyway, not only was there an extra man and an extra woman in the stable, there was also an extra baby. They laid him in a manger, the ox's manger, on top of the nice clean hay that the ox had intended to snack on later that night. But still, a baby is a baby and you could hardly begrudge him a place to sleep where he was safe from careless hooves. You know the ox thought looking back on the scene some years later. It wasn't really so bad, a bit cramped, a bit awkward, but nothing really to complain about when you thought of the cold outside. Not so bad that is until the next day when the shepherd started arriving with their sheep and their sheepdogs bossy things, always ordering everyone about. You couldn't, he admitted, leave them out in the cold and they seemed so eager to see the baby, their rough faces gentle with wonder as they gazed at the little boy. But still in retrospect, the ox opposed that one shepherd would have been quite enough and the sheep could have stayed outside for a while. But the shepherds were folk used to being with animals in a quiet way, comfortable and unpretentious. So it could have been worse. For instance, they could have been kings rather like the ones who strolled in a few days later, three of them with gifts and camels. The ox was a patient beast, gentle and mild mannered, but by the time he'd knocked over the myrrh trying to avoid stepping on a sheep and caught his horn on the elaborate tassels of a camel's headgear, it was simply more than the poor ox could stand. He kicked open the stable door and bolted out into the night. That night it was like nothing he'd ever imagined safe in the stable at sundown. The air was cold and somehow thin as if it had been stretched out into the vast spaces of the sky. And the stars, they seemed at once so close that his horns might dislodge them and so distant that his mind began to spin. One star seemed to hover over the stable, both closer and more majestically distant than all the rest. It was stunning, glorious, shimmering with what sounded in the fevered imagination of the trembling ox like distant bells or an unthinkable chorus of angelic voices. That night, those stars, it was beauty like nothing he had ever known, grandeur that left him terrified and shaken. The ox tried to move back toward the safety of the stable, but he couldn't seem to get his legs to move. The ox had no idea how long he stood there before he felt the warm touch of a hand on his neck. Ah, my friend, said the man they called Joseph, so you too come out into the night. Could it be that even a simple beast feels as I do? Sometimes the splendor in there is more than I can stand. I find myself gazing at the child until time stands still, caught in the beauty of that new life. Why is it that when I look at him I feel like a whole new world is starting to unfold before my eyes? Does every father learn to live with such a glimpse into eternity? Sometimes it's more than this old heart can take, and I have to walk out into the simplicity of the night for fear I will get lost in such open spaces. The ox, being an ox, said nothing, only leaned into the comforting warmth of the man and pondered. How could it be that simplicity and glory, tight corners and vast spaces, could be so strangely mixed? Did the singing that still filled him come out from those stars? Or was it from something deep inside? Eventually, the man and the ox turned and headed back toward that stable. The man lay down in the straw of the ox's bed, and the ox nosed his way in so that he could look at the sleeping baby. Why yes, I see it now. Somehow the face of the child, even in sleep, seemed to hold love wide enough to encompass all the animals, the shepherds, the wise men, and every wandering stranger. The ox had lived in the stable all his life. But until that moment, he had never noticed that through a crack in the roof, one star shone into the stable, impossibly bright, impossibly near, impossibly distant, shining on the impossibly open face of a sleeping child. Some people are really good at picking out gifts. Some people are really good at making homemade gifts. Some people are really good at both of those things. I've always considered myself not so good at either one. Sometimes my problem is that my own desires cloud my judgment. Take, for example, my annual gift to my parents when I was a kid of French vanilla scented candles. I loved those things. The price was right for my small budget. What could be wrong about it? But I realized looking back that I had no real evidence that my parents liked scented candles. In fact, there were never any in the house besides the ones I gave them. In fact, there wasn't anything scented because my mom hated scented stuff. And I wasn't so good at homemade gifts either. For example, there was the time in elementary school where I made my mom a clay martini glass. I really expected that she would use it for its purpose, but she never did. And somehow this might be a reflection on her value of this gift. It ended up back in my possession about 25 years ago. I use this martini glass now as a paperclip holder on my desk. And it's pretty good for that, although a little bit wobbly. Maybe I should have presented it as a paperclip holder. Anyway, this checkered gift-giving history that I have is why I've always felt some affinity with the wise men, well, two of them anyway. The one that gave the gold, well, he did pretty well. Gold always seems to work. But the other two really, what were they thinking? Frankincense and myrrh? You've got to be kidding me. So Frankincense is an aromatic gum resin used as incense in religious practices. And myrrh is the same thing, only it is also used as a perfume. So I have a hard time imagining that either Frankincense or myrrh were at the top of Joseph and Mary's Christmas list that year. I can imagine that if they had gift receipts back in those days that Mary would have looked at those gifts, hoping that a gift receipt was taped to it so she could take it back. The poet Norma Farber wrote a poem about three more visitors that came that night bearing gifts. These visitors were the three queens. And they brought much more practical gifts. Here's how the poem goes. The queens came late, but the queens were there with gifts in their hand and crowns in their hair. They'd come, these three, like the kings from far following, yes, that guiding star. They'd left their ladles, linens, looms, their children playing in the nursery rooms. And told their sitters, take charge, for this is a marvelous sight we must not miss. The queens came late, but not too late to see the animals small and great, feathered and furred, domestic and wild, gathered to gaze at a mother and child. And rather than Frankincense and myrrh and gold for the babe, they brought for her who held him a home-spun gown of blue and chicken soup with noodles, too. And a lingering, lasting cradle song. The queens came late and stayed not long, for their thoughts already were straining far, past manger and mother and guiding star and child aglow as a morning sun toward home and children and chores undone. I really like that poem. So the three queens brought the equivalent, modern equivalent of underwear and socks, probably a lot more useful than Frankincense and myrrh. But they also threw in this beautiful gift that is useful, but very temporarily, and that was this lovely cradle song. What a fantastic combination of gifts, practical, two of them, and beautiful, one of them. They're good. Here's the thing I realized, though. I imagine Mary and Joseph really were happy about all those gifts and treasured all of them. Most of all, I bet they treasured the gift of human companionship that they received on that fabled night. How awful that ordeal must have been, traveling while nine months pregnant to fulfill a pointless government order, then labor sets in, and they're thinking, where are we going to have this baby? And just then, gifts of compassion and care start rolling in. The innkeeper says, it's not much, but at least it's a shelter. You could have your baby in my stable. The shepherds gather round. The wise men arrive, and Farber's version, the three queens arise too. And it doesn't really matter what they give this baby and his parents. What matters is human companionship, compassion, and love that just materializes in the story out of nowhere. This is where the true moment of magic in the story happens. And so now I realize there were moments of magic too in my gift of that French vanilla-scented candle each year and the Clay Martini glass slash paperclip holder. The magic was not in the things themselves. The magic was in the love behind the gift. All of our gifts, brilliant and stupid, practical and sublime, expensive and cheap, all of them are an embodiment of hands holding each other in love. We invite you to rise in body and or spirit to sing with us. Name number 237, The First Noel. The first Noel was to certain poor shepherds in fields where My name is Mandy Natchampasic Maloney, and I'm the director of religious education here at James Reade. Today I'm going to read for you a story called Liz the Magi, which I wrote. Liz was only eight. That's what she told herself to make herself feel better. Eight-year-olds are not expected to buy Christmas presents. Yet Liz so badly wanted to buy her father a present. She knew just the one she wanted to buy for him too. You see, her dad's old car, the one that made the loud putt-putt noise when he started it up, did not have heat. So each cold day when her dad drove off to work in the old car, he wore his favorite jacket. Her jacket itself wasn't new by any means, but it was still very nice. It was the softest leather, and her father looked quite handsome when he wore it. It was her father's singular, expensive possession, and a gift he'd had for so long no one could really remember where it had come from. Whenever her dad had somewhere to go, among company, he would put on the jacket and smile at Liz. Liz wanted to buy her father a pair of gloves to match that very nice jacket and keep her father's hands warm. Liz had saved every bit of money she earned from the quarter she got for doing chores. She saved a quarter once for doing the dishes, another quarter for helping with the laundry, and another from picking up her room. Her grand total was $3.50. $3.50 was not enough to buy her father the very nice gloves to go with his very nice jacket. Liz felt quite disappointed on Christmas Eve. She knew that if she expressed how badly she wanted to get him a pair of nice gloves, he would tell her that Christmas was about family, about enjoying a day that only comes once a year, and about being together. He often told her that Christmas was a time to celebrate that miracles, however small, still happen on earth. But that didn't change that he had to work. She stomped her little foot, refusing to feel frustrated. She was eight, and that was almost, almost halfway to being an adult. She was a big girl. She would solve this problem. With only a little pause, Liz ran into her bedroom and grabbed a thing for which she was most proud, with the exception of her father, that is. In school, she'd painted a scene, and it was beautiful. She had used her fingers, different sized paint brushes, and all her favorite colors to paint a picture of her most loved place on earth. The park across the street, where her dad took her to slide down the slide and swing on the swings. That painting had been hung in the school's hallway and had earned her a prize. She looked at it lovingly, sympathetically. Liz took the painting down from her dresser and held it tenderly in both her hands. She felt the canvas, something she thought was quite fancy to paint on, for what she hoped was the last time. She asked her babysitter to walk her to the neighbor's house. After putting on her coat, gloves, and scarf, because Liz's father would never let her go without warm winter gear, Liz and her sitter tracked through the snow to her neighbor's house and stood looking at the next door neighbor. Liz asked if her neighbor would be interested in buying her painting. Liz stood nervously hoping and wishing that her neighbor would agree. Why, that's our park across the street, explained the neighbor and then asked, Liz, why would you want to sell such a nice painting? Liz answered, hopefully, so I can buy my dad some gloves. Hold on here a minute, the neighbor said. Liz waited, hopping anxiously from foot to foot until her neighbor returned and paid her for her painting. Liz's sitter took her to get her father's gloves. And while holding them, Liz knew she'd never been happier. Her dad would be so warm in his new gloves. That night, as soon as her dad was in the door after work, Liz shoved his new gloves at him. Look, dad, she called and then giggled with surprise and joy on his face. There to go with your coat. My Lizzie, he said, how did you get these? She hung her little head for a moment and said, I sold my painting. Are you mad? Her dad paused for a minute, but just a minute before he said, no, sweetheart, I'm not mad. Liz and her dad sat down to dinner and then snuggled up on the patched old couch to watch cartoons and eat a cookie each, which they'd save for themselves after setting a batch out for Santa. Liz, her dad said, I have a gift for you. Liz tore into the package to find a frame. It was a stylish frame to go around what had been her favorite possession. When Liz felt the prick of tears coming on, her dad said, don't worry. You'll paint another painting, a great painting. And we'll put it in here. How did you get it? Liz asked. I sold my coat. Her dad explained, still smiling. Liz snuggled back down under her father's elbow and said, it's okay, dad. Christmas is a time to celebrate that miracles, however small, still happen on earth, like warm gloves and frames that will hold new pictures. You're here this evening because something in the story of the birth of Jesus, the child of the holy, just as we are, something in the story of the Son of Light being brought into life in the most humble of places, touches us. When this son grew up, he taught that the kingdom of God might be found here on earth, and he lived in a way that showed people how that might be so. We take an offering now as part of our congregation's missions to bring love and justice into the world. All the money received in tonight's offerings will go into direct service. 100% of your donation to James Reeve congregation will go to the minister's discretionary fund, which I use to help those in our community who are in financial need. And first Unitarian will use 100% of the offering tonight to support eviction prevention through just Dane. Between the recession that is disproportionately has disproportionately hit lower income people and the eviction moratorium that's expiring, generously supporting just Dane's eviction prevention efforts is needed now more than ever. And I can add that through an anonymous donation, we will add at least 4,000 and maybe more, if we raise at least $4,000 this month. You'll find instructions for donating to James Reeve's minister's discretionary fund and FUS's eviction prevention fund on the screen during the offering music. Thank you for your generosity. This Christmas, candles of joy, despite the sadness, candles of hope where despair keeps watch, candles of courage for fears ever present, candles of peace for tempest-tossed days, candles of grace to ease heavy burdens, candles of love to inspire all my living, candles that will burn all year long. We'll sing together hymn number 251, Silent Night, Holy Night, the first verse in German. Nor myrrh, nor even frankincense would I have for you this season, but simple gifts, the ones that are hardest to find, the ones that are perfect, even for those who have everything. I would if I could have for you the gift of courage, the strength to face the gauntlets only you can name and the firmness in your heart to know that you, yes, you can be the bearer of the quiet dignity that is the human glorified. I would if by my intention I could make it happen, have for you the gift of connection, the sense of standing on the hinge of time, touching past and future, standing with certainty that you, yes, you are the point where it all comes together. I would if wishing could make it so have for you the gift of community, a nucleus of love and challenge to convince you in your soul that you, yes, you are a source of light in a world too long believing in the dark, not gold, not myrrh, even frankincense would I have for you this season, but simple gifts, the ones that are hardest to find, the ones that are perfect, even for those who have everything. Blessed be go in peace and Merry Christmas.