Christmas Eve in New Zealand

We trickled out of our hostels and hotels, we travelers from far-flung spaces, winding our way by twos and threes and sixes to tiny St. James Anglican Church. It wasn’t until Elaine and I reached the quiet one lane highway that I realized we weren’t going to be the only out of place visitors in the congregation on Christmas Eve, far from home.

In truth, there were only two members of St. James there. As the priest introduced herself, she confessed that she, too, was a visitor–from another part of New Zealand, here with her husband and son to gather us in worship with nine lessons from scripture, an Advent Candle, and song.

Looking at it one way, we all botched it. The priest’s iPad quit sending out sound, though it had worked half an hour before. When it did finally work, the recorded pianist couldn’t keep a steady time; we struggled to find our way as we sang, one time finding ourselves a whole bar behind. We lit the candles out of order. At one point, a man in his twenties in the second row on the left had to put his head down and cover his mouth to keep from laughing. Looking at it one way, our visiting congregation with the visiting priest performed horribly.

And yet…

She asked for volunteers to read God’s redemption story, nine passages that painted a wide ranging biblical arc. So we heard the Good News in a New Zealand accent; and an American, a British, an Irish, and a vaguely continental European accent. We watched a child from Kuala Lumpur light one of the Advent candles, and it was the Canadian young man from the second row who saved Christmas by restoring the iPad’s sound.

We became a community. Not a deep one. Not a lasting one. But we were gathered.

And for so many reasons…because for the first time in years I wasn’t leading the Christmas Eve service, because on one level it was so hilariously awful, because it was so wrong and weird to be apart from our kids and our people, because so much has withered and not stood the test over the last few years…for so many reasons I saw the heart of it all again, anew.

We became a community because we welcomed Jesus, God-come-near. From almost every continent, we vagabonds sat in a small chapel in New Zealand, gathered to honor and worship a baby born two thousand years ago in oppressed and impoverished Palestine. Christian community truly is God-instigated, not human-created.

We try to create it.

We try to make it.

We often perform it better than we rag-tag wanderers did tonight.

But we botch it. We get full of ourselves, we make it about ourselves, we build our tiny empires and identities. We exclude when we mean to include, we dig in our heels when patience is called for, we wound our own because they didn’t get it quite right enough. We are infinitely creative in our failure, and yet we keep trying.

True community, the kind our souls were created for, comes with the invitation to come. Come to the One who has drawn near, to the Word made flesh. We somehow found ourselves in a chapel full of hope, though wrapped in our human frailty and failure. We came and we found a divine home where none of us (well, only two of us) lived and belonged.

Come.

“O come, let us adore him.”

Once again, it is Jesus that I keep coming back to in this year of unsettled, magnitude ten earth-shaking. I can’t leave him. And I keep finding him, or being found, or something. Tonight we found him, or were found by him, or something. We were gathered, we found community, not because of the words we sang or the service we tried to create. We were made a community by the One we believe took on flesh for our salvation.

“O Jesus! for evermore be Thy name adored.
Word of the Father, now in flesh appearing;
O come, let us adore Him,
O come, let us adore Him,
O come, let us adore Him,
Christ the Lord.”