It’s great to be here on this night. It’s a Holy Night. Set apart. Not another like it. And quite frankly, there is nowhere I’d rather be. Not because we’re in a church, or the beauty of it…though I confess, it’s rather stunning in here tonight. But because we set apart this night, to be together, to celebrate Christ. I hope I would feel the same way if we were huddled on a beach somewhere around a large campfire, trying to stay warm.

In many respects, that is what we do tonight. We simply gather together, in the presence of God.

This morning I was up early, and went for a long run. It was pitch black when I left, heading west. About halfway through, I made the turn, and headed back to the east. It was still dark…but the sky in the east had just the slightest gray shade to it that made you know for sure: “No secret here,” I thought. “Clearly, things are about to change.” The further east I ran, the brighter it got until you could no longer say it was dark, and oranges and pinks and reds began to appear in the sky. Magnificent. The sun revealed the day, made it known in all its glory.

God is not very good at keeping secrets. As surely as the rising of the sun chases out the dark and reveals the day and the contours of the land, God has said “yes” to not keeping us in the dark.

Oh, sure, we wish sometimes that God was a little less mysterious, a little more predictable. We wish that he would show up in different ways than He does. But what the Christmas story makes clear is that God is entirely disinterested in secrets. God wants to be known. God wants to know us.

And so into a world that was every bit as dark and full of warfare and violence and injustices as ours is today…came the Son of God, Jesus Christ. Jesus reveals God. When we want to know what God is like- we can look at Jesus- life, death, resurrection. There are no secrets. No secret passwords, no secret handshakes, no secret knowledge to figure out. In Jesus, God is definitively revealed. Uncovered.

One of my favorite authors, Frederick Buechner, tells a story- a true story, about a church gathered like we are one Christmas Eve. It was a church that traditionally had the children enact the nativity scene as the service unfolded. And so the manger was front and center at the bottom of the steps. Mary was there in a pale blue robe, Joseph beside her with his scratchy cotton beard. The wise men joined them, and a number of shepherds.

I suspect that, if there were enough kids, there were also sheep- maybe they used the fuzzy toilet seat cover sheep hats like Bethany did for so many years. And the Christ child was right in the middle, laying on straw brought in for the occasion.

The Christmas story was read, the carols were interspersed, it was beautiful and going perfectly. Then it was time for the heavenly host, the angels, to arrive. There were a lot of angels, robed in white and sitting with their parents. At the appropriate moment, they all spilled out of the pews and came up front to the manger. They sang their lines, just like at rehearsal, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace, good will among men.” However, the arrival of so many angels at one time made for quite a bit of crowding and jockeying for position in the ranks.

One particular angel, a small girl of about nine, ended up so far out on the fringe she couldn’t see anything, not even on tiptoes. “Glory to God in the highest, peace, good will among men” they sang again. And as the music drifted away and there was a quiet moment, the little girl cried out in a voice Buechner said was “shrill with irritation and frustration and enormous sadness at having her view blocked” - LET JESUS SHOW!

Let Jesus show. There are a lot of ways we can cover Jesus up.

-We can be more worried about religion than knowing God.

-We can overlay our own culture, our own politics, our own theology on top of Jesus.

-We can quit talking about, watching for or pursuing this God who has pursued us.

- We can crowd around the manger until no one, even ourselves, can actually see Jesus.

Fortunately, God is bigger than us. The Light just won’t be put out.

God parts the crowd around the manger as easy as He parted the Red Sea, as easy as He stopped the Jordan River, as simply as Jesus told the wind to stop and it did.

With our lives- our hearts- our words- our job is simple.

Let Jesus show.