And in that moment, I understood that each child, there and everywhere, like the child baptized here today, was and is the Holy Child, the promise, the hope of all humankind, the eternally reborn, Incarnate One. But Jesus, we say, was special, unique. At this time of year, as well as at Easter and at Halloween, the pagan origins of this or that custom, or of the entire holiday itself, are regularly trotted out. This is often done to discredit the custom and discourage its use, as if the whole truth was contained in that fact. It is part of the nature of human parents, of human communities, to see in their innocent children the hope of continuation, of a better future, of eternal life.
Birth is always a miracle.
As the Norse understandings of light and growth as expressed in the tree were taken to proclaim not just the natural world but the goodness of God, the nativity stories of Jesus work with the natural human tendency to hope. The nativity stories of Jesus proclaim that in this particular birth, hope is, in fact, fulfilled. Yet, it is hard to say just how this is so. In I Corinthians, Paul says that Christ crucified is a scandal to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks. It is the Incarnation itself that is the scandal, both in Paul's day and in our own.