Tonight I simply want to tell you three stories.  The first is a well-known story about a baby born about 2,000 years ago.  No doubt God chooses carefully where every baby will be born, so this baby’s birth puzzles us.  This baby was destined to bring God’s love into the world in a marvelous new way.  In fact, this baby was so close to God’s heart, that people later said of him: to see him is to see the human face of God.  So why would God arrange for this special baby to be born in a cattle shed?  Let’s try to get behind the image of our little creche scenes – so clean, so sweet-smelling and sanitary – and face the truth.  Jesus was born to humble parents in a squalid setting.  The sudden bellowing of a cow could well have blasted Jesus’ little new-born ears.  Whisps of straw surely poked his tender skin.  And his very first breath would have filled his tiny nose with the pungent smell of fresh manure.  Some start for the one who would be called the Son of God!

 

            The second story was told by the keynote speaker at an annual conference for the priests of our diocese, the Rev’d Martin Smith.  Martin was the superior of an Episcopal monastic order, and is the author of several, much-read books on spirituality.  He was raised and educated in England.  Martin told us that he finished his schooling ahead of schedule, and had several months to wait before his first term would begin at Oxford.  He decided to spend those months researching the holy wells that dotted the Oxfordshire countryside.  These  wells had been identified even before the Christian era as being in some sense holy.  When Christianity came to Britain, the church continued to identify these wells as holy.  Perhaps it was just the mystery of fresh, pure water bubbling up out of a spot in the ground.  Perhaps the water had been shown to have healing properties.  In any case, certain wells were acknowledged as holy, and the ground around them and the water that flowed from them were treated as sacred.

 

            Martin researched medieval maps to learn the location of the wells, and then set out on his bicycle to find them.  It was not easy.  After the advent of the scientific world view, holy wells went out of fashion.  No one he could ask in our era knew about any such wells.  Moreover, to translate medieval maps onto today’s maps presented special challenges; it was not always possible to pinpoint locations.  Martin persevered, however, and gradually was able to find and identify many of the ancient sites.

 

            One holy well eluded him, and it was perhaps the most sacred of all.  Again and again he set out on his bicycle to search, and each day he pedaled home without success.  He checked and rechecked the ancient maps and references.  Nothing.  Finally one day, as he searched an area where he thought it should have been, his eyes fell on a large, gnarled oak tree off on a hillside.  Under its spreading branches stood a herd of cows, taking shelter in its shade.  He noticed that the area under the tree seemed especially moist, but then he reflected that the ground where cattle habitually stand does tend to be extra moist.  Nevertheless, he unstrapped his foxhole shovel and set off up the hill.

 

            He began to dig.  He dug all around under that oak, and in the process shifted a small mountain of. . .  what cows produce when they are standing around switching flies.  Eventually he reached an area that just seemed to get more moist the deeper he dug.  He kept at it, piling the rich and redolent material off to one side.  Then he reached a point where water was definitely flowing up out of the ground.  He kept digging and at last cleared away the remaining muck, revealing an ancient wooden pipe, the trunk of an elm tree, hollowed out and sunk in the ground.  Out of it rose living water, clear, sparkling, fresh and pure.  He had found that most sacred of those holy wells.

 

            The third story comes from the book, Kitchen Table Wisdom, by Rachel Naomi Remen.  She tells the story of Helen, a woman of exceptional beauty, who came to her for counseling.  Helen spent hours on her appearance.  She told Rachel that no one had seen her face without make-up since she was a child.  When she was married she woke up half an hour before her husband, so that when he opened his eyes she would be fully made-up and dressed.  She came to counseling, because she was engaged to be married a second time, and she had doubts.  Her fiancé was kind, loyal, and intelligent, but he lacked passion – “pleasant but boring” is how she described him.

 

            Helen lived in Marin County, across the Golden Gate Bridge.  On October 17^th, 1989, Helen was high in a San Francisco department store when the earthquake struck.  The building shook, Helen was thrown to the floor, all lights went out and broken glass scattered everywhere.  Helen had left her own clothes and her purse in a locked dressing room while she went down two floors to look for matching shoes.  Like everyone else, she groped her way to the stairs and made her way down and out of the building.  Without money or car keys she was at a loss.  She tried a public phone, but it was dead.  Never one to ask for help, Helen turned north and began to walk home... in four inch heels.

 

            Soon she had to abandon the shoes.  Picking her way through the rubble of buildings and stumbling in streets filled with water, filthy from the fire fighting efforts, it took her over eight hours to reach home.  She arrived in the early hours of the morning stained and sweaty, with bleeding feet, hair matted and astray, all disheveled – a mess!  She had to knock to get in.  Her fiancé opened the door, took one look at her, and wrapped her in a passionate embrace.  She told Dr. Remen that whenever she starts to slip back into her habit of self-perfection she has only to remember the look of love in her fiance’s eyes when he opened the door.

 

            Why has the Christmas story held us in its grip for 2000 years?  Isn’t it because the nativity story gives body and warmth to unsuspected truths of the Spirit?  Could it be, for instance, that you and I hold within us holy wells?  That through each of us, in a unique new way, the deep spring of God’s love seeks to break through to the world?  I believe so.  If we lack evidence for it, perhaps we have not sought that spring where it lies.  Seek for Jesus all you like in a palace; you will not find him.  Seek for the holy well in your places of power, in the palace of your self-perfection; you will not find it.  Your holy well, the place where God’s love will enter the world in a whole new way, lies behind the “No Trespassing” sign.  It lies in that part of ourselves we deem least worthy, that bin where we throw our refuse, that mire where we dare not tread for sheer vulnerability.  The Christmas story tells us: go there, be there.  Accept that paradoxical place of stench and beauty, inhabit it.  In this season which is all about belonging, and having a place at the human family table, here, behind that No Trespassing sign, lies our passage to intimacy, bliss, and passion.  Amen.