Christmas Eve/Christmas Day

 

December 24, 2025

 

Luke 2.1-20

 

+ It’s kind of a Christmas tradition here at St. Stephen’s for me to tell this story.

 

It’s a story I LOVE to tell on Christmas Eve because it is not the typical Christmas Eve story.

 

It’s actually been a couple of years since I shared it.

 

But…this Christmas Eve story does not involve your usual cast of characters.

 

It involves rather a very famous High Church parish in New York City and a very famous actress from a by-gone era.

 

The story involves Tallulah Bankhead.

 

Now some of you are thinking: I haven’t heard that name in years.

 

Others are maybe saying: I have never heard that name before in my life.

 

But Tallulah Bankhead, star of stage and screen, including, most famously, Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, she also made a great appearance on I Love Lucy, was also an Episcopalian.

 

And in fact quite the High Church Episcopalian.

 

When she was in New York, she attended the Church of St. Mary the Virgin just off Times Square.

 

If you have never been there, it is truly the place to see—if in fact you can see it.

 

This church is so High and is notorious for using so much incense it is affection ally called “Smoky Mary’s” (and it is one of my favorite places to visit in Manhattan).

It’s so High Church, it makes Smoky St. Stephen’s look like a Quaker Meeting House!

 

In the 1950s, the priest at smoky Mary’s, was Fr. Grieg Taber.

 

Fr. Taber was one of the interesting and eccentric characters in the Episcopal church in the day.

 

There have been many stories of Fr. Tabor.

 

But this one is one of the best…

 

One Christmas Eve in the 1950s Fr. Taber—good and loyal priest that he was—was sequestered in his confessional.

 

Back then, even some Episcopalians felt compelled to go to confession before receiving Holy Communion at the midnight Mass.

 

And Smoky Mary’s was so High Church that, yes, it even had a confessional.

 

Hmmmm. A confession! Could that be Fr. Jamie’s next project here at St. Stephen’s?

 

Nooo!

 

Well, Fr. Taber was there in his confessional, awaiting penitents, when he heard the oh-so-very-familiar, low, smoky voice of Miss Tallulah Bankhead.

 

There was certainly no mistaking who it could be.

 

As he peeked out through his curtain, there he saw her making her way through the church.

 

She paused and looked up at the giant crucifix above the altar, with its almost life-sized figure of the crucified Jesus.

 

Suddenly she exclaimed, in her wonderfully Tallulah Bankhead way,

 

“Smile, Dahling! It’s your birthday!”

 

 

There’s actually another very famous story regarding Tallulah Bankhead at Smoky Mary’s, which I also love.

 

One Sunday morning, a Bishop was visiting Smoky Mary’s, about to officiate at a service there.

 

As he and the procession were in the vestibule waiting to enter the church, the thurifer (the kid with the thurible) has to use the restroom.

 

He asked the Bishop if could hold the thurible while he went off to the bathroom.

 

The Bishop was standing there in his mitre and his cope, swinging the thurible when who should stumble in, but Tallulah Bankhead!

 

As she passed the bishop, she looked, reacted, then leaned close and said,

 

“I love the hat, Dahling, but your purse is smoking!”

 

The Bishop who ordained me to the Diaconate, Bishop Andy Fairfield, who was pretty straight-laced, told me that story once.

 

I love these kind of stories, because it shows that the Episcopal Church has always been filled with some amazing characters.

 

And the story of Tallulah Bankhead greeting Jesus on he cross on Christmas Eve is truly one of my favorites.

 

Now, for some people, at first hearing, it might sound irreverent or possibly even downright sacrilegious.

 

Ah…but if you believe that, then you miss the whole point of that wonderful little anecdote.

 

What some people might perceive as sacrilegious and disrespectful I see as wonderfully intimate.

 

There is a wonderfully intimacy between Bankhead and Jesus in that moment.

 

And let’s face it, intimacy is what Christmas is about.

 

An intimacy from God to us.

 

An intimacy very unlike any other kind of intimacy.

 

When we think long and hard about this night, when we ponder it and let it take hold in our lives, what we realized happened on that night when Jesus was born was not just some mythical story.

 

It was not just the birth of a child under dire circumstances, in some distant, exotic land.

 

What happened on that night was a joining together—a joining of us and God.

 

God met us half-way.

 

God came to us in our darkness, in our blindness, in our fear—and cast a light that destroyed that darkness, that blindness, that fear.

 

In this dark, cold night, we celebrate Light.

 

We celebrate the Light that has come to us in our collective and personal darknesses.

 

We celebrate the Light that has come to us in our despair and our fear, in our sadness and in our frustration.

 

And as it does, we realize---there is an intimacy to that action on God’s part.

 

I am very fond of saying that if we only look at Christmas as something that happened then and there, then we have missed the point of Christmas.

 

We objectify Christmas and make it something wholly “other.”

 

We can easily say to ourselves—it’s a quaint little story from ancient times but it doesn’t have anything to do with me, here, right now, in Fargo, North Dakota, on this night in 2025.

 

But, the fact is, it does!

Because if we truly follow Jesus, if we truly are Jesus’  followers in this world, we know that, because of Jesus, because of his birth and life and death, we too are to become like Jesus.

 

Or rather, what Jesus was, we too are to become.

 

We too are to be anointed children of God in this world.

 

We too are called to do what Jesus did and he who Jesus was to others.

 

And in doing that, we realize that what happened in Bethlehem on this night, happened at our birthday too.

 

Just as Jesus’ birth is holy, so too were our birth holy as well.

 

A Light from God shined on each of us as well when we were born.

 

And continues to shine on us now.

 

Just as we Jesus embodied God’s love, so we are called as well to embody God’s love now and always in this world.

 

And in doing so, we experience an amazing intimacy.

 

Or, as one of my favorite poets, the great Anglican poet Christina Rosetti put more eloquently:

 

Love came down at Christmas,

love, all lovely, love divine;

love was born at Christmas:

star and angels gave the sign.

 

 

That love that comes down at Christmas—that love, all lovely, love divine—that love dwells in each of us. Right now. Right here. Tonight.

 

And star and angels truly give the sign.

 

For each of us.

 

We find ourselves expressing our intimacy back to God.

 

Each of expresses our love differently.

 

People like Tallulah Bankhead cry out happy birthdays to crucifixes on Christmas Eve.

 

The rest of us probably aren’t quite that dramatic.

 

Well, some of us, aren’t that dramatic!

 

But the intimacy we feel between ourselves and God is a very real one tonight—in this very holy moment.

 

We find that this love we feel—for God and for each other and for those we maybe don’t always love, or find difficult to love—that radical love is more tangible—more real—than anything we have ever thought possible.

 

It is here, within each of us tonight.

 

And that is what we are experiencing this evening.

 

Love came down.

 

Love became flesh and blood.

 

Love became human.

 

In Jesus.

 

And in each of us.  

 

And in the face of that realization, we are rejoicing tonight.

 

We are rejoicing in that love personified.

 

We are rejoicing in each other.

 

We are rejoicing in the glorious beauty of this one holy moment in time.

 

If that isn’t intimacy, I don’t know what is.

 

This beautiful night, let us each cling to this love that we are experiencing tonight and let us hope that it will not fade from us when this night or the day tomorrow is over.

 

Let us cling to this holy moment and make sure that it will continue to live on and be renewed again and again.

 

Love is here.

 

Love is in our very midst tonight.

 

Love is so near, we can feel its presence in our very bodies and souls.

 

So, let us share this love in any way we can and let us especially welcome this love— love, all lovely, love divine—this love made real and present in the shelter of our hearts.