Christmas Day, 25 Dec. 2022. The Very Rev. Pamela L. Werntz
Isaiah 62:6-7, 10-12. You shall be called ‘Sought Out, a City Not Forsaken’.
Titus 3:4-7. We might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.
Luke 2:1-20. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen.
Merry Christmas everyone! Take a deep breath. Pay attention to what you smell. If you are missing your sense of smell, use your memories. What are the smells you associate with Christmas? The smell of church, of greens and candles burning, of wood? Maybe more domestic smells like cinnamon and nutmeg? Baked treats? Evergreen trees? The smell of Christmas dinner? The smell of wood-burning stoves or fireplaces? Maybe Christmas smells that you remember from childhood? I remember the smell of my grandmother’s house, of antique furniture mingled with her perfume. The smell of snow, of winter air? Rudyard Kipling once said, “Smells are surer than sights and sounds to make your heart-strings crack.” [1]
Smells can be overwhelmingly nostalgic; they can transport us to another place and time in the blink of an eye. Smell is the first sense to develop when we are born and often the last sense to go when we are dying. In fact, smell is the only sense that we cannot willfully shut out without dying. We can close our eyes to not see. We can cover our ears to keep from hearing. We can refrain from tasting or touching. But we cannot decide to refrain from smelling if we want to keep breathing. Helen Keller, who was unable to see or hear, wrote this about smell.
Smell is a potent wizard that transports us across thousands of miles and all the years we have lived. The odors of fruits waft me to my southern home, to my childhood frolics in the peach orchard. Other odors, instantaneous and fleeting, cause my heart to dilate joyously or contract with remembered grief. Even as I think of smells, my nose is full of scents that start awake sweet memories. [2]
I thought of that when I was meditating on today’s Gospel lesson. How many times have you heard the story that we just read from this Gospel of Luke? Over the years, how many ways have you seen depictions of the shepherds being surprised by the angels shouting from heaven or by the scene at the manger, when the shepherds meet the Christ child? The passage ends with the line: “The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen.” It occurred to me that I wanted to know something about what they’d smelled.
I’ve always connected smell with spiritual journeys in my own life: the smell of rain; the smell of honeysuckle and sandy Maryland soil; the smell of incense, beeswax, and chrism. Some terrible smells, too; but I won’t name them now. There is a realness about smell that doesn’t exist with the other senses. There is a truth about smell; it’s difficult to fool the sense of smell. So I spent some time wondering about what the shepherds smelled.
I thought about the smell of fear. The shepherds on the hillside, keeping their flocks by night, were confronted by an angel of the Lord, who completely terrified them. Fear has a particular smell doesn’t it? And sheep have a smell. Good shepherds smell like their sheep, not just because they spend so much time with the sheep, but also because they know that sheep also have a well-developed sense of smell. According to Sheep101, they “are very sensitive to what different predators smell like.…Sheep also use their sense of smell to locate water and determine subtle or major differences between feeds and pasture.” Sheep can smell the difference between good and bad, safe and dangerous, familiar and strange. [3]
So then what did the shepherds and their sheep smell? They traveled into the town of Bethlehem, a city overcrowded by census-taking and tax-paying. What is the smell of overcrowding? What is the smell of an occupying army trying to control the crowds while the taxes are collected? The smell of the military? The smell of money? What is the smell of a town that does not have the resources to house everyone who needs shelter, or to feed everyone who is hungry? What is the smell of illness? What is the smell of poverty, of oppression?
And the shepherds found Mary and Joseph and the babe lying in the manger. What do you imagine that smelled like? The smell of stable animals, animal feed, and sweet hay mixed with manure and urine; the smell of a woman giving birth; the smell of pain and exhaustion; the smell of the worst possible timing for a baby to be born; the smell of unconditional love; and the smell of worry and wonder all mixed up together.
There is a realness about smell, a truth about it, that I think goes with this story of Emmanuel, which means God–with–us, not God-up-there-or-out-there-somewhere-far-away-anywhere-but-here. This is a story about God Who wants to be with us so much that God is risking childbirth and infancy. This is not a story about getting saved by getting whisked away or beamed up; it’s not a story about escape. It’s not a story about a picture-perfect scene of pastoral bliss, no matter how many different ways that picture gets drawn or how many times that story gets told. No, this is the story about God being a baby born in the middle of the mess, a big, dangerous, smelly mess. This is the story about love, which needs to declare itself to the real world, not an imaginary fantasy world. This is the story about Love that needs to show the world that it can no longer be contained. This is the story about Love that will make your heart break wide open and then fill it to overflowing.
Take another deep breath. Breathe in the realness of Christmas morning. Breathe in the true Love of God that is all around you.
- Rudyard Kipling, “Lichtenberg”, 1901. Available in 2023 from the Kipling Society.
- Helen Keller, “Smell: The Fallen Angel”, The World I Live In (NY: Century, 1910): Ch.6, available from Internet Archive.
- “Sheep Senses”, available at Sheep101.info.