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On Sunday, I traveled to New York and attended services with my sister and young nephew at Saint Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue. After, we spent some time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s magnificent exhibit “Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350.”
In his homily at Saint Thomas, The Rev. Canon Carl Turner reminded the congregation that the second Sunday of Advent is the Sunday of the messenger. (Fr. Turner amusingly recounted his days working for the Royal Mail and actually delivering Christmas cards.) Today, we are the messengers of the story of Christ’s birth—one of arrival, hope, and redemption—a story of love.
 With the sermon in my mind, I entered the dark rooms of the Siena exhibit to face messengers of 700 years ago who, in their way, were sharing this same love story of arrival, hope, and redemption. Duccio’s masterpiece Madonna and Child, the first work in the exhibition, is exquisite as you can see in the image. Yet, as sublime as they can be, paintings are physical objects, too, created by human beings—and this is especially true of a devotional painting such as this one, which belonged to a person who used it in a different time and space. If you look carefully, you can see the burn marks from votive candles along the bottom edge of the frame, a reminder that we are connected to those who observed this painting before, who stayed up at night to watch and wait, their brains and spirits wrestling with its meaning. The balustrade Duccio painted between us and the figures reminds us that we are separated from them, but suggests that the separation is less profound than we may think. What is holy is present, if we look for its messengers.
On Wednesday evening, the Sunday School presented their annual Christmas Pageant, and indeed the messengers of what is holy were among us. The baby Jesus crawled barefooted around the altar, admiring the gifts brought by the Wise People; the older children read the story. The angels wiggled a bit, Mary and Joseph conveyed perfect gravity, a small cow put his head down to rest, and during the songs nothing in astronomy could account for the exuberant movements of the large paper star, embellished with glitter, and brandished on the end of a broomstick.
 And this, for me, is Christmas in a nutshell. We humans are full of contradictions. The baby Jesus is supposed to be what is divine made human, a way of understanding that we, too, contain what is divine and what is ordinary. Sometimes what is solemn is also funny. Sometimes what is beautiful is also a bit ragged. All these things can be true at once—and that dissonant truth is often what art can show us so clearly. The painting at the Met that made me laugh out loud—which I find amazing, that a 700-year-old message is still funny because it is true, it is human, and it is divine—was Simone Martini’s 1342 painting “Christ Discovered in the Temple.” Any parent or boarding-school teacher would recognize the subject immediately: an adolescent who has traversed a boundary, arms crossed, annoyed with one parent who is angry and worried, and another parent who is trying to reason with them both. Luke tells us in this moment, Mary said, “Child, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously looking for you!” We have all been there. God was made human; he was a teenager; he was sometimes a bit challenging.
What is the message? Love. Love is what makes us human, and love is what makes us divine. Love is what allows us to reconcile within us and among us what is superb and what is hard. Love makes us family and it makes us a community. And although our community includes those of many faiths and those of no faith at all, I hope all of us who share a connection to St. Andrew’s will, this season, embrace, embody, and deliver the message of approaching, hopeful, redeeming love.
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