A few days ago, I read about an urgent exchange on a Reykjavik Facebook page.^[1]

It seems that a cygnet – a baby swan – had somehow become frozen to the ice in a local body of water and was dying.  

People were tremendously upset but felt utterly powerless about how to respond. 

Should they risk going out on the ice themselves to rescue the swan, especially if it wasn’t clear how thick the ice was? 

Would the fire department come out for a baby swan? 

What do you use to break up the ice? A hammer and chisel? A rubber mallet? Some sort of saw?  

Did anyone on the thread even have a saw?  

Things went on like this for a while, until finally a naturalist, Kerstin Langenberger, replied, “I am on my way with the necessary equipment.” 

Apparently, by way of equipment, she brought a friend, some thermoses of warm water, and a surfboard, which was there in case the ice broke.  

Then Langenberger slowly thawed and finally freed the cygnet, which promptly flew away, no doubt with a real story to tell the other swans. 

For us, of course, it’s a story about having the right equipment.  

I imagine that, if called upon, anyone on the Reykjavik Facebook page would have been able to lend a thermos and some warm water. 

It’s less obvious to me that somebody in Iceland would have had a surfboard handy.  

But let me not assume. 

You know, I’ll just go ahead ask: if I get trapped in the ice somewhere here in town, does anyone have a surfboard they could bring to my rescue? 

In all seriousness, we may or may not have what we need to bring to a rescue.  

We may or may not even know what the right equipment ought to be.  

But most of us know something about feeling trapped, or at least stuck.  

We may not know what it is to be a rescuer, or even rescued (or rescued yet), but we know feelings of the cygnet in the ice. 

We know them all too well.  

And that’s why we hold onto the story of Christmas so dearly, with its deep affirmation of the power and promise of rescue. 

The narratives of Christmas Eve will circle back to the silent night and the fragile baby, practically a cygnet himself, come to join the precarious world with nary a surfboard or thermos in sight.  

But we are to understand that his mother’s peace on Christmas night comes on the other side of knowing.

She had received the angel’s remarkable announcement that this baby – her baby – would be the one bringing rescue…that from then on, nobody would be condemned to be stuck.

She stands on that promise.  

“My soul magnifies the Lord,” she says.  “And my spirit rejoices in God my savior.” (v. 46-47)

“He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts,” or, as the Revised English Bible puts it, “he has routed the proud and all their schemes.” v. 51)

She’s putting the schemers on notice, and “scheme-ees” too: help is on the way.  

It’s a message that, for its part, “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” gets right in its depiction of Christmas Eve, which is all about rescue.  

In particular, you’ll remember right at the end, when in the face of the storm, all the misfit toys living in exile on that island are gathered around another lonely campfire, figuring that Christmas has come, and that once again, they’ve been forgotten.  

And then, quietly in the night sky, they hear the approaching sleighbells, and they realize that their dark night is finally over, that the ice has melted, and that they will love and be loved the way they’d always longed to do.  

Can Christmas really do that? 

It can.

It can if we take its point about remembering the forgotten, or about making room at the table—especially when there seems to be no room at the inn. 

It can if we measure strength in terms of the deep roots that keep us anchored rather than the strong arms that state their business only by swinging. 

It can if we are slow to hate and quick to seek understanding and to work toward settling our differences.  

It can if we are willing to be rescued from all those who would tell us to wise up, hunker down, and cash in unless we want to go out on a limb and find ourselves straight out of luck.  

Christmas reminds us that the world does not have to be the way it still too often is.  

We don’t need to be trapped.  

There is a different way to live, and a different teacher for us to follow—a teacher who speaks with authority from the heart of life itself.  

Each year, in these weeks before Christmas, it seems like something really is thawing our spirits, warming our own hearts, freeing us from the ice in all its forms that nearly manages to freeze the life right out of us. 

But just at the moment when it seems like we might finally succumb, the word goes out, and help is on the way.  

Slowly, the cygnet feels itself unlock and raises its wings to attempt the sky. 

God has lifted up the lowly and has filled the hungry with good things.  

And we remember what it is to soar. 

Amen.  

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^[1] My own source for this story is the tremendous preacher Marci Auld Glass, who reposted it on her Facebook page.