Luke 2:1-14
Chapel in the Pines Presbyterian Church
Mindy Douglas Adams
Christmas Eve
December 24, 2009
It's
been a rough week for Unitarian Universalists this week. Seems that last week Garrison Keillor, of Prairie Home Companion fame, came down
on the denomination pretty hard in a Salon.com article he wrote.
In
his article, Keillor reflects upon his visit to the First Church of
Cambridge, a Unitarian place of worship, where he discovered that the Christmas
hymn "Silent Night" has "been cleverly rewritten to make it more about silence
and night and not so much about God." He
didn't like this too much and he obviously had some opinions about Unitarians
already, so he didn't mince words in his reflections, writing,
Unitarians listen to the Inner Voice and so they have no creed that they
all stand up and recite in unison, and that's their perfect right, but it is
wrong, wrong, wrong to rewrite "Silent Night." If you don't believe
Jesus was God, OK, go write your own [bleep] "Silent Night" and leave
ours alone. This is spiritual piracy and cultural elitism and we Christians
have stood for it long enough.
Christmas
is a Christian holiday [he continues] -- if you're not in the club, then buzz
off. Celebrate Yule instead or dance around in druid robes for the solstice. Go
light a big log, go wassailing and falalaing until you fall down, eat figgy
pudding until you puke, but don't mess with the Messiah.1
Now those are Keillor's words, not mine, but they did
cause me to reflect a bit. And I think,
truth be told, that society and culture have been messing with the Messiah for
quite a long time now. Christmas itself
has become such an amalgamation of traditions, stories, songs, cultural
behaviors and religious beliefs that the Messiah just becomes one of any number
of popular characters, including Santa Claus, Rudolph, Frosty, Scrooge, the
Grinch, and the Little Drummer Boy.
Just this week I was out caroling with my neighbors, whom
I love very much and who come from very different cultural backgrounds and religious
amalgamations themselves. As we walked
around, laughing and catching up, we stopped at our neighbors' homes and sang
"Deck the Halls" immediately followed by "Angels We Have Heard on High" or
"Frosty the Snowman" right before "Silent Night." One child requested "Go Tell It on the
Mountain" and an adult innocently asked, "Is that a Christmas song?"
Everywhere you go this season, you can experience this
amalgamation. In the stores, you will
find Christmas ornaments of angels or the manger scene right next to UNC, Duke
or State basketball ornaments, or reindeer, or snowmen. You can find a sweater with the Star of
Bethlehem right next to one with holly berries on it. All the while you will hear music in the
background playing, "Winter Wonderland" followed by "Grandma Got Run Over by a
Reindeer," followed by "O Holy Night."
In a sermon he preached a few years ago, Michael
Lindvall, pastor of The Brick Presbyterian Church in the City of New York,
helps us understand that we really celebrate Christmas at three different
levels. The first level is the one
closest to the surface, the one that makes us feel like December is one big
party. He writes,
The office kicks back, school's out, a few days off, some
time with the family, too much good food and drink, presents passed
around. To celebrate Christmas at this
level, you don't have to be even vaguely spiritual much less a Christian.2
Lindvall goes on to admit that he loves Christmas at this
level, and I would have to agree with him.
I love the feeling in the air, the lights on stores and streets and
houses and the Christmas trees seen sparkling through the windows. I love the fresh baked cookies and treats
that come to the office or from friends and family. I love the smell of nutmeg in our kitchen. I love
wrapping presents to Christmas music on the stereo and dancing with Tyler to
our favorite holiday tunes. I love
watching "The Santa Clause" and "Elf" with Scott and Tyler. I love hot chocolate with mint or eggnog with
rum or holiday stollen-bread or freshly made butternut squash soup - all of it
shared with family or friends! I could
go on and on. Lindvall agrees: "Christmas
at this level is, as the song has it, ‘the most wonderful time of the
year.' But wonderful as it may be, it's
not quite enough."
So we move to the second level of Christmas. This level is a little deeper because it
causes us to consider the needs of others, not just our own needs. This level, Lindvall writes,
Says it's all about love ‘round the hearth and giving,
giving generously. This is the Christmas
of Charles Dickens', A Christmas Carol.
. . .It's vaguely spiritual, ‘sort of' Christian. The love and giving echo the most ancient of
Christian values. Scroogy hearts really
are sometimes softened in these days; the selfish actually give; sometimes the
estranged are reconciled.3
This is the level that stirs within us a desire to care
for others, to work in the food pantry, to buy Angel Tree presents for poor
families, to give generously, to consider the needs and wants of others. As Christians we do this as a part of our
understanding of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, but plenty of non-Christians and
even atheists find reasons to be kind to one another that have not a thing to
do with the Messiah. I do love this
level, for at this time of year people all over the world think differently
about themselves and about others. At
this time of year, people in general are more likely to lend a helping hand of
love and compassion, than perhaps we are at any other time of the year. "Christmas at this second level is a kindly
feast of loving and giving, but as rich as it may be, even this is not deep
enough."
Friends, on this
night we have gathered for the deepest meaning of Christmas. On this night, we have come together as a community
of faith because we know that, as much as we love Ralphie, Rudolph, Scrooge's
miraculous transformation and Elvis Pressley's version of "White Christmas,"
these things fall away in importance as we stand before the manger and witness
again the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Lindvall again,
The deepest meaning of the birth of Jesus . . . many
found scandalous 2,000 years ago. It's still scandalous to a lot of
people. It is, however, the central
meaning of the birth of Jesus, and it pulls the day to a more profound level of
meaning. The word that Christians have
always used to talk about the core of Christmas is "incarnation." Incarnation is the scandalous affirmation that
in Jesus Christ, somehow God "took on
flesh."
Somehow, in Bethlehem's child, God draws near.
Somehow, in Jesus, God becomes one of us.
Somehow, God articulates God's very nature through Jesus Christ.
Somehow, Jesus' death becomes the emblem of God's love.
Somehow, Jesus' life again becomes God's last word - life.4
As we gather this night, we celebrate this central
message of the birth of Jesus. We claim
our humanity and we find our hope in the divinity of the Christ child, who
became light and love on earth, who forgave the world in ways we cannot
possibly comprehend, and who died that we might have life. God-becoming-human is what Christmas is
about, and no sappy Christmas tune has the power to take that away and no other
message will hold us up in our deepest darkest hour. No other message has the power to bring peace
on earth and life everlasting.
Some
of you may have heard the story about a Christmas
event which occurred long ago, in 1914, on the World War I battlefield in
Flanders, along the border of France and Belgium.
It
seems that on that Christmas day, German, British and French troops were
settling into their mud-filled trenches for a reprieve following days of each
side trying to kill more men from the other side a few hundred yards away. As the quiet settled across the wet and
miserable land, a young German soldier began to sing "Stille Nacht, Heilige
Nacht." His voice echoed across the
war-torn battlefield and soon was joined by others, first in his own trenches,
and then in the ones across the way.
When
that hymn was finished, the British and French responded with other Christmas
carols. Author Jim Wallis writes,
Eventually, the men from both sides left their
trenches and met in the middle. They shook hands, exchanged gifts, and shared
pictures of their families. Informal soccer games began in what had been "no-man's-land."
And a joint service was held to bury the dead of both sides.
The generals, of course, were not pleased with these
events. Men who have come to know each other's names and seen each other's
families are much less likely to want to kill each other. War seems to require
a nameless, faceless enemy.
So, following that magical night the men on both sides
spent a few days simply firing aimlessly into the sky. [Eventually, though] the
war was back in earnest . . . Yet the story of that Christmas Eve lingered - a
night when the angels really did sing of peace on earth.5
A
night when men who sang in different languages and fought for different sides
came together and saw the humanity of the other and were at peace.
You know, in light of that
story, I guess I can't blame Garrison Keillor for getting a little upset at the
Unitarians for changing the words to "Silent Night." After all, just the romantic notion of a
quiet night wouldn't have been enough to spur those soldiers on to put down
their arms to celebrate Christmas.
No. I think it had to be
something much greater, like the knowledge that what they were doing wasn't
right - killing fathers and sons and lovers and real people, or like the hope
that peace could be o'er all the earth, or like the promise that beyond the
tragic deaths of so many on that battlefield was life everlasting, or like the
realization that they themselves, soldiers covered in mud and blood and rain,
could be instruments of the peace of Christ in a war-torn world.
It didn't last, the peace of
that Christmas Day, but as Christians we are called to follow Christ in our
lives by partnering with Christ to work toward a peace that one day will be
global and that one day will be everlasting.
We are called to work toward a peace that will be about the ceasing of
war, but will also be about peace in the hearts and minds of all people. We are called to spread the good news of
Christ's incarnation, of the promises that God
is with us. We are called to rest in
the promises of the resurrected Messiah, our Lord, that we might be able to
live together in love and peace for every night, not just this one night. And so we gather this Eve of Christmas,
pushing back all the trappings of Christmas at level one and even level two, in
order to find the deeper truths of the Incarnation. And as we gather, we find not despair in that
battlefield story, but hope - hope which claims that somewhere deep within us
all is a longing for our Messiah - a longing for the stillness of that first
Christmas night when God, who had been far and away, became human, when God,
who had been high and above, became one of the least-of-these, a dependent,
helpless child. On this night we
remember and celebrate the time when God, who had been distant, became close -
as close as the very marrow of our bones.
On this night, we find the Messiah here with us. We come, perhaps, closer to our Messiah than
we will any other time of the year. And
in coming close, we realize how close God already is to us, how close God in Christ
always has been. May we stay as close as
we are this night - to one another and to our Lord -every day of the year.
May God's peace in Christ surround you this night and
give you hope for yourself, for your neighbor, and for the world. Amen.
1 http://www.salon.com/life/christmas/index.html?story=/opinion/keillor/2009/12/15/cambridge
2 Michael Lindvall, "The
Christmas Scandal," December 24, 2006, The Brick Presbyterian Church in the
City of New York.
3 Ibid.
4 ibid
5"Christmas in the Trenches"
- SojoMail 12.23.09 - a email letter sent by Sojourners magazine, to which I subscribe.
