Christmas Without Ornaments: A Summer Christmas Sermon

Scripture: Matthew Chapter 2

A couple of weeks ago, our family went for our annual vacation in the Adirondack Mountains. On our drive there we passed by a little town called North Pole, New York. North Pole is one of those novelty villages that dot the American landscape, and it will not surprise you to learn that its central feature is a sprawling tourist attraction called “Santa’s Workshop.”

We could not tell whether Santa’s Workshop was accepting visitors—the parking lot harbored a lone station wagon—but it didn’t matter. It was a warm July day, the mountains beckoned, and we were more enthused about encountering a brook trout or a blueberry patch than an elf or a reindeer. So we slowed down slightly but didn’t stop.

Occasionally, Christmas comes to us this way. We turn a corner and find ourselves hard upon it, unprepared, our head in other places. We do what we must to survive the holiday without alienating any family or losing any friends. We get the last scrawny tree on the lot. We try to get to church and honor a tradition or two. And then we move on. We slow down slightly but we don’t stop.

These days, though, it often seems as if we spend the entire final quarter of the year preparing for Christmas. It has become a cliché to remark on the fact that popular culture has commercialized the holiday, and I don't intend to re-tread that well-worn path. But I do think it worth noting that the same economic forces that drive the commercialization of Christmas also push the season of its celebration earlier and earlier.

The assault begins months ahead of time, not in the “bleak midwinter” but while we’re still raking up leaves. We are inundated with preseason sales of decorations, advertisements for gifts, piles of junk mail and catalogs urging us to get our shopping done before the rush, magazine articles giving us a head start so we can finally achieve the perfect Norman Rockwell holiday we’ve always dreamed of and stop sending relatives home hungry and angry, and so on and so on.

At some point in the fall of last year I discovered that a radio channel I periodically visited had converted to a program made up entirely of Christmas music, twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week. Now, I like Christmas music as much as the next guy. But that’s an awful lot of snowmen, sleigh bells, and singing chipmunks.

Of course, the church does what it can to compensate for this onslaught and to keep us focused on the religious significance of the holiday. Still, this too involves a great deal of preparing for Christmas. We decorate the church. We have children’s pageants and hold special concerts. We organize efforts to buy Christmas gifts for those less fortunate than we are. We even make a ritual of our preparations through the celebration of Advent.

All this secular and sacred preparing means that we no longer celebrate Christmas. We marinate in it. We sit in a simmering pot of Christmas cheer for months and months. And, as a result, by time the holiday arrives we are thoroughly saturated with messages of sweetness and cuteness, little drummer boys and silent nights, joy to the world and sleeping in heavenly peace. It is in this state of mind that we typically hear the story of the nativity.

That is one of the advantages of honoring Christmas in the summer. It allows us to turn to that story unprepared. It gives us a chance to encounter that event—that world changing event—on its own terms, without distractions, without packaging, without promotion. It compels us to celebrate Christmas without ornaments.

And what a story it is. It is set in Judea, which we might think of as occupied territory under Roman control. In 40 B.C., the Roman Senate appointed Herod the Great as King of Judea. The Senate chose Herod because of his demonstrated ability in military and political confrontations.

Indeed, a remarkable fact tells us a great deal about Herod and about Rome’s confidence in him: at the time of his appointment, the throne of Judea was occupied by one Antigonus II, installed there by the Parthians, an Iranian people who had successfully stopped Roman expansion in the past. Thus, in order to accept his assignment, Herod had to march on Jerusalem, defeat the Parthian forces, and unseat and execute Antigonus. So, he did. And then he went on to prove himself as ruthless in guarding the throne as he had been in acquiring it.

We therefore have to wince when we read these words: “In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, ‘Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.’” In fact, these words should make us wince three times. It is the wrong question—a question threatening the existing order—delivered to the wrong man—a paranoid king with the power of the Roman Empire behind him—by the wrong men—magi who came from the East, perhaps even from the Parthian Empire. Matthew tells us that this encounter frightened Herod, and he adds that it frightened “all Jerusalem with him.” We can understand why: a terrified despot is a terrifying prospect.

No stranger to war, Herod knew precisely how to begin—by gathering information about the enemy. So he called together “all the chief priests and scribes of the people” and demanded to know where the child would be born. He summoned the wise men and asked “the exact time when the star had appeared.” Then he tried to make the magi into his unwitting accomplices in murder: “[W]hen you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage.” This is how Herod the Great prepared for Christmas.

Think of it. The most powerful military and political force on the planet was mobilized to find and kill an obscure Jewish infant. Herod would stop at nothing to accomplish his mission—even if it meant treating countless other children as collateral damage. And, tragically, it did.

So when Herod discovered that the wise men had betrayed him “he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under.” Imagine the shock, the anguish, the inconsolable despair wrought by this slaughter; imagine a land littered with the corpses of infants and toddlers; imagine the horror of it all—if you can bring yourself to do so. It is a gruesome vision perpetrated by the worst impulses of humankind and unadulterated evil: greed, wrath, hatred, the lust for power, the willingness to sacrifice the innocent.

Well, if hell mobilized, then so did heaven. A dream prevented the magi from returning to Herod and disclosing the whereabouts of the child. And an angel appeared to Joseph in a dream and told him to take his family and to run for their lives.

At Christmastime we often read this angel’s words with a tone reminiscent of a warm and fuzzy suggestion from a concerned uncle. I even remember a film version of the nativity where the angel delivers these lines like a friendly ghost in no particular hurry: "Jooooo-seph. Awaaake. Taaake the chiiiiild. Gooo to Eeeeegypt." Sorry, but I don't think so.

Lovely, gentle renditions like this miss the unmistakable urgency of the message. That urgency is harder to overlook if we remember what Herod was doing and if we remember that Joseph was sound asleep when these words descended upon him: “GET UP! Take the child and his mother and FLEE to Egypt! STAY THERE! STAY THERE UNTIL I TELL YOU! Herod is looking for the child in order to KILL HIM!” I almost imagine the angel with hands on hips, hollering like a divine drill sergeant.

Actually, the scripture tells us that these words came to Joseph not as reassuring guidance but as a startling revelation. It does so indirectly. It does so by beginning the next verse with this pointed observation: “Joseph got up!”

Those mobilized angels came to Joseph again. They guided him back to Israel. They ushered him into Nazareth. A prophecy was fulfilled. A savior was saved.

The story of how this happened is hard and frightening. It is not comfortable bedtime reading. Good things happen to bad people: Herod gains a throne and holds it until his death. Bad things happen to good people: innocent children are murdered; families are devastated; and one very special family is hounded from one desperate place to another. This Christmas—the Christmas without ornaments—is not for the faint of heart.

By time my mother reached her eighties she had endured more than her share of suffering. One day, to brighten her spirits, she went to a hair salon at a fancy department store as a minor indulgence. As she left the salon, feeling very stylish, a young woman behind the cosmetics counter called out to her “Well, don’t you look cute!”

My mother stopped in her tracks, turned, and marched over. “Young lady,” she responded. “I am more than eighty years old. I have lived through three wars, one of which killed my first husband. I have buried three men who I loved. I have survived financial ruin, a heart condition, skin cancer, breast cancer, the loss of a kidney, and blindness in one eye. I am many things. But I am not cute.”

Christmas is many things. But it is not cute. Celebrating it during the summer may help us remember what Christmas isn’t, and what it is.

It is the time when we remember the coming of Jesus Christ into our world—our world. Not a world filled with sweetness and light and talking snowmen and red-nosed reindeer, but the real world. A world filled with pain and suffering, greed and indifference, hatred and prejudice, war and violence, despair and death, horror and terror; a world that needs saving; a world that can be saved—through the grace and power of Love Itself. That is, indeed, the only thing that has any chance of saving it at all.

That is what Christmas is. It is Good News, the Ultimate Good News, the Best News Ever. It is, as the angel says to the shepherds, “good news of great joy.” It is sacred and saving news brought to a sad and sinking world. It is irresistible light, even in the presence of overwhelming darkness.

Have we ever needed it more?

Amen.

Of Grace and Patriotism

For most American, patriotism comes cheap.

This occurred to me recently while reading the work of the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoffer – a Lutheran pastor who had time and occasion to think deeply while detained in the Nazi prison where he died.

In a book called The Cost of Discipleship Bonhoffer criticized what he called “cheap grace.”

Through grace, Bonhoffer wrote, God grants forgiveness. We cannot hope to earn it. It comes to us free.

But this carries with the risk that we will receive the gift without behaving like truly grateful people, that we will receive forgiveness without offering back our repentance, that in the process of being forgiven we will forgive ourselves of any obligation to live differently.

In Bonhoffer’s words, “Cheap grace is the grace we bestow upon ourselves.”

Perhaps the same holds true with patriotism.

We accept our country’s bounty and opportunities – in Robert Frost’s memorable phrase, we take “the gift outright.” We say the proper things, we honor the symbols of our country’s ideals, and we embrace the attendant rituals. We do this every Fourth of July, and this one will surely be no different, particularly with our country at war.

But we can be a superficial and ungrateful lot. Do we take time on holidays like the Fourth of July to think about the priceless nature of this country’s freedoms and the rights we enjoy? Do we pause between the picnics and the softball games to ask ourselves whether our declared patriotism – our purported love of country – really costs us anything?

In 1783, George Washington found himself with a mutiny on his hands. Congress had never come up with a plan for paying the revolutionary soldiers the wages they had earned, and the troops had run out of patience. In an effort to calm them, Washington agreed to speak with their officer corps.

Washington could give powerful and inspiring speeches, but on this occasion his speaking ability did not count for much. The officers gave him a very chilly reception. In the tension of the moment, Washington stumbled over his text, paused, and famously said: “Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country.” History tells us that Washington’s officers began to weep out of respect for his sacrifice.

Of course, we don’t have to think back two centuries to find examples of costly patriotism. In wartime we count those costs dearly and daily. We count those costs in lost limbs, lost lives, lost fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters. Whatever our other political differences, surely we can agree that those who have made such sacrifices for love of country have earned the name of “patriot.”

I love my country, even with all of its shortcomings. I respect and honor the Constitution, even with all of its imperfections and ambiguities. But I also recognize that my patriotism has come cheaply, while others have earned it by paying the greatest cost imaginable.

Costly grace, Bonhoffer tells us, “is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it, a person will go and sell all they have.” A person who would do honor to grace must be willing to give their life to it, and for it. Perhaps the same holds true for those who would do honor to their country.

This Fourth of July signals an occasion for celebration.

Perhaps it also signals an occasion for reflection, and an opportunity for each of us to ask whether we have given back enough to a country that has given us so much.