Christmas Stories

Scripture: Luke 2-16

For more than a month, we get ready for Christmas.  At church, we celebrate the ancient tradition of advent, which occupies so much of our time and attention that we call it a “season.”  We read biblical passages that anticipate the birth of Christ; we light candles; we decorate the sanctuary; we gather toys and gifts to donate to those who have fallen on hard times.

Outside of church, we engage in other sorts of rituals.  We unpack the nativity scene, the decorations, and the ornaments.  We put up the tree.  We cook and bake and devour vast amounts of food.  We labor to find just the right presents for just the right people.  We marinate in Christmas music that starts in November and that follows us ubiquitously into cars, malls, stores, elevators, restaurants, even restrooms.

In this connection, I’ve noticed that a number of contemporary Christmas songs ask a question that sounds something like this: “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Christmas could last all year long?”  And I have to confess: I wonder.  After all, the way we do Christmas is pretty exhausting.  And I’m not sure how many of us would enthusiastically agree to spend the next fifty weeks doing the same things we have done for the last two—let alone at the same pace.

Also, this time of year can seem a little artificial.  It should have a special quality—and it does; it shouldn’t feel like the rest of the year—and it doesn’t; but, as Prince Hamlet said, “there’s the rub.”  After all, we spend most of our lives in the other eleven months of the year.  So there is always the risk that we may elevate this season to such a height—and accelerate it to such a frantic dash—that it will lose its relevance to how we actually spend the overwhelming majority of our time on planet earth.

I think that this is what makes Luke’s description of the events immediately preceding the birth of Jesus so instructive.  It doesn’t seem like a particularly inspiring collection of verses; to the contrary, it reads like a pretty bland recitation of relatively non-momentous facts.  It almost sounds like an entry in the “local news” sidebar of the Bethlehem Daily Tribune: “census brings Joseph home after long absence; ‘gee, it’s great to be back,’ he declares.”

Indeed, everything about the text reinforces its ordinariness.  The emperor issued a decree—that’s hardly surprising.  Decreeing things is what emperors do, and this one did a lot of it.  As you may recall, Augustus came into power after the assassination of Julius Caesar and during a period of political upheaval and military rule.  After defeating his rivals, Augustus restored the trappings of the republic, but historians tell us that in many respects he remained a dictator.  The most famous statue of Augustus—the Augustus of Prima Porta housed in the Vatican Museum—portrays him with his right arm raised commandingly, as if issuing just the sort of decree Luke describes.

Next we’re told that this particular decree required the registration of everyone who was under Roman rule.  Now, this passage has prompted a vigorous and unresolved debate among biblical scholars because little, if any, historical evidence confirms that such a census occurred during this period.  So, what’s going on here?  Was Luke thinking of the census that is mentioned in Acts 5:37 but confused about its date?  Was he giving us a nod toward Psalm 87, which seems to link the registering of people with the birth of the Messiah?  Was he doing a little stage management by offering an explanation as to how Jesus came to be born in Bethlehem, thereby fulfilling an ancient prophecy?

For today, let’s put those questions aside and shift our focus from why Luke tells us about the census to how Luke does so.  If you look carefully, you’ll notice that this passage is characterized by a severe economy of words and by no drama whatsoever.  This seems particularly striking because these verses are surrounded by drama.  Immediately before it, we get Mary’s beautiful magnificat (“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior”) and Zechariah’s spirit-driven prophecies about the birth of John (“Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel, because he has come and redeemed his people”).  Immediately after these verses, we get angels appearing to shepherds and “a great company of the heavenly host singing ‘Glory to God in the highest.’”  Chapter 2 of Luke comes to us as an interruption in the midst of exaltation. 

The verses about the census are dry, low-key, and journalistic.  They probably have something to do with the government wanting to tax its citizens—a practice, as Ben Franklin observed, that is as inevitable and predictable as death.  Certainly, these verses don’t make particularly good fodder for hymns or Christmas carols or holiday pageants.  In his Messiah, Mr. Handel decided to skip this rather prosaic part of the story entirely.

And that leads us to the most surprising part of this very unsurprising first advent: Luke’s declaration that Joseph went to be registered with Mary, who was “expecting a child.”  Surely, this wins any contest of the greatest understatements in the history of the written word.  In fact, it may be that the only real competition comes in the next verse: “While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son.” 

So, how does Luke describe the events immediately preceding the birth of Christ?  He portrays them as the stuff of everyday, ordinary life.

But what do we do in the days immediately preceding Christmas?  We labor—sometimes to the point of despair and dismay—to make them as special, as non-everyday, as extraordinary as we can.

Do you sense something of a disconnection here?

Now, permit me to say that I’m as fond of Christmas preparations as anyone I know: I love reading the familiar verses and singing the old carols; rediscovering the silly ornaments that Lisa and I have accumulated over the years; getting together with friends to celebrate the season; searching for gifts that will bring smiles to the faces I adore; smelling the fresh-cut Christmas tree as it warms in the living room and the sap starts to flow again.  I am no Grinch, even if I do wish that my heart was bigger, more accommodating, and open to greater levels of commitment and empathy and forgiveness than it seems currently able to sustain.

So please understand that I am not asking you to downplay Christmas or to ignore its obvious specialness.  I get all that.

No, to the contrary, I am inviting you—as I think Luke does—to see that Christmas also lives in all the simple, mundane, unspectacular weeks that will follow.

It lives in the midst of business as usual, where decrees are issued and taxes come due and people obey laws and couples become engaged and children enter this weary and restless old world.

It lives in the miracle and wonder and blessing that we celebrate on December 25^th —and also in the miracles and wonders and blessings that may cross our paths on all the days that follow. 

It lives in readiness and in celebration—and also in the midst of drudgery and in the uneven and uncertain path that we call work-a-day existence.

It lives when our hearts are filled with inexpressible joy—and also when we are burdened with unimaginable horror and sorrow over the headlines in the newspaper.

I think that the special genius of this passage in Luke is that it moves us past the idea of getting ready for Christmas and into the idea of getting ready for anything—because God may become stunningly present for us even in the highly improbable context of a governmental head-counting.

*    

I am sure that many of you have seen the photograph and the videos that went viral a couple of weeks ago on the Internet about New York Police Department Officer Larry DePrimo.  DePrimo was on patrol on 44^th Street in New York on a very cold night when he noticed an elderly man lying on the sidewalk.  The man had no socks or shoes, and DePrimo became concerned.  He ran into a nearby store and bought the man a pair of sturdy one-hundred dollar boots.  DePrimo knew that this was the kind and compassionate thing to do; what he did not know was that a tourist took a photograph of him doing it.  That picture was posted on Facebook; it promptly garnered hundreds of thousands of “likes”; DePrimo was identified; and the picture and the tale spread like wildfire.  Everyone agreed: it was a great Christmas-time story, and so it is.

But, of course, there are countless Christmas stories.  Many of them happen during the other eleven months of the year.  Many of them unfold over a number of years, or even decades, or even lifetimes.  All of them bring a ferocious light that presses back against the relentless darkness that always threatens to consume us, but that finally cannot, because God won’t have it.

Here are just a few of those stories, gleaned from a single website (the CNN 2012 Heroes page, if you're interested), after only about fifteen minutes of looking around on the Internet:

For the past two years, Dr. Benjamin Labrot has practiced medicine from the decks of a 76-foot-long refurbished ship called the Southern Wind, where he serves not only as the chief physician but often as captain, cook, and lab technician.  Sailing a nonstop circuit between Haiti, Honduras, and Panama, Dr. Labrot and a crew of volunteers have managed to provide critical services to about thirteen thousand people—many of whom had never before received any medical attention at all.  Dr. Labrot acknowledges the challenges and the rewards his work entails.  He says: “I had to postpone many aspects of my own personal life.  I don’t have a home.  I had to give up a lot.  But I gained everything.”  This Christmas story has been going on for two years, now—two years and counting.      

Nepal is one of the poorest countries in the world.  It has no social safety net.  This means that, when someone goes to prison, they have two choices: they can bring their children to prison with them; or they can leave their children to fend for themselves on the street.  Since 2005, 28-year-old Pushpa Basnet of Nepal has taken those children in.  This doesn’t require much of her.  She just has to feed, clothe, teach, and launder for the forty children who live with her; take them to visit their parents in prison; and help their parents learn a trade so they’re in a better position to be caregivers once they’re released.  This Christmas story has been going on for seven years.  And Pushpa Basnet is still a very young woman.

A common problem bedevils children who are diagnosed with certain types of cancer: the treatment severely compromises their immune systems.  As a result, the disease does not just steal their health—it steals their childhood, preventing them from such basic activities as playing with other kids.  Well, one day a woman named Nancy Zuch, whose daughter Morgan was battling cancer at the time, noticed something: the hospital where Morgan was receiving treatment allowed her to play with another child who was in the same condition.  Morgan went on to recover, and Nancy went on to found a preschool in her daughter’s name.  The Morgan Center is a cheerful, bright, colorful, and meticulously sanitized space—the only one like it in the world—where children who are fighting for their lives can gather together to do the stuff kids loves to do: sing; read stories; make arts and crafts projects; laugh; play.  This Christmas story has been going on for nine years … and it has a beautiful future.

Stan Brock, on the other hand, did not appear to have a particularly beautiful future when he was a teenager.  He dropped out of school at sixteen and found himself herding cattle for a living.  He barely scraped by, sometimes going for days without food or water.  Indeed, just about the only thing he could say for himself was that he was working hard and developing some amazing skills with a lasso.

And that’s where he was when a television show called Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom discovered him in the nineteen-sixties.  It turned out that the show needed someone who could lasso big and unfriendly animals—you can see a video of Stan wrangling with a buffalo on YouTube if you like—so they took him on.  His new role gave him security, a certain measure of fame, and the opportunity to travel the world.  But he never forgot where he came from: “I understand what it is like to be penniless, homeless, and uninsured,” he says.

So, after he learned how to fly an airplane, Stan offered to bring medical support to areas that otherwise wouldn’t receive it.  In 1985, he turned this avocation into a nonprofit organization called Remote Area Medical, which has involved more than 70,000 volunteers, has held over 600 medical clinics worldwide, and has helped more than half a million people.  Stan Brock sleeps in his company headquarters at a ramshackle old schoolhouse in Tennessee; he has no assets other than a bicycle and some tools; and he does not accept an income from the enterprise he runs.  “I guess I’m your basic indigent CEO,” he says.  This Christmas story has been chugging along for more than a quarter of a century.  And it ain’t over yet.

In each of these stories, a moment of clarity, insight, and inspiration came to someone.  Stan Brock realized the importance of medical care in remote areas after a horse kicked him in the head in the Amazon.  Nancy Zuch observed one fragile child playing with another and recognized the potential.  Pushpa Basnet saw innocent children going to prison—because that’s where their parents were—and concluded that this was an intolerable state of affairs.  Benjamin Labrot sat down and wept when he discovered that he could not carry all the medicine that his patients needed in his backpack—and he resolved to find a way to carry more.  Officer Larry DePrimo says that he was moved to buy that pair of boots after the homeless man for whom he had expressed concern looked him in the eye and said “God bless you.”

Maybe that’s how Christmas stories work for all of us.  We stumble across a blessing.  We realize we need to carry more.  We encounter an injustice that we cannot ignore.  We see a new way to bring people together.  We get kicked in the head.  And so we set out to write our own Christmas story—one that may start tomorrow or that may already be underway; one that may last for sixty minutes or sixty years; one that may begin its unfolding in any season, under any circumstances, at any moment, even in the most ordinary of moments—even at this very moment.

So, what moves you toward Bethlehem?

What gifts do you bring?

What causes you to raise your eyes and to look beyond the madness and the malevolence and the materialism of this world and to see—at long, long last to see—the faint but unmistakable glimmer of an irresistible star?

Amen.

Beyond Understanding

Scripture: Isaiah 40:1-5, Mark 1:1-8


Bill Watterson, the author of the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, once said: “The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us.” Indeed, I often wonder what a rational, clear-thinking alien would make of our countless peculiar behaviors. What would such a creature think of pumpkin carving, neckties, catch-and-release fishing, the seventh-inning stretch, riding stationary bicycles, running marathons for fun, or bringing cats and dogs into our homes so we can feed them and have them ruin our rugs and furniture? In fact, as I reflect on these things I have no idea what to make of them, either.

I found myself conducting this little thought experiment the other day when I was listening to a radio station that is currently devoting all of its air time to holiday music. I wondered: if an alien were sitting beside me and listening, what would he think Christmas is about? I imagined our visitor saying something like this:

“These songs appear to tell a story but its plot line is unclear to me. The principal player in the drama might be an infant, a boy who plays the drum, three kings, several singing chipmunks, a snowman who has eyes made of coal, a mutant reindeer, or a large bearded man who watches people when they’re sleeping and can read their minds. The story clearly revolves around gifts, although I cannot comprehend why anyone would want most of them, such as those lords who are leaping up and down. I cannot even tell where the tale takes place, at various times it appearing to occur in a little town in the desert, a toy factory in the arctic, decked halls, grandma’s house, or a city shaken by the cacophonous noise of silver bells. As far as I can discern, the story is completely incoherent and has no meaning whatsoever.”

We all recognize the problem I’m describing. And many of us try to counter these confounding cultural influences by making declarations about the true meaning of Christmas. Before this season is over, someone will tell you that the true meaning of Christmas can be found in children or family or tradition or generosity or helping those less fortunate. A real rabble-rouser might even suggest to you that Christmas is about celebrating the birth of Jesus. Of course, all of these have some kernel of truth in them. But I want to invite you to consider this possibility: if we’re after the true meaning of Christmas, then we have to think much, much bigger than these statements suggest. Indeed, we have to think so big that we will we encounter the limits of what we are capable of understanding.

In order to clarify what I’m getting at, I’d like to talk about just one of the characteristics shared by the various gospel renditions of the birth of Jesus. It is a characteristic that has immense theological importance, even though it tends to fall outside of our twenty-first-century conversations about Christmas, and certainly doesn’t make itself manifest in the lyrics of such seasonal classics as “Jingle Bell Rock” or “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Clause.” The aspect of these stories I will ask you to focus on is this: all of the gospel writers place considerable emphasis on the idea that the birth of Jesus fulfilled a prophecy—a very, very old prophecy. For example, parts of the book of Isaiah are dated to seven or eight hundred years before the birth of Christ.

Of course, the gospel most interested in connecting the birth of Jesus with the fulfillment of these ancient prophecies is that of Matthew, who in telling the story refers to passages from Isaiah, Micah, Hosea, and Jeremiah. Matthew also makes less explicit allusions to various Mosaic texts and even invokes a prophecy of uncertain origin: “He will be called a Nazarene.” The gospel of Luke includes some similar references, although here the notion that Jesus fulfills the messianic prophecy is conveyed through the voices of various players in the drama: Gabriel, Zechariah, the angel who appears to the shepherds, Simeon, and Anna. The gospel of John includes quotations from Isaiah that parallel those we find in Matthew. And similar allusions appear at the beginning of the gospel of Mark—even though that gospel includes no birth narrative but rather starts by moving swiftly from Jesus’ baptism to the inauguration of his ministry. What—first and foremost and perhaps above all other things—did the gospel writers want us to know about Jesus coming into this world? That it accomplished something that had been foretold for generations and generations and that had been in the making since the very beginning of time.

Now, this is the point in the sermon when most preachers would probably extol you to find a few minutes in the coming days to interrupt your busy Christmas preparations in order to ponder the dimensions of this idea. But, unfortunately for you, I am not most preachers. We’re therefore going to do it at this very moment. So fasten your seatbelt, take a deep breath, clear your mind, and try to get your head around the bigness of what the gospel writers are trying to tell you here.

Imagine a plan so vast, so intricate, and so complex that it requires all of time to unfold. Imagine an act of creation that carries with it such dazzling possibilities that we end up with Siberian tigers and the music of Bach, Mount Everest and the Pythagorean Theorem, the Amazon basin and the plays of Shakespeare, hummingbirds and calculus. Imagine that in the midst of all this richness there is a signal event of such transformative importance that God whispers of it to His chosen prophets—not because it is imminent, but because it is a wonder exceeding all other wonders. We might sometimes think to ourselves that God is pretty good at keeping secrets—perhaps even too good for our taste. But this was a secret of such surpassing significance that word got out early.

What an amazing, attention-grabbing, humbling word it is. It is the word of God made into—of all improbable things—the warm, soft flesh of a baby. It is the word that the God who created the universe itself loves you and chases you and calls you into the shelter underneath His wings. It is the word that you cannot have suffering, cannot have anxiety, cannot have disappointment, cannot have pain that is bigger than the one who made you and who will see you through it. It is a word that ushers us into a life that is grateful and faithful and forgiving and relentless in the granting of mercy and the demanding of justice. It is a word that can lead you into a courage that passes all understanding; a resolve that passes all understanding; a peace that passes all understanding; a joy that passes all understanding—a sweet, sweet joy, indeed.

Ah, joy to the world—the Lord is come! Let earth receive her king. Let every heart prepare him room, and heaven and nature sing. And heaven and nature sing. And heaven, and heaven, and nature sing.

And the people said: Amen.

Did You Hear What I Heard?!

Scripture: Luke 2:8-14

The nativity set that my parents lovingly displayed every Christmas season left something to be desired. Over the years, the stable had loosened around the joints and had taken on a dangerously wobbly quality. I doubt that any Little Town of Bethlehem Safety Inspector would have allowed its occupancy, let alone by the Lord and Savior of Mankind.

The set featured about a dozen animals, most of which had lost at least one limb as the result of careless packing or unpacking. The only way to make the poor creatures stand up was to lean them against one of the stable walls. This explains why, for many years, I mistakenly believed that Jesus was born in an animal hospital.

My parents were more fastidious about the human figures and replaced those that turned up missing an arm or a leg or a head. But the new figurines were never the same size as the old ones—and in some instances they were quite a bit larger. This will help you understand why I affectionately nicknamed their nativity set “The Attack of the 50-Foot Shepherd.”

I take that figure as a symbol of sorts, because many of our Christmas traditions seem to make the shepherds into outsized and unreal characters. We portray them in paintings and films as improbably holy, improbably meditative, and improbably clean. We sing Christmas carols about them, including one (“Do You Hear What I Hear?”) where a shepherd and a lamb engage in a conversation, transforming the shepherd into some sort of desert-wandering Dr. Doolittle.

I love these traditions as much as anyone, but I think it is important to notice that they come at a price: they can cause us to lose sight of the shepherds’ humanity.

The gospels make clear, however, that these shepherds were ordinary human beings, just like you and me. Luke tells us that they did not react to the angel’s appearance with preternatural joy but with understandable terror. I doubt they joined arms and blissfully sang “Do you hear what I hear?” I think they probably grabbed each other by their robes and cried “Did you hear what I heard?!”

By the way, the story goes on to provide a wonderful little detail. Once the shepherds felt somewhat reassured, they did precisely what most of us would do: they talked amongst themselves before settling on a plan. These days, they would have formed a committee.

The gospel of Luke thus belies the idealized image of the shepherds as perfect disciples who eagerly received God’s word and immediately responded to God’s instructions.

Once we recapture a sense of the shepherds’ humanity we can imagine some of the thoughts and feelings they must have entertained. Surely, like all of us, every one of those shepherds had from time to time prayed for a sign of hope. Well, on that midnight clear they got a whopper. But it seems fair to assume that they did not get what they expected and they did not get it when they asked for it. In this respect, the experience of those shepherds is probably very like our own.

We can also empathize with the shepherds’ decision to go see for themselves. Perhaps that decision came from faith, perhaps from skepticism, but in any event who could resist? And then we can imagine the excitement, the mad dash to Bethlehem, the crazy search through town for a baby wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.

Now, we know how the story ends—but they didn’t. So imagine—if you possibly can—the utter and inexpressible amazement they must have experienced upon discovering exactly what the angel had described. Surely, this was an occasion for turning to each other and asking “Do you see what I see?!” Then they told all who were gathered what the angel had declared; and Mary treasured all those words, and pondered them in her heart.

But I am particularly intrigued by what happened next. It is recounted in a verse that is often overlooked—in fact, you probably didn’t miss it when you read the passage cited above. Luke tells us that “[t]he shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.”

I can’t help but wonder: and then what? Did the shepherds become disciples who devoted their every waking moment to spreading the “good news of great joy?” Or did they go back to their flocks and fields, treasuring and pondering like Mary?

And how did they preserve the immediacy and reality of the amazing experience they had shared? How did they avoid falling into doubt and skepticism and rationalization? How did they keep themselves from concluding that the voice of the angel was probably just the sound of the wind in the night? How did they avoid shrugging the whole thing off, telling themselves that anyone who went looking for an impoverished child in Bethlehem would surely find one? If the shepherds were human beings, just like you and me, then how did they keep from falling prey to those very human questions?

Well, we don’t know. The gospels don’t tell us. But I think the answer is this: they remembered. After all, sometimes memory—and only memory—can make faith possible. And I suppose that we are like the shepherds in this way, too.

It often feels to me that during this season we long to reconnect to something very old, something fundamental, something deeply embedded in our collective Christian memory. Certainly, Christmas brings forward-looking feelings of hope and renewal and the promise of peace on earth and goodwill toward all. But there is simply no denying the backward gravity that sets in at this time of year.

For many of us, this means memories of wonderful holidays. Every December, I re-read a delightful essay called “Recipe for Christmas” by Pulitzer Prize winning author Robert Coffin. Coffin grew up in Maine and argued that any Christmas worth celebrating had to correspond with his experiences as a child. According to Coffin, a decent Christmas therefore requires—among other things—a farm, an ocean, a cold snap, a big fall of snow, a blazing fireplace, a hand-cut fir tree, a horse-drawn sled, a father who tells stories and sings and shoots a goose for roasting, and a mother who strings popcorn and cooks the goose—along with three steamed puddings and twenty-five pumpkin pies.

Of course, most of us never had a Christmas that fits this description. In fact, many of us remember Christmases we’d prefer to forget. Perhaps you’re having one of those Christmases this year.

But the “good news of great joy” is that we share a memory that can sustain us—each and every one of us. It is the same memory that must have offered endless comfort to the shepherds when that miraculous night had ended and the drudgery of everyday life had resumed.

It is the memory of an angel’s voice. It is the memory of a light in the darkness.
You have heard it, even if not while you were watching your flocks. You have seen it, even if not in the sky over Bethlehem. But, as sure as I stand here, I am certain that the voice and the light have come to you, too.

Did you see what I saw?

Did you hear what I heard?

I think you did.

This week, like all the weeks after it, will do its best to distract you from the voice and the light. It will do all it can to drag you to that terrible and sad place called forgetfulness. I think that the shepherds offer us a simple, two-thousand-year-old lesson about how to contend with that challenge. And it can be summarized in just one word: remember.

Remember, brothers and sisters in Christ.

Remember the voice.

Remember the light.

Remember.

Remember.

Remember.

Amen.

The Tree with the Lights in It

Scripture: Matthew 2:9-12


“When [the wise men] had heard [King Herod], they set out; and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising, until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.”

These words come from the New Revised Standard Version of the Holy Bible, or the “NRSV” to its friends. Its precursor, the Revised Standard Version (or “RSV”), was published in 1952 and reflected fifteen years of work by a committee of distinguished biblical scholars. After its publication, the RSV was officially authorized for use by a vast array of Christian churches: Protestant, Anglican, Roman Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox. Indeed, whatever their other disagreements, these churches concurred about the quality and scholarship of the RSV. Another committee—equally distinguished—subsequently brought additional expertise to the text, resulting in the widely respected translation we find in the NRSV.

Nevertheless, it seems to me that all these fancy, highly educated, and deeply spiritual scholars did a pretty shabby job on this particular gospel passage. In these verses, the translators seek to tell us the story of Christmas. But just consider all the things they left out.

They left out the snow, the winter wonderland, and the giant inflatable yard ornaments. They left out the candy canes, the eggnog, and the fruitcake—the last being an omission many of us do not regret. They left out sleigh bells, silver bells, seven swans a-swimming, six geese a-laying, and five golden rings. They left out Santa, Frosty, Rudolph, the Grinch, Ebenezer Scrooge, George Bailey, Charlie Brown, singing chipmunks, and that perenially annoying kid with the drum. They do mention presents, but since only one person got any—and it wasn’t us—they obviously missed the whole point of the passage. They even left out the centerpiece of the story: the thing we put all those presents under, the Christmas tree, the tree with the lights in it.

All kidding aside, it is remarkable to note the many layers of tradition we’ve piled on top of this sacred text over the centuries. Some traditions, like the tree with the lights in it, persist. Others have faded away as the world has changed.

For example, many years ago there was a story told among country folk—like us, I suppose—that on Christmas Eve the oxen kneeled down at midnight, just as they had done before Jesus in the manger. Some farming families honored a tradition of recounting this tale just before they put the children to bed. The great poet Thomas Hardy wrote a lovely piece about this tradition—and what it might mean to us adults. Slightly paraphrased, it goes like this:

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock
“Now they are all on their knees,”
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years, yet I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
“Come, see the oxen kneel,

“In the lonely farmyard by yonder vale
Our childhood used to know,”
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.

I suspect this explains why many of us cling so tenaciously to our Christmas traditions. They remind us that even in this tired old world there remains a cause for joy and amazement and celebration. So we return to those traditions, even in the gloom of the troubles that surround us, “hoping it might be so.”

Of course, traditions have their complications. Just consider my complicated fifty-two-year-old relationship with the tradition of the Christmas tree.

I have sweet memories of many of those trees. My grandparents, consistent with the fashion of the times, decorated their tree with piles of garland and tinsel until you couldn’t actually see the tree any more. My father, on the other hand, took a somewhat sparser approach in order to emphasize the ancient German ornaments that had been in his family for generations and that were, well, unspeakably ugly.

I remember the tree Lisa and I shared early on when we lived in a small loft apartment in Ann Arbor. We had no room for a real tree, so we adopted one that stood on top of an adjoining office building and that we could see through our living room window. I remember the first tree I cut down for Lisa, and the first trees Evan and J.J. cut down for our family, once they were big enough to work a saw and fast enough to get out of the way when the tree fell down. And I remember the handsome, freshly cut, piney smelling tree we brought into the living room one year that our dog Jackson decided to claim for his own .... I won’t describe how, but I suspect you can imagine.

But there were other years and other trees. There was the tree down the hospital corridor from the room where my grandfather died. There were the trees my family decorated when my father was away and we didn’t know when he’d be coming home. There was the first tree I decorated after my father’s passing, when I no longer had his big mitts clumsily handing me delicate old ornaments with the paint worn off of them. And there was a year of sadness and transition when I had no tree at all. I remember those trees, and those years, as well.

We do a lot of this at Christmas. We look back. We remember. Some years it is our cherished memories that give us the only warmth we find during the holiday season. And sometimes it is our recollection of harder Christmases that makes our current joy even brighter.

But, however we approach the season, we seek out the familiar. We honor our traditions, even in their bittersweet complexity. This is comforting, for sure; but it also gives rise to a problem.
I’m not talking about the problem that we have acquired so many layers of tradition that rediscovering the meaning of Christmas underneath them requires us to engage in something like an archeological dig. That is inarguably true, indeed so true it has become something of a cliché. But I’m talking about a different problem—one that comes from the nature of tradition itself.

Tradition relies on repetition, consistency, and predictability. It has a “now we do this because this is what we always do” quality to it. It lures us into comfortably rehearsed patterns of experiencing the season. We have a list, we check it twice, and when everything on the list has been accomplished we know we’ve finished with Christmas. And then we move on.

But this way of engaging with things conflicts with what Jesus—not the baby in the manger but the “young and fearless prophet”—calls us to do. Over and over again, throughout the gospels, Jesus urges us not to look back but to look forward. He implores us to recognize the work that stands before us—feeding the poor; sheltering the homeless; caring for the sick; comforting the distressed; fighting injustice and bigotry and hatred and violence wherever we find it. He challenges us to see things anew, afresh, as we have never seen them before, as filled with the innate stuff out of which might just come the very Kingdom of God.

Think about what Jesus said. In the Sermon on the Mount, for example, he repeatedly invites us to see things in a radically different way. "You have heard it said that you should not commit murder but I am telling you that even anger offends the God of peace." "You have heard it said that we should take an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth but I am telling you that revenge and retribution offend the God of forgiveness." "You have heard it said that we should embrace our neighbors and despise our enemies but I am telling you that such stinginess of spirit offends the God of love."

And think about how Jesus lived. He did not just have love for people—he had hope for them and faith in them as well. He drew in those that society cast out: the lepers; the unclean; the tax collectors; the prostitutes. He saw them as others did not, and being seen by him in that way transformed them. Society called them cursed; Jesus called them his children; and two-thousand years later we call them blessed; we call them disciples; in some cases, we even call them saints. And if this capacity to see everything and everyone with eyes that are refocused and reborn is fundamental to who Christ was then it must be fundamental to what Christmas is.

In her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard describes what happened when surgeons first discovered how to perform safe cataract operations. Inspired by their success, the surgeons traveled across Europe and America operating on numerous men and women and children who had been blind since birth. Medical historians captured the reactions of these people when they first opened their eyes and saw.

Annie Dillard writes that these newly sighted people can teach us something about how dull our own vision is. Some were amazed by things we take for granted, like the miracle of what our hands look like when they move or the fact that everyone has a different face. One young boy was astonished by the appearance of a bunch of grapes: dark, blue, shiny, with bumps and hollows. A twenty-two-year old girl was so dazzled by the world’s brightness that she kept her eyes shut for two weeks. When she finally opened them, an expression of gratification and astonishment spread over her face, and she couldn’t stop looking at everything around her, all the time exclaiming: “Oh God, how beautiful!”

But my favorite is a little girl who, with her newly acquired sight, found her way into a garden and stood transfixed in front of a tree. For the first time, she saw the sun coming through the branches and illuminating the leaves. She was speechless for a while. But then she turned to the person beside her and said, “Ah, this is the tree with the lights in it.”

Traditions are wonderful things. They bind us together. They comfort us. And I hope nothing I’ve said will keep you from putting cookies out for Santa, or singing along with Elvis’s “Blue Christmas” on the radio, or wondering what the oxen are up to, or sitting quietly to admire the tree with the lights in it.

But I also hope that, as Christmas approaches, you will make time to look forward, to remember not just the cry of the infant Jesus but the call of the risen Christ, to understand that you are an instrument of God’s peace and a messenger of God’s love, to embrace everything and everyone around you with a full and forgiving heart, and to see, really see, as you have never seen before, occasionally even whispering to yourself, “Oh God, how beautiful!”

There is an old and simple story that might help you with this. Maybe you know it. Here’s how it goes. Many years ago there were three wise men. They had a long, hard journey. But when they arrived at their destination, they saw something overwhelming and indescribably wonderful—something that, once seen, changed them forever; something that, once seen, could not be unseen. They bowed down. And, when they traveled on, they followed a new way.

Gracious Lord, who made the star over the stable, who made the tree with the lights in it, and who made even our searching and wandering hearts, grant that in this season, and then in all the seasons of our lives, we might go and see and do likewise.

Amen.

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.