"Stairway to Heaven"

     I was chatting with a colleague the other day and he mentioned how amazed he is that for all the changes we have seen over the years in what makes for popular music – rock, soul, pop, new wave, reggae, ska, hip hop, and so on – the Christmas season always seems to be about the old nuggets. In secular culture, “White Christmas”, “Rudolph”, “All I want for Christmas is my Two Front Teeth”, “Baby Its Cold Outside”, and the like; in church,  “Silent Night”, “O Come, All Ye Faithful”, “Away in the Manger”, “Joy to the World”, etc.

            He is right, of course. I think really good music has a way of sticking with us, even as styles and tastes change, and that this is particularly true of Christmas music.

            All of this being a somewhat roundabout way to get me onto another piece of music that has endured over the years, at least over the years since I was a teen, and which is perennially voted to be one of the top rock n’ roll songs of all time, Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” For those who do not know this rock anthem, it begins

“There’s a lady who’s sure

All that glitters is gold

And she’s buying a stairway to heaven.”

            Now why this has come to mind for me is that I sometimes think that this is something that many of us, maybe all of us, try to do, if only unconsciously. That although we might not try to buy a stairway to heaven, we try to find ways in which we might climb up and out of the ordinary life which we know day in and day out, that we might somehow transcend the commonplace and reach the mystical peaks.  And so in the season leading up to Christmas, we look forward to a time which somehow seems set apart from the rest of the year in a special way, a time of joy when we can be lifted up out of our dull, everyday, mundane existence, into a poetic world of mystery and wonder.

            We know just how to do this, certainly here in the church. Electric candles glow warmly in the windows of the Meeting House; beautiful, festive poinsettias adorn the sanctuary, spilling exuberantly up and out of the Deacon’s Pew below the pulpit; advent candles of purple, rose and white gaily sputter away above a wreath of green; hand bells ring out and pipe organ serenades; at the close of the service, the lights are dimmed and we each lift candles heavenward.

            Everything is orchestrated to lift us out of the ordinary.

            Silly us. Do we really think that we need to buy a stairway to heaven? This is the Christmas message, the meaning of the Incarnation – if a stairway to heaven was ever needed, it was designed, engineered, and  installed by the Master Architect some 2000 years ago. Not so hard-working, dedicated, faithful people might, with just the right combination of setting and music and prayer, scramble their way up to heaven. No, not that, but so that God might slide right down its banister into our common, ordinary world, bringing heaven to earth.

            God used that stairway, Luke tells us, to descend to a lowly stable in a nowhere town in a nothing corner of the mightiest empire the world had yet to see, to a man and a woman who were peasants far from home and who were soon to be refugees in an alien land. God used that stairway to become one of us, to take on our common lot, to walk among us, to teach us, to model a new way of being with each other, to heal us, to suffer with us, even to die for us.

            God used that stairway, John tells us, to become flesh and live among us, to bring the true light into the world, so that all who received him, all who believed in his name, might become children of God, and so find a new way to have life, and life abundant.

            Silly us. We don’t need to climb up and out of this world, this life, this muck and mire, to find God. This is the gift of Christmas to us all – that God so loves you that God has come to us to make the ordinary, extraordinary, so that we who cannot climb up to heaven, might have heaven come down to us.

            So Merry Christmas, indeed! Amen.