"A Night To Remember"

 

            This was a night to remember.

            The shepherds, they would remember that night for the rest of their lives, remember the angels visiting them on the hillside, remember their visit to that stable in the little town of Bethlehem, remember meeting Mary and Joseph, remember, and this would be the greatest memory of them all, remember greeting the Messiah, the Lord, wrapped in cloth and lying in a manger.

            Mary and Joseph, they remembered as well. They remembered how they had met, the plans they made together, the hopes they had for a married life together. They remembered that strange angel greeting to Mary, and the promise that she would be the one to bring into this world a special child, a child that they would name Jesus. They would remember the long pregnancy, the excitement of Mary’s visit to see her cousin Elizabeth; they would also remember the long trip to Bethlehem to take part in the census.

            And when the shepherds finally departed, having told Mary and Joseph the angel tidings, we are told that “Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.” Remembering it all, trying to put it together in her mind, trying to figure out what it meant for her and her young family.

            This was a night to remember long ago; and this is a night to remember for us as well.

            So many of our special memories are wrapped up in celebrations of Christmas. We remember the excitement we knew as children, lying in bed on Christmas Eve, tossing and turning and wondering if we could stay awake long enough to hear the reindeer prancing on the roof, or if Santa would eat the cookies we left out for him, or if we really would get that sled or doll or Red Raider BB gun that we hoped we would get. We remember the joy of the family dinner on Christmas Day, all the generations gathered around the table, the roast beast or the turkey and the special dishes and the candlelight. And then, later, some of us remember having that special someone with us on that day, so proud and excited and nervous and wondering if the rest of the family would take to them.

            Of course we all have other memories of Christmas celebrations, memories that might not always be so happy – the Christmas you were away from family and friends, serving our country oversees, perhaps in wartime; that first Christmas after the loss of a parent or a spouse or a treasured relationship; that Christmas when it seemed as if you were the only one not in the spirit of the season.

              To remember something is to have it come to mind, something which often just happens, not prompted by an act of will.  Anything can set that memory off – a similar event, a taste, a smell, a song heard on the car radio, something you glimpse out of the corner of your eye.

But to remember something can also be an act of the will; we will ourselves to recollect it, we chew it over until suddenly the memory comes to life once again.

I think this is why Christmas Eve was a night to remember for Mary and Joseph, and a night to remember for us as well. Mary and Joseph were trying to make sense of it all, trying to put it all together, trying to figure out what it meant for them and their lives that Jesus was born.

And this is our proper work this evening as well, to not just hear this old, old story once again, but to remember it, to try to put it all together, to make sense of it for us and for our times and our lives.

What difference does it make to you that God so loved the world that God took on human form and weakness and lived among us and taught us and suffered with us and died for us?

What difference does it make, for instance, that the Prince of Peace came to us, promising us a peace beyond all human understanding, when we live in a time when the status quo seems to be a constant state of war?

What difference does it make to us that the first Christmas prompted generous giving by everyone, by wise men from the East, from shepherds on a hillside, from animals at the stable?

What difference does it make that in the darkest night in the darkest time of year in one of the darkest eras of history a light shone in the darkness, and the darkness has never prevailed against it?

Bottom line, what difference does it make to us that Jesus was born?

Christmas eve is a night to remember, but of course the task is too much for just one evening. Which is why we gather together each Saturday and Sunday throughout the year, to remember. To retell the story until we come closer to getting it right, to hash it our, to chew on it, to seek its meaning for us in our lives, in the joys and sorrows of the one life we each have been gifted with.

So let us, tonight, remember – remember to not only welcome Jesus into our hearts once again, but to remember throughout the year to come as well. Then it will be both a merry Christmas, and a happy new year. Amen.

“The Original ‘Let’s Take Christ Out of Christmas’”.

     There has been a lot of blather these last few years, much of it coming from television and radio talk show hosts, complaining that they – the “they” being the ACLU, the “liberal media”, the forces of political correctness, etc. – that “they” have conspired to take Christ out of Christmas.  Those who, out of sensitivity to those who are Jewish, Muslim, pagan, or none of the above, say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas”, are accused of secularizing the holiday, and even of victimizing Christians – although how a group that makes up over three-quarters of the U.S. population can be considered “victims” might be a bit of a stretch.

            In our reading for today, on the other hand, we get the original guy who really did want to take the Christ out of Christmas – King Herod. Herod had heard rumors that a child had been born who would be king, and the arrival of the magi from the east, telling him that they sought this child, was enough for Herod to commission the magi as his agents, charged with reporting back to him the location of this potential usurper. But the magi, having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, go home by another route. Herod, infuriated that the magi have thwarted his machinations, exercises the nuclear option, sending his henchmen to murder all children under the age of two in and around Bethlehem.

            But Joseph, having himself been warned in a dream about Herod’s murderous scheming, wakes Mary in the middle of the night, and together, with their newborn clutched close to her breast, flees across the border to Egypt.

            Herod wants to take the Christ out of Christmas, and people pay for his jealousy, his rage, his paranoia. Children die. Parents are bereft.

            I often have folk telling me that politics has no place in the church or in the life of faith. The first Christmas, however, is political to its very core, with a petty tyrant ready, willing and able to eliminate a potential rival, even if it meant the wholesale slaughter of infants.  Herod knows that there is room for only one king, and if this child is to be king, he cannot be.

            By telling us of Jesus’ start in life as a political refugee, Mathew is telling us in prose what John tells us in his gospel in poetry, that “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has never put it out.” 

            So even as we abhor the violence in this account of the Holy Family fleeing to Egypt, we can see that at the heart of the narrative this is the Christmas story as well; that on Christmas, love was born into the world, and nothing, not even the power of earthly tyrants, can separate us from so strong a love.

            But while the Christmas story begins with this story of God’s all-powerful love, it does not end there.  While nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, we, like the shepherds and the magi and Mary and Joseph before us, cannot remain huddled around that manger forever, for he is no longer there. The Herods of this world still walk the earth, still hatch their murderous plots in modern palaces around the world, still scheme to profit off human misery, whether it be sex trafficking in Thailand and Los Angeles, or arms trade on the African continent, or drug peddling in our high schools and on the back streets of our towns. And too many Rachels still bewail their lost children, the children victimized by bullying and violence in their homes and neighborhoods, the grown children ensnared in cycles of spousal abuse, the young men and women fed into the meat grinder of constant warfare.

            Joseph had a dream, a message from God, that compelled him to get up and out in the middle of the night, that an innocent child might be protected.

            The question for us, even as we celebrate the joy of Christmas, is whether we, in the light of day, will remain huddled around an empty manger, or instead respond to God’s call to get up and go, and do our part, in our turn.

            Merry Christmas! Now get out of here.

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"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.

           

"Christmas Upside Down"

     Maybe the reason I like the movie so much is that it turns on its head my traditional understanding of how Christmas is supposed to be; it takes that Hallmark card version of the Christmas holiday, the one we all hope for, where all is calm and all is bright, and gives it a big kick right in the rear end. And not only that, in doing so I think it comes closer to the truth of what Christmas is really all about.

            The movie I am talking about dates from 1983, and has since becomes something of a Christmas season classic, right up there with “Miracle on 34^th Street”, “It’s a Wonderful Life”, and the like. Its name is “A Christmas Story.” For those who have not seen it, a quick summary: Set in a small town in the late 1940s, it is almost Christmas, and little Ralphie Parker, a 6^th grader at best, has his heart set on a Red Ryder 200-shot Carbine Action Range Model Air Rifle. When he tells his mom of this Christmas wish, with a gasp of horror she dismisses the idea, saying "You'll shoot your eye out" -- which is the same response every adult has to subsequent requests, including the Santa at the mall. While the main plot revolves around Ralphie’s hope of getting the air rifle, what makes the film really interesting is the way everything in the Parker family falls apart as they try to get ready for Christmas. Ralphie’s father wins an award, which turns out to be a gaudy table lamp in the form of a woman’s shapely leg, which Ralphie’s mother abhors and “accidently” breaks; the furnace keeps breaking down; the car gets a flat on the way to buy the Christmas tree; Ralphie says the “f-word” in front of his father with predictable consequences; the neighbor’s dogs rampage through the kitchen and eat the Christmas turkey; and the movie ends with the family celebrating Christmas at the only place open in town, a Chinese restaurant.

             Many of the Christmas cards we get each year proclaim “Peace”, which is fitting since we know Jesus as the Prince of Peace, but in “A Christmas Story”, Christmas comes in with anything but peace – instead, Christmas comes in with chaos and disruption, and the family’s settled, everyday life is turned upside down. Looking back on that time, the narrator, now an adult, says, “Oh, life is like that. Sometimes, at the height of our revelries, when our joy is at its zenith, when all is most right with the world, the most unthinkable disasters descend upon us.”

            But isn’t that the real story of the first Christmas?

            Look at Joseph. Life was going quite smoothly, thank you very much. A young man making his way in the world, so much so that he was in position to get married and move out of the family house. A favorable match is made with an attractive local girl, and they are engaged to be married. He likely has found a house, made plans to make some improvements, is looking forward to the wedding night. And then his fiancée tells Joseph that she is carrying a child, a child that cannot be and is not his. He is, of course, devastated, but figures that he can salvage his situation by quietly breaking off the engagement and getting on with his life. But then God breaks in, a heavenly messenger comes to Joseph in a dream, telling him that the child was of the Holy Spirit, and that he ought not be afraid to take Mary as his wife.

            When Christmas comes to Joseph, it does not bring a sweetened, easier life – it brings disruption, it brings change, it turns his world upside down.

            When Christmas came to Mary, it does not make life easier, it makes it more complicated, more difficult, more challenging, it turns her world upside down.

            No wonder their reaction, when each are told by an angel of the impending birth, is one of fear.

            Six months later Jesus is born, not at a local hospital, not at their home, not at the parents’ home – but in far off Bethlehem, in a stable, among the farm animals, with a feedbox for a crib. And next thing you know the ICU turns into Grand Central station with the arrival of a gang of grubby shepherds and, hard on their heels, some suspicious looking characters from the East.

            In the Incarnation, in God becoming one of us, in taking on our human flesh and our common lot, God began to set things right with us, to fix what we so badly messed up and were unable to fix on our own.  But it seems that could not be done in a business-as-usual, all-is-calm-all-is-bright fashion – it took some serious disruption, some serious chaos, some serious I’m-going-to-turn-your-world-upside-down stuff. The gifts of God which we celebrate on the Sundays of Advent – hope, peace, joy, and love – they come through God’s disrupting intrusion.

            I sometimes wonder if we have Christmas all wrong.  At Christmas, we seem to want to go back, back to the good old days, back to the days of Currier and Ives prints of sleighs jingling their way through a quiet snowfall, back to remembered cozy times around the fireplace, back to the happiness of children attacking a pile of presents jumbled under a gaily decorated Christmas tree, back to an imagined healthy, happy, peaceful nuclear family sharing a feast together.

            And yet the original Christmas story at heart wants to break us of this addiction of imagining that safety and salvation lie in going back to some sort of mythic haven, in pretending that everything is really all calm and bright. The original Christmas story tells us that God’s salvation for us comes to disrupt our world and to call us to get up off our duffs and take our part in God’s sweeping, world-changing purposes. The original Christmas story tells us to not be afraid to say yes to God, to take on what the world might consider to be too risky, to stand up for someone in need, to bear love into the world.

            What would it mean if we allowed Christmas to turn our world upside down? 

What would it mean if it turned on its head our understanding of Christmas as a time to give in to the consumer culture which tells us to spend ourselves into debt for months so that we can buy others lots and lots of gifts, while at the same time we live in a culture awash in more stuff than we know what to do with?

At a time when much of the world suffers from lack of safe water and malnutrition, from diseases such as cholera and typhoid and typhus and intestinal parasites, while we on the other hand suffer from diseases of affluence like obesity and lung cancer and alcoholism and drug addiction, what would it mean if we let Christmas turn our world upside down?

Could we imagine saying to our loved ones, “This Christmas, one of my gifts to you is a contribution to the Heifer Project, so a family in Central America might have a flock of geese, or impoverished farmers in Arkansas might be helped to develop markets for locally grown food”?

Could you imagine, amidst all the giving that you will do, adding one more, a gift to your local church, to support its ministries in a time when we have a severe budget shortfall?

Can you imagine saying to your family, “Please honor me this year by giving a gift to charity in my name”?

What would it mean if we allowed Christmas to turn our world upside down, but not only in how we think about gift giving, but also in how we think about the ways in which God might be working in our lives?

What would it mean if, when disaster strikes, when we lose a spouse or an unforeseen illness strikes or that pink notice lands in your in-box at work or you have up and move from your single-family home to a retirement community or an assisted living facility, you could imagine that this disruption was not the end of the world, but the beginning of God’s new start in your life?  How often it is that, when our ordinary routine is upset, when our settled expectations of how life should be are upended, that our reaction is to say, “God, where are you?!” What we mean is, “God, why have you abandoned me?”  Maybe we have the right question, but the wrong assumption behind it, that God’s desire for our lives is that same as ours!  But what if we allowed Christmas to turn our world upside down, and could imagine that this disruption, this time of chaos, might be the birth pangs of something unexpected and wonderful?

This is Ralphie’s wisdom from “A Christmas Story”: “Sometimes, at the height of our revelries, when our joy is at its zenith, when all is most right with the world, the most unthinkable disasters descend upon us.”

            Friends, I believe the challenge for us is to imagine the Christmas story, the gospel Christmas story, as our story, and to imagine responding to it, in all its awesome and even fearful potential, in trust, as did Joseph, and in faith, as did Mary. Our challenge is to look at that disruption square in the face, and then say, as did Mary, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word”

Long ago, Christmas turned their world upside down. My prayer for you is that this year, you will let Christmas turn your world upside down as well.

The Traveling Village People

     The village people have gathered under Christmas trees just about every year since 1930 or so, first when my father was a young boy growing up in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, then in our family's  home in Ambler,  and now that he is gone, under our family tree here in Massachusetts.  There are farmers and farm animals, a barn, a church, houses and vintage automobiles, a park and a lake, a policeman and a minister, fancy society members and working men and women. All hand-painted lead, all lovingly wrapped in tissue and stored away once the pine needles turn brown and the New Year comes in, all brought out and placed under spreading boughs of green, encircled by Lionel locomotive and tender, boxcars and caboose.

     It was a big deal, I thought, when my father told me I was old enough to set the village up, and he turned this annual delight over to me. This year, it was my turn, and not without a considerable sense of, of what? -- loss, poignancy, satisfaction, wonder? -- I turned this tradition over to my two youngest children.

     

     How much we turn over to our children in the hope that they might carry it forward!  I suspect that more often than not we do this not overtly and with stated intention, it just happens as we live our lives side by side with them, as we model by what we do and say how we believe that life fully lived should be.  

     Maybe something to think about when we debate whether to go to that Christmas eve candlelight service....

     

Angels Among Us

     This angel, my mother's favorite Christmas decoration, is also a music box, and she spins elegantly to "Silent Night."

     I sometimes think this is how we like our angels, beautiful, soothing, and fixed in place.

     A woman told me once that she believed in angels, and she even had proof, thrusting into my hands two old Polaroids. "The angel", she told me with a sage nod of the head, with trembling finger pointing towards what I took to be a reflection of the camera's flash off a mirror in the background.

          Angels I have encountered, both in the Bible and in my personal experience, have been neither so retiring or discreet, so undemanding or so ready to let us enjoy the status quo.

     In the Bible, angels are messengers, delivering messages from God to usually startled just-plain-folk.  Abram and Sarai, knowing that they are well past child-bearing age, entertain three desert visitors for dinner, and are shocked to discover that they had been visited by angels bearing news of a new beginning. Mary, whose hopes centered on her recent engagement to a man named Joseph, is blown away when an angel visits her and tells her that she has been made a partner in a divine plan to save her people.

     In my life, there was the Christian Education director who told me that she thought I should teach church school to 7th and 8th Graders, back at at time when I had no idea that I could attempt such a thing, and no inkling that this was anything I might ever want to do; there was the former missionary who stopped into worship at the church I served one Sunday and told us, in the time of prayer concerns, of the horrors of the civil war in Sri Lanka, which led to a mutually-enriching partnership between our church and a village church in that country; there was that obstinate Academic Dean at seminary who told me I had to take a course across the river at Harvard Div School (the horror!), which is where I ended up meeting an amazing theology student who joined me in the adventure of married life.  All this, for starters...

     Who are the angels in your life?  Looking back, where can you see that divine messengers have appeared on your doorstep, startling you with their news, calling you into something new?  Where are they today, and will you entertain them?