St.
Alban's Episcopal Church
Austin, Texas
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Austin, Texas
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From the Pulpit:
One year, as Christmas was approaching, a first grade teacher asked her class a question. She did not ask what they wanted Santa to bring them or if they had been good little boys or girls that year. She did not ask them whether they were going to Grandma’s house or if their trees were real or artificial or if they thought it was going to snow. She asked them to tell her what love is. And a little boy said, “Love is what you feel at Christmas when you stop opening presents and listen.” Can you believe that kind of wisdom came from a six-year-old? (1) Christmas is all about love, but it is not the sentimental love of cheesy commercials. It is not cute love or warm fuzzy love -- we have puppies and plush stuffed animals for that. It is about radical love. It is about love that breaks in exactly when things are not cute or warm and fuzzy. We’ve all heard the story since we were very small and know all about the Angel Gabriel and what an outrageously faithful young woman Mary was. We know about the trip to Bethlehem and the overcrowded inn and the birth of the child in the stable warmed only by the steamy breath of the resident animals. To jump ahead, we know about the wise men and nasty King Herod and the escape into Egypt for the young family. These stories are part of our flesh and blood, and yet we love to hear them told over and over again. We tell the same stories every year and we sing the same songs, the ones it just wouldn’t be Christmas Eve without. One year I went to a preaching conference the first week of Advent. It was at the National Cathedral College of Preachers in Washington, DC, and we had a big snowfall the first night I was there. The building I was staying in could have been the setting for a Harry Potter movie, and it felt like a Christmas movie as the huge white flakes fell in the darkness beyond the tracery of the windows and gradually covered all the bushes in the cloister just as the great carillon bells of the cathedral began to peal in the night air. In my small preaching group we were working with the texts for Christmas Eve and my fellow preachers got it in their minds that this year they were all going to preach on Isaiah’s prophecy. I was quiet and listened to all their homiletical arguments but finally I spoke out. No, I said. The people are coming for Baby Jesus and this one night of the year, they deserve Baby Jesus. It doesn’t matter in the least that they’ve heard it all before. Christmas Eve is one of the times when people who don’t go to church come to church. We want to welcome them and let them know we’re happy they’re here. These people don’t want a theological challenge. They want what is familiar and comforting, the stories and songs of their grandparents and their childhood. It doesn’t even matter to me all that much if you leave tonight not having heard anything new from the sermon. I do just want everybody to be glad they came. And we’re all here because of the Baby Jesus. Yes, it is the same story every year, but every year it finds us in a different place. Some people have moved to a new city and are trying to find a church home. Young people are home after a first semester away at college. Maybe for some it has been a year of unusual prosperity and success, but for others there have been anxieties and loss. Probably most of us have known a Christmas that found us in a place we’d rather not be. Someone has died during the year, and we try to put the wreath on the front door, but our heartache rings much louder than any jingle bells. There are the years of the divorce, of the diagnosis, the treatment, the uncertainty. And those are the years when we know that sentimental love is worth less than the tinsel on the tree. Those are the years when we need to hear about the radical love, the love that broke into a world that was far from perfect. The reason that God became incarnate as a baby boy and grew up and lived and taught among us and was judged by the powerful and died and was raised was exactly because this world is so broken. A perfect world would not have needed him, and it is those with hearts that have been broken who need him most tonight. Christ was born for the broken-hearted, the outcasts and the scorned. As that little first-grader intuitively knew, Christmas love is in the silence that touches us when we put aside the wrappings and the trimmings, when we lay down our expectations and allow God’s love to reach into the cracks and crevices of our lives, where we know what it is to need it to stay alive. You all remember the story of How the Grinch Stole Christmas. And I know that Dr. Seuss doesn’t make the first mention of God or Jesus, but the essence of that holy love is still there. Little Cindy Lou Who watched the Grinch Santa stealing the last crumb from the mouse, and in the morning as the Grinch sat waiting on Mount Crumpet he heard the sound of a Christmas that looked nothing like the Whos had expected. What was essential, as Antoine de St. Exupery said, was invisible to the eye. First there was the silence, filled with love, and then the Who’s joined their hands and sang because Christmas was not something the Grinch could steal. And God’s gift of love, the gift of God’s own self given to us could not be killed. That is why we are here today, not only because this child was born but because in him we were given the gift of eternal life. We are here because of Easter, because in that birth we were given the reality of resurrection as well. I hope you all are enjoying this Christmas Eve with all its traditions and trimmings. A few hours ago the children had their pick-up pageant and as always it was adorable. We sang the familiar carols, and we’ve had a good start on them at this service, too. The poinsettias are beautiful, and so is the candlelight. And in a few minutes we’ll sing Silent Night. And I have one Christmas wish for you, and it is that you may find some silence, some pause between all the family and the gifts and the food, and that in that silence you may be in touch with the radical love, because that is the real gift of the day, the presence of the all-loving God among us and within us. Amen. (1) Story told by Lane Denson on his blog, “Out of Nowhere.”
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05/16/2008 | ||||||
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The
Rev. Margaret Waters