Confronted by Christmas

Sermon by James W. Crawford

December 21, 1997

Luke 2:1-20

And so the wondrous day approaches. For some of us, confronting Christmas may begin as long ago as July, lying on the beach, panicking: good grief! only173 shopping days left! Charles Schultz captures a certain  mood when he pictures Lucy and Linus working on their Christmas cards and Lucy asking, "Did I send a Christmas card to Marla last year?" And Linus answers, "Yes, I remember you said she didn't send one to you." And Lucy replies, "I think I'll send her one anyway. Maybe it'll make her feel bad."

But it is George Bernard Shaw who confronts Christmas in his no- nonsense and caustic fashion: "I am sorry," he writes, "to have to introduce the subject of Christmas . . . . It is an indecent subject; a cruel, gluttonous subject; a drunken, disorderly subject; a wasteful, disastrous subject; a wicked, cadging, lying, filthy, blasphemous and demoralizing subject. Christmas is forced on a reluctant and disgusted nation by the shopkeepers and the press: on its own merits it would wither and shrivel in the fiery breath of universal hatred; and anyone who looked back to it would be turned into a pillar of greasy sausages."

Nice! And I suppose Shaw is tweaking, perhaps, that greatest of English-speaking Christmas story-tellers, Charles Dickens. But frankly, I believe Dickens has it right when he says, "If any of you have any quarrels, or misunderstandings, or coolnesses, or cold shoulders, or shynesses, or tiffs, or miffs, of huffs, with any one else, just make friends before Christmas -- you will be so much merrier if you do. I ask it of you for the sake of that old angelic song, heard so many years ago by the shepherds, keeping watch by night, on Bethlehem heights."

And as a matter of fact, it is that angelic song and those shepherds ensconced on Bethlehem Heights that confronts us in this church, week after week. In this room we find ourselves surrounded by Christmas, but most especially, as we have said time and again, every Sunday morning as we make our way into this beautiful room, Luke's story of the Annunciation -- the story we read just a moment ago -- glows vividly before us. Whatever else happens here each Sunday -- the music, the preaching, the prayers, the hymnody -- we do all of it in the light of this glorious stained glass window,  a window reminding us again and again of what Carl Sandburg calls "The Story that Never Wears Out."

Confronted by Christmas? You will remember Luke's story begins chronologically. We hear of Jesus' birth in Bethlehem. Luke begins with  reference to the era of Augustus Caesar. Now, we literal-minded types like to have things dated; we want our history straight. Augustus Caesar ruled the Roman Empire from 27 BC to 14 AD. We remember Augustus as one who settled the terrible civil wars breaking out in the Empire after Julius Caesar's assassination. His reign brought civil peace across the far-flung tribes, municipalities and cultures of the Empire. Indeed, the birth of Augustus is described on one monument to his statesmanship as "The beginning of the good news -- the Gospel -- for the world." That is how the birth of Augustus Caesar is described by his propagandists and PR people: "The beginning of the good news -- the Gospel -- for the world."

Beautiful! Augustus Caesar: his minions, his weaponry, his decrees ruling Western civilization, gaining reverence as one whose reign Providence offers as gift to all the world.

For Luke the irony proves all too delicious. While the world bows to the authority and power of Augustus, a birth takes place in one of his colonial hamlets in far away Palestine. And Luke turns his world upside down. He gives that newborn Jewish, insignificant, out of the way, off the graph, alien child the very titles reserved for the mighty Augustus Caesar. You see, Luke makes reference to Augustus in his narrative not so much to help us determine the date of Jesus' birth sometime between 14 BC and 27 AD.  Luke wants to tell us -- and does so with cunning and wicked irony -- Luke wants to tell us where the true good news really lies. While the world looks to Rome for its directives, its style-setting, its cultural icons, the true center of the world lies not in the Imperial City, with its palaces, stadia, military barracks and royal paraphernalia; the true center of the world lies rather in that backwater Judaean crossroads, sound asleep -- or perhaps screaming his lungs out -- in a feed trough, sharing a shelter for oxen, the child of an itinerant pair on the road. Because, as Luke tells it, Augustus Caesar dictated a property tax policy compelling everyone to show up in their own hometown. Luke wants us to know that the paramount place in history belongs not to Rome but to Bethlehem, that the fulcrum of world history rests, as one Scottish divine puts it on "a certain baby's birth in a certain little town in a wee part of the world."

What a terrific and consoling message that is!

Last month I saw an ad for the magazine Vanity Fair featuring what it called "A Portrait of World Power." So I went out to Max Kaiserman's newsstand and picked up a copy. The item in the table of contents describing this "portrait of world power" says, "In a sweeping 58-page portfolio, Annie Leibovitz, Jonathan Becker, Harry Benson, Helmut Newton, Snowdon, and other top photographers capture the 64 men and women who shape the planet today: Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Madeleine Albright, Pope John Paul II, Rupert Murdoch, the Dali Lama, Fidel Castro, Bill Gates, Gianni Agnelli, Boris Yeltsin and more." Portraits in Power: billionaires, oil barons, media moguls, dictators, sheiks, monarchs, industrial magnates, tycoons of technology - that is where the power lies, blurts Vanity Fair, and as the world turns a lot of us nod in solemn agreement with a tendency to envy and a wish we might be so lucky.

Do you know what this great window says about that Vanity Fair analysis?  "Forget it! It's balderdash," insist these shards of stained glass confronting us each week. "Fraud," cries this glorious, image-filled, polychromatic  herald spilling its message across this nave. Finally, the power really at the heart of the world, what ultimately makes the difference, lies not in the machinations of the CEOs, the incantations of the high priests, the deals of the power brokers, the speculations of the money managers -- as Vanity Fair would have it. The difference lies in the kind of life beginning in a humble and marginal setting but lived out in such a fashion that for love's sake it may end -- it may end - on the likes of a cross. We are confronted, you see, in this Christmas window, with a life lived outside the camp, a designated criminal, a homeless nomad, powerless, poverty-stricken, friendless -- in no way a candidate for Vanity Fair -- a life demonstrating for all time what quality and commitments, what convictions and actions would really make the difference in this world of ours, would truly shape -- noreshape! - the planet. Caesar Augustus and his progeny we encounter in our pop magazines, newspaper headlines and in celebrities playing musical chairs on our pathetically hyped talk shows -- just the same old story, deja vu! It is Ann Weems who puts her finger on the glorious paradox confronting us in this Christmas window; she reminds us of the freshness of this story and why it never wears out:

Whoever expected the advent of God in a helpless child?
Had the Messiah arrived in the blazing light of the glory
 of a legion of angels wielding golden swords,
 the whole world could have been conquered for Christ
 right then and there
 and we in the church -- to say nothing of the world! --
 wouldn't have so much trouble today.
Even now we simply do not expect
 to face the world armed with love.

Some window, this!

And just once more: It is hard for us to see it clearly, but across the breasts of those angels in our window there flows a banner saying, as the classic King James text reads, "Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace and goodwill toward men." What Christmas promises you and me, this church, our city, our nation and our world is hope -- hope for justice, hope for peace.  To say this at Christmastime sounds like a cliché, to be sure, but at Christmastime we continue to pray and live for that promised hope. And we know there can be no peace where there is no justice. It is that conviction, for instance, that keeps Kip Tiernan, Fran Froelich and the Poor People's United Fund working out of a room in the Gordon House of this church, reminding us as winter sneaks in on us this afternoon -- that tonight is the longest night of the year -- and Massachusetts shelters for the homeless continue to overflow. Kip recalls us prophetically to our task: "We need atone for what we have accommodated ourselves to: the legislated famine of the innocents, in the name of fiscal madness (read mean-spiritedness). . . We need repent as citizens of the Commonwealth for what we have and have not done to ease or end the suffering of our brothers and sisters who have no paid lobby to protect them, or speak up for them. . ." Justice!

And peace? A universal peace. We hope for that! The stories we hear of genocide in Rwanda, ominous rumblings from Iraq, Bethlehem itself a near war zone this very day, the fragile and volatile armistice, even yet filled with fear, revenge, tribal and religious hatred in Bosnia, the proliferation of weapons from merchants everywhere -- this country supplying by far the most -- fueling the furious civil conflicts erupting across the world: through everything, Peace on earth, good will to all; that is the core of the Angel's hope!

And Philip Berrigan will not let that hope die. Can you believe it? Father Berrigan, at age 74, bloodying another nuclear submarine, seeing the cold war over, social needs crying for assistance and the weapons industry barely abated. From his jail cell Father Berrigan a week ago testified with gusto,  stubbornness and an incredible hope telling The New York Times: "We need to say, 'no.' We need to say 'no!' You don't do that with my tax dollars; you don't do that under my name." He calls his protest, sadly enough, "theater of the absurd." And he goes on, "But I'd like to die with my boots on. I'd like to die being of use to other people, writing, or speaking some truth, or maybe even during the course of an action. I don't want to die on the beach!" Could Philip Berrigan serve as a seraphic witness in a world still ruled by Augustus Caesars? Do he and Kip and Fran tell us that the key to hope, as Paul says, is patience, the tenacity to keep on keepin' on?

I came across a little story the other day illustrating the tenacious hope revealed through this window. Bishop Raymond Hunthausen of Seattle used it to sustain his commitment to the peace movement in tough times.

I think the story can hold for all of us as we confront, receive and make our choices this Christmas. The story goes like this:

"Tell me the weight of a snowflake," a coal mouse bird asked a wild dove.

"The weight of a snowflake," answered the dove, "is nothing more than nothing."

"In that case I must tell you a marvelous story" said the coal  mouse. "I sat on the branch of a fir, close to its trunk, when it began to snow -- not heavily, not in a giant blizzard -- no, just like in a dream without any violence. Since I didn't have anything better to do, I counted the snowflakes settling on the twigs and needles of my branch. Their number was exactly 3,741,952.  Then the next snowflake dropped on the branch -- 'nothing-more-than-nothing,' as you say -- and the branch broke off."

Having said that, the coal mouse flew away. The dove, since Noah's time, an authority on such matters, thought about the story for a awhile, and finally said to herself: "Perhaps there is only one person's voice lacking for peace to come about in this world."

Perhaps.

Confronted by Christmas. Each Sunday. This window, mediating as Charles Dickens wrote: that old angelic song heard so many years ago by "shepherds keeping watch by night on Bethlehem Heights," it confronts -- then embraces -- yes, embraces us, not with a sublime aesthetic rendering of an ancient event. No way. It embraces us profoundly, vividly, radiantly right here, right now with our desperately-yearned-for Christmas Gospel -- Love at the heart of the Universe, hope always for healing in our world -- Emanuel, God with us .