Are You Getting Ready For Christmas?

Sermon by James W. Crawford

 December 14, 1997

Luke 3:7-17

Are you getting ready for Christmas? Only ten more shopping days, you know. If nothing else, we surely feel the invasion of the season upon our regular routine. Around our house, with grandchildren on the agenda, our storage space -- and it is ample -- gets packed with accessories for Thomas the Tank Engine, including a new engine named James! Our  kitchen turns into a ginger bread bakery; Linda and I make an appointment to decorate our house and adjust our calendars to purchase our tree at the empty lot across from a Gulf station out on West Beacon Street, and then, of course, to dress it up in kindergarten and CVS  eclectic. I heard one of our members comment the other evening that her Christmas cards were still at the store. She captures the observation of Will Stanton who remarked, "When it comes to Christmas cards there are two kinds of people, orderly and disorderly. Orderly people mailed their cards by December tenth. Disorderly people say, 'December tenth! Good grief, I thought it was November tenth!'"

And of course, today, upstairs in Mary Norton Hall we present one of the great Christmas precursors of all time, children's theater capturing a Christmas mood that never misses, drama moving and melting us all.  Although there may be among us one or two people who feel about the pageant much like that father in Barbara Robinson's touching and hilarious tale, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. Remember? Ms. Robinson writes,

Mother didn't expect to have anything to do with the Christmas pageant except to make me and my little brother, Charlie, be in it (we didn't want to) and to make my father go and see it (he didn't want to).

Every year he said the same thing: "I've seen the Christmas pageant."

"You haven't seen this year's Christmas pageant," Mother would tell him. "Charlie's a shepherd this year."

"Charlie was a shepherd last year," replied my father. "No, . . .  you go-on and go. I'm just going to put on my bathrobe and sit by the fire and relax. There's never anything different about the Christmas pageant."

Mother said, "There's something different this year."

"What," asked my father.

"Charlie is wearing your bathrobe."

So that year my father went to the Christmas pageant . . . to see his bathrobe, he said.

Are you getting ready for Christmas? That's the question Luke asks us when he describes John the Baptist out there in that bleak and merciless Palestinian desert proclaiming the anticipated coming of Messiah and calling men and women to preparation through a revolutionary change in behavior. The terse sentences Luke uses to describe John's encounter with the crowds coming to this howling wilderness offer just an inkling of what he anticipates the coming of Christ to be and what goes into preparation for the Christ's arrival. We need remember when Luke writes of Christ's coming, he anticipates not simply an individual's showing up. He envisions not a single person arriving on the scene. Luke expects a Messianic age. His Gospel, written some forty years after Jesus' death, tries with this vivid desert imagery to announce a new age, a new era, a radical disjunction between the kind of world we live in now and a world breaking into our current history that can only be described by the kind of life Jesus lived and the quality of the community he sought and promised us all. Luke tells us in these great Advent texts to prepare ourselves for a radical ethical community grounded in love, issuing in justice and peace. As our closing hymn this morning affirms:

Christ comes to break oppression to set the captive free;
 to take away transgression, and rule in equity.

And to get ready for it? To prepare for this new "reign on earth begun," Luke gives us John the Baptist and offers some vivid and startling clues to how we might act. To us the Baptist's encounters with the crowd and his remarks tend to read like sound advice, but actually John recommends ethical conduct reflecting behavior in a world turned upside down.  Those crowds flocking around John perceive he demands conduct unlike anything they have practiced before.  Remember as they hear John's demand to repent, to reshape their lives, to turn around and march to a different drummer they stand there shocked, stunned by what lies before them and ask, "In light of this new world crashing in upon us, in preparation for this Messianic age, for God's sake, what shall we do?"

And John tells them. And he is tough. John does not tell them to go to church more often, to read the Bible, say their prayers. "You think you can claim to be children of Abraham, to lean on your religious credentials? Forget it. God can raise children right up out of these desert stones if with no effort. All your church attendance, your vested choirs, your gilded sanctuaries, your prayers, hymns and sermons mean nothing. Ritual without repentance is a joke. If you want to prepare yourself for the new age become alert to the terrible gap between rich and poor, the disenfranchised, disinherited, the so-called boats left out of the rising tides now slowly sinking beneath the surface: shed your indifference to the ones suffering from  injustice, discrimination and poverty. Whoever has two coats must share with him who has none, and whoever has food must do like wise." No Christmas charity here! John charts a recasting of the system where terrible disparities exist and opens channels for equity to everyone.

And those tax collectors who meet John in the desert?  "Collect no more than is appointed you," he says. "No more business-as-usual." The Messianic age cuts the roots of graft, the game of cost overruns. It evaporates the payoff, the kickback, the torn up ticket. The rotten campaign contribution seeking influence, the soft money buying access, the deal  made at the expense of another--gone! Behavior dissolved by that Messianic world careening around the celestial bend.

And, yes, soldiers who wander out to that desert outpost wonder, "What shall we do?" And John's radical answer? "Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusations, and be satisfied with your wages." What is he saying? Sounds pretty tame, doesn't it? Tell the truth and keep your promises. John is tougher than that. He is telling us that in Christ's future  government does not cater to the interests of the monied; it is not a prop for the social or political elite; its forces of taxation, policing and military power are not there to defend unjust status quos, to feed fat cats at public troughs, to justify forces sustaining oppression, to hide those public servants who lie under oath. John condemns patriotic allegiance distorting, competing with or distracting our primary allegiance to Jesus Christ and the world Christ represents and undergirds.

Do you see it now? Getting ready for Christmas, as Luke sees it, getting ready for Christmas means getting ready for the new world John sees surrounding the Nazarene strolling toward him through the desert blaze, and it pictures a revolutionary ethic as if we lived in a world turned upside down and backwards.

So we ask again, are you getting ready for Christmas? To follow Luke's perspective, let me tell you a little story. It comes from former Georgia Senator Sam Nunn. The story  offers a glimpse of our Christmas preparation. As Nunn tells it,

A reporter was covering the tragic conflict in the middle of Sarajevo and he saw a little girl shot by a sniper. The sniper threw down his pad and pencil and stopped being a reporter for a few minutes. He rushed to the man who was holding the child, and helped them both into his car.

As the reporter stepped on the accelerator, racing to the hospital, the man holding the bleeding child said, "Hurry, my friend, my child is still alive."

A moment or two later, "Hurry, my friend, my child is still breathing."

A moment later, "Hurry, my friend, my child is still warm."

Finally, "Hurry. Oh, my God, my child is getting cold."

When they finally reached the hospital, the little girl had died.  As the two men were in the lavatory, washing the blood off their hands and their clothes, the man turned to the reporter and said, "This is a terrible task for me. I must go and tell her father that his child is dead. . . He will be heartbroken."

The reporter was amazed. He looked at the grieving man and said, "I thought she was your child."

The man looked back and said, "No, but aren't they all our children?"

Aren't they, indeed, as we testify here? Aren't they all God's children, wherever they may be at this Christmastime in Sarajevo, Pyongyang, or Baghdad; Paducah, Kentucky; Mudende, Rwanda; or Boston, Massachusetts? We know the new era Luke promises remains to be seen, but the way we perceive and treat one another now does not have to wait until that new world arrives. In fact, we can treat one another as if it has arrived and offer a taste of what living on the edge of Advent is really like. We can live John's promise engaging the world in what one man calls "a conspiracy of love."

And the Advent world promised by John can have other dimensions as well. However we slice it, the message bears hope to our world. It bears hope personally to you and to me. I wonder, for instance how many of you in our congregation this morning hope to meet Mr. Right or Ms. Perfect soon, maybe even right here in this church, perhaps at coffee hour this morning?

Oh, what a new world that would bring to a lot of us! An Advent Miracle! Would you appreciate a clue as to how such a miracle might happen? I have one. And I want to tell you where I got it. Last week, theNew York Times Magazine ran a fabulous issue devoted to the religious mood of our time. In one article it described the St. Thomas Aquinas House on the campus of Purdue University. St. Tom's, as they call it,  reads like a terrific church welcoming men and women from all over the religious landscape, at every point in a religious pilgrimage. In any case, at St. Tom's they sell T-shirts with the best Top Ten church pick-up lines. I called them up and asked for those lines. A wonderful young woman said she would send them to me, and as a Christmas gift, they would send a shirt, too, as well as a more serious list of ten reasons to attend St. Toms. Here, however, for those of you who might be interested, with a little editorial touch, are the ten best church pick-up lines:

Number 10: Hi, is this pew taken?
Number 9: Would you like to share a hymnal?
Number 8: Don't worry; I'm attracted to you purely in a  spiritual way.
Number 7: I'm United Church of Christ. What's your sign?
Number 6: So, you worship here often?
Number 5: They're singing our hymn.
Number 4: How about we go over to my place for a little spiritual devotion?
Number 3: Read any good Bible passages lately?
Number 2: This must be where all the angels sit.
Number 1: My prayers are answered.

Miracle on 34th Street has nothing on us. Dartmouth and Boylston may be a Christmas miracle address, too.

And as radical a hope as a pick-up in church might seem to some of us, preparation and readiness for Christmas includes a hope that surfaces  contrary to all other circumstances. It seems almost, as the Gospel of John says: in Advent, light shines in darkness and the darkness cannot put it out.

I came across a wonderful illustration of this indomitable Christmas hope in a letter Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote his parents at Christmas, 1943. As most of you know, Bonhoeffer, one of the radiant spirits of the German Confessional Resistance to Hitler during World War II, was thrown into prison by the Gestapo as a conspirator in a desperate attempt to assassinate Hitler. He was hanged in Tegel prison on April 6, 1945, one month almost to the day before the German surrender on May 7.  Bonhoeffer wrote this letter of unquenchable hope amid circumstances we would more than likely identify with darkness and despair. He  writes:

I don't have to tell you how greatly I long for freedom, and for all of you. But for decades you gave us such incomparably beautiful Christmases that my grateful memory of them is strong enough to outshine even this rather dark one. It is times like these that show what it really means to have a past and an inner legacy independent of the change of times and conditions. The awareness of being borne up by a spiritual tradition that lasts for decades gives one a strong sense of security in the face of all transitory distress. . .

(And those of us who share joyous Christmases over a lifetime, as did Dietrich Bonhoeffer, are no less grateful for this kind of security in face of all transitory distress.) He goes on,

From the Christian point of view, spending Christmas in prison doesn't pose any special problem. Most likely, a more meaningful and authentic Christmas is celebrated here by many people than in places where only the name of the feast remains. Misery, pain, poverty, loneliness, helplessness, and guilt have an altogether different meaning in God's eyes than in the judgment of men. God turns toward the very places from which humans tend to turn away. Christ was born in a stable because there was no room for him at the inn: a prisoner can understand all this better than other people. It's truly good news for him; in believing it, he knows he has been made a part of the Christian community that breaks down all spatial and temporal frontiers, and the walls of prison lose their meaning.

Do you believe that? As you prepare for Christmas this year, in whatever circumstance you find yourself, amid whatever assessment you make of the world's condition, can you believe God turns toward the very places from which human beings tend to turn away? It means God turns toward even you; incredibly, toward me, and far beyond our comprehension and surely our own capacity, toward those from whom we turn away.  And God's recognition makes us all part of this wondrous community, breaking down all spatial and temporal frontiers, binding us by a love never turning away, never letting us go.

So, are you getting ready for Christmas? To be sure, order your poinsettias, string the lights on the tree, bake your cookies, send your cards -- and yes, wait on tip-toe. Better yet, throw your life -- your whole being -- into serving that new world hurtling toward us, changing everything, turning us around, bearing us into a radical future ruled finally, from a rude Bethlehem manger.