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These days, the most usual greeting heard this time of year is "Merry Christmas." But the Biblical greeting for Christmas was not "merry," but "blessed." When the angel announced to Mary that she was to conceive and bear a son, the angel said, "Rejoice! The Lord is with you." And then, according to some texts, the angel added, "Blessed are you among women." And when Elizabeth, who was carrying John in her womb, greeted Mary, she said, "Of all women you are the most blessed, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.... Blessed is she who believed [what the angel told her], that the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled." And then Mary sang her great song: "From this day forward all generations will call me blessed, for the Almighty has done great things for me. Holy is his Name." When God touched the lives of Mary and Elizabeth they were blessed. God's touch did not promise merriment, but blessedness. I don't know where or when it began, that we came to think of Christmas as a merry time. I suspect it's rooted somewhere in our sentimentality, born of a kind of nostalgic rear-view vision that leads us human beings to look back at where we have been, or at least back at where we imagine we have been. But nostalgia is a vision that does not look back very far. Nostalgia does not look back much beyond the immediate past of our childhoods or the lives of our parents or grandparents. And we don't remember it is as it was, so much as we conspire with songwriters and advertisers to dream of a Christmas we think should be. We dream of a white Christmas even if we live in Texas or Arizona, with glistening tree tops and happy children listening for sleigh bells, even when we live next to the freeway. We smell cookies in the oven; and even as big boys we anticipate the latest toys we hope will bring us joy, even when we know they won't, because they never have. And we drink more and more bubbly stuff, which we are told can make a merry Christmas even merrier because of the "cheer" it provides. And year after year we are disappointed, because even as we do these things we know that they don't speak truth to us. We are aware, even though we try not to think about it, that far from being a "merry" time, for many Christmas is, in fact, the most depressing time of year. Separation from loved ones often gives Christmas a melancholy edge, especially for those who live alone and who sometimes pass even Christmas Day by themselves. The slick ads that entice us to spend more than we can afford often cover a deep depression that waits to surface just as soon as the Christmas tree comes down and the bills come in. And one night's alcoholic "cheer" quickly turns into the next morning's hangover, or even, for some, into death or the loss of a leg or brain. And why? Because we build up a sentimental view of what life at Christmas should be, based upon a dream of what we imagine it once was, and we ignore the reality of what it actually is. It's no wonder, then, that depression visits more frequently at this time of year than do the wise men from the East, because depression is "the affective response to the gap between what is and what a person judges 'should be.'" And depression, pushed to the wall, becomes despair. The truth is that Christmas was never meant to carry the weight of our sentimentality and nostalgia. Someone on the radio recently complained that the problem with Christmas in America these days is that there is too much about Christ. But if you don't know history you don't know anything, and the truth is that from the beginning Christmas brought Christ, a Word from God about real life, a Word from God to real life, a Word of hope for the future. Christmas began, long ago, in fear, in bone-chilling astonishment, with an angel telling a peasant girl to rejoice, because she was "blessed." She was blessed, the angel said, because God had chosen to use her life to turn the world upside down. And the child was born, not in a lovely, decorated creche, but in a barn or a cave, among the real-life odor of the feces of cattle, attended by the weariness of a man and woman "great with child" who had traveled for days only to find no place to sleep, born in the dark of a shed that had no electricity, no running water, no heat, and lots of animal waste. Elizabeth Little Elk, a Lakota Indian, tells about a Christmas gift she received from her mother when she was a little girl. "We were very poor," she says. "And my gift that Christmas was an orange. I asked my mother about Christmas, and about giving. My mother took me out to the barn behind our house. She picked up some straw and said, 'Here. Feel this, and smell this.' Then my mother picked up the orange and said, 'Break this open. Smell this. Taste this.' I did. Then my mother said, 'This is where Jesus was born, and this is how he lived. Never forget that.' And I have never forgotten...." This is the reality of God's becoming flesh. It was in the midst of real life, in a barn or a cave, in a land where the living Word of God had not been heard for over 300 years, in a land where, since the people's return from exile in Babylon, God had been mocked first by the Greeks and then by the Romans. It was in a world much like our own, a world where occupation troops were swarming the streets of foreign lands with their spears and their armor and their uzies and where the ancient promised hope of God seemed dim indeed. God became flesh right in the midst of real life, in the midst of the real life of the disappointment and discouragement and depression, perhaps even the despair, of Israel. God does not disdain real life. God loves real life, and promises to live it and redeem it. That's why, "when the time had fully come," he became part of it. Christmas is the message that God loves real life so much that he sent his Son to be part of it and to bring us once again the news of the angels, the news that God is with us. So rejoice! You are blessed, because God is not through with us yet. That's the promise of Advent and Christmas -- blessedness, not merriness, the blessedness of hope. And blessed is she, or he, who believes that what the angel promises will be fulfilled in her, or in him. In us. But it's so different from what we have made of Christmas. We are bound to be depressed by the Christmas we have made, because it can never quite match what we judge Christmas should be. Nor can the Christmas we have made hold any promise for the future. How different the Christmas God has made for us, the Christmas he offers us, as he offered it to Mary before us! The Christmas we have made is based upon a view of what we reckon Christmas should be, while we ignore the reality of what it actually is. But "In the child of Bethlehem," in the Christmas God has made for us, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer reminds us, "the life of the world to come has come into the life of the world that is." God became one of us in the world that is to bring hope for the world to come. And if, like Mary, we let him visit our lives -- not the idealized lives we often wish we lived, but the real lives we do live -- with the kids screaming in the next room, with the bills piled up so high we can hardly find the desk, with the dog that can't seem to remember to go out when he needs to, with the broken water pipe that flooded this parish church this Christmas Eve morning, even with all our weakness and sin and unfaithfulness and the weight of all our fears and the modesty of our expectations, even with the real-life fact of death -- if we let God in to visit these real messed-up real lives of ours, he will bless them with the promise and the hope of the Christmas he has made for us. But blessing, remember, does not confer ease or comfort or pleasure. It was not easy or comfortable or pleasant for Mary to face the neighbors when she was great with this child. It was not easy or comfortable or pleasant for Mary later to watch the young man she had reared being ridiculed by the town leaders. It was not easy, later still, for her to watch him being mocked and spat upon by all and hammered to a cross. What blessing confers is peace and hope. The babe in the manger is not the Christ of Christmas. The babe in the manger is but the beginning of the blessing, not its fullness. The babe is only part of the Christ whose mass we keep. To see Jesus the Son, to see the fullness of the promised blessing of Christmas, we will have to get down on our knees with Mary not only before the creche with the babe meek and mild on a silent, holy night, but also down on our knees with Mary before the Cross on a dark, stormy day, and there receive the sacrifice the Son of God himself makes for us. The creche, the Cross, and the empty tomb -- that's the whole of the promised "Emmanuel." That's the fullness of the promised "God-with-us" here, tonight, in the midst of life as it really is. The Christmas we have made can be depressing, because it can never match the Christmases we imagine in our minds. And depression, pushed to the wall, can become despair when the Christmas we have made brings no hope for the future. But the Christmas God has given us -- the Son who was announced to Mary and who became flesh in a barn among the smells of oranges and straw in the gloomy days of Israel, and who was reared by Mary and Joseph in Roman-occupied Galilee and then crucified by the powers of darkness but raised to life by the God of blessing -- this Son, this Christ of Christmas, is confirmation of the truth the old rabbi spoke to John Claypool. Some of you will remember the Christmas story Father Claypool tells, which I've shared with you before. But it's worth hearing it again on this Christmas Eve in the real world 2003, with armies patrolling the streets of the world again, and terrorist warnings ratcheted up to orange again, and many modern Marys great with child among us, because Father Claypool's story is what the Christmas God has given us is all about. It happened when Claypool was in his thirties, a young Baptist pastor in Louisville, Kentucky, in the 1960s. It's the story about how he and some other white pastors and the local rabbi joined the civil rights marches in Louisville. Claypool and the rabbi and the other white pastors wanted very much to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem, as some of them perceived their own ancestors had been. And one day they had a meeting at the synagogue with some of the black civil rights leaders. And the meeting did not go well, because the whites were wary of the blacks and the blacks were suspicious of the whites, including Claypool and the rabbi. And by the time the meeting was over little progress had been made toward common ground. And after the meeting, the rabbi asked Claypool to join him in his office. He told Claypool that he was concerned about him, because he looked really down. And Claypool admitted that he was depressed, perhaps despairing. He feared that in real-life America in the 1960s there was no way for blacks and whites to move forward together, given all the mutual suspicion and distrust they had just experienced in their meeting. And the rabbi, an older man who had himself survived Auschwitz just twenty years earlier, said something to Claypool that has stuck with him all his life. He said, "Young man, I want to tell you something that I want you to remember. Remember that despair is always presumptuous. Despair is always presumptuous because despair is saying something about the future you have no right to say for the simple reason that you haven't been there yet." And that, from the lips of one of Jesus' fellow Jews, is God's Christmas blessing tonight. It's the blessing of hope, the blessing received by all the world when the angel Gabriel visited Mary in the dark days of Israel two millennia ago: "Rejoice! The Lord is with you. Blessed are you!" Anne Lamott tells about her old car's breaking down one day, and about how she had little money at the time, and about how worry overwhelmed her as she asked the old-timer at the garage how much it would cost to repair the car, and about how the old-timer noticed her downcast face and then told her that if the only problem she had was a problem that money could fix, then she didn't have a very interesting problem. Well, Christmas,1863, found the United States with a problem money couldn't fix, a serious problem. We were in the midst of civil war. Flesh and blood from the same families were killing each other in fields not far from where some of us would later grow up. Whether the nation itself would survive was arguable. Sometimes we forget that our own Civil War was the bloodiest war in the whole world in the 19th century, a war in which fathers and sons and brothers were among those killing each other. It was a day not unlike our own, a day dark and gloomy like that Good Friday long ago, with people living in fear and soldiers patrolling the streets with their spears and their muskets. And on Christmas Day, 1863, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow sat in his study in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Longfellow, like the nation at large, had a problem money couldn't fix, a serious problem, and hope seemed more a fantasy than reality. Longfellow was overcome with worry and despair. His wife had recently died, he grieved for his country, and he was worried about his son, because he had received news that his son had been seriously wounded in battle somewhere in the South, and his son, of course, was not home for Christmas. So in the real-life world of Christmas Day, 1863, Longfellow sat at his desk and scribbled these words: In despair I bowed my head;But as he wrote those words, Longfellow became aware of the sound of bells from a nearby church. The bells pealed faith, confidence, assurance, the presence of a hope much stronger than the malaise that gripped his soul that Christmas Day. And with the bells ringing the Word of hope of the Christmas that God has made for us, Longfellow began to edit and rewrite his scribblings: I heard the bells on Christmas Day,It is a song as old as God and as fresh as tomorrow morning, a Word made flesh by God and Mary on the Christmas God made for us. In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. |