First Parish in Concord

Forget Love: A Sermon for Christmas

On Friday mornings I sit at my computer downstairs and await the arrival of the muse, whatever creative impulse that comes that causes my fingers to move over the keyboard, whatever voices there are that happen to whisper in my ear, wherever my mind and heart are moving at that particular moment. It is not always so easy, so magical. In fact, there are times that nothing happens at all, and I keep waiting for the fingers to move, the voices to whisper, the mind and heart to jump-start.

But I am here to assure you that I do not necessarily leave this all to chance. Early on, I make up folders for each of the Sundays I am going to preach during the year, make these up several months in advance, put a date on them, assign the broad topic for the morning in question, and file them away in my desk, each of these folders: “December 20, 1998- Christmas.” Then, if I find a poem or a story or an article that seems to approximate the topic, I drop it into the folder. The low moments of the week come when I am sitting there on a Friday morning, staring and listening, and I reach for the folder, and it is empty.

It was not empty this week: there were three scraps of paper, two of them from the First Parish in Bedford newsletter, clipped for me by Margaret, written by the Bedford minister, John Gibbons, a very funny guy. The first clipping has these three sentences: “Did you hear about the teenage girl with chronic bronchitis who was found to have a bit of evergreen lodged in her lung for a dozen years-- the result, presumably, of inhaling the aroma of a Christmas tree when she was a toddler? The still-green sprig was removed and she’s now fine. The moral: Celebrate but don’t inhale.” This brief story, in itself, would probably have made a fine sermon, and the last line is a wonderful sermon title. “Celebrate, but don’t inhale.” But I think the image stands by itself, so I simply will pass along the wisdom of it all.

The second piece from John, in a scrap of paper now seven years old, recounts John’s effort to sell a previous home in another part of the state, part of his family’s move to Bedford. Let us simply say that he succumbed to the customs of the area, a particular custom of those desiring to sell a piece of real estate. We do not see this much in Concord, but I can assure you that John is not making this up. I will let John tell you in his own words what he did. “Saint Joseph,” he tells us, “besides being a carpenter and the husband of Mary, is the patron saint of discouraged real estate owners desirous of a sale. To sell a house, a statue of St. Joseph is buried head down, in the front yard, facing the house.”

And then he says that the previous Christmas his wife had given him an eighteen-inch plaster St. Joseph, which he promptly buried as instructed. It took a year, they had only one offer, they tried not to appear too anxious, and they promptly accepted that offer. “Thank you, St. Joseph,” he says, “for favors granted.” And then he makes these observations about himself, particularly in response to the incredulity of his family and friends at his willingness to bury a saint head down in the front yard. “It’s true,” he says, “that aspects of my behavior sometimes strike me as bizarre. And yet I firmly believe that to be religious is to be ‘not all there’- not stuck in the status quo, not resigned to the tyranny of the way things are.”

And then John remembers a line from Susan Sontag whom he says “states it more eloquently: ‘All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears.’” And I was thinking to myself as I read that line that this is what Christmas is for me, some suspension of the world as it appears: the mother, the father, the baby, the angels, the shepherds, the star, the wise men, this story from the Gospel of Luke that we heard read this morning and will hear again on Christmas Eve, the Christmas Cantata that we have heard sung, this improbable story of virgin birth (though test tubes are making this possible), this child become the Prince of Peace. It is an improbable story.

It is an improbable story as our bombs rained down on Baghdad this week, only a camel ride from Bethlehem. It is an improbable story as our own Congress goes even more amuck this week, discussing on the floor of the House of Representatives “who touched whom and where.” Hello?!! Let’s trade stories of adultery and discuss whether it matters if you testified under oath or not. This is the “tyranny of the way things are,” to take John’s line, and doesn’t this all feel like tyranny: these bombs, these impeachment hearings, these absurdities. And these are worldwide absurdities, national political absurdities, to say nothing of whatever absurdity that may be a part of your life this week, right in your own families, your own workplace, your own struggles for health, and for happiness.

And into this comes Christmas: something that is “not all there,” we would say, rather strange. Angels, shepherds, stars, the birth of a baby, animals, a stable, no room in the inn. We’ve heard it all before. It’s a bizarre story. How could there be such things as angels? How could anyone follow a star? To enter into this story is to “be not all there,” is to be a religious person, “not stuck in the status quo, not resigned to the tyranny of the way things are.”

So, this old newsletter clipping could have been a sermon, there’s a sermon there, but the “not accepting the world as it appears” message led me to the third piece of paper in the December 20^th folder, an excerpt from Rebecca Wells’ novel, The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, a book I liked very much. The piece of this novel that I want to read to you, and the place where I found this rather strange sermon title, takes place early in the book, an exchange of letters between daughter Sidda and her mother Vivi.

Dear Mama and Daddy,

I have decided to postpone my wedding to Connor. I wanted to tell you before you hear it from someone else. I know how word spreads in Thornton. My problem is, I just don’t know what I’m doing. I just don’t know how to love. Anyway, that’s the news.

Love, Sidda


Siddalee,

Good God, child! What do you mean, you ‘don’t know how to love?’ Do you think any of us know how to love? Do you think anybody would ever do anything if they waited until they knew how to love?! Do you think that babies would ever get made or meals cooked or crops planted or books written or what-have-you? Do you think people would even get out of bed in the morning if they waited until they knew how to love? You have had too much therapy. Or not enough. God knows how to love, Kiddo. The rest of us are only good actors. Forget love. Try good manners.

Vivi Abbott Walker

That’s a reading for Christmas, if I ever heard one, mother to daughter. If you’re lucky, maybe you’ve received a letter like that- or, better yet, written one. “God knows how to love, Kiddo. The rest of us are only good actors. Forget love. Try good manners.” I think Vivi is absolutely right. What she is saying is right at the heart of this Christmas message of incarnation, right at the core of Christian belief: God become human, God in the form of a baby, born in the most humble of places. We’re singing Charles Wesley’s “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” in a moment, with some very non-Unitarian words in the second verse:

Christ, by highest heaven adored; Christ, the everlasting Lord!
Late in time behold him come, Offspring of the Virgin’s womb.
Veiled in flesh the Godhead see; Hail the incarnate Deity,
Pleased as man with men to dwell, Jesus, our Emmanuel.

“God knows how to love, Kiddo. The rest of us are only good actors.” It’s all there, beginning with this story of Jesus’ birth, of his life and teachings, of his death and resurrection. We don’t have to wait to love perfectly. “For God so loved the world that He gave his only son,” the Gospel of John says. “God knows how to love, Kiddo,” Vivi says.

“The rest of us are only good actors.” And sometimes not so good. We know best our own imperfections. But, most of the time, we manage to get out of bed in the morning. Some of us have had too much therapy. Some of us have not had enough. But we can’t wait to get it right. “Forget love. Try good manners.” Which is to say, the kind of love people speak of when they speak of the love of God, this love is bigger than both of us. Forget that. But how about good manners.

By good manners, I mean what we say when we say the benediction out loud here, week after week. This is our own appeal for good manners to one another: leaving here and acting with peace, acting with courage even when we don’t feel like it, holding on fiercely to whatever goodness is within us, not giving back evil when evil comes at us, strengthening the faint heart someone else is carrying around, supporting the weak and helping the suffering through words and deeds, honoring all beings: the birds of the air, the fish of the sea, the grouchy neighbor next door, the one who cuts us off in traffic.

Try good manners. Leave love to the forces that are bigger than both of us. Remember the carol we just sang a few moments ago from a bulletin insert, these words another verse to the same hymn, found in our own hymnbook:

Once more child and mother weave their magic spell,
touching hearts with wonder words can never tell;
in the bleak midwinter, in this world of pain,
where our hearts are open, love is born again.

“Love is born again”- and again, and again. It is Christmas again. Listen to the story in a new way. Don’t worry about being “not all there.” Do not be “resigned to the tyranny of the way things are.” This is a story of a miracle, of the birth of peace, of peace once again, of love once again, of a God of love, a spirit of love and life crashing through into our lives in the bizarre story of a baby born in Bethlehem centuries ago, born amidst all the turmoil of people suffering from war, born amidst a time when Caesar Augustus is perhaps fighting off the talk of impeachment on the floor of the Roman Senate.

It is Christmas again. Forget love. Try good manners.