Hark
- Details
- Created on Sunday, 25 December 2011 16:50
- Written by Donna Davis
If you stand back and look at the Christian calendar as a whole, Christmas leaps out as a real milepost. Then, a little further along, there’s Easter. They’re big mileposts - invoking beginnings and endings. They each have their associated days of waiting - Advent and Lent. In this hemisphere, Christmas comes at the time of year when the nights are longest and Easter arrives when we’re just starting to tip back into longer days. The early Christian church constructed the liturgical year so Easter is always on a Sunday. But Christmas isn’t. Christmas wasn’t even on the calendar for the first Christians. Christmas appeared in the fourth century A.D. after a heated debate - was Jesus human or was he pure spirit? The church in Rome came down on the side of Jesus possessing a real human body and a document from 354 A.D. lists December 25th as his official birthday. Now I certainly have no special insight into what that particular Calendar Committee was thinking, but perhaps to have a birthday actually feel like a birthday, it needs to land on one day of the week one year and a different day the next.
So, here we are - a congregation that has been gathered for 375 well-celebrated years, gathered in worship on Christmas Day on a Sunday. I can imagine those early members of First Parish, bundled up, dogs keeping their feet warm, settling in for a nice, long sermon. It’s quite possible that for them, Christmas on a Sunday was much like any other Sunday. After the Protestant Reformation, our Puritan forefathers outlawed Christmas. Since the date of Jesus’ birth is not actually in the Bible, they were rather suspicious of using it as an opportunity to eat, drink and be merry. I’ll confess I didn’t check the actual practice of this ban against our history in the archives at the Concord Library, but it wouldn’t surprise me if a chilly Sunday morning worship service was pretty much it in terms of Christmas “celebration”.
The celebration of Christmas as we know it didn’t take off until the mid 1800s. When Queen Victoria married Prince Albert, he introduced the royal family to the German tradition of bringing trees into the house and decorating them. The poem The Night Before Christmas was published and Charles Dickens wrote his novel A Christmas Carol. The Writers Almanac with Garrison Keillor comments, “A Christmas Carol showed Christmas as a time for family, for simple pleasures, for gathering around the table — what we call “the Christmas spirit”. It was also a time for parties, for dancing and drinking and playing games, which was dangerously close to Pagan rituals in the eyes of some. But Dickens’ vision of Christmas caught the imagination of readers in England and America, and it helped create the Christmas ideal that is all around us today.”
That’s some of the back story on Christmas. Kind of interesting, huh? A little bit of food for thought. Right up my alley - and maybe yours? I think we Unitarian Universalists love the back story. We seek out the back story. If I had a bit more time, you know I’d have been in those library archives. Our thirst for the back story is a cornerstone of our faith. Listen to these phrases from our principles and purposes: words and deeds of prophetic women and men, wisdom from the world’s religions, Jewish and Christian and humanist teachings, the results of science. We want to know stuff. How much we want to know probably varies depending on our individual needs. When we claim this faith, we admit to ourselves and each other that we want that context, that sense of perspective, a different point of view. We want to ponder the framework upon which to hang our free and responsible search for truth and meaning.
Our attachment to the fire hose of knowledge is nicely counterbalanced by another cornerstone found in our principles and purposes - direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life. It’s this aspect of our faith that reminds us to occasionally let a back story actually move to the background and leave us open to a fresh interpretation of something we know oh-so-well.
The story of today definitely fits into that know-it-oh-so-well category. Here it is, from the second chapter of Luke:
“And it came to pass in those days that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed. And Joseph also went up from Galilee unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, to be taxed with Mary, his espoused wife, being great with child. And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. And she brought forth her first-born son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger because there was no room for them in the inn.”
Many of you heard that story yesterday at one of the Christmas Eve services. I bet some of you know it so well, you could have recited portions of it along with me. It’s a story that has seeped into us, a story that can easily turn into ubiquitous background music to so much that happens between Thanksgiving and this day. And yet, if we’re lucky, if we’re open to those forces creating and upholding life, we might find something new in an old, old story. That’s what happens to the young narrator in Barbara Robinson’s book, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. Through a series of events, the main roles in her church’s Christmas pageant are filled by the children in the Herdman family. The opening paragraph of the book describes the Herdman children this way:
“The Herdmans were absolutely the worst kids in the history of the world. They lied and stole and smoked cigars (even the girls) and talked dirty and hit little kids and cussed their teachers and took the name of the Lord in vain...”
It’s through these unlikely messengers that the narrator has the chance to see the Christmas story with fresh eyes. The narrator is sitting next to her classmate Alice, when Ralph and Imogene Herdman make their entrance as Mary and Joseph:
“They just stood there for a minute as if they weren’t sure they were in the right place...They looked like the people you see on the six o’clock news - refugees, sent to wait in some strange ugly place, with all their boxes and sacks around them.
It suddenly occurred to me that this was just the way it must have been for the real Holy Family, stuck away in a barn by people who didn’t much care what happened to them. They couldn’t have been very neat and tidy either, but more like this Mary and Joseph (Imogene’s veil was cockeyed as usual, and Ralph’s hair stuck out all around his ears). Imogene had the baby doll but she wasn’t carrying it the way she was supposed to, cradled in her arms. She had it slung up over her shoulder, and before she put it in the manger she thumped it twice on the back.
I heard Alice gasp and she poked me. “I don’t think it’s very nice to burp the baby Jesus,” she whispered, “as if he had colic.” Then she poked me again. “Do you suppose he could have had colic?”
I said, “I don’t know why not,” and I didn’t. He could have had colic, or been fussy, or hungry like any other baby. After all, that was the whole point of Jesus - that he didn’t come down on a cloud like something out of “Amazing Comics,” but that he was born and lived...a real person.”
Near the end of the story, our young narrator continues to ponder what she has witnessed:
“For years, I’d thought about the wonder of Christmas, and the mystery of Jesus’ birth, and never really understood it. But now, because of the Herdmans, it didn’t seem so mysterious after all.
When Imogene had asked me what the pageant was about, I told her it was about Jesus, but that was just part of it. It was about a new baby, and his mother and father who were in a lot of trouble - no money, no place to go, no doctor, nobody they knew.”
The narrator could have been outraged by what the Herdmans had “done” to the Christmas pageant. Perhaps there were members of the congregation who were outraged - a cigar-smoking Mary might seem downright sacrilegious. Instead, this young girl experiences a moment of awakening. She sees something new, something she missed before.
In the earlier readings, two poets express similar moments. From the poem Nick read by Anne Porter:
When clustered sparks
Of many-colored fire
Appear at night
In ordinary windowsWe hear and sing
The customary carolsThey bring us ragged miracles
And hay and candlesAnd flowering weeds of poetry
That are loved all the more
Because they are so common
Sounds like a direct experience of transcending mystery to me. And, again, from Gary Johnson:
In the dark streets, red lights and green and blue
Where the faithful live, some joyful, some troubled,
Enduring the cold and also the flu,
Taking the garbage out and keeping the sidewalk shoveled.
Not much triumph going on here—and yet
There is much we do not understand.
And my hopes and fears are met
In this small singer holding onto my hand.
Onward we go, faithfully, into the dark
And are there angels singing overhead? Hark.
Ordinary windows. Taking the garbage out and keeping the sidewalk shoveled. A mother and a father in a lot of trouble, surrounded by people who don’t much care what happens to them. It’s the stuff of our everyday lives. And it’s all mixed in with holding hands and singing carols. Colored lights and poetry. A new baby wrapped tightly in soft cloth. Life loved all the more because it’s so common. Filled with ordinary events that just for a moment can bring us fully awake, aware with every cell. But we know, in that moment, that life - our very life - is a ragged miracle, filled with mystery and unbidden moments of wonder. Onward we go. Faithfully. Into the dark. And are there angels singing overhead? Hark.