A Fourth Church Sermon by John Buchanan

December 24, 1999 | Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve

John Buchanan
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Prayers for the People by John Wilkinson

Every year when I sit down to write a sermon for Christmas Eve, I remember something the great American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr said about Christmas sermons. He didn’t like them. In fact, on Christmas Eve he intentionally looked for a church where the service does not include a sermon. The reason, Niebuhr explained, is that the preacher is not up to the task. The topic is too big. Better to leave it to the poets and musicians, who have a way of expressing and celebrating truth without becoming so tedious—or boring.

My closest advisor tells me every year when she senses that I’m starting to fret about it, “Stop worrying. They’re not coming to hear you. They want to hear the story, light a candle, sing Silent Night and go home.”

And every year I consider not preparing and preaching a sermon and every year decide I can’t do that either. I’m much too Presbyterian to worship without the preaching of the word, and besides, there are all those folk out there, some maybe for the first time, or maybe the only time ever—the ones my friend Barrie Shepherd, at the First Presbyterian Church of New York City tells every Christmas Eve—“By the way, we do this every Sunday at 11:00.”

But I do understand how music tells the story with more depth and power and clarity than words alone ever could. And I do get out a few favorite poems, Dickens’ Christmas Carol, Truman Capote’s, A Christmas Memory, Why the Chimes Rang—my favorite from childhood—and W. H. Auden’s For the Time Being, A Christmas Oratorio.

At the end of the long drama, Auden concludes

“Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree, Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes. The holly and mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,. . . .There are enough. Leftovers to do, warmed up, for the rest of the week.
Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,Stayed up so late, attempted—quite unsuccessfully—To love all our relatives, and in general. Grossly overestimated our powers.”

We do place a lot of demands on ourselves at Christmas time, don’t we? Cookies to bake, special goodies which simply must be reproduced in the very same way year after year, and cards to address from a list that grows every year and never gets any smaller, gifts to purchase, wrap, deliver, parties to attend, dinners to prepare, trees to purchase and decorate, and journeys to take, to be with loved ones.

I’m sure most of you heard or read—or received by email, this year’s favorite story about those first Christmas journeyers—the Three Wise Men. The assumption is that the wise men botched the job—because they were three wise men and not women. Had the Magi been women, they would have:

asked for directions
arrived on time
cleaned the stable
helped deliver the baby
brought a casserole
given practical gifts

We subject ourselves to high expectations and an enormous amount of stress to get to this evening in one piece and sometimes something gets lost in the process: something of the simplicity and goodness and unmistakable clarity of the event we celebrate tonight.

When we were very young parents we decided that in our home we would remember what the event was really about. We would focus on the story of Jesus’ birth and not the cultural icon which Santa Claus has become. No “You better be good, you better watch out, you better not cry, you better not pout,” in our house. No reward punishment dynamic, no pagan mythology. The real story would be quite enough.

We also decided that there would be no toy guns in our house.

We lost both battles—quickly and decisively. In the absence of real toy guns, they (and even though it was not politically correct, I have to say it was the boys) simply turned other objects into weapons of mass destruction. Hair brushes became pistols; rulers became rifles, spatulas and wooden spoons became machine guns. It was a running shoot out in the living room between a 6 and 4 year old armed with a spatula and wooden spoon that did it. I surrendered. I made them turn in their weapons, took them to the basement, and with a jig saw someone had given me, made them very simple, but proper rifles, so that the battle could resume.

Just a week ago, I was sitting with my three-year-old grandson and we were eating reindeer cookies with wonderful white icing and red noses—an annual gift from Ruthie, the Director of the Day School. So we were enjoying our reindeer cookies when he took a bite, examined the cookie carefully, wrapped his little fingers around the legs, pointed the antlers and said, “Bang, Bang,”—a reindeer cookie pistol. It’s no wonder we lost!

We had no more luck with a Santa-free Christmas. We really weren’t committed to it anyhow, and it didn’t take long for our children to teach us that there is a lot to be said for wonder and myth and imagination, that the line between what is real and what is unreal is not always as clear as we want it to be, and that there is more than one way to tell the truth, particularly if it is good and important truth. Finally, their immersion in the notion, in spite of our ignoring it, taught us to reexamine and rediscover the original idea of a saint who brings gifts for no other reason than he likes to give gifts. Our children taught us that there is some serious theology there.

And so I was delighted this year to discover something G. K. Chesterton wrote about Santa Claus. It’s in a collection, Spiritual Literacy—Reading the Sacred in Everyday Life (Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, p. 267, see Daybook, Fall 1999)

“What has happened to me has been the very reverse of what appears to be the experiences of most of my friends. Instead of dwindling to a point, Santa Claus has grown larger and larger in my life. It happened in this way. As a child I was faced with a phenomenon requiring explanation. I hung up at the end of my bed an empty stocking, which in the morning became a full stocking. I had done nothing to produce those things that filled it. I had not worked for them, or made them or helped to make them. And the explanation was that a certain being people called Santa Claus was favorably disposed toward me. What we believed was that a certain benevolent agency did give us those toys for nothing. And, as I say, I believe it still. I have merely extended the idea. Then I only wondered who put the toys in the stocking. Now I wonder who put the stocking by the bed, and the bed in the room and the room in the house, and the house on this planet, and the great planet in the void.”

Chesterton went on to say that once he was grateful for a few dolls and crackers, but later he was grateful for stars and street faces and wine and the great sea. Once he was grateful for a gift too big to fit into a stocking. Later, he was grateful for “a present so big it takes two stockings to hold it, and then leaves a great deal outside: it is the large and preposterous present of myself.”

Christmas is about gifts we do not earn or work for or deserve. Christmas is about the amazing grace of God—to give us this gift of ourselves, our lives, the time of our lives we have already been privileged to live and the time we have left to live, whatever that is. Christmas is about a God who wants us to know that we are loved, that our lives are intended, that apart from anything we have done or not done, the creator wishes us well. Christmas is about a God who came among us in the birth of an infant in Bethlehem to let us know how profoundly we are loved.

And Christmas is about a God who wants all of us to be changed by that love, changed into grateful children who suddenly find that they must love, must live in the love of God, by loving and caring for one another.

Dan Doty, who works for a church in Rock Island, wrote an article recently about driving an 11 year old boy to a penitentiary in a neighboring state, to see his older sister, convicted of a violent crime, not eligible for parole until she is 58. Charles lives with his grandmother—his mother lives in the same city and only agrees to see him occasionally.

All the way home in the car, Charles was sullen, didn’t say a word. At the outskirts of the city, he suddenly asked Dan, “Would you take me to my Mom’s house?” Mostly when he calls and asks to see her she has some excuse for not taking him for the weekend. The visit with his sister had obviously stirred up longing for his mother. “If you’ll just take me, she’ll have to see me,” he explained.

Dan reflects:

“The lad’s hostile demeanor, the quiet, lonely suffering that had been so apparent throughout our trip—was the aftermath of repeated rejection by one of the central figures in his life. For Christmas, the eleven year old with me that day didn’t want money or the latest fad in clothing or the newest high-tech game. He longed for his mom.”

Dan concludes:

“The best Christmas gift you can give your child—or anyone else for that matter, I might add—your spouse, your dearly beloved, your parent, your brother or sister, your friends, the best gift of all is the gift of yourself.

May God’s love for you, given in the birth of the baby in Bethlehem, stir up in you the capacity—the willingness—the need—to love as you have been loved.

It is the best gift of all.

And so, W. H. Auden has the shepherds say:

“Let us run to learn
How to love and to run
Let us run to love.
All, All, All,
Run to Bethlehem.

Amen.

Prayers for the People
11:00 p.m. Christmas Eve Service
By John Wilkinson, Associate Pastor

What language shall we borrow, eternal God, to express what we cannot express, to tell of the glad tidings overflowing in our hearts, to be embraced by this most extraordinary happening when your love took human form, our form, and came to earth to dwell among us, full of grace and truth. We could find no adequate words, and so we stumble along seeking to articulate through experience, through story, through a hand held or a laugh shared, through a common struggle, through a hope and a fear—because we believe that as stories unfold in history, as experiences are baptized by the rivers of the living of our days, so your son’s promise, this tiny little baby’s invitation, transforms us, redeems us, claims us, makes us whole.

And so we would gather in these late hours before the dawn—to hold hands, to light candles, to sing songs, to hear the story yet again, because by so doing we cling to hope’s vision. And this holy night, might our song include words of gratitude for those dear to us—little babies and aging grandparents, for partners and dear ones and spouses, for children, for those saints who now from their labors rest but whose very testimony makes Christmases past so very present. We thank you for the church—this church, every church, who through story and song and act of compassion has lived Christmas’ promise now for two millennium. Make the church strong and faithful. Make it hospitable and open. Make it bold and transforming—with authenticity and integrity enough to be formed and reformed by the Word.

Be with those whose difficult struggles this night make Christmas itself a difficult moment—those with struggles be of the body, of cancer or AIDS or addiction, or of the spirit, of loneliness or neglect or hopelessness or hunger or cold. Bring your tender, healing touch, and make us ambassadors of everything we share this night, of the transforming power of love’s touch. We pray for our city, for this great city, for the cities from which we come—for the lively mix of people and traditions and cultures that represent your great rainbow. Help us to be good citizens for your sake, that justice and equity be granted with full measure, that true neighborhood might know no boundary, that playgrounds and classrooms and boardrooms and council chambers might reflect the promise of this good night. We pray for the world, so complex, so contentious.

The prophet named your son to be the prince of peace, and so he is. And so let peace reign in every corner of your creation. Do not allow terrorist threat or tyrant risk to fray the fabric of reconciliation. May your spirit’s power abide with those in power, with the President and Congress, with lawmakers everywhere, that decision might be right and fair and just. We thank you for glimmers of hope’s possibility in Northern Ireland, in conversations between Israeli and Syrian. What language shall we borrow, gracious God, except the language of the angels and shepherds, the animals and kings, the stars themselves who gather in a chorus beyond beginnings and endings to sing your praise, to gather at the manger, to follow a star, to worship a king, to adore a sweet and precious baby. Make our hearts glad as we receive this gift.

Draw us into the mystery of your love and illumine our paths with the light of Christ’s presence, the word made flesh. And hear us now as we say together the prayer we learned as children. . .