A Fourth Church Sermon by John Buchanan

December 24, 2006 | Christmas Eve 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

A Partridge in a Pear Tree

John Buchanan
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 96
Luke 2:1–7

Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace—
all these curious and forbidding terms that Christians keep on using in their attempt to express in language one thing and one thing only:
that in this child, in the man he grew up to be,
there is the power of God to bring light into our darkness, to make us whole,
to give a new kind of life to anybody who turns toward him in faith,
even to such as you and me. . . . How do we know?
Adeste fidelis. Come and behold him. Speak to him
or be silent before him. In whatever way seems right to you
and at whatever time, come to him with your empty hands.
The great promise is that to come to him who was born at Bethlehem
is to find coming to birth within ourselves something stronger and braver,
gladder and kinder and holier, than ever we knew before or than
ever we could have known without him.

Frederick Buechner
“Come and See,” Secrets in the Dark

We have heard the story and loved it all our lives. And we have been waiting—
weeks and months—waiting for this day, waiting all our lives.
Startle us again with newness and surprising beauty;
startle us with possibility and hope.
As angels startled shepherds in the night,
so, O God, come to us this day with your saving love:
in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Have you ever noticed how hard it is to give a gift to some people? Sometimes it’s impossible. “Oh, you shouldn’t have,” they say when we present the gift we have thought about, purchased or made, and proudly presented. “You shouldn’t have.” Or sometimes it’s “You didn’t have to do this.” Those phrases slip out so easily, and at one level they are intended to convey a sense of unexpected grace at undeserved generosity. But they may also represent something deeper. It is impossible even to give some people a compliment. “You look nice this morning”—“Well, I feel terrible.” “That’s a very nice sweater”—“Oh, it’s an old one, practically worn out.” “You did a good job”—“I could have done better.”

Peter Gomes, Minister of Memorial Church at Harvard and a professor at Harvard, remembers a lesson he learned years ago. He had just graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was teaching at Tuskegee, his first job. On the weekends he was often invited to preach at one of the rural Baptist churches in the surrounding Alabama community. He recalls preaching in a particularly poor church where the custom was to pass a bag around for a collection to pay the visiting preacher. At the end of the service when the people proudly presented the bag to Gomes, he was embarrassed and his response was, “Oh no, I can’t take your money. You need it much more than I do.”

The people of the congregation kept insisting, pressing the bag of money on him, and he kept refusing until finally he won. They gave in, stopped insisting that he take the money, and kept it. He was feeling pretty good about the whole thing, and when he returned to Tuskegee told the story to anyone who would listen, boasted a bit about how these poor people tried to give him a little money and how he had held out and finally won. One colleague, a woman, told him that what he had done was terribly wrong. He had been ungracious. They wanted to give him something to show their gratitude and he spurned them, denied them the opportunity to give a gift. “You must learn to be a generous receiver,” his older and wiser colleague told him (What We Forgot to Tell You, p. 112).

It is a lesson everybody needs to learn—to receive a gift generously, graciously, gratefully, to learn that the only appropriate response to a gift is not “You shouldn’t have” but “Thank you”; to a compliment not “It’s an old sweater actually” but “Thank you, how kind of you to say so.” It is why we are here this morning—to say thank you for the gift of God’s love given in Jesus Christ.

In the meantime, most of us have spent a fair amount of time shopping for gifts for our loved ones. Some are not done yet. Some, the very brave, may not have started yet and will do it all this afternoon. Every Advent I retrieve from the shelf and reread several selections from one of my favorite Christmas books, A Sprig of Holly. It is a collection of short editorials by the late Halford Luccock, who wrote a generation ago for the Christian Century.

In one of those editorials he refers to an old yuletide song that was reintroduced to the public in the 1950s, “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” It is actually several hundred years old and now has been played and sung so much that it appeared in a newspaper poll recently among the most irritating Christmas songs, second only to “Do You Hear What I Hear?” and “Little Drummer Boy,” which tied for the carol most people are sick of hearing.

“The Twelve Days of Christmas” is about a list of “riotously inappropriate and ludicrous gifts . . . two turtle doves, three French hens, six geese a-laying, eight maids a-milking, twelve drummers drumming.” “A Partridge in a Pear Tree? What on earth could one do with that?” Luccock asked and said that’s precisely the beauty of it. The old song actually contains a profound philosophy: “It celebrates the high wisdom of completely inappropriate and largely useless gifts.”

We’ve been singing about a partridge in a pear tree for several hundred years. “Would we have been singing about a floor mop?” Luccock asked.

His advice: give your true love an impractical gift. Give grandma perfume, not another pair of woolen mittens. She has plenty already and probably hates them. “Buy her lipstick or dancing slippers.” Now I confess that every time I read this little essay, I get a little uncomfortable, because I remember my own misguided pragmatism—the electric knife and the Mixmaster that I proudly presented and were generously and graciously received years ago.

“The best gifts of love,” Luccock wrote, “are those which show a lovely lack of commonsense.”

There is, after all, a precedent. The first Christmas gift was highly inappropriate and impractical: a baby, born in a cow stall. Who wanted that? What people wanted was a king, like David, who would unify the nation, rally the troops, drive out the Romans, and reestablish the monarchy. That’s what a messiah should do. Make things right in the world. Defeat God’s enemies, establish a new order of things based on real power. And so when the gift was given, nobody much noticed. The town itself, Bethlehem, David’s town, didn’t notice. The innkeeper himself didn’t see anything except a weary couple, the woman heavily pregnant.

God’s gift of love was not exactly what people wanted at the time—or want now, for that matter. We’re still hoping for a God who will put things right in the world. In fact, on a now global scale, the air is full of rhetoric about a clash of civilizations, a world conflict in the name of competing ideas about God. We want a real God, a powerful God, who confirms our own ideas and who puts in their place our opponents, who we assume are God’s opponents as well.

But God comes quietly, intimately, personally, to change the world, to bring in the kingdom, by changing, softening, compelling human hearts.

Scottish poet George MacDonald wrote:

They all were looking for a king
To slay their foes and lift them high:
Thou cam’st, a little baby thing
To make a woman cry.

The unique Christian idea is that the very essence of God is not what we expect—power, majesty, awesomeness—but vulnerable love. The unique Christian idea is that there is absolute truth in the newborn lying in a manger, truth about God and truth about you and me.

The highest and best we can be is simply grateful for that gift and then responsive, living lives that reflect the truth that God is love, the truth that we were put here to love one another.

Peter Gomes said the most profound thing he ever read about Christmas was also the simplest:

Mary held in her arms
The God of love
That we might hold in our hearts
The love of God.

My own favorite is from a very distinguished academic theologian, the late Langdon Gilkey, who said simply, “To be enabled to love is the greatest gift that can be given to us.”

That is what a church is for, by the way, to enable us to love. Sometimes we forget that and think that church is about converting people, growing membership rolls and budgets, building buildings, winning theological arguments, maintaining moral standards—all of which is part of it. But church is the way you and I, out of our busy, hurried, overcommitted, exhausting lives, are enabled to love, are given the most precious gift of all: the opportunity to love, to pour something of the love of God we have received back into a world that so desperately needs it.

A lot of that happens around here every day of the year. Let me tell you about one evening, last Monday. In addition to Sunday Night Supper that is served in our Dining Room every week by our Social Service Center and volunteers—for hungry and homeless neighbors—and will be served this evening as well, in addition the Board of Deacons of this church and other volunteers provide a weekly Monday Night Supper over at Catholic Charities on LaSalle Street. We rent the space, provide the food and volunteers to prepare it and serve it. Larry Nicholson, our Volunteer Director, told us about last Monday. As the 125 mostly homeless men and women, exhausted from a long day on the street, cold, hungry, gathered and sat down at tables festively decorated, a wonderful hot meal that had been provided by a couple from the congregation was served by volunteers in Santa hats. There were home-baked desserts and then two special gifts: members of our wonderful Morning Choir sang for thirty minutes and Akiko and Nathan Cole, violinists with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, members of the congregation—she is a Deacon—played for the guests: Bach’s Concerto in D Minor for Two Violins, Hayden’s Duo Opus 99 No.1, and Christmas carols—a lovely gift of beauty by our gifted singers and two distinguished violinists, a gift given to people whose lives are mostly empty of beauty. Before the evening was over, each guest was given a warm scarf and, a final grace note, Christmas cards, stamped, so guests could send Christmas greetings to others. Larry said the guests usually eat quickly and go back out onto the street immediately. But last Monday they lingered, stayed at the tables, talking with the volunteers, with one another, laughing.

The greatest gift of all is to be enabled to love.

We will light our candles tonight. All over the world people will be lighting candles. In Chicago, Beijing, London, Baghdad, Jerusalem and Bethlehem, Damascus and Tehran, people will sit in darkness and hold small candles and ponder a gift of love that comes into a world that desperately needs a gift of love and comes into individual lives, your life and mine—love like a small light in the darkness or like gentle music in the midst of the world’s harsh noise, like a Bach violin concerto at the Monday Night Supper.

A friend of mine, Kathy Bostrom, Co-Pastor with her husband, Gregg, of the Wildwood Presbyterian Church, wrote an Advent meditation that I think is remarkable.

Last year, in the weeks before Christmas, Kathy found herself in the hospital, recovering from her second major surgery during the year. It was mid-December. She remembers that a hospital is not a haven of quiet and peace and rest. She had a roommate who smoked in the bathroom and turned the TV on at all hours of the night. Across the hall an elderly woman cried out in pain every three minutes, day and night, night and day. A “code blue” sent emergency personnel and crash carts racing down the halls.

Kathy tells her own story best:

One night as I lay in my hospital bed, hooked up to so many machines I couldn’t even move without help and close to tears from the pain and frustration, I heard a faint sound. Amidst the cries of pain, blaring TVs, and beeping monitors, I swore I heard a different type of sound altogether: a soft, sweet, gentle song. Then it was gone. Was I imagining things? That was entirely possible with all the medications coursing through my veins.

A few hours later, still awake and trying to block out the sounds of the woman wailing across the hall and the loud, angry voice of my roommate swearing on the telephone, I heard the strange, beautiful sound again. Could it possibly be? No, I must be hearing things.

When the nurse came in to check my vitals, I asked her: was it me? Or was there indeed a very different sound breaking through the harshness of that place?

“Oh,” she said, as she wrapped the blood-pressure cuff around my bruised arm. “It’s tradition here. Every time a baby is born in the nursery, they play Brahms’ lullaby on the loudspeakers.”

A lullaby on the loudspeakers. Floating through the harshness of those halls—a lullaby.

And right then, for the first time since I had come through the emergency room of that hospital, I smiled, albeit weakly. I felt hopeful. I felt peace. Lullaby on the loudspeakers: a baby is born!

During the remaining time I spent in the hospital, I listened for the sounds of that lullaby. Amidst the horrible sounds of pain and misery that surrounded me, I strained to hear the sound of hope, of life, of new beginnings. Lullaby on the loudspeakers. A child is born.

And I thought of another lullaby, which broke into the sounds of the night nearly two thousand years ago, and in my heart, I heard the whisper of angels’ wings:

Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people; to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.

Do not be afraid, for over the sounds of people weeping and IVs beeping and bombs bursting, over the cries of pain and suffering and sorrow, there is a heavenly lullaby: Do not be afraid—I bring you good news, which is for all people. (The Presbyterian Outlook, 20 November 2006)

God wants to make generous givers out of you and me. God wants us to learn the profound truth that it is more blessed—which literally means “more happy”—to give than to receive.

God wants you to empty out your emotional closet of all the unnecessary accumulation and make a place in your life for newness, for surprising grace, for creativity and love.

God wants you to know and understand that you are so safe in God’s love that you are free—free to be extravagant with your love, your time, your resources, you life itself.

God wants you and me to be a little less practical, conservative, careful, and cautious and to become extravagantly generous, over-the-top, when it comes to love.

God wants your heart.

God wants your love, and God’s strategy to accomplish this ambitious agenda in your life is to come to you with a gift.

Karl Barth said somewhere that the problem we have with Christianity is that in our heart of hearts we do not like to receive gifts that we have not earned or do not deserve. Grace makes us uncomfortable, the great theologian observed.

And so sometimes we are reluctant to be a recipient, hesitant to open our hands and our hearts to receive the gift. “Oh my, no” we say. “Thank you very much, but I can’t accept that.”

God intends to make you into a genuinely alive giver by coming to you with a precious gift: the gift of God’s own eternal, unconditional love, given in a child.

Karl Barth also said somewhere that in the final analysis, when it comes to the gospel, God’s grace in Jesus Christ, we are all like children on Christmas morning, surrounded by wonderful generous gifts.

The good news, which is for all of us, for the whole world and for each one of us, is that the gift has been given, God’s love has been born among us. God’s love would be born again this day, in your heart and mine.