December 24, 2001
Isaiah 9:2-7
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Luke 2:1-20
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“Right Here, in Our Own Bethlehem”

You can feel it’s Christmas, can’t you?  It just seems to be in the air.  And while we know the Christmas story –– in fact that is why we are here … to hear it one more time –– yet, we are also awash with the memories and emotions of this season.

Not all who are here are here because there is an impelling wish to worship.  Some of you are here because Mom and Dad want to start or perpetuate a tradition, but your mind is on the big package leaning against the wall, or the little box that looks like it came from the jewelry shop, hanging on the tree.

For others who are here, it’s a hard time of the year.  The rocking chair in which your spouse sat last Christmas isn’t filled or rocking.  Others of you will gather, as Chris and I will, around our tree, alone.  We’re sad that our girls are not here, but we are also glad they are with their families and starting or continuing their traditions; that’s as it should be.

Still, each of us is here for one basic purpose; we want to hear that baby in the manger cry again.  Deep down, we know that, each year, the world wrestles with a host of problems.  Some people, who view life through very different lenses, are driven by selfishness and greed.  And in the pursuit of their aims, they care little about the impact on others.

We are driven back to our belief, that the way of life incumbent in that baby, is the way the world needs.  If the lifestyle He lived and taught is not working, it is not because the message was wrong; it is because it is not seriously tried.

That is one of the reasons why we continue to celebrate Christmas, year after year, no matter how dire the circumstances might be.  Hope and love are necessary commodities, and we find them in that baby, just as we find that potential in the face of every baby.

Years ago, Peter Marshall was a well-known and loved Presbyterian minister.  He was also Chaplain to the United States Senate.  On one occasion, he penned these words: “Finally, Christmas will come.  Don’t worry; you’ll be ready….  You’ll catch the spirit, all right, or it will catch you, which is even better.

And then, you will remember what Christmas means: the beginning of Christianity … the second chance for the world … the hope of peace … and the way.  The promise which the angels sang is the most wonderful music the world has ever heard.  “Peace on earth and good will toward all.”

It was not a pronouncement upon the state of the world, nor is it a reading of the international barometer of the present … but it is a promise … God’s promise … of what, one day, will come to pass.

The years that are gone are graveyards in which all the persuasions of humans have crumbled into dust.  If history has any voice, it is to say that all these ways of humankind lead nowhere.  There remains one way ... the way … untried, untested, unexplored fully … the way of Him who was born a babe in Bethlehem.

In a world that seems not only to be changing, but even to be dissolving, there are some tens of millions of us who want Christmas to be the same … with the same old greeting, “Merry Christmas” and no other.

We long for the abiding love among people of good will which the season brings … believing in this ancient miracle of Christmas with its softening, sweetening influence to tug at our heartstrings once again.  We want to hold onto the old customs and traditions because they strengthen our family ties, bind us to our friends, make us one with all mankind for whom the child was born, and bring us back again to the God who “gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him shall not perish, but have everlasting life.”

So, we will not ‘spend’ Christmas … nor ‘observe’ Christmas.  We will ‘keep’ Christmas … keep it as it is … in all the loveliness of its ancient traditions.  May we keep it in our hearts, that we may be kept in its hope.

That’s what we feel tonight. I sat Thursday evening, alone in the living room, with only the tree lights on; the ball game was over, so even the TV was off.  It was almost as if I could see my Dad again, decorating the little house in which he was reared, just as he used to do.  Each Christmas, out would come the raveled red and green streamers.  They would be twisted and then fastened in each corner of the living room, near the ceiling, and they would cross each other in the middle, where the center light was.  And then, he and my Mom would drape the icicles over the streamers from corner to corner, until they, too, reflected the lights of the tree.  That always seemed so neat when I was a kid.

I haven’t thought about those streamers for years, but somehow, that night, I missed them, and I missed Dad. You know what I mean.  Many of you have similar feelings tonight … That’s part of Christmas.

Every Christmas is an experience, taking us back to the way that life used to be.   We remember the anticipation when we were kids.  The sleep we crave now simply would not come.  I remember our own girls having string go down the hall to each other’s rooms, where it was tied around one of their toes.  Often we’d get up in the morning and see them already there: around the tree, on the floor just sitting and staring, allowing the excitement to build within until they were virtually uncontrollable.

Every father here can recall Christmas Eve in the basement, or in another room, trying to assemble a toy or a bike made in Japan, with directions written in by some Japanese student, in elementary English.

Can’t you see now, the kids running over to the plate where a partially eaten cookie, left for Santa Claus, remained beside a glass of milk, 1/3 full?  And we Northerners, even you snowbirds who are here only for a visit, want that White Christmas.

I remember Chris and I, one Christmas in Southern California, sitting on the back porch steps in our bathing suits.  It kept the mess out of the house, but it wasn’t the same.  This is one time when we don’t want too many things to change.

But things do change.  For most of us, the kids are gone.  Oh, sure, they come home from time-to-time, and it’s wonderful, but it is not the same.  And even when we think we have adjusted to the loss of someone we loved, we miss them … especially now.  We really miss them.

We know we’ve intermeshed the Christmas story with our own traditions.

We are well aware that Santa and parties and gifts are all part of the season, yet the story still tugs at us.  Just last Friday, I received an e-mail with a story. 

“It was the day after Christmas at a Church. The Pastor of the Church was looking over the crèche when he noticed that the baby Jesus was missing from among the figures.  He hurried outside and saw a little boy with a red wagon; in the wagon was the figure of the infant Jesus.

He walked up to the boy and said, ‘Well! Where did you get your passenger, my friend?"

The little boy answered, ‘I got him at the Church.’

‘And why did you take him?’

The boy replied, ‘Well, about a week before Christmas, I prayed to the little Lord Jesus, and I told him that, if he would bring me a red wagon for Christmas, I would give him a ride around the block in it.’ ”

This morning, we read our papers or watched the news, and again, we are worried about our world.  Once again, people are murdering others, over seemingly-silly little disputes.  A religious fanatic, elevating himself to the status of a god, seeks to force his views upon the world and doesn’t care one whit how many innocent people are killed, just so long as he gets his way.  We know it can’t be tolerated, even though we hate war and killing, and though we grieve over all the innocents who are involved.

We worry about global warming and overpopulation and the fact that the places where the population is growing most rapidly, are the places where they can least afford the influx of more people.  We wonder “how can we continue to buy more and more cars or put more trucks on our freeways, and still move?” ….  And we are upset that the gap between the haves and the have-nots gets wider and wider, and we rack ourselves for a solution, when inside, we know we are part of the problem and therefore must be part of the solution.

We wonder and are deeply concerned whether or not we will be able to afford medical protection when our working days are over.  We struggle with why certain people are discriminated against, simply because they view life and love differently.  Despite it all, we are here tonight in this lovely Church.

We’re here because this is our spiritual home. Some of you were married here.  Others have had family members buried from this room.  Children have been baptized, and occasionally, we‘ve been challenged by a sermon, and always, we’ve been moved by the readings, the prayers, and the music.  It’s not the music of the record shop or the pop radio; this is the music of the ages, and it says to us, when we are in here, in this place, “it is different.”  When we worship, we are going to give God our best: nothing less.

Yes, tonight it is Christmas Eve, and we are here, and somehow, we feel better.  That child in that manger gets through to us and again.  We know we are not alone . . . .

We know that, despite what we have done with our lives, up to now, we ARE loved … and that God is giving us another chance.

We know the world doesn’t try very hard to live the life that He taught but, tonight … if only they would….     

You see, Christmas is not just Mr. Pickwick dancing a reel with the Old Lady of Dingly Dell, or Scrooge waking up the next morning a changed man. It is not just the spirit of giving, abroad in the land, with a white beard and a reindeer.  It is not just the most famous birthday of them all and not just the annual reaffirmation of Peace on Earth that it is often reduced to, so that people of many faiths or no faith can exchange Christmas without a qualm.

On the contrary, if you do not hear in the message of Christmas –– something that must strike some as blasphemy and others as sheer fantasy –– the chances are, you must not have heard the message for what it is.

“Emmanuel” is the message, in a nutshell . . . which is Hebrew for “God with us.”  That is the essential message of Christmas: “Emmanuel.  God with us,” and to the questions it raises: “Who is this God?  And how is God with us? “

“The high and lofty one who inhabits eternity,” is the answer to the first, said Isaiah.

It is the answer to the second question that seems foolish to so many, because the claim that Christianity makes for Christmas, is that at a particular time and place, God came and revealed himself to us in a baby.

When Quirinius was Governor of Syria, in a town called Bethlehem, a child was born who, beyond the power of anyone to account for, was the high and lofty one, made low and helpless.  The One who inhabits eternity came and revealed himself in time.  The One whom none can look upon and live, made known in a stable, under the soft indifferent gaze of cattle.  The Father of all mercies puts himself at our mercies.

Those who believe in the transcendence and total otherness of deity, find that the story diminishes God.  For those who do not believe in God, it is ultimate absurdity.  For those who stand somewhere between belief and unbelief, it challenges credulity in a new way.  The claim is: it is something that has happened, and reason itself is somehow tested by it ... humankind’s whole view of what is possible and real.  Year after year, the ancient tale of what happened is told  ––  raw, preposterous, holy  ––  and year after year, the world, in some measure, stops to listen.

More than anything else perhaps, to dismiss this particular birth as no different from the birth of Socrates, say, or Moses, or Gautama Buddha, would be to dismiss the quality of life that it has given birth to, in an astonishing period of time.  There have been wise ones, simple ones, sophisticated ones, and crude ones; respectable ones and disrepectable ones.

There have been medieval peasants and eighteenth-century aristocrats, nineteenth-century spinsters and twentieth century dropouts.  They need not be mystics or saints, or even unusually religious in any formal institutional sense, and there may never have been any one dramatic moment of conversion that they would point to, from the past.  But somewhere along the line, something deep in them split, starwise, and they became not simply followers of Christ, but bearers of his life.  A birth of grace and truth took place within them, scarcely less miraculous in its way than the one the Magi traveled all those miles to kneel before.

To look at the last great self-portraits of Rembrandt, or to read Pascal, or hear Bach’s B-minor Mass, is to know, beyond the need for further evidence, that if God is anywhere, it is with them, just as God is also with the man behind the meat counter, the woman who scrubs floors at Froedtert Hospital, and the school teacher who explains fractions to a bewildered child. And the step from ‘God with them” to ‘Emmanuel, God with us’ may not be as great as it seems. What keeps the wild hope of Christmas alive year after year, in a world notorious for dashing all hopes, is the haunting dream that the child who was born that day may yet be born again, even in us.

So, dear friends, we are here to say, “God is with us, right here wherever we may wish to make a cradle to receive him. God is here, to calm us; to assure us that all is OK with those we have lost; to tell us the world does have hope, and that you and I can be part of it.”