Sermon

Why Christmas?

The Rev. Jack D. Bryant

Hope Unitarian Church

December 5, 2004

First Reading: Matthew 1:18-25

Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.’ All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: ‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,’ which means, ‘God is with us.’ When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife, but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus.

Second Reading: Reuters News Report - November 29, 2004.

US Christmas sales growth looking good ...but not that good, despite an $8bn spend on Friday

Americans spent more in shops at the start of holiday shopping than a year ago, according to figures released on Saturday, but retailers' hopes for the key season were curbed as titan Wal-Mart cut its November sales forecast.

Consumers lined up to grab early-bird specials as stores opened from 5am on the Friday after Thanksgiving, which is one of the year's biggest shopping days, known as Black Friday as it used to be the day retailers got into profit.

Black Friday used to be the biggest shopping day of the year, but now it competes with the Saturday before Christmas for top sales. Black Friday was the biggest shopping day in 2003.

Early sales data from analyst ShopperTrak showed Black Friday sales rose 10.8 per cent from a year ago to $8bn, while Visa USA said spending on its cards rose 15.5 per cent to $4.1bn with sales up but plastic also more widely used.

"We are cautiously optimistic this will be a good holiday season, but it is too early to tell if it will be a great holiday," said Visa USA spokesman Paul Cohen.

. . .

Enthusiasm over Black Friday sales was tempered as Wal-Mart Stores, the world's biggest retailer, said its November sales failed to meet expectations, signalling shoppers may not be a bullish as hoped this holiday.

Wal-Mart, in a weekly call, said sales at US stores open at least a year rose 0.7 per cent from a year earlier, missing a forecast two per cent to four per cent rise, with high oil prices and fewer discounts curbing spending in the first week of the holiday.

Sermon

It was last summer when I decided to use monthly themes as a guide to my preaching. That was when I decided to pursue the theme of Christmas during December. The choice seemed obvious - ridiculously obvious. But as I began to think about the specifics of my sermon topics I decided it wasn’t so obvious after all - for reasons ancient and contemporary.

Last Sunday I used a reading from the Gospel of Luke; this morning one of my readings is from the Gospel of Matthew. Both readings were excerpts from the birth narratives, the stories about the miraculous birth of Jesus. But here’s a question for you: How many of you have read the birth stories from the Gospels of Mark and John? I know you haven’t because there are no birth stories in those two Gospels. If you look in your bibles Matthew is the first Gospel listed, but it wasn’t the first written. Mark is the actual first Gospel. It was written about the year 70, ten years before the Gospel of Matthew. John is the last of the Gospels and the one theologically closest to modern, orthodox Christianity. If Christmas, the celebration of the birth of Jesus is so important, why isn’t it mentioned in two of the Gospels?

The answer, of course, is that what we call Christmas and the celebration of the birth of Jesus wasn’t important to the early church. The original celebrations of Christmas were an attempt to reshape the Roman festival of Saturnalia into a Christian event. The festival of the Saturnalia and the birth stories - the contradictory birth stories by the way - were stuck together in an effort to create something new. But it wasn’t so much an effort to bolster Christianity as it was an attempt - by co-opting the Saturnalia - to undermine the existing religious practices of the time. It was more of a negative religious practice than anything positive. As a result it was not celebrated on a regular or consistent basis - and when it was, it was just as likely to have the character of the original Saturnalia - a kind of extended drunken brawl. By the sixteen hundreds the situation was so bad that decent people didn’t celebrate Christmas - and governments actually made it a criminal offense. The Pilgrims and Puritans - our religious ancestors - were among those who made it a crime to celebrate Christmas. But don’t worry. That’s long past. We will be celebrating Christmas this year. But why? - that’s the question.

The first answer is straightforward. It’s because Unitarians were an essential part of the driving force to transform Christmas from a time of drunken brawling into a family event. They did so because at the time - in the early 1800’s - they were concerned about moral values. They voted on the basis of morality. They believed that religion was the basis for morality. In particular they believed in family values. That was the motivation for creating Christmas as we know it today, a holiday that has little more than a name in common with the earliest forms of its celebration some eighteen or nineteen hundred years ago. The greatest exemplar of this new kind of Christmas is, of course, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, the English Unitarian. That’s why we’ll be reading excerpts from A Christmas Carol at our Christmas Potluck Dinner in a few days.

But that doesn’t really answer the question, because if you look around you will find a lot of people - including some Unitarians - who aren’t comfortable with Christmas. One of our better known ministers rewrote the words to a popular Christmas carol a few years ago, turning it into a classic example of adolescent shock behavior. I’ve heard some Unitarians actually speak against Christmas. Along with others in our larger culture - they want to celebrate the Solstice or Kwanza or Hanukkah or Ramadan or rituals from Buddhism or Hinduism - anything but Christmas.

Of course, it’s not just Unitarians who do this with Christmas. Recently I read a sermon written by a Rabbi who told of being asked to promote workshops on Buddhism for Jews. He was asked to do so because he is a participant in frequent interfaith dialogue with Buddhist leaders he is known to admire and respect. He declined, however, and lamented the practice among Jews of practicing Buddhist meditation. Why, he asked, should Jews practice Buddhism when they haven’t first tried practicing its Jewish counterpart, studying the Torah? I don’t perceive this as a serious problem in Judaism, however, and some of the best evidence of that is Hanukkah. Hanukkah is a holiday of little historical significance in Jewish life. In some ways Judaism is to Hanukkah as Christianity is to Christmas - except the ancient celebrations of Hanukkah lack the negative aspects of Christmas. But the reason Hanukkah has become so significant in Judaism is because of Christmas. Jews could celebrate the solstice or Kwanza or perhaps something out of Buddhism. But they don’t. When faced with the cultural challenge of Christmas Jews have chosen to look within their own tradition and find something they can lift up and celebrate. Which gets me to what’s bugging me this morning.

As I look at Unitarianism, I believe we have had a tendency for the last century, when faced with theological challenges that make us uncomfortable, to run away. We embrace solstice and new age practices, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism and everything we can think of so we won’t have to confront what makes us uncomfortable. It is what you might call religious cut-off behavior. It’s is why we have rejected traditional religious language to the point that we have difficulty carrying on any kind of religious conversation not just with others, but even amongst ourselves. But such behavior does not free us from the past, it does not free us from ideas, traditions and practices that make us uncomfortable. Instead, it ensures that we continue to be bound, hand and foot to such ideas, ideas that control us even as we deny them.

In the nineteenth century Unitarians could have continued the practice of the Pilgrims and Puritans and refused to have anything to do with Christmas. If they had, we might well be in the same boat as some of the small Christian sects that to this day refuse to celebrate Christmas. But they didn’t. Instead, they engaged with the stories, looked at the world around them, and recognized the possibility that the old stories could be seen as having a new meaning for new times. They realized that the story of a birth, of any birth, is always miraculous, and that within that story were bits and pieces that reminded them that the real meaning of Christmas was bigger than a single babe in a single manger. It reminded them that it was a story about love and giving on many different levels, a story that could point us towards a celebration of Christmas bigger than the established religious doctrines and dogmas of that time and place. It could point us towards a celebration of Christmas that could encompass every family and call for us to make it not a time of the year for reciting creeds, but for turning our lives towards concrete and specific acts of loving kindness to others.

It’s hard to see that today. Most of what we see and hear about Christmas is in the business section of the newspaper. “US Christmas sales growth looking good ...but not that good, despite an $8bn spend on Friday.” That’s the dominate Christmas message this year. It’s all about how much we’re going to spend this year as compared with last year, about Wal-Mart’s sales forecast and customers lining up at 5 a.m. in the morning on Black Friday. I can’t imagine anything that sounds less like Christmas than talk of Black Fridays and credit card borrowing. But that’s where the language is. And it has about as much to do with Christmas today as the stories in Matthew and Luke or the occasional admonition that Jesus is the reason for the season - an argument badly undercut by the total absence of any mention of the stories in two of the gospels, an argument undercut by the lack of any mention of the birth stories in the letters of Paul that actually predate the Gospels, an argument undercut by the history of its celebration.

In such a world the first reason for celebrating Christmas is still a good and powerful reason. But there’s a more important reason. It’s because the same issues that drove our religious ancestors to reinvent Christmas two hundred years ago are alive today. Those are the attempts by some people to turn religion into a rigid, dogmatic activity based on rules and beliefs that are the antithesis of everything religion is supposed to represent. For example, we live in a state that overwhelmingly passed an amendment banning gay marriage, an amendment that was passed out of fear. And we live in a country where two of the major television networks have refused to run a television ad for the United Church of Christ. Have you heard about this? The ad shows people walking into a church - except a couple of bouncers turn away people of color, the handicapped and others - including couples that might be gay. It concludes by saying “Jesus didn’t turn people away.” CBS explained its rejection of the ad saying, "the Executive Branch has recently proposed a constitutional amendment to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman." It’s also been said that we live in a country where morality and religion are playing an every more important role in the public square. But that claim cannot be reconciled with the reality of television networks refusing to air the UCC’s ad - an advertisement that reminds us of what religion is supposed to be about - an advertisement that reminds us that religion is supposed to be about that which binds us together, not that which tears us apart and separates us from one another - be it rich or poor, handicapped or able bodied, gay or straight, black or white. There is, however, no problem with airing “Desperate Housewives.”

The struggle continues. Just as Charles Dickens - raised against the backdrop of debtor’s prisons, child labor, and poverty in a society of rigid class structure - was able to re-imagine the spirit of Christmas, we have the opportunity - amidst the challenges of our society to see the celebration and practices of Christmas as something that can address those problems. There are, of course, some problems with that. While I believe the essence of Christmas as it is practiced today is to be found in A Christmas Carol and not the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, those stories are still a part of Christmas. And those stories contain elements difficult and uncomfortable for many Unitarians, which is why I think some Unitarians - and other people as well - are uncomfortable with a religious Christmas and would rather talk about retail sales predictions.

But the solution is not to turn Christmas into a marketing event, anymore than it is to run to other religions - or psychotherapy - every time we hear something in our own religious tradition that makes us uncomfortable. The vision of our church is “Seeking Truth, Sharing Love: Within - Among - Beyond.” I believe the “within” part requires us to be willing to confront and explore the parts of Christmas that are most difficult for us because it is only by doing so that we can get the fullness of the tradition and have the best chance for personal growth and transformation as religious people. I think that is what Thoreau meant when he spoke of striving to understand the full meaning of life, be it terrible or sublime. We can’t do that by running away from it. Which is why I think we Unitarians need to embrace Christmas with all its history, but especially the history and tradition that comes from the Gospel stories which are most difficult for us. And it’s why I believe those of a more traditional religious outlook should embrace Christmas this year with a special emphasis on Charles Dickens and his little book about a “Ghost of an Idea.”

So why Christmas? We need Christmas because it is the story of a righteous man and a loving mother and a child who changed the world. We need Christmas because there are stars in the sky each night a child is born - and each night a child is adopted. We need Christmas with all its miracles to be reminded that miracles do happen. We need Christmas because if we don’t embrace it we run the risk of waking up one morning and discovering that our lives are as empty as Scrooge’s was before the visits from those ghosts - lives so empty that all we can speak of are Black Fridays and sales forecast met or exceeded. We need Christmas because, as one story says,

“Christmas is not a day, really. It is light, I think. It comes when days are shortest and darkest and hearts despair, and it reminds us that winter death is a temporary thing and that light and life are eternal.

“And it is hope. Life-giving hope. For it demonstrates how kind and generous and self-forgetting human beings can be. And we know that what people can be sometimes, they can, if they will, be most times.

“And assuredly, it is love. Its symbol is a newborn babe, warm and safe in his mother'’ arms. To be sure, he was born a long, long time ago. Yet through the ages his influence as he became a man and the truths he taught and the love he incarnated have proved stronger and dearer in matters that matter most than all the kings and armies and governments of history. Oh, whatever else it may be, Christmas indeed is love.”

. . .

“[and] When it comes, Christmas brings the light that redeems us from darkness, the life-giving hope that casts out fear and the love that overcomes the world. ‘It is Christmas!’ [And] We rejoice. (Celebrating Xmas: An Anthology, p. 146).

Amen.