Christmas Eve 2017: "Keeping Christmas Well"

CHRISTMAS MESSAGE   “Keeping Christmas Well”

Well, we made it to Christmas. We made it through all the ugliness, hostilities, and violence of 2016. We made it through the messiness that we call life to this evening, this precious, sacred evening, when we can find refuge from all of that and rest in the soft candlelight, the soothing music, and the miraculous story of a baby’s birth.

And there has been a lot of messiness lately: the political mudslinging, the ongoing threat of terrorism, the horrendous acts of genocide and warfare around the world, and the loss of far too many of our young people to accidents, drugs, and violence.

It’s no wonder we come here tonight to find some peace for our souls, a moment’s rest for our bodies, and some comfort for our aching and fearful hearts.

If you’re like me, you take comfort in the symbols and rituals of Christmas, such as those beautiful carols, the lights, and the reading of the Christmas story.

I think that one of the most beloved symbols of Christmas is the nativity set: that lovely scene of Mary, Joseph, and the baby in the stable. We have a set here. You probably have one at home. 

In general, I like these nativity scenes, but there’s something about them that’s always bothered me. They are beautiful to look at, yes, and some of them are incredible works of art. But they are simply artistic representations that are designed to create a vision of tranquil peace and sublime beauty. And I’m afraid they’re not very realistic.

I mean, think about it. We have a story of a young, unmarried girl – most biblical scholars believe Mary would have been 14 or 15 – who is nine months’ pregnant, and who has just been forced to travel some 70 miles from her home over dirty, rutted roads to a town where she can’t even find a decent place to spend the night. She gives birth and has to put her sweet, newborn son in a manger – a feeding trough for animals. In addition, she’s far from home, so her friends or relatives weren’t there to support her and help her through the birth.

After going through all that, do we really think that Mary would look like she does in many of the nativity scenes: calm, serene, squeaky clean, and beautiful? I don’t think so. I’m not sure the real Mary would even recognize herself in these beautiful portrayals of her son’s birth.

I wanted to find a nativity scene that was more realistic, and that would show Mary as dirty, exhausted, scared, and overwhelmed. So I did a search online, and I found two paintings that I thought were very touching in the way they portrayed Mary, Joseph, and the baby.

The first painting, by artist Walter Rane, shows Mary curled up on her side, holding the baby, with Joseph kneeling next to her. They are surrounded by rags and bundles of their belongings. There’s nothing clean or calm about this scene. Mary looks exhausted and even uncomfortable. Joseph looks concerned.

In the second painting, completed in 1890 by by Gari Melchers, Joseph is sitting on a stool, looking at the baby, who is tucked into a small stone manger, or feeding trough. Mary is on the ground, slumped against Joseph’s legs, sound asleep. She doesn’t look peaceful or serene. She looks like a woman who had just given birth! Her clothes are disheveled, her hair is untidy, and there’s even a smudge of dirt on her face.

I love these two images, but I doubt they’d ever reach the level of popularity of those nativity scenes in which Mary is depicted as sweet, peaceful, not a hair out of place, not a smudge of dirt on her rosy cheeks, not a sign of anxiety in that blissful expression on her face.

OOPS! Sorry. One of my cats must have put that one in.

That’s better. Of course, most people prefer this soothing image of Mary to the one that would be more realistic and accurate. I think it’s because we want to keep the messiness of human life out of our idealized Christmas scenes. We don’t want to see the dirt, the fear, the anxiety, or the reality of an unplanned pregnancy that almost resulted in Joseph breaking off his engagement to Mary, and leaving her to fend on her own.

And I get this. There’s enough messiness all around us. We want to make sure Christmas is a safe refuge from the ugliness and messiness.

But when we idealize the story of Jesus’ birth, when we sanitize it and make it clean and pretty and safe, we’re missing a critical truth of the whole story of Christmas: in Jesus, God came smack dab into the center of human messiness  because that’s the part of our lives that needs God the most. In that baby in the manger, God claimed the messiness of human life as a part of God’s own self. And that means nothing – nothing – in our lives or anyone else’s life is too dirty or too messy or too ugly for God. Nothing in our lives is beyond redemption, nothing lies outside the possibility of transformation and change.

For the past four Sundays, during the season of Advent, we looked at the story of Ebenezer Scrooge from the classic tale, “A Christmas Carol,” by Charles Dickens. We saw how Scrooge was an angry, bitter, greedy old man who was transformed into a man who learned how to “keep Christmas well” and “honor Christmas” in his heart all year long.

We learned that there was nothing in Scrooge’s life that was beyond redemption – not his tendency to say “bah humbug” to anyone who wished him a Merry Christmas – not his desire that those dreadful poor people should die in order to “decrease the surplus population” – not even his belief that “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart!”

As Scrooge learned from his journey with the three Spirits of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, there was room even in his cold, messy, ugly heart for hope, love, and compassion to be born anew. Everything that was ugly in his life was full of potential for being transformed into something beautiful.

But Scrooge’s transformation didn’t come easily. He had to take a painful and difficult journey with those three spirits who led him first, through his past, then, into the lives of those poor people that he found utterly contemptible, and finally, into a future vision of what “might be” if he didn’t change his heart and his life. Along the way, he had to confront the painful memories that he allowed to shape his life and make him bitter. He had to see for himself that even those poor people who he found so disgusting could experience beauty and love in their lives. And he had to face the bleakness of a future in which he was dead, and so no longer had any power to change anything.

When his visit with the last spirit was almost finished, Scrooge’s transformation is almost complete. He tells the spirit:

“I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach!”

The potential for this kind of dramatic transformation is at the core of Christmas. Rather than seeing Christmas simply as a time of peace, tenderness, and escape from the messiness of our lives and the world, perhaps we can see Christmas in another way: as the awesome power of God to transform lives, contained in a tiny baby.

On this night, we sing about the “little Lord Jesus” “so tender and mild,” sleeping in heavenly peace. But the truth of the Christmas story is that tender, sweet baby was poised to unleash the fullness of God’s justice, mercy, and forgiveness on an unsuspecting world. Through that vulnerable little infant, God was prepared to reveal a kind of love the world had never seen – a self-giving, compassionate love that put others first, that refused to hate anyone, and that responded to evil with humble faithfulness to God. It was a love that would transform lives and turn the whole world upside-down.

Ebenezer Scrooge learned, though his experiences with the three Spirits, what it meant to “keep Christmas well.” The question for us is: have we?

I believe that we keep Christmas well when we learn what Scrooge learned, and when we let hope, compassion, and love be kindled anew in our hearts.

We keep Christmas well when we open ourselves up to both the miracle of that first Christmas night, and to the ongoing miracle of transformation.

We keep Christmas well when we wake up to the wonder of the potential for change that is made possible through the birth of this baby.

We keep Christmas well when we affirm that the promise of God’s transforming love is present even in the messiest of human situations: where innocent people are slaughtered, where distrust and suspicion turn friends and family members against each other, where greed makes profit more important than people, and where anger leads to acts of violence and oppression.

And finally, we keep Christmas well when we allow the power of God’s love in Jesus to enter into the messiness of our own lives to transform our fear into hope, our anger into compassion, our bitterness into understanding, and our despair into joy.

I hope that Charles Dicken’s final words in his story A Christmas Carol will be true for all of us, not just tonight, but always:

“And it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if anyone alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!”

Indeed. Amen.