How to Not Ruin Christmas
Homily delivered at Trinity Parish Ashland (Oregon)
24th December 2018: 6:00 p.m. Said, 11:00p.m. Sung Festal Mass
24th December 2018: 6:00 p.m. Said, 11:00p.m. Sung Festal Mass
The Very Rev. Fr. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
God, give us hearts to feel and love,
Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh.
Amen.
The
Right Reverend John Chane, the former Bishop of Washington DC, once told me the
story of his most memorable liturgical disaster. He was serving as the Dean of the Cathedral
in San Diego, and for Christmas Eve, they had an early evening service for
families, with full Nativity Pageant.
One particular year, the Blessed Virgin was played by a demur 12 year
old girl who clearly was teacher’s pet at school: she organized all the other
players, scolding when necessary and making admiring and praising comments as
she deemed right. Among the shepherds
were two brothers who seemed to be the opposite of teacher’s pets. During the main service, not the rehearsal mind
you, one of the brothers elbowed the other, provoking a swift push back. The first brother fell, right into the thurible
stand, knocking the smoking censer filled with hot coals out onto the rug,
which burst into flames. Pandemonium
ensued: shrieks of terror, crying, and
jostling to get to the exits. The verger
ran into the sacristy and returned with a fire extinguisher: a loud SHHHHHHHUUUUUFFFFF and a cloud of
white retardant put the fire out. As the
cries and moaning subsided and the children returned to their places, the 12
year old prissy Blessed Virgin was heard to say over all the rest, shooting
daggers with her looks at the two brothers, “Look! Now you’ve gone and ruined
Christmas!”
“Ruined
Christmas!” How many of us have heard
those words hurled at us, either as kids or as adults, usually from family
members.
“Ruined
Christmas!” Whether it was late gifts or
decorations, some untoward scene at the dinner table, spurred on maybe by too
much holiday cheer, or, if in church, misspoken lines or wrong turns in
procession, a spectacularly wrong note in an anthem, or burning down the
Nativity Pageant: “Ruined
Christmas.”
There are many reasons to love the
season, but there are also tensions. The holidays bring with them a whole
lot of expectations, what we need to do, who we need to be with, what we ought
to do, how we ought to do it, to properly celebrate and not give
offense. The holidays can bring us face-to-face with our own failings,
those places where we do not measure up, either to the expectations of others
or ourselves. They bring us face to
face with our losses and our regrets.
That’s why it seems so easy to “Ruin Christmas.”
I wonder, though. The Feast of the
Nativity, or Christmas, is the Feast of the Incarnation, of God becoming truly
human. We honor the birth of a little child into poverty, knowing
that in him God is taking on all that it means to be human, including suffering
and death. Yet we think we can ruin Christmas
by not measuring up in one way or another.
If we think that the feast can so easily ruined by human failing, then
we have misunderstood the feast.
By becoming truly human, God embraces
human weakness and failing. In
incarnation, God tells us that it is O.K. to be not O.K., and shows us that
acceptance of who we actually are rather than who we want to be is the starting
point of spiritual progress.
Jesus says it again and again in
life: Do not judge. Accept with gratitude all the gifts and
blessings God gives us. Do not envy
others or covet their station or possessions. Help others, don’t worry about
doing it just right. Let go, and let God.
Such a spirituality informed even
Jesus’s attitudes toward partying. Jesus
liked a good party, but did not want party planning to control life. Note
that in the story of the wedding at Cana, he provides hundreds of gallons of
the finest wine to the joy of the guests, but also questions his Mother’s trying
to control every little detail.
We often hear this time of year complaints
that there is a war on Christmas when we try to wish more inclusive happiness
on others by saying “happy holidays.”
But this is mere tribalism at its worse: my group’s holiday is bigger
than yours. I’ll tell you what the real
war on Christmas is: when we mouth pious praise of the holy family of
Palestinian refugees fleeing Herod and seeking asylum in Egypt yet at the same
time support separating refugee children from their parents or teargassing families
on our southern border who have fled turmoil in their homeland.
We also hear calls to “put Christ
back in Christmas.” People complain about commercialization, too much partying,
and not enough praying. This phrasing of the question gets the issues all
wrong. It separates the partying and celebration from spirituality. Granted,
some people see the holiday solely as a consumer or marketing event. The
holiday is thus diminished, often becoming a source of stress and depression,
something easy to ruin.
The problem, however, is not too
much celebration, but too little. “I will greatly rejoice in the LORD, my whole
being shall exult in my God” says Isaiah. It is not just “the spiritual side”
of us that should rejoice. To want to turn Christmas into a sectarian prayer
meeting rather than the public, boisterous, and commonly shared party that it
currently is—for both believer and unbeliever—stems from bad theology.
Incarnational theology demands that our prayer be common prayer, or prayer in
community, and our holidays be shared events.
The incarnation marks a radical
continuity between our human lives and God’s, and that implies sacredness in
all it means to be human, even things that we find embarrassing, demeaning, or
silly. We often miss the point, wrongly thinking that somehow God came among us
without truly being one of us. This “God incognito” is a total warping of the
meaning of the incarnation. God became truly human in all ways (except in
resisting God), and that means it’s O.K. to be fully human. In fact, it means
God calls us to be fully human, and to do that he calls us to follow his
example when he was among us, and not resist God so much. It is only thus that
we can find our true and full humanity.
William Stringfellow wrote,
“Jesus Christ means that God cares extremely, decisively, inclusively, immediately, for the ordinary, transient, proud, wonderful, besetting, frivolous, hectic, lusty things of human life. The reconciliation of God and the world in Jesus Christ means that in Christ there is a radical and integral relationship of all human beings and of all things. In Christ all things are held together (Col. 1:17b)” (A Public and Private Faith, 1962, 40-44).
Incarnation tells us to accept who
we are—gifts and strengths, disabilities and ugly deficiencies, and all. We
must accept who others are as well. We must be gentle both on them and
ourselves. I think that is the most
important thing if we do not want to “Ruin Christmas.”
Starting where we are, we must
respond to the glimpses of glory, to the places in our lives where the veil
between this world and the next is thin. Seeking to let God finish creation
in us, trying to amend our lives, both personally and communally, requires an
open-ended listening, a total trust in God’s good intentions. It means joyfully serving and helping others,
welcoming, feeding, and housing the stranger, foreigner, and oppressed. It means not beating up on ourselves, and
being kinder to others.
Ambrose of Milan, who taught and
converted Augustine of Hippo in the mid fourth century, wrote dozens of hymns
popularizing the basic teachings of Christianity. Both Ambrose and Augustine
were very flawed people—Ambrose an anti-Jewish bigot and Augustine a lecher who
never seems to have escaped his conflicted views of his own bodily urges. But they both persevered in open-ended
listening to God. That’s why we call them saints—not because they lacked flaws,
but because they persevered despite them. One of Ambrose’s hymns praises the
enfleshment of Christ in these words:
O equal to Thy Father, Thou!
Gird on thy fleshly mantle now;
the weakness of our mortal state
with deathless might invigorate.
As God became truly human in Jesus, let us accept our own humanity, with all its limitations and failings. Let us follow Jesus, and try to live in his light. Though we might make every effort not to ruin Christmas, let us as a first step not worry at all about getting everything just right.
Peace and grace.
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