Scriptures: |
Isaiah 11:1-9 |
Christmas, we often say, is for the children – indeed, this whole twelve days of Christmas, ending on the day of Epiphany three days from now, is seen as a time of particularly heightened attention on our children. The look on a child’s face on Christmas morning, we feel, is worth all the busyness and bother and bustling we have to do to get ready for that time – so we believe, and most of the time it’s even true. The songs and stories – both the new, popular ones on TV and our iPods and the Internet along with the old, traditional ones – so often begin from a simple premise and end by putting forth a child-like truth. The operative words we would like to use for this season are those we associate with child-like-ness: awe, wonder, joy, pleasure, giving, love. But for those of us who are not children (which pretty much includes everyone still here) the operative feelings of this past month so often become: tiredness from too much work to get ready, wondering if it’s all really worth it, depression because our lives and our relationships are not all we would like them to be.
And then along comes the church and in some ways adds to our woes by being a curmudgeon and railing against commercialism and materialism, telling us not to use “Xmas” because that “takes Christ out of Christmas”, offering even more activities and services and things to be busy with. Also, some of us clergy want to talk about “big”, “important” ideas around Christmas-time: incarnation and redemption and “the Word become flesh” – and pretty soon it’s tough to say from the Christian church’s viewpoint that “Christmas is for children”. In place of the child’s-eye-view of a simple, beautiful birth in a smelly stable, with all those animals and shepherds and angels (creatures children can identify with) we are offered an adult reality: God become human to save us and to offer atoning grace for our sins. From this viewpoint it would seem as though Christmas is definitely not for children but rather it is for a proclamation of and celebration of the coming of the Christ-event into our all-too-adult lives.
Now, I imagine that you’re already anticipating me here, because you know I’m not going to leave it at that. The vision that we seek in the Christmas story and the Christ-event is not one limited to children or child-likeness or adult realities or theological abstractions. No, the love that shines forth in the coming of the Christ is one that is more inclusive, not less so. So, what we have to do is to find ways in which Christmas is for all of us – to blend together the child in us and the adult in us, no matter what our age, as we come in awe before this incredible thing that has happened in our lives.
The image that I want to use to do this blending is that of family. And I don’t mean just family in the nuclear sense but rather family in the many ways we both do and can relate to one another. Among the many things that Christmas is all about one of the most important is about not being strangers. A good friend of mine, a Roman Catholic priest who works in communication for the Archdiocese of San Francisco, tells the story of being on a weekend retreat with 70 high school students. The retreat setting was high over a California beach, and toward the end of the weekend my friend, who was somewhat worn out (I don’t know if you’ve noticed but 70 high schoolers can do that to you), was relaxing and just trying to get a bit of renewal on the cliff over-looking the beach, when he noticed far below two figures walking along the beach below. On an impulse he waved to them. They waved back; a friendly-enough moment, and he turned to go. But then he saw that one of these distant figures, this stranger, was starting to write in the sand – huge letters because the distance was so great. It must have taken 20 or 25 minutes. But then gradually, the letters became clear: H – E – L – L – O B – R – O – T – H – E – R. A reaching out – from a stranger – that took time-and-work investment, for no other reason than the desire to share a simple greeting. My friend, the priest, was too modest to say this while he was telling me the story, but it struck me afterwards that the other meaning to be found in this encounter is that he did not turn and walk away when the distant stranger began writing in the sand. He offered his own time-investment, and the result was a communication that brought them together in what, for that moment, I would call a mini-family. Because Christ came to us, we no longer need to turn away from the one whom we might consider a stranger.
Our interim conference minister, Jane Fisler Hoffman, in writing a thanksgiving greeting that came just before I left last month, has this to say about another way of understanding family: “I join with all of you in giving thanks for the blessing of whatever configuration of folk is 'family'---relatives, church family, neighbors. And for me there is what has become the SCNC 'family' of churches. Now I know that some of the experts have decided that 'family' may not be the best metaphor for church life in implying an unachievable idyllic reality. But I know of no such ideal family -- certainly not mine! -- so when I suggest that I am grateful for our family of congregations and pastors I simply mean that I am grateful to God for all of us in community, with all our wonder and warts!” This is also a good illumination of the meaning of “family of faith”, an anthem that our choir will sing one of these Sundays.
Family, then, in all of its many sensesis the bridge that connects our child-like-ness with our adult realities. You know, as we get older we are supposed to get wiser. But actuality the wisdom of age is really just a rediscovery of what we already learned as children. You probably remember a few years back when educator Robert Fulton pointed out that the best lessons we learn in life are the ones we learn in Kindergarten: you know: share everything, play fair, don’t hit people, put things back where you found them, clean up your own mess, don’t take things that aren’t yours, say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody (and mean it), wash your hands before you eat, flush, warm cookies and cold milk are good for you, live a balanced life: learn some, think some, draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some, take a nap every afternoon, be aware of wonder, goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the plastic cup all die (so do we).
I’m not going to do it, but a theologian could apply a big, heavy theological word to every one of those simple learnings. Everything you ever need to know about living is in there somewhere: the Golden Rule, love, basic sanitation, ecology and politics and equality and…well, just sane living. Take any one of these items and put it into sophisticated adult terms and then apply it to your own life, your work, your government, your family (however you want to define family), and they will hold true and clear and firm. What kind of a better world would it be if we – all of us – had cookies and milk at about 2:00 each afternoon and then laid down for a nap? What kind of a better world would it be if our country – if all countries – had as a basic national policy to always put things back where it found them and to clean up its own mess?
This is what family does for us. It helps us to see that at the most fundamental level how we experience the Christ-child, how we experience the Christmas season, and thus how we experience life is not so different whether we are child or whether we are adult. And here, of course, along with Jane Fisler Hoffman, I am now thinking of the church as family. Who we are for one another breaks down the seeming barriers that different ages place before us, and we truly do become no longer strangers because of our age differences. In child-like-ness we capture all the wisdom we will ever need to know. Jesus understood this so well as we read in many Gospel passages. Perhaps he, too, was recapturing the experience of his birth even as we recapture it for ourselves today. In the passage in Luke that we read Jesus is saddened by the “adult-ness” of those he sees around him, concerned with great affairs but missing out on the life of the spirit. He compares them with outcast children – children who turn their backs on one another, who do not know the strength of family love, who “played the flute for you, and you did not dance”, who “wailed, and you did not weep.” The family that Jesus came to found was (and is) a family that includes gluttons and drunkards, tax collectors and sinner of all stripes. And within such a family wisdom – the wisdom of Kindergarten – is a wisdom that “is vindicated by all her children.”
When Isaiah ends his great vision of the coming community of the people of God – a vision that includes images of peace (a wolf living with a lamb), of ecological wholeness (“the lion shall eat straw like the ox”), of justice (he shall “decide with equity for the meek of the earth”), of the knowledge of God throughout all the earth – at the end of this magnificent vision he concludes with the line, “and a little child shall lead them.” Isaiah is imagining here the child that is in each of us. It is that child to whom the Christ-child appeals – the child in all of us who molds us together in the family that is the church, who enfolds the stranger in, who does not let the love that came down at Christmas die. Yes, Christmas is for children – that is, for us who en-vision the child that, in God’s sight, we are, and who are willing to take that vision into the family that is, for God’s sake, all the world.
Amen.
Dave Pomeroy
First Congregational Church/United Church of Christ
Las Vegas, NV
January 3, 2010