Oak Chapel United Methodist Church

All Sermons are © Copyrighted and may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the express permission of the author.

Most of us haven't the foggiest idea what "bells on bobbed tails" might be; fewer yet have actually heard them ring (nor ridden in a one-horse open sleigh at all, I suppose!). Truth is, in most cases we don't go "over the river and through the woods" these days to get to grandmother's house. We may go over the Bay Bridge, or through some airport somewhere. Most of us have not tasted chestnuts roasted on an open fire, nor eaten Figgie Pudding, thank God! (Although, the unfortunate among us will probably be called upon, at some point during the holidays, dutifully to endure some fruitcake.) These are the wish-images of Christmas -- what we would like Christmas to be. Half the Christmas cards Mary and I receive contain some scene from nineteenth century, Courier and Ives America. We like the sentiment, but the images are no longer relevant. "Look for it only in story books, for it is a world gone with the wind."

It may be that nostalgia has always kidnapped Christmas, that each generation has always looked back to its childhood (or to the memories of its grandparents) and longed for simpler, better times. "Backward, turn backward, O time in thy flight. Make me a child again just for tonight." That could be a Christmas Eve prayer, couldn't it? So the images of Christmas come and go, and we love them, and the merchants play upon them on their way to our wallets. But most of them are out of date.

Of course, there is an image of Christmas that never changes and can never be exploited to make a buck. You can't sell toys, or sweaters, or neckties, or digital cameras, with the manger story. It doesn't work out. In fact, the two agendas are pure opposites, don't you see? The world proclaims, with great persuasiveness, that "The secret of living is getting." Christmas says, "The secret of living is giving." And ne'er the twain shall meet.

Those mean old merchants could never distract us from true Christmas if we did not let them. We are co-conspirators in Yuletide commercialization - they sell and we buy. Giving (God's giving, the Wise Men's giving, our giving) is the obvious and rightful theme of Christmas, and there's no excuse for missing the obvious. An elementary school teacher in Alaska tells a story from her first year of teaching there. She had just left a comfortable, warm home in the "lower forty-eight," to teach kids in this barren, frigid place, who (she thought) lived so far from so much. When Christmas came that first year, she looked in her teacher's manual to see how one might produce a Christmas pageant. The manual obviously had been written by someone who lived in a warmer place. It suggested, for example, that the children playing Santa's reindeer should wear brown jump suits and their horns should be fashioned out of tree branches and painted. She read that aloud to her children and said, "We won't be able to do that. There are no trees anywhere around. We'll have to figure out something." One little boy raised his hand and said, "We have plenty of reindeer horns." There's plenty of the real Christmas still available to us. We don't have to look very far, and we don't have to accept tawdry substitutes. You can't kill Christmas, because it keeps on happening. As D. H. Lawrence said, "There is no end to the birth of God."

Airports today are bristling with security. One woman tried to take a nativity scene, a creshe, on board in her carry-on bag, but the agent spotted the ceramic figures (Mary, and Joseph and the baby), pulled them out and said, "We'll have to X-ray these." "Why," she said. "Because they might be full of explosives." Which, of course, they are. They proclaim a doctrine so revolutionary that even their most fervent devotees wince to think of it, and sometimes remove the explosives and fill them, instead, with traditions and commercialization. But you can't kill Christmas. There is no end to the birth of God.

We have this little gadget at home by which we can control the television from our seats. You probably have one, too - or several. It says a lot about me, the way I use that thing. I flip from one channel to another (especially at night as I get more tired and the quality of programming worsens). No channel gets more than two seconds. I have developed some kind of immune system - built up a resistance to almost everything. It doesn't matter if it's a train crash, or some pitch man offering the buy of a lifetime, or a beautiful movie star. Two seconds. That's it. On to the next channel.

A lot of us live that way. Surfing. Never getting serious. Watching for some gimmick, some jingle or sound bite, or some other exciting thing that might capture our imagination, if only for a moment, and make us feel that we are actually headed somewhere. The gadget is called a "remote," of course. And when we live that way, we make ourselves remote from all that is real. For example, we build up an immunity to Christmas and make ourselves remote to it: two seconds, that's all she gets, and we're on to the next anxiety. There's so much more to this story. We can't just pack it up in the attic and forget it 'till next year. But I'm not worried: you can't kill Christmas. There's no end to the birth of God.

Tiny Tim holds up his crutches and says, "God bless us one and all." And we know what he means. There is a blessing for every human being in this marvelous day. Scrooge will come to see the light. The ghosts of Christmases past will be put behind us, and Christmases future will be bright. I am confident that Christmas will not die because its success is based on selfishness - the one thing we can always count on. In the long run, people discover that the secret of living is giving and that the self-absorbed life absorbs life…and turns us into nothings. Jesus only asks us to give what we cannot keep, in order to gain what we cannot lose. That's a good deal in anybody's book. And people are born anew into that understanding every day. There is no end to the birth of God.