This is my first Christmas at Trinity Cathedral, and I am overwhelmed with how beautiful this is—the greens and flowers and decorations are all spectacular. I love Christmas.
I love hearing the story about God’s love being born, coming to us in the form of this helpless baby of humble birth. I never get tired of it, year after year after year. I love everything about Christmas. I’m not supposed to love everything about Christmas; I’m supposed to complain about the commercialism and the business and all that other stuff, but I love even that. I love the fact that it Toys ‘R’ Us, and in Home Depot, and in the liquor store—not that I ever go in liquor stores—you can hear songs about God’s love. Isn’t that something? This story of God’s love won’t be denied, it can’t be squashed; it just comes through everywhere. Even cartoons that are supposed to be secular, like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer—what is it about? It’s about light shining in the darkness, and the darkness doesn’t overcome it; and where did that theme come from, I wonder?
There are other things to love about Christmas. For many of you, it is children and grandchildren showing up at your house. For others, this may be your first Christmas with a brand-new baby, and you get to be your own Nativity scene! For me, every Christmas is connected with every other Christmas I’ve experienced. I particularly remember Christmas as a young boy. I can still feel the wonder and excitement and joy. In my house growing up, we opened all of our presents on Christmas Eve- how great that was! My parents explained that Santa Claus was so busy, it would help if he could come to a few houses early on Christmas Eve. My parents got on the list for this special early delivery, but in order to do that, we kids had to get out of the house. Now that I am a parent and I know what it’s like on Christmas morning, I’ve figured out my parents’ real motivation was that they didn’t want to get woken up at six a.m. on Christmas Day. So my parents had gotten together this plan with Santa, and we would get presents early.
In order to make that happen, my father would take us kids all out on Christmas Eve, and we would either go to a movie—one year we saw Pinocchio—or, if there wasn’t a movie for us to see, we would just drive around and look at all the lights on the houses. Now, the combination of the magic of seeing all of those lights on those houses, and the excitement of knowing that at that moment Santa was at our house delivering presents, was just too much to stand. Somehow, every year, that excitement gets stirred up in me. Even though I’m not a kid anymore, still there’s a part of me that is so excited about Christmas.
I know, and the longer I live the more I know, that there is another side to Christmas as well. Within this joy of Christmas, as the same time, there is also a deep sadness. There is the empty stocking that doesn’t need to be hung anymore; the empty chair; the family members that may not be coming back for Christmas. There is the first Christmas after a divorce, when you have to try to negotiate what the new “normal” would be. Because every Christmas is somehow linked to Christmases past, we remember fun we had in the past that can’t be repeated again. If you’ve lost a loved one, and you’ve experienced your first Christmas alone already, at the following Christmas you may ask yourself—will the pain be any less this year?
The mystery, the wonder, is that somehow this sad side of Christmas, this broken-hearted side of Christmas, coexists with this joyful and wondrous and love-filled side of Christmas. I suppose that has been true for all of the Christmases that I have experienced; and I know that it was true for the first Christmas.
Imagine… Imagine you are Mary. You’re a young teenager. You’ve been thinking, as a young girl, what it would be like to be married, to have a baby. Now you’re fourteen, you’re not married, you’re pregnant, and you live in a small town. You know what that means; everyone’s talking. And when you’re nine months pregnant, when you’re about to give birth, your fiancé tells you that the two of you have to go to Bethlehem, seventy miles away. You’re going to walk, or ride a donkey, over seventy long miles to get to Bethlehem, when you’re nine months pregnant. Then you get there, and your fiancé’s family doesn’t welcome you in! I don’t know where Joseph’s family was… So you go to the inn, and there is no room. You go to a stable, a cave… can you imagine? You lie down, your water breaks, contractions come.
I was present in the room when each of my children were born, and I can’t even imagine having the company of a cow in the room at that time. Mary’s mother isn’t there; her sisters aren’t there; it’s just Joseph, and what does he know about birthing babies? Then the only people who show up, the only attendants, are shepherds that you have never met before. Imagine them in the birthing room with the cows. When Mary fantasized about giving birth to her first child, that was not the picture she had.
I can imagine Mary being heartbroken; I can imagine her weeping. This… this is what it’s going to be like when my first child is born? she asks.
Then the baby comes. She looks at this child. And this time, her tears are different. This time her heart opens up in a way it has never been opened before. This time she falls in love more deeply than she ever imagined was possible. In the midst of her sadness and her pain and her heartbreak comes this profound and deep joy. That is the meaning of Christmas.
Christmas is not about love. Christmas is not about light. Christmas is about love in the midst of pain; it is about light shining in the darkness. That is what I love about Christmas. Christmas shows us that there is no dark corner of our life, there is no piece of brokenheartedness that God cannot be born into, that cannot be transformed, that is out of reach or out of touch. Christmas is about love transforming the broken bits of our lives as well as being present in the obviously joyful parts.
Somehow this simple act of love that we can share with one another makes Christmas happen all over again. Christ gets born in us; God’s love transforms us, over and over again. One of the things that happens at Christmas is the telling of stories. I always hear stories—new stories that I’ve never heard before, about people’s lives being transformed by little acts of love. About Christmas happening in strange ways.
I recently heard a story about a woman, named Barbara Cunningham; she’s now a Congregational minister. This story takes place forty years ago in a little farming town called Nampa, Idaho.
Barbara was nine years old. Her Sunday School class decided, as a Christmas project, to adopt needy children. Each child drew names from a hat, and Barbara drew the name of a young girl her age, named Connie. Connie lived in Nampa, in a three-bedroom home with her parents and nine siblings. Barbara went home and showed the name to her mother. Because they didn’t have a lot of money, and because in those days it wasn’t as simple as running out to Toys ‘R’ Us, they decided to make a Christmas present for Connie.
They made her a doll. They used a cotton flour sack for the body, cotton yarn for hair, buttons for eyes, embroidered a mouth, made a cute little dress from some scrap fabric, and the red shoes of the doll were painted on. Barbara took the doll and carefully wrapped it in some of last year’s Christmas paper, and Barbara and her mother went to Connie’s house.
Barbara was a little nervous when she held the doll out and said, “Merry Christmas.” Connie was reluctant. Both mothers encouraged Connie to take the gift and open it up. She opened up the paper, looked at this handmade doll, and her face lit up. With a squeal of delight she hugged Barbara, and the two of them ran off to the back room to play with this new doll.
Shortly thereafter, Connie and her family moved away. Barbara never saw Connie again.
Thirty years later, Barbara was volunteering in a hospital in Seattle, Washington. She was working with cancer patients, many of whom were coming to get bone marrow transplants, which was a new procedure at the time. One day when she was there, a young girl showed up. This young girl had leukemia, and her mother had tragically died a few months earlier in a car accident. The girl held in her arms an old doll. It was made of cotton fabric; there were only a few strands of yarn for hair left; one of the button eyes was missing, and the painted-on red shoes were all dirty.
This young girl held onto the doll tightly. When it was time for her procedure, one of the nurses told the girl she needed to put the doll down. The girl didn’t want to let it go. She asked Barbara if she could hold the doll for her, and as Barbara took the doll, she asked this young girl to please tell her the story of this doll.
The girl said, “My Mom gave it to me. Mom said it helped her through a hard time, and she hoped it would help me too.” Barbara asked what her mother’s name was. “My Mom’s name was Connie,” the girl replied.
That simple, humble, pure act of love—it transforms lives. It brings God’s love, Christ’s love, present in our hearts. What I love about Christmas is that this gift of love isn’t something that simply happened two thousand years ago, but is something that happens again and again and again. It is a love that not only do we get to receive, but we get to give. We can bring people alive. That’s what I love about Christmas. Amen.