Celebrating Christmas

I have to confess, I’ve always rather liked Ebenezer Scrooge. I’m not talking about the Scrooge in the later sections of A Christmas Carol, the genial old fellow who overflows with cheerfulness and generosity. No, I always sympathized with the cranky, impatient curmudgeon who dismissed all the do-gooders and sentimentality around him at Christmas time. Bah! Humbug!

Surely, the worst parts of celebrating Christmas today would make an angel growl “Bah, humbug.” Or more modern words to that effect.

For much of my adult life, celebrating Christmas had nothing to do with organized religion. As a young adult I had come to see the orthodox religious celebration of Christmas as quaint but sadly out of touch with reality. Shepherds, angels, wise men, virgin birth, frankincense, and myrrh. Give me a break!

At least the orthodox celebration had a kind of integrity. The secular celebration was far worse. Santa, flying reindeer, elves, jingle bell rock, singing chipmunks, “I saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas,” and all the rest. BAH! HUMBUG! You tell ‘em, Scrooge.

And so as a family we tried to celebrate in our own way. We looked for something more intellectually honest than orthodoxy and something with more depth than wanton consumerism. We made heroic efforts to get together with extended family, traveling all over the country in order to share a special time together. I know a number of you here have made a heroic effort to be her with loved ones. (Our recent blizzard no has interfered with many plans to gather with loved ones.) We wanted Christmas to be a special time for our children. This is not always easy when the father is channeling Scrooge. Me, help find a Christmas tree? Get real! Like so many of you, we looked for ways to avoid the worst trivializations of Christmas and ways to affirm what we thought was the truest spirit of Christmas—a spirit of generosity, of hope, of compassion, of love of family, of community. And, in all honesty, like Scrooge I spent a lot of effort just trying to endure it all.

It isn’t all that easy to celebrate Christmas with integrity. If we are not orthodox believers, what are we celebrating? Can an agnostic celebrate Christmas? A Jew? A muslim? Our Christian religious heritage presents many of us with a dilemma. On the one hand, there is much there to value and to pass on. On the other hand, many of us struggle with accepting a story about a virgin birth, a bizarre story of a Roman decree that asks every male to go to his ancestral home, choirs of angels, shepherds willing to leave their sheep in order to worship some poor newborn. How can anyone who knows anything about astronomy celebrate a star guiding wise men? 

So, on the one hand, we face a religious Christmas story that many of us, myself included, cannot accept as literally true. On the other hand, our commercial culture drowns us in saccharine sentimentality and lures us with billions of dollars worth of clever ads to go out and spend our money.

Can we celebrate Christmas with integrity today? Can you and I steer between a naive fiction on the one hand and superficial self indulgence on the other? Is there another way to celebrate Christmas? Is there a way that is faithful to what we believe and to what we hold sacred in life?

I believe there is.

It finally hit me a few years back that the Christmas story is not really about what happened two thousand years ago to someone else.

The real Christmas story is about us. The true Christmas story is about the future, not the past.

The Christmas you and I should celebrate is not really about Jesus. The story is about us. The story is about touches our hearts. The story is about the world we long to see. The story is about what makes life worth living. The Christmas story is your story, it is my story, and, most importantly, it is our story.

Perhaps I should explain.

As some of you heard me say a couple of weeks ago in a sermon, the Christmas stories do not appear in the earliest Christian writings. They were added about 50 years after Jesus died. The first gospel written, the gospel of Mark, does not mention the birth of Jesus. There are two stories. The story in the book of Luke tells of traveling to Bethlehem from Nazareth, staying in a stable, the choir of angels and the shepherds. The other story, from Matthew, has the three wise men and King Herod.

From the first telling, however, the stories were really about the future and our human hopes for the future. The telling of a birth story was a way of getting the listener’s attention. It was a way of saying to the listener that this Jesus was amazing, was miraculous, was the bearer of a sacred message.

The message was about hope for the future. Jesus’ message over and over was a message of compassion, of generosity. His message was a message that each one of us is precious. He taught that we should love one another and care for one another. We are all, he said, precious children of God.

Over the centuries the two stories in the scriptures became united into one story. Every Christmas pageant has the shepherds and the wise men together at the stable, blending the two stories.

And more stories get added all the time. My soul mate Ebenezer Scrooge has become an inseparable part of Christmas in English speaking countries. The tale of Las Posadas, of Mary and Joseph, is retold in Spanish speaking countries. Handel’s Messiah and Bach’s Christmas Oratorio are sung by thousands and heard by millions. Carols fill the air. We can fill a small library with Christmas stories that touch the heart.

Christmas has become this enormous container that holds our hopes, our dreams, our sense of what is most precious in life. Christmas is really about us. It is really about the future.

At Christmas we celebrate peace. We celebrate peace because every day we see images of violence and war. We celebrate peace because we cannot take peace for granted. Any story of a savior has to be a story of a prince of peace.

At Christmas we celebrate by giving gifts. We give gifts because, at our best, we want to express our love and our gratitude. We want to be generous—generous to family, to friends, even to people we do not know.

At Christmas we celebrate by sharing. We share because suffering touches us. At our best, we want to help heal the world’s wounds, to alleviate suffering.

At Christmas we celebrate by gathering. We gather with family, with friends, and we gather in community. Last year just under a thousand men, women and children gathered here, in this progressive church filled with skeptics, to celebrate Christmas. We gather because, deep down in our hearts we long for community. We would be one with all people.

At Christmas we celebrate by singing. Familiar carols revive treasured memories. The songs express the hopes and longings of the human spirit as only music can. Singing together makes us one.

At Christmas we celebrate by focussing special attention on children. What could be more about the future than our children and grandchildren? Children carry humanity’s message of hope into the future.

Christmas is not about repeating a tired orthodoxy. At its most profound level, Christmas transcends Christianity. All of humanity can celebrate peace, hope and generosity.

To celebrate Christmas, to truly celebrate Christmas, is to affirm everything that we hold sacred, to affirm everything we long to become, to affirm our hopes for a world we are striving to create. Even old Ebenezer Scrooge figured that out.

May you and I celebrate Christmas with all the enthusiasm our spirits can muster. Let us celebrate by sharing hope, by exchanging gifts with those we love. Let us celebrate with acts of compassion. Let us celebrate by working for lasting peace. Let us celebrate Christmas by nurturing the flame of hope in our souls. Let us celebrate Christmas by creating wonderful memories our children will carry with them their entire lives.

Christmas is about you and me and those we love. Christmas is about our hopes for our future.

Let every heart rejoice. May this Christmas be far beyond merry. May this be a joyous, wonderful, glorious and blessed Christmas.

Amen.