2023-01-04
Brooke Strong
Sermon Text...
Christmas Eve, 2022 Hamilton Coe Throckmorton
Luke 2:1-20 The Federated Church, UCC
When I was seven years old, my family and I were in Switzerland for Christmas that year. I had begun having questions about Santa and whether he was real. Not only had I developed my own doubts, but other children were questioning the reality of his existence as well. So I lay in bed that Christmas Eve, intently staring out the window into the heavens, hoping against hope for a sure and certain sign. And what I can still vividly remember seeing, just as I was ready to drift off to sleep, were the lights of what I could only assume was Santa’s sleigh flying overhead delivering presents to children around the world. I cannot tell you how relieved and excited and peaceful that sight made me.
Of course, over the years, I have come to see that Christmas was so much more than that welcome sight when I was seven. As delightful as the sight of Santa was that evening, I learned, as time went on, that Santa was but the tip of the proverbial iceberg in my panoply of blessings. I came to see that at the heart of life was the One who made it all possible.
And the astounding thing is that this mysterious God, this God whom I couldn’t see no matter how hard I tried, walked with me and sat with me and filled me and loved me at every moment of my life. And of all our lives. And perhaps the oddest thing of all was that this God of all the universe had left the divine perch high in the heavens to become one of us. How likely is that?! How incredibly improbable does that seem?! God—one of us?
“Don’t try to explain the incarnation to me!” said the children’s author Madeleine L’Engle some years ago (quoted in Richard Rohr, Daily Meditation, Dec. 20, 2022). It’s not explainable. God shed the regal robes to be born in an out-of-the-way place and laid in a feeding trough from which the family animals are fed? It’s ridiculous! Isn’t it?
You know what may be more ridiculous, though? Trying to conceive of the universe and this earth and our remarkable lives as random accidents that just happened to erupt spontaneously. Is it just the luck of the draw that I happened to meet my wife Mary nearly thirty-eight years ago and then we were gifted with two sons and a daughter-in-law and two granddaughters? Is it pure chance that you and I made our way here on this frigid evening to sing carols and gaze at entrancing candles and listen to a sublime story and music? Is it sheer happenstance that you will laugh uncontrollably this evening at something your sibling says or does, that you will weep at the memory of a dear friend or relative who is now gone, that you will find yourself enchanted by a simple stillness and beauty that you may never have noticed before? Is all of that nothing more than a strange coincidence?
Our entire lives are punctuated with moments of untold blessing. And because we can never really fathom exactly how these things and people have come to be, we pause in our tracks this evening to say, “There’s something more than me. There’s a grace and a power and a source of blessing in my and our lives that fills us and restores us.” If we really take in the richness and marvel of our lives, how can we not be engulfed by a sense of wonder at its breathtaking magnificence and possibility. Not coincidence, but mysterious blessing.
It may be that one of the great gifts of this Christmas Eve is that it can restore to us a sense of wonder. In the drudgery of the chores and tasks of our lives, we can so easily miss out on that sense of wonder, an awe at what would, but for the exuberant generosity of God, be the sheer unlikeliness of the radiance and beauty and giftedness of life.
Here’s an example of that wonder and expectancy with which to approach life: we all know how “maddeningly elusive” unicorns are. No one has ever seen, much less captured, one. A few weeks ago, though, in fact, a Los Angeles County first-grader named Madeline “won government approval to keep a unicorn as a pet in her backyard should she be the first to find and tame one of the magical and majestic creatures.”
Madeline wrote a letter to the Department of Animal Care and Control. “She was polite but short and to the point. ‘Dear LA County, I would like your approval if I can have a unicorn in my backyard if I find one. Please send me a letter in response.’
“Two weeks later, the department’s director, Marcia Mayeda, wrote just such a letter. Her response . . . said she was granting Madeline’s request—with conditions. To legally keep a unicorn, she would have to follow certain rules to ensure her magical-beast-turned-pet was well taken care of.
“They include polishing the unicorn’s horn monthly with a soft cloth, treating it to watermelon at least once a week, and giving it ‘regular access to sunlight, moonbeams, and rainbows.’ And if Madeline decides to bedazzle her mythical pet, she must guarantee that any ‘sparkles or glitter used on the unicorn must be nontoxic and biodegradable to ensure the unicorn’s good health.’”
Mayeda, the department head, says that “when Madeline’s letter arrived, ‘everybody was just so touched and charmed and just thrilled with it. . .. But, she added, if she gets a request for a dragon license, [she’s] referring them to the fire chief.’” As it happens, Madeline was to come in to the office soon, when they were to give her Mayeda’s letter, the actual unicorn license, and a red, heart-shaped ‘Permanent Unicorn License’ tag that they hung around the neck of a stuffed animal unicorn” (The Plain Dealer, Dec 17, 2022, p. A14).
That sort of simple wonder—from both Madeline and the government office—is an unsurpassed gift in life. It conveys that the world is an enchanted place full of promise and surprise and the sort of magic that fills us with joy. As we pause this evening from the busyness and routine of our lives, perhaps this is a moment to renew our sense of wonder at the incredible richness and beauty and delight God has given us.
And as we pause in wonder at the grace and magnificence of life, what we are led to perceive is the astonishingly ordinary, yet, at the same time, life-transforming gift that comes to us at the hand of Emmanuel, God with us. As much of a gift as Santa is, I have come to see that without God I wouldn’t exist at all. Without God there would be none of the blessings of the other 364 days. Without God there would be none of the goodness and grace that undergird us at every instant—no faithful presence and partnering when we’ve been sick, no slow and inexorable progress in caring for creation, no advance in racial justice, no enlarged sense of marriage equality, no stunning Cavs victory in 2016, no tsunami of butterflies at a first love. When God becomes incarnate, when God comes to be with us, it is the source of untold blessings, blessings we could not possibly have created on our own.
Several weeks ago, at a Federated commission meeting, one of the members of the commission read to the group a piece she had come across that was a reminder of the heart of this season and this day. Many of you will remember the comic strip Peanuts, written by Charles Schultz, a strip still included in The Plain Dealer and numerous other media outlets long after Schultz died. Schultz, as you may know, would have turned 100 a few weeks ago. In honor of that day, countless other comic-strip writers included him or one of his characters in their own strips that day.
“In 1965, . . . Schultz, a devout Christian . . ., was asked to create a Christmas special for CBS featuring the Peanuts characters. He agreed with one requirement, that they allow him to include the story of the birth of Jesus. Although the station’s executives were hesitant and tried to convince him otherwise, Schultz was insistent. As a result, for the past 50-plus years, millions of people have watched A Charlie Brown Christmas and heard the story of Jesus and ‘what Christmas is all about.’”
Embedded in Schultz’s story, though, are some subtle, maybe unnoticed, clues to the depth of the Christmas story. And they center on the blanket carried by the character Linus. Linus, as many of us know, seems to live with a kind of chronic anxiety, and so he carries his security blanket with him wherever he goes. In fact, in all the years of Schultz’s strip, “Linus NEVER drops his blanket, except once. While sharing the message of [Jesus’ birth], Linus drops his blanket at the exact moment he [repeats the words of the angel who comes to the shepherds in the fields:] ‘Fear not!’
“In this seemingly innocent moment, Linus delivers a [stirring] reminder of the [heart] of Christmas. We are to ‘fear not,’ for Jesus is born.” Nothing needs to weigh us down. Nothing can imprison us in its clutches. No matter how things are going, no matter how desperate things may seem, the angel’s instruction, which is really a blessing, holds us fast: Fear not. Or to put it another way: trust. For all shall be well.
Close observers of the story may object that shortly after this moment, Linus does indeed pick up his blanket again. The striking thing, though, is that he later drops it one more time. “Amid big, bright colorful, shiny artificial trees, Charlie Brown [chooses] the least of these, a little, wooden tree with just a few branches. Shortly thereafter, Linus uses his blanket to wrap [around] the base of the tree and says, ‘Maybe it just needs a little love.’ In that [very] moment, the tree awakens, stands tall and firm. [This is a vivid reminder] “that no matter who we are, [no matter] how many mistakes we’ve made, a little love can make all the difference” (anonymous, as found on Facebook).
The blessings of Christmas are legion. And they are all gifts of the radiant, eternally giving God. May this cold dark night restore in us a sense of wonder. May it spark in us a reassurance and a trust that conquers all fear. May it kindle in us a deep and abiding sense of an all-embracing love that holds us close now and always. May Christmas fill us with a sense of wonder, and of trust, and of love. For God is with us.