O holy Child of Bethlehem,
Descend to us, we pray;
Cast out our sin, and enter in,
Be born in us today.
(Phillips Brooks, 1868)
I have to admit it. I’ve always been sort of a curmudgeon when it comes to
Christmas. You can ask my children and the various congregations I served over the years. My curmudgeonly-ness is not directed at the holy day per se, but what has been done to it culturally. There’s always too much glitter and tinsel and hype for my taste, starting way too soon. Those year-round Christmas stores literally elevate my blood pressure should I stumble upon one on some sweltering summer day. And those radio stations with “all Christmas all the time” from post-Halloween onward are another big irritant to me. If I hear old Burl sing those inane holly, jolly lyrics one more time…or that Ms. Brenda Lee rocking around the Christmas tree for the umpteenth time in a single day, I’m gonna swear and not just off Christmas radio! And then there’s my two least favorites of all time – the insane Bolero-like piece of musical monotony called “Little Drummer Boy” and its equally obnoxious companion “Do You Hear What I Hear?” I have to tell you that my Chicagoland congregation roasted me at my retirement party knowing I despised puppets and clowns with a puppet show depicting the time when Bing and David did their duet of that drumming kid song. So now you know from whence I come on many things Christmas.
I have always preferred Advent with its somber blues or purples and its message of introspective preparation and attentiveness to the prophetic word, a word that challenges the ways things are with a siren call to get ready for a time to come when burning justice and radical mercy prevail. I think you can imagine how over the years all those kiddie pageants and choir cantatas which intruded into Advent’s peace were merely endured by me.
So when I was assigned this day to preach– Advent Sunday number four – I was determined not to do a head-on rush to the manger, but rather allow Advent to hold us for a while longer, saving us from the onslaught of the casual social appropriation of Christmas in the wider culture. Advent is a time that invites us to ponder the fabric of our souls and the patterns of our spirituality in a world filled with vulgar violence and institutional evil that have become tragically all too commonplace. This is what Advent is meant to be, what it was and is in the life of the community of faith.
Advent is a gift to us to help us stay close to the God who sent a baby to save us from our sins. I hope you caught that in the middle of Joseph’s angel dream: “…[Y]ou are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” Advent invites us into a telling of the story of the God who surprises a violent world by showing up as an infant Prince of Peace. Amid all the daily lies, vulgarity, and hate spewing forth from our version of a demented Herod, we could easily be lead to what Fosdick called “weak resignation to the evils we deplore.” Thus visions of preposterous angel choirs or even just one as in the case of old Joseph invite us to another way. And yet I wonder….
I wonder for example if it were reported on the local news that angels sang last night over Deforest, would that be seen as particularly good tidings of extraordinary joy? Besides, who would believe it? Probably just some kid flying a drone, right? Or what if a new born baby came to save his people from their sins? Would that mean anything to us? Were angels to proclaim peace on earth, good will among all people, well, that would be something to sing about, if we could believe in angels. But sins? Saved from sins? What sins?
That sort of thing may have been good news when Matthew wrote his gospel for a people deeply conscious of broken covenants. But we don’t talk much about that these days, expect in theological pieties. And what covenants do we break?
Back in the mid-1940s as the horror of World War II was coming to an end, the Pulitzer Prize winning author Phyllis McGinley penned a poem called “This Side of Calvin.” In a satire on preaching in that era which is embarrassingly close to an accurate description even today, she spoke about the Rev. Dr. Harcourt who, and I quote, “And in the pulpit eloquently speaks on divers matters both with wit and clarity: …all things but Sin. He seldom mentions Sin.” Neither do the pulpits of Christianity Lite some 80 years later, with super rich guys like Osteen and his host of wannabe imitators in those big box former K-Mart churches providing entertainment and messages that are all cuddly and personal, just “me and Jesus” happy as larks.
When I was in seminary fifty years ago the renowned psychiatrist Karl Menninger wrote a bestselling book we all read called “Whatever Became of Sin?” In it he addressed the amazing disappearance in modern times of the word and idea of sin from common vocabulary and thought. The truth is, today’s predominant so-called “Christian” evangelical Right has pretty much effectively reduced sin today to a catalogue of immoralities of their very own choosing – like being LGBTQ+ or being pro-choice or being empathetic – all the while turning a blind eye to the clear immorality emanating from the halls of power they zealously support as they wrap the Bible in the flag and establish White House Faith Offices, wearing the cross around their necks as a warning.
So, what sins, we must ask, are we to be saved from?
As long as sin is just some kind of assortment of indecorous offenses against good taste or one’s own religious predilections, then all the fuss about divine intervention of One to save us seems somehow either unnecessary or irrelevant. When we have no compelling sense of offending God in what we have made of life for ourselves or others, what reference does sin have?
The faith which motivated Matthew to write his Gospel takes on a very different view. While the Christian faith certainly addresses private “immoralities,” there is something of far greater consequence which troubles Matthew and the prophets who came before him and the apostles who came after him. What matters above all is what we do to ourselves collectively, to each other as sons and daughters of God. What matters is how we break trust with the One who gave the world to us and who gave us our lives in that world. God created human life in the divine image. God has put within us the possibility and potential for mercy, for purity of heart, for humility, to be peacemakers, to hunger and thirst for righteousness, to find life by losing it for God’s sake. When we deface the divine image in ourselves and trample on it in each other, we “break covenant,” turning away from God’s love and what we were made to be.
Of course none of this means much unless a God of loving purpose who gave us our lives to begin with calls us to return home when we go our own ways, disregarding the sacredness in life and creation. We can hardly ignore the human condition, can we? As Menninger wrote fifty years ago:
“Has the sense of morality vanished from the people? Has the rule of expediency, of success, of technological triumph replaced the necessity for moral integrity…(T)he new gods seem to have failed us…. Things are all wrong.”
The kind of people we have become – as individuals, as communities, as a whole human race –powerfully suggest what Matthew knew – that we need to be saved. Not from something, but for something. We need to be saved precisely because the God who cares about who we are cares about what we make of the gift of life. God has set before us the ways of life and health and peace, but too often we have chosen the ways of death, sickness and estrangement. Therefore, the best good news the Gospel could possibly give us is the announcement of One who comes to show us with clarity what our lives ought to be, transforming our hearts so that we will love God and each other after the fashion for which we were created and who, by love and forgiveness, takes from us the burdens of sin and guilt of which we cannot unburden ourselves.
If there is good news to be had in this world, it is this – that God is with us, Emmanuel, taking us out of our resigned selves and replanting us in the landscape of new life, where we ought to be in the place just right, to reference an old Shaker hymn.
If this Advent journey to a birth in Bethlehem means anything, it is this – in the birth of Jesus the Spirit of God was operative as never before in the world, a Spirit who enables us to be who we were created to be – agents of God in the re-creation of the human soul when it has lost the life it ought to have.
The late pastor, professor, theologian and author John Killinger wrote what is for me the essence of Jesus’ coming: God did not become human in order to make us like God, but rather that we might become most fully ourselves, who we were created to be.
Jesus, whose birth, life, death, resurrection and coming again we celebrate, enables us to see who God is and who we ought to be, opening the eyes of our minds so that we can know the truth of God and the recreating power which can release and save us. As Matthew tells us, this child is from the Holy Spirit, and he will save us from our sins.
Now even for a curmudgeon like me, that’s what this season is all about. That’s a Christmas I can embrace!