Home for Christmas
Commentary
My living room contains a painting of the great race between a horse and a steam locomotive by the Canadian artist, Alex Colville. The artist has added an unusual twist. Rather than a race, the familiar scene is shockingly distorted by the arrangement of the principals. In Colville's version it is not a race; the engine and the horse are running toward a head-on collision. Disaster is certain as the two go full tilt at each other.
Colville's reflection on the conflict of the beastly disordered universe of the horse versus the ordered might of the steam locomotive sums up my feelings as we hit Christmas Day. The season is a minefield on which the struggles between Christ and culture are fought out. It is one thing to fight out these struggles in a seminary classroom, quite another to find yourself dealing with a child who cannot imagine why, on God's green earth, they should go to church on Christmas Day. Having been raised in the Christ and culture mindset where the church is supposed to transform the culture, I look with interest to see just who is going to transform what on Christmas Day. One of my annual rights upon receiving the calendar for the new year is to check and see if this is the year that Christmas falls on Sunday. The commercial empire has already taken over Caesar's role and now the turn of the calendar feels like the final knockout blow. Pastors are of two minds in this moment. Don't we find ourselves both denouncing the culture and wanting to be a part of it at the same time? Who wants to be working on Christmas Day? Whose family wants you to be taken away from the culturally defined protocol of the day's activities? Like Colville's painting there is disaster pending.
Of course, there is a school of thought, behind the service of lessons and carols, that says if we just repeat the story softly and slowly, we can be out of here in a jiff without having done too much damage. Who can go wrong with the evocation of manger, Wise Men, and shepherds? After checking the secular calendar for an accident about to happen we had better be sure to check what the lectionary might do to us. I am ready to sue.
With all that could be available to us, we are presented with the choices of three texts that seem to have been chosen by the original scrooge. There will be no manger scene to distort, no terrified shepherds or Wise Men slotted into arriving at the wrong time. There will be no eloquent Handel-like readings from the Hebrew Scriptures. Even in most Bibles the hymn-like poetic quality of the last two texts is masked by their arrangement on the page. There will be no talk of virgins conceiving or nasty innkeepers. I know what happens when a new denominational hymnal trifles with the tunes and telling of this story. There will be flesh, engine parts, and torn up rail ties scattered everywhere.
Of course, the days when there will be even more terrific tension from competing claims headed for a collision course will be the weeks and months to come when, as Paul puts it, we will have to work out our salvation in fear and trembling. As a matter of fact, by Christmas afternoon those who have loaded up on the secular version of the holiday will be wondering whether the effort was worth it. The texts assigned to Christmas Day seem geared to helping us in the days to come as much as to cherish this day. Isaiah proclaims that the exiles are going home. The letter to the Hebrews announces that in the Christmas events we have been touched by something that is much more than an angel. The gospel says that we have seen the glory of God in the Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us. Certainly, these texts challenge the mood and tenor of this day. However, they can lead us through the living of the rest of our days showing us wisdom and granting us grace.
Isaiah 52:7-10
"We are going home." At those words there is dead silence in one of the final scenes from the movie, M*A*S*H. Any veteran who has spent a good deal of the tour of duty counting the days knows the power of those words. Many Vietnam veterans know the pain that came when, having gotten home, they did not feel at home. On their arrival home, there was a country so conflicted that it was in many ways unsure of how to welcome them home. Many returnees brought home excess baggage that needed tending to before they settled in. For both veterans and non-veterans, the lyrics in "I'll Be Home For Christmas" bring tears to their eyes, for even when they are at home it does not always feel like being at home.
Isaiah's announcement is addressed to sixth-century B.C. Hebrew exiles who will find the fulfillment of this promise in the right of return granted by the Persian King Cyrus. Yet, for some veterans, and the characters portrayed in M*A*S*H, as well as some newly released prisoners from jail, there is some uncertainty about their desire to return home. They have settled in careers, developed friendships, and had some of the most significant experiences of their lives far from home. Verse 11 seems to take a more intense turn, "Depart, depart, go out from there! Touch no unclean thing; go out from the midst of it, purify yourselves, you who carry the vessels of the Lord." It seems that exile was a place where folks could get contaminated and comfortable. The book of Daniel seems to preserve a memory of some folks having done well, while in exile others tried to pass into the alien culture.
Yet, "How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger ... who brings good news," we are going home. Of course, we do not know where Jesus is headed, but we do know that he goes to prepare a place for us and that place looks like home. Usually, the post-birth anxiety mounts as the parents prepare to take the baby home. In this case, the anxiety mounts as the baby prepares to take us home to meet our heavenly parent.
In chapter 51, Isaiah writes that the people have gotten far from home because, "You have forgotten the Lord, your Maker, who stretched out the heavens and laid the foundations of the earth. You fear continually all day long because of the fury of the oppressor, who is bent on destruction. But where is the fury of the oppressor?" Our forgetting has been the root of our fear. Has not the world become less hospitable because we live less out of a sense of abundance and more out of a fear of depletion? Currently, the planet could safely sustain all of its habitants, yet many have too much and even more have too little. Having forgotten in whose image we are made we live as if we can find home by having more to live on than to live for.
Much ink has been spilled on whether in Second Isaiah, from which our text is drawn, the suffering servant is an individual or the nation. One thing is certain; that if there is to be a home then there will have to be a suffering servant somewhere. If home is a place where we can feel safe and find strength and experience growth it will have to do with somebody (or bodies) standing with and up to us at the same time.
How beautiful is the one who announces that God is ready to lead us home. This is good news that will outlast this day. The one we celebrate this day, through his life, teaching, death, and resurrection, can make a home of this planet and the places where we live. He can take us home.
Hebrews 1:1-4 (5-12)
My expectation of Dickensian characters dressed in costume attentively listening in candlelight to a reading of the King James Version of prophecy and natal pageant comes crashing headlong into this lectionary reading. "The exact imprint of God's very being," and "When he had made purification for sins." The words send me back to "seminary thinking." This accident about to happen leaves me wondering how I will apologize for this sidetrack into a theological twilight zone. The commentaries seem to provide little help as they offer no unanimity as to who were the Hebrews and just what form inspired this document. About the only unanimity lies in the certainty that it was not Paul who wrote this.
Worse yet, in a culture infused with a fascination with angels, as evidenced by the television series, Touched By An Angel, the letter seems to go out of its way to put angels in their place. "Of the angels he says, 'He makes his angels winds, and his servants flames of fire.' " In other words, angels burn out like a match and quickly blow out to sea. "And, 'In the beginning, Lord, you founded the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands; they will perish, but you remain; they will all wear out like clothing; like a cloak you will roll them up, and like clothing they will be changed. But you are the same, and your years will never end.' " In short, where angels operate and where they live will be history, while God endures. A solid theological point that I might not want to make to a congregation where the competition for the angel parts in the pageant has been intense and where the last grandma I visited showed me her precious century-old angel that will go on the top of the tree. If we do not have angels, can it be Christmas?
Before you brace for the collision and the inevitable clean up of horse and engine parts, consider that in its own way this text may have drawn out a fundamental truth of the Christmas story. We are saved not by angels or even by a preoccupation with them but by a Savior. It seems the recipients of this letter have allowed their faith, like many of our living rooms this Christmas morning, to become cluttered with what the belief and the story come wrapped in. Like some children this Christmas morning, to the horror of their parents, many of us find ourselves playing with the box and the wrapping that the faith comes in rather than enter into what was intended. Consider how easily we can get sidetracked by the Christmas buildup and in managing the externals of the faith, all to the detriment of the eternal.
We need something more than angels to accomplish salvation. Several theological strains testify to this truth. The reality of the cross and the Good Friday experience is certainly on the back burner in the way we celebrate Christmas. However, Matthew's rendition of Herod's antics puts them front and center. Clearly, angels are well beyond the cross. Frankly, while I can enjoy an angel as well as the next guy, I just can't quite bring myself to relate to them. Even the characters from Touched By An Angel leave me somewhat cold. Nice enough people, but well, that is the problem -- angels are not people. I keep looking for where the wings attach. I am saved by a God who becomes human, who as the text has it, "Did speak in many and various ways through the prophets but who has now spoken to us through a Son." I am saved by one who, in my denominational statement of faith, has shared our common lot. Angels are wonderful, but it seems to me, basically beyond their ability to have a personal relationship.
God so loved the world that he chose to become human. When I stop fighting my own humanity and chose to be human in the way Jesus is, there is a saving event for me and for the world.
John 1:1-14
I have little time for many of the news stories that make their usual appearances at Christmas. You cannot get through the holiday without some tale of how scientists have, at long last, figured out what comet, asteroid, or other heavenly phenomenon was responsible for the story of the star that came and rested over the place where Jesus was born. They leave me cold. However, the bare-bones style of John also leaves things a bit flat. We want real people responding, pondering, being afraid, and ready to consider legal maneuvering over odd birth circumstances, not to mention being stupid enough to close the door of the inn on the Savior of the world. We want drama, passion, and suspense. Many who have come home for the holiday do not want to be thrust into a classroom for a lecture on the Logos.
We have a hard time recapturing the mind set that could quiver and quake at the prospect that this Logos could take on flesh and dwell among us, to the point that you could see that he was full of grace and truth. In some sense, John was written to explain how it was that some folks could not see the things that were clear to John's community. It was an emotional issue for folks whose rabbi didn't get it, whose neighbors laughed at it, and whose children or parents were most definitely going to be left behind on this one. For John, a lot of people lived in the dark because the wind blows where it blows and had not brushed back the spiritual fog that shrouded their minds. The good news was that this darkness was contained and would not overcome the light. The bad news was that you might have to say good-bye to your cousin and your favorite butcher who now believed that you were cursed. "He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him."
A few years ago, a Boston Globe story stood John's imagery on end and yet expressed his fundamental point. The article reported that for scientists and other stargazers it is becoming increasingly difficult to see the heavens. According to the story we are not suffering from darkness but from light pollution. There is just too much light going around that prevents people from seeing.
Our children are exposed to too much light as they sit in front of flickering television and computer screens that may be robbing them of their childhood. We are not in a fog -- we are dazed by too much brilliance. It is widely reported that there is now a knock-down-drag-out affair to get preschoolers into elite nursery schools so they can go up the food chain to the right postgraduate schools and careers.
In my high school you never went wrong exercising your sparkling mind in brilliant put downs. In some ways we believed like Machiavelli, that "it is better to be feared than loved."
John seems to have it a bit wrong here. Not darkness, but too much brilliance gets in the way of our sight. However, the Gospel of Matthew offers another insight. "But if your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!"
"But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God." If my high school friends and I had taken up the offer, I suspect that all our children would be better off as a result of our receiving this gift.
Application
Christmas this year falls in a way that heightens a lot of the mixed feelings that many preachers bring to this day. Normally a day of family obligations and personal crashing of our usual routines, today will conflict with the expectations of Christmas Sunday. We want the day to confirm our expectations and strengthen our souls, not raise our guilt to new levels. In some sense we might play it straight and preach and pray as if there is no conflict or we do not have our own mixed feelings. The other option is to sail into the wind and recognize and define the conflict in a faithful way. Underneath the surface expression of our conflicted feelings is the real conflict of just what will "get us home." On this day what is the most saving thing to do for the long haul? How will the light that the darkness cannot overcome shine through in what we do this day? Or will this day be one more in which our brilliance and the usual abundance of earth generated light crowd out light from another source? In any event, God bless you, and "Merry Christmas."
An Alternative Application
Hebrews 1:1-4 (5-12). I cannot take my eyes off of the Hebrews text. Perhaps it is because it is the last one that I would choose to make part of the Christmas Day lectionary reading. What hits me is the economic and political language of the text. "But in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds." All things seem to mean more things than I want or imagine them to be. I can hear the chorus from Handel's Messiah singing, "And the government shall be upon his shoulder." What would it be like if this occurred? Would we be less concerned to hunker down into red state and blue state bunkers and more open to making purple? Would we be more about drawing lines in the sand or more open to making inclusive circles? If the government of my life were upon Jesus' shoulder would I put more effort into trying to be everywhere than in his kingdom?
Preaching The Psalm
Psalm 98
Some people are gifted in music. They can sit down and play an instrument the first time they touch it. Others are not so blessed. For them, music comes with difficulty. Carrying a tune is hard, even if they have a bucket. But gifted or not, it seems that most of us share a love of the music we already know. Whether it's hymns or popular music, classical or country, we all relax into the strains of music we find familiar. Like a favorite chair or flannel shirt, we cling to the comfort of what we know.
At Christmastime, we see this in our love of the great, old carols. We delight in the sounds and warm each year to the memories that populate each note we sing.
And yet, on this day we hear the psalmist urging us to "sing a new song."
A new what? What's going on here? Is there something wrong with the old songs? Why on earth should a new song be sung -- especially at this time of year? The resistance to learning and singing new songs is palpable. It can be felt in the cold winter air.
When it comes to Christmas and Easter, some of us don't like new songs much at all. New songs take energy to learn. New songs jolt us out of our comfort zone. New songs mean new words, new notes. They mean ... change.
But a new song is exactly what this day calls us to sing. Jesus Christ is born! God is doing a new thing, a mighty thing, and what could be more fitting than a new song? What could be more appropriate than singing new notes of praise, shouting new lyrics of love and fidelity? Can we do anything less than compose a new symphony of praise? Would we dare to do anything else but make a new and joyful noise to a God who comes to journey with us through these difficult days?
It's Christmas. The baby is born. The Messiah is come, and new possibilities hang on the air like incense in a cathedral. Should we? Could we? Dare we? Perhaps, for a moment, we might step out of our comfort and ease to welcome the one who is born into the cold. Maybe we might -- just this once -- set aside the familiar well-worn tunes to try a few verses of something new?
Try it. Make it up, even. Hum a few bars, and maybe everyone could join in the new song together. For indeed, this God child deserves a new song. Come, let's sing it together.
Colville's reflection on the conflict of the beastly disordered universe of the horse versus the ordered might of the steam locomotive sums up my feelings as we hit Christmas Day. The season is a minefield on which the struggles between Christ and culture are fought out. It is one thing to fight out these struggles in a seminary classroom, quite another to find yourself dealing with a child who cannot imagine why, on God's green earth, they should go to church on Christmas Day. Having been raised in the Christ and culture mindset where the church is supposed to transform the culture, I look with interest to see just who is going to transform what on Christmas Day. One of my annual rights upon receiving the calendar for the new year is to check and see if this is the year that Christmas falls on Sunday. The commercial empire has already taken over Caesar's role and now the turn of the calendar feels like the final knockout blow. Pastors are of two minds in this moment. Don't we find ourselves both denouncing the culture and wanting to be a part of it at the same time? Who wants to be working on Christmas Day? Whose family wants you to be taken away from the culturally defined protocol of the day's activities? Like Colville's painting there is disaster pending.
Of course, there is a school of thought, behind the service of lessons and carols, that says if we just repeat the story softly and slowly, we can be out of here in a jiff without having done too much damage. Who can go wrong with the evocation of manger, Wise Men, and shepherds? After checking the secular calendar for an accident about to happen we had better be sure to check what the lectionary might do to us. I am ready to sue.
With all that could be available to us, we are presented with the choices of three texts that seem to have been chosen by the original scrooge. There will be no manger scene to distort, no terrified shepherds or Wise Men slotted into arriving at the wrong time. There will be no eloquent Handel-like readings from the Hebrew Scriptures. Even in most Bibles the hymn-like poetic quality of the last two texts is masked by their arrangement on the page. There will be no talk of virgins conceiving or nasty innkeepers. I know what happens when a new denominational hymnal trifles with the tunes and telling of this story. There will be flesh, engine parts, and torn up rail ties scattered everywhere.
Of course, the days when there will be even more terrific tension from competing claims headed for a collision course will be the weeks and months to come when, as Paul puts it, we will have to work out our salvation in fear and trembling. As a matter of fact, by Christmas afternoon those who have loaded up on the secular version of the holiday will be wondering whether the effort was worth it. The texts assigned to Christmas Day seem geared to helping us in the days to come as much as to cherish this day. Isaiah proclaims that the exiles are going home. The letter to the Hebrews announces that in the Christmas events we have been touched by something that is much more than an angel. The gospel says that we have seen the glory of God in the Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us. Certainly, these texts challenge the mood and tenor of this day. However, they can lead us through the living of the rest of our days showing us wisdom and granting us grace.
Isaiah 52:7-10
"We are going home." At those words there is dead silence in one of the final scenes from the movie, M*A*S*H. Any veteran who has spent a good deal of the tour of duty counting the days knows the power of those words. Many Vietnam veterans know the pain that came when, having gotten home, they did not feel at home. On their arrival home, there was a country so conflicted that it was in many ways unsure of how to welcome them home. Many returnees brought home excess baggage that needed tending to before they settled in. For both veterans and non-veterans, the lyrics in "I'll Be Home For Christmas" bring tears to their eyes, for even when they are at home it does not always feel like being at home.
Isaiah's announcement is addressed to sixth-century B.C. Hebrew exiles who will find the fulfillment of this promise in the right of return granted by the Persian King Cyrus. Yet, for some veterans, and the characters portrayed in M*A*S*H, as well as some newly released prisoners from jail, there is some uncertainty about their desire to return home. They have settled in careers, developed friendships, and had some of the most significant experiences of their lives far from home. Verse 11 seems to take a more intense turn, "Depart, depart, go out from there! Touch no unclean thing; go out from the midst of it, purify yourselves, you who carry the vessels of the Lord." It seems that exile was a place where folks could get contaminated and comfortable. The book of Daniel seems to preserve a memory of some folks having done well, while in exile others tried to pass into the alien culture.
Yet, "How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger ... who brings good news," we are going home. Of course, we do not know where Jesus is headed, but we do know that he goes to prepare a place for us and that place looks like home. Usually, the post-birth anxiety mounts as the parents prepare to take the baby home. In this case, the anxiety mounts as the baby prepares to take us home to meet our heavenly parent.
In chapter 51, Isaiah writes that the people have gotten far from home because, "You have forgotten the Lord, your Maker, who stretched out the heavens and laid the foundations of the earth. You fear continually all day long because of the fury of the oppressor, who is bent on destruction. But where is the fury of the oppressor?" Our forgetting has been the root of our fear. Has not the world become less hospitable because we live less out of a sense of abundance and more out of a fear of depletion? Currently, the planet could safely sustain all of its habitants, yet many have too much and even more have too little. Having forgotten in whose image we are made we live as if we can find home by having more to live on than to live for.
Much ink has been spilled on whether in Second Isaiah, from which our text is drawn, the suffering servant is an individual or the nation. One thing is certain; that if there is to be a home then there will have to be a suffering servant somewhere. If home is a place where we can feel safe and find strength and experience growth it will have to do with somebody (or bodies) standing with and up to us at the same time.
How beautiful is the one who announces that God is ready to lead us home. This is good news that will outlast this day. The one we celebrate this day, through his life, teaching, death, and resurrection, can make a home of this planet and the places where we live. He can take us home.
Hebrews 1:1-4 (5-12)
My expectation of Dickensian characters dressed in costume attentively listening in candlelight to a reading of the King James Version of prophecy and natal pageant comes crashing headlong into this lectionary reading. "The exact imprint of God's very being," and "When he had made purification for sins." The words send me back to "seminary thinking." This accident about to happen leaves me wondering how I will apologize for this sidetrack into a theological twilight zone. The commentaries seem to provide little help as they offer no unanimity as to who were the Hebrews and just what form inspired this document. About the only unanimity lies in the certainty that it was not Paul who wrote this.
Worse yet, in a culture infused with a fascination with angels, as evidenced by the television series, Touched By An Angel, the letter seems to go out of its way to put angels in their place. "Of the angels he says, 'He makes his angels winds, and his servants flames of fire.' " In other words, angels burn out like a match and quickly blow out to sea. "And, 'In the beginning, Lord, you founded the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands; they will perish, but you remain; they will all wear out like clothing; like a cloak you will roll them up, and like clothing they will be changed. But you are the same, and your years will never end.' " In short, where angels operate and where they live will be history, while God endures. A solid theological point that I might not want to make to a congregation where the competition for the angel parts in the pageant has been intense and where the last grandma I visited showed me her precious century-old angel that will go on the top of the tree. If we do not have angels, can it be Christmas?
Before you brace for the collision and the inevitable clean up of horse and engine parts, consider that in its own way this text may have drawn out a fundamental truth of the Christmas story. We are saved not by angels or even by a preoccupation with them but by a Savior. It seems the recipients of this letter have allowed their faith, like many of our living rooms this Christmas morning, to become cluttered with what the belief and the story come wrapped in. Like some children this Christmas morning, to the horror of their parents, many of us find ourselves playing with the box and the wrapping that the faith comes in rather than enter into what was intended. Consider how easily we can get sidetracked by the Christmas buildup and in managing the externals of the faith, all to the detriment of the eternal.
We need something more than angels to accomplish salvation. Several theological strains testify to this truth. The reality of the cross and the Good Friday experience is certainly on the back burner in the way we celebrate Christmas. However, Matthew's rendition of Herod's antics puts them front and center. Clearly, angels are well beyond the cross. Frankly, while I can enjoy an angel as well as the next guy, I just can't quite bring myself to relate to them. Even the characters from Touched By An Angel leave me somewhat cold. Nice enough people, but well, that is the problem -- angels are not people. I keep looking for where the wings attach. I am saved by a God who becomes human, who as the text has it, "Did speak in many and various ways through the prophets but who has now spoken to us through a Son." I am saved by one who, in my denominational statement of faith, has shared our common lot. Angels are wonderful, but it seems to me, basically beyond their ability to have a personal relationship.
God so loved the world that he chose to become human. When I stop fighting my own humanity and chose to be human in the way Jesus is, there is a saving event for me and for the world.
John 1:1-14
I have little time for many of the news stories that make their usual appearances at Christmas. You cannot get through the holiday without some tale of how scientists have, at long last, figured out what comet, asteroid, or other heavenly phenomenon was responsible for the story of the star that came and rested over the place where Jesus was born. They leave me cold. However, the bare-bones style of John also leaves things a bit flat. We want real people responding, pondering, being afraid, and ready to consider legal maneuvering over odd birth circumstances, not to mention being stupid enough to close the door of the inn on the Savior of the world. We want drama, passion, and suspense. Many who have come home for the holiday do not want to be thrust into a classroom for a lecture on the Logos.
We have a hard time recapturing the mind set that could quiver and quake at the prospect that this Logos could take on flesh and dwell among us, to the point that you could see that he was full of grace and truth. In some sense, John was written to explain how it was that some folks could not see the things that were clear to John's community. It was an emotional issue for folks whose rabbi didn't get it, whose neighbors laughed at it, and whose children or parents were most definitely going to be left behind on this one. For John, a lot of people lived in the dark because the wind blows where it blows and had not brushed back the spiritual fog that shrouded their minds. The good news was that this darkness was contained and would not overcome the light. The bad news was that you might have to say good-bye to your cousin and your favorite butcher who now believed that you were cursed. "He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him."
A few years ago, a Boston Globe story stood John's imagery on end and yet expressed his fundamental point. The article reported that for scientists and other stargazers it is becoming increasingly difficult to see the heavens. According to the story we are not suffering from darkness but from light pollution. There is just too much light going around that prevents people from seeing.
Our children are exposed to too much light as they sit in front of flickering television and computer screens that may be robbing them of their childhood. We are not in a fog -- we are dazed by too much brilliance. It is widely reported that there is now a knock-down-drag-out affair to get preschoolers into elite nursery schools so they can go up the food chain to the right postgraduate schools and careers.
In my high school you never went wrong exercising your sparkling mind in brilliant put downs. In some ways we believed like Machiavelli, that "it is better to be feared than loved."
John seems to have it a bit wrong here. Not darkness, but too much brilliance gets in the way of our sight. However, the Gospel of Matthew offers another insight. "But if your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!"
"But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God." If my high school friends and I had taken up the offer, I suspect that all our children would be better off as a result of our receiving this gift.
Application
Christmas this year falls in a way that heightens a lot of the mixed feelings that many preachers bring to this day. Normally a day of family obligations and personal crashing of our usual routines, today will conflict with the expectations of Christmas Sunday. We want the day to confirm our expectations and strengthen our souls, not raise our guilt to new levels. In some sense we might play it straight and preach and pray as if there is no conflict or we do not have our own mixed feelings. The other option is to sail into the wind and recognize and define the conflict in a faithful way. Underneath the surface expression of our conflicted feelings is the real conflict of just what will "get us home." On this day what is the most saving thing to do for the long haul? How will the light that the darkness cannot overcome shine through in what we do this day? Or will this day be one more in which our brilliance and the usual abundance of earth generated light crowd out light from another source? In any event, God bless you, and "Merry Christmas."
An Alternative Application
Hebrews 1:1-4 (5-12). I cannot take my eyes off of the Hebrews text. Perhaps it is because it is the last one that I would choose to make part of the Christmas Day lectionary reading. What hits me is the economic and political language of the text. "But in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds." All things seem to mean more things than I want or imagine them to be. I can hear the chorus from Handel's Messiah singing, "And the government shall be upon his shoulder." What would it be like if this occurred? Would we be less concerned to hunker down into red state and blue state bunkers and more open to making purple? Would we be more about drawing lines in the sand or more open to making inclusive circles? If the government of my life were upon Jesus' shoulder would I put more effort into trying to be everywhere than in his kingdom?
Preaching The Psalm
Psalm 98
Some people are gifted in music. They can sit down and play an instrument the first time they touch it. Others are not so blessed. For them, music comes with difficulty. Carrying a tune is hard, even if they have a bucket. But gifted or not, it seems that most of us share a love of the music we already know. Whether it's hymns or popular music, classical or country, we all relax into the strains of music we find familiar. Like a favorite chair or flannel shirt, we cling to the comfort of what we know.
At Christmastime, we see this in our love of the great, old carols. We delight in the sounds and warm each year to the memories that populate each note we sing.
And yet, on this day we hear the psalmist urging us to "sing a new song."
A new what? What's going on here? Is there something wrong with the old songs? Why on earth should a new song be sung -- especially at this time of year? The resistance to learning and singing new songs is palpable. It can be felt in the cold winter air.
When it comes to Christmas and Easter, some of us don't like new songs much at all. New songs take energy to learn. New songs jolt us out of our comfort zone. New songs mean new words, new notes. They mean ... change.
But a new song is exactly what this day calls us to sing. Jesus Christ is born! God is doing a new thing, a mighty thing, and what could be more fitting than a new song? What could be more appropriate than singing new notes of praise, shouting new lyrics of love and fidelity? Can we do anything less than compose a new symphony of praise? Would we dare to do anything else but make a new and joyful noise to a God who comes to journey with us through these difficult days?
It's Christmas. The baby is born. The Messiah is come, and new possibilities hang on the air like incense in a cathedral. Should we? Could we? Dare we? Perhaps, for a moment, we might step out of our comfort and ease to welcome the one who is born into the cold. Maybe we might -- just this once -- set aside the familiar well-worn tunes to try a few verses of something new?
Try it. Make it up, even. Hum a few bars, and maybe everyone could join in the new song together. For indeed, this God child deserves a new song. Come, let's sing it together.
