SERMON PREACHED BY
THE REVEREND DR. HAROLD T. LEWIS, RECTOR
CALVARY EPISCOPAL CHURCH,
PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA
ON THE FEAST OF THE NATIVITY OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST, 2007

 

 

"This shall be a sign unto you; you shall find the Babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger." (Luke 2:12)

 

Last week, I received from a parishioner (who will remain nameless) an E-mail entitled "Holiday Eating Tips." It is too long to cite in its entirety, but some of the tips were these: "Avoid carrot sticks. Anyone who puts carrot sticks on a holiday buffet table knows nothing of the Christmas spirit." Another: "Drink as much eggnog as you can. Who cares that it has 10,000 calories in every sip?" Or this one: "If something comes with gravy, use it." You get the idea. Last Sunday, I was speaking to another parishioner, whom I shall also protect with the shield of anonymity, who wore a multi-colored plaid shirt, an in-your-face Christmas-motif bowtie and a pin-striped suit. In defense of his sartorial envelope-pushing, which would cause the editors of GQ to have a stroke, he explained that Christmas is about excess!

 

And so it is. We over-eat, over-spend and over-decorate our houses. And nor is the church exempt from this deeply ingrained societal habit. While we make do with two modest bouquets of flowers on most Sundays of the year, tonight the church is abloom with a thousand poinsettias. And while our organ is normally the sole instrument accompanying our voices, tonight a brass quintet and tympani make our celebration more festive. And, (dare we say?) even people are in excess! And, as you know, I am not like some tacky preachers who use their Christmas sermons to berate those who have been less than assiduous in church attendance throughout the year. Rather I commend them for their theological insightfulness, for understanding the significance to our faith of the Nativity of Jesus Christ. Besides, the wise preacher knows that an excessive crowd translates into an excessive offering, which in this parish, by the way, is earmarked for outreach!

 

Now many Bah! Humbug! theologians, steeped in the God-forbid-we-should-have-a-good-time Protestant work ethic, would point to some of the practices I have mentioned as evidence of the commercialization of Christmas in particular and the decadence of society in general. They might even say that such practices manage to take the Christ out of Christmas! To such allegations, may I offer a hearty "Au contraire"? You see, all of these customs have theological underpinnings. Our excesses are but a feeble human attempt to match the excessive outpouring of God's love in sending His only Son to be born for us. Our gifting --- and re-gifting (which is the new euphemism for dumping-that-dreadful-tie-my-co-worker-gave-me-on-somebody-else) are expressions of our appreciation for that unspeakable gift of our Lord's Incarnation.

 

Our actions function as signs --- signs of that love, signs of our appreciation, signs of our gratitude. The only "requirement," as it were, is that we not lose sight of the fact that Jesus' Birth was called a sign. The angels tell the shepherds: "This shall be a sign unto you; you shall find the Babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger," which, lest we forget, is an animal's feeding trough. Now if we were writing the script, we would have had a proper crib, an elegantly embroidered layette set, and at least a halo, befitting Jesus' station. If we were writing the script, we would have reserved a suite at a hotel, ashamed of the fact that Jesus' earthly parents were too poor to afford decent housing, and too unimportant and too unconnected even to be offered a room with a local family. If we were writing the script, the first visitors to the Crèche would not be the lowlife shepherds, but some people on the A-lists from the Christmas parties we've been attending. We would conveniently choose to forget that Jesus would later make a point of associating almost exclusively with B-list folk --- prostitutes, tax-collectors and sinners --- throughout his ministry. If we were writing the script, we might have made Jesus into a nice guy to have around to utter a prayer or mumble a platitudinous Beatitude now and then, and not someone who believed himself to be called to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.

 

But thankfully, we did not write the script, for if we had we would have fashioned a Jesus unfit to minister, in the incomparable words of the Bidding Prayer at Lessons and Carols, to "the poor and the helpless; the hungry and the oppressed; the sick and those who mourn; the lonely and the unloved; the aged and the little children, and all those who know not the Lord Jesus." We would have a Jesus incapable of standing in solidarity with those people, many a stone's throw from this church, who because of abject poverty, inadequate housing and lack of access to health care, find laughable the claim that Pittsburgh is the most livable city in America!

 

The Jesus whose Nativity we would stage might be a savior incapable of helping to reform a nation which has lost its way, a nation which builds prisons at a more prodigious rate than schools; a nation whose leaders are the grandchildren of immigrants and yet which rails against the arrival of other "huddled masses yearning to breathe free"; a nation which has no compunction about sending its sons and daughters into a war many believe to be little more than a fool's errand.

 

Would the Jesus of our Nativity play be able to weep for his church, a church many of whose members now seem to believe that it is no longer the church's duty to minister to "all sorts and conditions" of people, and who wish instead to devise a "pure" church whose primary characteristic will be the conspicuous absence of women, racial minorities and those of homosexual orientation in leadership positions?

 

My sisters and brothers in Christ, could it be that our excessive revelings serve as a kind of antidote to the harsh back-story of Christmas? For in the "little town of Bethlehem" the oppressive regime of Caesar Augustus was a reality; the wickedness of Herod was a reality; taxation was a reality; the slaughter of the Holy Innocents was a reality. These realities remind us of the struggles with powers and principalities with which many must still contend today.

 

I would like to suggest, therefore, that the gifts (and the re-gifts) the eggnog, the decking of the halls --- and even our outlandish costumes --- are the signs of excess which serve as glimpses of that heavenly Jerusalem here on earth, where our Lord's wish may be fulfilled that in the world in which the Word was made flesh, everyone might have life and have it abundantly.

 

At this blessed season, then, as we leave this holy place, brimming with the excesses of the season, may the words of the great theologian and mystic Howard Thurman serve as our dismissal:
When the star in the sky is gone,??

When the Kings and Princes are home,

When the shepherds are back with their flocks,

The work of Christmas begins.

To find the lost,

To heal the broken,

To feed the hungry?

To release the prisoner,

To teach the nations,

To bring Christ to all,

To make music in the heart.

A m e n .