This is a glorious time of year. I am looking forward to
the cantata next week, the candlelight communion service on
Christmas Eve, and of course, the special day itself.
This season is also known for the ubiquitous Christmas
pageant - ours is done, but there are others all around. I read
recently (1) of a heated discussion between some pleading grown-ups
and a particularly adamant five-year-old. She would wear her new
dress or she would not appear in the pageant. First, the
Director begged her, "Please put on the costume. The people want
to see you as MARY."
"NO," replied the girl, "Either I wear this new red dress or
I will not go out on the stage."
Next, her Sunday School teacher pleaded with her: "This
costume is just like Mary would have worn. Mary was the mother
of Jesus and you want to look right for the part, don't you?"
"NO!" answered the little girl. "Either I wear this new red
dress or I will not go out on the stage."
Finally her parents instructed her, "You must wear this
costume, because when you are on stage, the people need to think
of you as Mary and they will be confused if you are not dressed
right."
"NO!" said the girl. "If I can't wear my new red dress, I
am not going out there."
Clearly, the adults were getting nowhere. An emergency
conference was convened. It was already past time for the play
to begin. The Director stepped out from behind the curtains and
announced, "Due to circumstances beyond our control, Mary the
mother of Jesus will appear tonight in a new red dress."
From behind the curtain, the audience could clearly hear a
young voice shout, "If Mary had had a new red dress that night,
she would have worn it." Ho, Ho, Ho!
I know the thing I enjoy most about the season is the
excitement I see on children's faces. My kids have outgrown
talking to shopping mall Santas, but one day I hope to have that
joy again with grandchildren. Charles Dickens wrote, "I have
always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round...as a
good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only
time I know of in the long calendar of the year, when men and
women seem by one consent to open their shut up hearts
freely...And therefore... though it has never put a scrap of gold
or silver in my pocket, I believe that it HAS done me good, and
WILL do me good; and I say, God bless it." Merry Christmas...
Merry, Merry Christmas!
Or perhaps I should say, "Merry XMAS." After all, that is
the greeting with which we are annually faced. We see it in
department store windows. It is on the cards we receive. Nine
glorious, gilded letters are strung, sagging in the middle across
doorways and halls and aisles all over the English-speaking world
cheerfully celebrating one of the great events in history...the
birth of "X." Merry Xmas!
No, this has nothing to do with the trumped up "War on
Christmas" that Fox News has been battling for the past couple of
years - complaints about greetings of "Happy Holidays" rather
than specific references to the Nativity. Now, apparently, even
Fox is getting tired of the issue so, a couple of weeks ago, Bill
O'Reilly simply declared victory - and he had won the war
virtually on his own, according to him. He asserted, "If I had
not done the campaign, then the forces of darkness would have
won. There's no question about that." It is, however, a bit
ironic that Bill announced victory in an interview with Alexia
Kelley, executive director of Catholics in Alliance for the
Common Good, who was on his show promoting an observance of
Christmas that laid less emphasis on giving and receiving gifts
and more on the blessed birth and the teachings of that babe of
Bethlehem emphasizing love of neighbor and care for the poor.
O'Reilly's reaction? "Ai-yai-yai...if that's the way you think,
how is Christmas in the Land of Oz? Do you celebrate it any
differently?" (2) Good job, Bill-o, good job. And a hearty Merry
Xmas to you too.
Has that ever bothered you? Merry X-mas? Years ago, C. S.
Lewis in Letters to an American Lady wrote, "Just a hurried
line...to tell a story which puts the contrast between OUR feast
of the Nativity and all this ghastly 'Xmas' racket at its lowest.
My brother heard a woman on a bus say, as the bus passed a church
with a Crib outside it, "Oh Lor'! They bring religion into
everything. Look--they're dragging it even into Christmas now!" (3)
For years folks have complained about that "XMAS"
abbreviation. They shout, "Keep Christ in Christmas," decrying
the commercialization of the whole season along with Ms. Kelley
as much as the use of "X." Half of the complaint is valid. No
one would deny that the season has been taken over by the wizards
of mass marketing in their quest to be the first-est with the
most-est. Most of us remember the not too distant past when
Christmas advertising began on the day after Thanksgiving. Now
we get it in late September. I am told that buyers for the major
retail chains begin their search for Christmas merchandise in
February and March. There is no question as to the over-commercialization of Christmas.
As to the other part of the complaint...the X...there is
less validity. To the English-speaking world, X is simply the
twenty-fourth letter of the alphabet. But to the Greeks, the
ones in whose language the New Testament was written, those
diagonally-crossed lines are the letter "Chi," the first letter
in the name "Christos," the Messiah. Through the years it has
been an acceptable abbreviation for Christ. If you look at the
lecture notes I took years ago in seminary, you will see it all
over the place.
To backtrack a moment, I am less than accurate when I say
that "X" to us is only a letter of the alphabet. Any math
student would happily correct me. In algebra, it represents an
unknown: 2+3=X...3x3=X. But suppose for a moment that the "X" in
XMAS also represented an unknown, not "the Word made Flesh," as
our lesson puts it. Suppose the Babe of Bethlehem were just
another of the countless millions through the centuries who are
born and die with no notice taken of them by any history. In
short, suppose Christ had never come.
It would not be difficult to imagine those in Bethlehem not
realizing that anything remarkable was taking place that night.
To the travelers who had arrived before Mary and Joseph, there
may have been some twinges of compassion at the sight of the
young couple (the woman VERY pregnant) making their way through
dark and dusty streets, but none apparently made any offers of
help, not for an "X." To the Roman legionnaire who stood watch,
on guard for any signs of trouble in the crowded town, the unborn
"X" was just one more potential rebel in that troubled land.
What if they had been right? Assume they were and picture
the result for the world. Several authors have written books
through the years on the condition of this planet if indeed that
Bethlehem child had been merely an "X"...not Christ at all.
Henry Rogers was one of those and his work was called The Eclipse
of Faith. (4) In it he imagines that some powerful hand has wiped
the influence of Christ out of our civilization, as a hand would
clean a blackboard in a schoolroom. Rogers represents himself as
going into his library to find no trace left of the life or words
of Jesus. All had vanished. The law books that provided
protection for widows, children, and the poor showed pages blank
except for the numbers at the bottom. Chapters had important
paragraphs missing turning them into meaningless jargon.
Suitably alarmed, he turned himself to his histories of art,
and where "The Transfiguration" and "The Last Supper" had been,
he found empty spaces. He pictured a tour through the great
galleries of the world and found frame upon empty frame that had
once contained the work of the great masters. As a lover of
architecture he envisioned the beautiful cathedrals of Rome,
Paris and Milan; he saw what was once Westminster Abbey. In each
case the only thing remaining was a huge, gaping crater of a
cellar. After all, they had been constructed in the design of a
cross, and without the one who had been sacrificed on the cross,
there would have been no call for constructing a building in the
shape of one. He considered the greatest poems of Dante and
Milton, of Wordsworth and Tennyson and again found empty pages
and, indeed, empty books. Finally, Rogers realized that, if
Christ had not come, the beautiful philanthropies, the missions,
the hospitals, the schools that have had such a magnificent
influence both at home and abroad, would all perish, as if shaken
down by some cosmic earthquake. It was a shattering view.
I suppose there are those who would not find the sight so
devastating. They would be willing to sacrifice some art, some
literature, some history for the sake of argument. They would
admit that it would be sad to lose these great masterpieces, but
life would go on. After all, the innate genius of the human
spirit would make up the difference. "Every day in every way we
get better and better." Nice thought...but it is a lie!
Libraries could be filled with the gory tales of "Man's
inhumanity to man." The Bible is more realistic - it calls us
all sinners.
But the humanist comes back and says, "No! Auschwitz,
Hiroshima, My Lai, Haditha - these are done in the name of
institutions, not humankind. Men and Women are GOOD! It is the
institutions that are evil. If poverty and ignorance were wiped
out and each one got a slice of the pie, everything would be all
right." Nice try. I wonder how often through the centuries have
utopian societies been attempted, only to fail every time. Is it
because they have become institutions, or is it because they were
populated by human beings? The latter, I fear, because after
all, institutions are merely OUR creations to better organize
society. Mark Twain said it best - "Man is the only animal that
blushes...or needs to."
But the most disheartening thought is that all this is true
in spite of the fact that Christ DID come, that the child of
Bethlehem WAS more than just another baby. Without that birth,
we would be immeasurably worse off.
Think about the world as it existed before the coming of
Christ. We take for granted what only centuries of Christian
influence have brought about. No longer do we concern ourselves
about questions of human slavery, but it existed that night in
Bethlehem. Women are no longer considered as little more than
property, but they were that evening in the Judean hills. The
hard labor of little children is today prohibited by law in
civilized society, but it was not around that manger. Human
sacrifice would be considered unthinkable today, but on that most
precious night, it was occurring in countries all around Israel.
Little babies born less than perfect are no longer routinely
drowned or left to starve, but they were in that day.
No one would deny that we still live in a terribly imperfect
world. We continue to be plagued with horrible examples of what
people do to each other - the holocaust of the Nazis, genocide in
Darfur, 9/11, continued terrorist attacks on innocent civilians.
In the third world today we see governments more concerned about
fighting rebels than feeding their starving millions. The news
is filled with stories of individual murder, rape, and robbery...
all in spite of two thousand years of the influence of the God
who loved creation so much as to take on its form to show us ever
after how we are expected to live. How much worse could it have
been without that influence?
Indeed, there is much that we would have lost had Christ not
come. Most certainly, we would have had a much different picture
of what God is like. As we read through the Old Testament, we
are struck by the awesome presence of a jealous and vengeful
Creator, one who has...and uses...a mighty power to destroy the
earth in a flood; one who rains fire on Sodom and Gomorrah in
anger; one who wages all-out war against enemies. Over and over
again, we are confronted with an apparently merciless portrait.
To be sure, the picture is incomplete, but the gentle, forgiving,
sympathetic aspects of the one we call "Our Father" are much less
noticeable.
A preacher came into a kindergarten-age Sunday School class
to speak with the children. He asked one little girl, "Do you
love Jesus?"
"Oh yes," she said, "but I hate God."
You see, that is part of the reason Christ had to come. Had
he not, we might never have had a true picture of God...one who
loves us in spite of our sin.
But, of course, there was more reason. He came to die for
us...to die that we might live. The God of justice in the Old
Testament had made certain stipulations as to what a right
relationship required and the basis of it was a system of
offerings and sacrifices that human beings had made virtually of
no effect. So in divine love, God substituted one all-encompassing sacrifice that gave humanity another chance...the
Babe of the Manger became the Christ of the Cross.
Love came down at Christmas
Love all lovely, love divine
Love was born at Christmas
Star and angels gave the sign. (5)
That love is SO important. Had Jesus been nothing more than
a nameless, faceless "X," how would we manage when our lives
begin to tumble in around us? When we have lost someone more
dear to us than we could ever express? When our families are
falling apart? When the job is lost or when business goes down
the tubes? In the middle of the darkest night, as we lie there
thinking about the disaster area we call LIFE, to whom would we
go...if not to Jesus?
We needed Jesus that night in Bethlehem. We need him now.
And we will continue to need him in the same way until he comes
again...not as a helpless infant, but as a mighty conqueror.
Then there will be no question as to whether or not he was more
than an "X." In that day, "every knee should bow...and every
tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord."
Go, tell it on the mountain,
Over the hills and everywhere;
Go, tell it on the mountain,
That Jesus Christ is born. (6)
Yes, this IS a glorious time of the year...the music, the
celebration, the unpredictable pageants, the joy on the faces of
our children...even all the wishes of Merry Xmas. After all, he
is NOT an "X." He is Lord.
Amen!
1. Al Fasol, Humor with a Halo, (Lima, OH: C.S.S. Publishing, 1989), pp. 25-26
2. http://mediamatters.org/items/200712050006
3. Lewis, C. S., Letters to an American Lady, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967), p. 80
4. Quoted by Newell Dwight Hillis, "What If Christ Were Not?" The World's Great Sermons,
(Garden City, NY: Garden City Publishing, 1943), p. 200
5. Roger Copeland
6. African-American Spiritual
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