"An Authentic Christmas for All: The Work of Christmas"
The Magnificat: Four dimensions to the power of Christmas
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, December 23, 2007
Text: Luke 1:46-55
It is a truism to say that as our lives evolve over the years, the meaning of Christmas changes with them. Our memories of Christmases past often either fade away or seem irrelevant in the present and present Christmases will be the launching pad for new ones to come. As I dwelled on how Christmas changes so much for us in the course of a lifetime, I reminisced about what it was like to be a child at Christmas.
I remember one particular Christmas with great affection. I was just a young boy and I was so excited about Christmas Eve that I simply couldn't sleep at all. Around 2:00 a.m. I decided to go downstairs and look around the house. As I descended the stairs, who did I see sitting on the couch but my father, eating cake and drinking tea that I had specifically left for Santa Claus. The look of disgust on my face was matched by the look of surprise on my father's. He looked at me and said something like, “I was just making sure, son that Santa got up the chimney safely.”
Realizing it was a poignant moment, my father suggested that we sit down and have a little cake together. He also realized that out of the corner of my eye I had seen something I should not have: A gift I had asked Santa for, which he had kindly delivered. It was my first pair of soccer boots, tied together on the tree. My father realized there was no point in fighting it - I had to try them on. So he took me to one side, knelt before me, put the soccer boots on my feet and taught me how to lace them properly, for there is a technique. For about 20 minutes, through trial and error, I learned to tie my first soccer boots. After a while, my father and I ascended the stairs and went to bed. I kept my soccer boots on.
Many years later, on the last Christmas I spent with my father, things were different. My father had congestive heart failure and was very weak, and we were going to a party at a neighbour's home in Bridgetown, Nova Scotia. I remember helping him put on the red cardigan he had worn ever since I remember celebrating Christmas. I put his arms through the sweater, buttoned it up, and then realized that the most difficult task for my father was to put on his shoes. So I got on my knees, put his shoes on his swollen feet, tied up his laces and we went off to the party together.
Christmases change, don't they? Our memories alter; situations make it a different experience. I think if we're absolutely honest, many of us have a sense of Christmas that is somewhat frozen in a particular moment, or with particular symbols. Many of us have what I call a “Norman Rockwell” vision of Christmas. Those images were set almost immemorially in time when Rockwell captured them in his illustrations on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post: The cars on Main Street outside the bank and department store, and the church as people were getting ready to go to a Christmas Eve service. Santa stuffing his pants with toys, getting ready for his visit. The mother on her knees beside her daughter, who is in bed, saying her prayers on Christmas Eve. Yet even those memorable images pale in comparison to those like The Annunciation painted by Botticelli in 1849, in which an angel appears to Mary in something like a Roman coliseum to announce the coming birth of the King of kings and Lord of lords. It's a magnificent painting, but again, it is frozen in time.
It's amazing how over the generations our images change; our memories change; Christmas changes. But every Christmas I ask myself the same question: Is there not something immutable about Christmas? For all the vicissitudes, the memories and the ebb and flow of traditions and ideas, is there not something that is almost timeless? The answer is, yes. Nowhere was that captured more than in today's passage, the Magnificat of Mary. The background for its writing and the form it may have taken originally are irrelevant compared to the theology within it. This one great statement contains the anticipation of what Christmas would mean and what the birth of the child Mary was carrying would do for the world. What it would do for the world was radical, dramatic and inspiring.
If you look carefully at the Magnificat, you will find four dimensions to the power of Christmas. They are what I like to call the “down-reach,” “in-reach,” “out-reach” and “up-reach” of Christmas. Mary expressed the “down-reach” when she said, “He who is mighty has done marvellous things.” The language we use to describe this is spatially oriented, although it doesn't need to be. The Mighty One - the God of the universe, the God of Israel - has done something powerful. As I suggested in my sermon last Sunday, God has come and dwelled among us, full of grace and truth. By coming into our midst, breaking into our world, God has done something mighty.
I have read a plethora of books, particularly over the past year, that suggest the whole notion of the incarnation - God coming and dwelling among us - is simply a fabrication of the earliest Christian community. They suggest it is no more than an idea that was established at the end of the first and maybe the beginning of the second century in the Common Era. Yet modern scholarship, good scholarship, realizes that, in fact, the earliest Christians saw the fulfilment of something that was already being talked about before the incarnation, before the Magnificat of Mary. If you look at the literature of the second temple of Israel, there is a sense in which God will return personally to the temple and bring the exiles home. There will be a homecoming for those who are scattered throughout the world and the exiles will be led personally to the restoration of the power of the temple.
In the Targum of Judaism, there is a reference to a liberator who will be God's vice regent, doing God's work and restoring justice and peace within the world. As we read the Dead Sea scrolls, which precede the writing of the canon of the New Testament, we find the language of visitation. They describe God, to use an exact word, “coming” and dwelling among his people. There was an anticipation rampant within the Judaism of the day that God was going to do something marvellous and majestic in a personal way. So the earliest Christians, those who met Christ, saw in him the fulfilment of the wishes and dreams of their people. Here was God, coming in person, to do something powerful and liberating but, as I suggested a few Sundays ago, contrary to their symbols and ideas of what a sovereign would be. This is the testimony of the New Testament: God, in Christ, has come, reached down into the world of the ordinary and human, and done so in a loving, personal way. But what a vulnerable way - as a child.
The fact that he came as a child is precisely what makes the Christmas story so majestic and wonderful for children. Why is it that children can grasp the meaning and power of Christmas when they might not get any of the other Christian holidays or doctrines? They can identify with a child, one of their own. Now, agreed, they don't always get it right. They often don't even get the words of the pageants right. I heard about a pageant not long ago in which a child playing one of the kings said, “We come bringing gold, common sense and fur.” You write it down, and they still don't get it. But does it matter? Does it? No. The story of Christmas is the story of a child coming and dwelling among us. That's why Jesus emphasized that the wonder children have about Christmas is what you need if you're going to enter the kingdom of God.
There was a little boy who went shopping with his mother in Selfridges department store in London, which has an enormous toy section and great big, wonderful nativity scenes. The little boy started to cry and kick up a fuss, when all his mother wanted to do was show him all the beautiful trees, hanging balls and magnificent displays. The boy kept kicking and screaming and saying he wanted to go home. His mother said, “If you keep that up, Santa's not going to visit you.”
The little lad was still crying and mad as heck. So his mother said, “You're not going to get any Christmas dinner if you don't stop crying.”
She tried everything, but he still whined and complained until finally she realized that his shoelace was undone. She got on her knees to tie up his laces and something hit her. You know, the store didn't look the same from down there. It was just a series of table legs, wires, boots, and people's legs and large posteriors. There was nothing beautiful or magical about it down there at all. She realized for the first time what the child saw, so she decided to cheer him up using some positive, rather than negative statements. She asked him, “Would you like to see Santa?”
They lined up, and when the boy finally got to sit on Santa's knee, Santa asked, “What do you want for Christmas?”
The boy said, “I want to go home!”
Can you blame him? We often don't understand what children see. I really despise the fact that we want to take pageants and nativities away from children so much, because I think when we do so, children lose the magical image. They lose the symbol of God being one of them and dwelling among them. This isn't just some sort of religious idea; it is a powerful symbol that children can grasp and it can make their lives richer. The “down-reach” of Christmas is vital. It is what Christmas is all about.
So is the “in-reach.” Mary said, “You have remembered your lowly servant.” There she was alone and pregnant. What did she understand? That God understood her. Most of religion is about our vain attempts to know God, and we forget about the fact that God knows us. The real heart of Christmas isn't that we find God; it is that God finds us. Our souls are restored and the depths of our inner beings are moved by that God who knows and identifies with us. In the first chapter of Colossians, Paul uses the Greek word eikon to describe himself, meaning the exact representation of the being of God. Jesus knows and understands us. Whatever the plights of our consciences or worries of our hearts may be, whatever our joys and expectations, glories or losses, sadness or exaltation, God knows. God knows, and his Son shows us he knows. We need to allow that God to reach into us, to renew our souls and hearts. If there is one dimension of the power of Christmas that is really missing in today's world, it is the in-reach: Allowing God to touch us at the core of our being.
There is also the “out-reach” of Christmas. Mary said in a radical statement, “He has exalted the lowly; He has given freedom to the captives; He will feed the hungry.” For Mary, the bursting in of this child was a story of identification with those who are outcasts, those on the periphery. In an empire that was governed by Rome and a society that was often obsessed with religious laws, the coming of this Son was the coming of God to those who needed to be exalted because they were lowly.
That is why I think of all the English-language writers who have captured Christmas, it is Dickens who best understood the problems of the industrial revolution, the displacement of people in large cities, the needs of the poor and how many of them turned to crime, the plight of the prostitute and the outcast. Dickens was able to capture in a fictitious form what the Son of God wants us to be aware of in an incarnate form: The needs of others. If there's one thing I'd say to young people, it is that you might have a glorious life, great insights and wonderful opportunities before you, but do you know what really makes you great? It is capturing the outreach of Christmas. God's will and purpose are that we lift up those who are lowly, and care for those who are the poorest.
A beautiful poem by Howard Thurman put it this way:
When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among brothers,
To make music in the heart.
The work of Christmas is the outreach of Christmas. It's not just a case of lifting up the lowly, giving to the poor and struggling for justice. It is the whole sense of the reconciliation of the earth with God and our reconciliation with one another. I know some people say, “Don't we just pay lip service at Christmas to all this goodness and kindness, only on boxing day or the week thereafter to forget it and drop it?”
Well maybe, yes. But are we so naive as to think that true reconciliation does not take time? Christmas is not about magic and the flick of a switch. It is about having a passion for what God wants for the world and seeking to live it every single day.
It's like a parable about three monks living in a monastery. They could only speak one sentence, once a year on Christmas day. The first Christmas, Brother Thomas said, “I really like these mashed potatoes and gravy along with turkey.”
After 365 days went by, Brother Peter said, “I find the potatoes rather lumpy and I don't like the taste of the gravy.”
One year later, Brother Luke said, “I wish you two would stop this constant bickering.”
Reconciliation takes time. It takes listening to what God really wants for the world, and having the grace, obedience and humility to listen to it.
Lastly, there is the “up-reach” of Christmas, and this is surely the most powerful of all. Mary said, “My soul doth magnify the Lord.” Mary was overwhelmed by the awe of the occasion. She had no other words to say but that Abraham and his seed would be blessed forever and that her soul magnified God. What Mary had was awe.
Albert Einstein, who never associated with any particular religious movement and never declared that he was a religious man, wrote the following words. I read them recently and thought, “Yes! That's right!”
I'm not an atheist and I don't think of myself as a pantheist. The problem involved is far too vast for my limited mind. We are in the position (notice his language) of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows that someone must have written the books, but it does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they were written, but the child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books. It doesn't know quite what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvellously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws.
What I believe is that the most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer stand rapt in wonder and awe, is as good as dead, like a snuffed out candle.
How right he was, but I would go further. I would say that our awe and wonder is magnified by the fact that this hand in the universe has become a child and dwelled among us, full of grace and truth.
A few weeks ago I had an unpleasant fall on the ice and hurt my back. For a few days I was in such pain that I was the greatest Scrooge and Grinch you've ever met. Pain will do that. I was feeling sorry for myself, especially as Christmas was approaching. I was leaving work after a hard day and there were virtually no lights on in the sanctuary. As I walked along I realized that my shoelaces were undone, so I had to bend over to tie them up. I sort of got on one knee and put my other foot on the step of the chancel, and slowly tied up my shoes. All I could see as I looked up was the window with Christ knocking on the door. Suddenly I realized, “Stirling, this is the right way to be at Christmas: On your knees, even in your pain, in awe looking up at Jesus Christ.”
Surely that is the immutable Christmas. Surely that is the power of Christmas - the awe of Christmas - that will never change. May you have that Christmas in all its dimensions. Amen.