A CHRISTMAS POSTSCRIPT BY DR. SEUSS AND ST. LUKE

December 29, 1991

8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan

Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
Colossians 3:12-17
Luke 2:41-52

"...'Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?! But
they did not understand..." ~Luke 2:49, 50 (NRSV)

Someone, it seems, is always worrying that we might be
having too much fun at Christmas, or that the fun we're having is
not connected tightly enough to the birth of Jesus, or that
Christmas fun is not consistent with Christmas theology.

The protesters have objected to the secularization of
Christmas, the materialization of Christmas, the exploitation of
Christmas, in methods draconian and modest. Among the more
dramatic have to be the Puritans who, in addition to inventing
Thanksgiving, worried so much about Christmas fun that they
passed a law in 1659 banning any Christmas celebrating and fining
anyone caught merry-making five shillings.

Two years earlier the British Parliament abolished Christmas
as a public holiday, and before that celebrating Christmas was a
punishable offense in John Calvin's Geneva.

But perhaps the most famous Christmas protester of all was

the Grinch, the unforgettable character in Why the Grinch Stole
Christmas.

The creator of the Grinch, Theodore Geisel, known and loved
as Dr. Seuss, died this year.

If you do not know hin,
shame on you!

His books are best sellers
And you should own two!

The wonderful thing about Dr. Seuss was that his books were
about important ideas. The other wonderful thing about Dr. Seuss
is that his books are fun to read. Poetry is an oral, audible,
sensory medium: You must speak it and hear it in order to get

it. Dr. Seuss knew how to write in a way that simply insisted on
being spoken. |

"Do you like green eggs and ham?

"I do not like them, Sam-I-an.
I do not like green eggs and ham.

"Would you like them here or there?

"IT would not like them here or there.
I would not like them anywhere.

"I do not like green eggs and han.
I do not like them, Sam—I-am."

[Green Eggs and Ham]

Now that's language demanding to be read aloud. Dr. Seuss's
secret was marketing it as children's literature so that adults
would have a legitimate excuse for doing something most of us
would not otherwise find it possible to do, namely sit down alone
and read out loud...

"On the last day of summer

ten hours before fall,

my grandfather took me

out to the Wall.

For a while he stood silent

Then finally he said,

with a very sad shake

of his very old head,

‘As you know, on this side of the Wall

we are Yooks.

On the far side of this Wall

live the Zooks.!

Then my grandfather said,

‘It's high time that you knew

of the terribly horrible thing that Zooks do.
In every Zook house and in every Zook town
every Zook eats his bread

with the butter side down.'"

(The Butter Battle Book]

That is from the Butter Battle Book which is one of the
clearest and most cogent analyses of the arms race, the rise of
-militarism and the role played by the military/industrial complex
in this nation.

So - he will be missed, and his books will continue to be
read, particularly the one which put him at least in sympathy
with the Christmas protesters.

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The Grinch was one of those difficult and unpleasant people
who worry that the rest of us are having too much fun at Christ-
mas.

"The Grinch hated Christmas!

The whole Christmas season!

Now, please don't ask why.

No one quite knows the reason.

It could be his head wasn't screwed on just right.

-It could be perhaps, that his shoes were too tight.
But I think that the most likely reason of all

may have been that his heart was two sizes too small."

So the Grinch decided to do something about it.

in Who-ville Christmas was celebrated with great enthusiasm,
a mountain of toys in each house, a great feast which all the
Whos attended, and after the feast, singing, in which alli the
Whos joined, holding hands.

The Grinch hated that most... that Singing...

So on Christmas Eve, after every Who was asleep, he came
agown from his mountain, down every chimney, stole all the
presents, toys, treats, decorations, trees, stuffed all of it
back up each chimney, and at the end, reached down and took even
the Christmas log from each fireplace, and carried it all up the
mountain to dump it over the other side.

Chicago scholar, Susan Thistlethwaite, in an appreciative
year-end essay in Christianity and Crisis asked, "What can we in
religion say about the flat-out loss of Christmas as a dramatic
ritual of the Christian year that the Grinch does not say in a

much more vigorous and vinegary way?" [Christianity and Crisis,
12/11/91, p. 379]

The Grinch is actually one voice ina very old chorus of
voices, from within the Christian church: Warning that the
message and meaning of Christmas can get lost in the midst of the
celebration of Christmas, observing that by a kind of curious
perverse logic, the bigger Christmas becomes, the more distance
appears between the festivities and their origins. The solution
has often been radical. Do away with Christmas altogether. No

Christmas is better than this pagan circus this year-end orgy of
spending.

And while that may be taking your indignation too far, the
thought does occur, does it not, when the horns are blaring at
Chestnut and Michigan, and the cabbies are cursing at the pedes-
trians who won't obey the traffic lights, and the Santa Claus
drummer is back flailing away, and two drunks are fighting, anda
homeless man is rummaging through the garbage can in front of the

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church, jostled and shoved by oversized Crate and Barrel boxes
and Henri Bendel shopping bags.

The thought does occur; but my proposal is that this whole
issue is anticipated by and addressed by the writer who is the
one responsible for Christmas - St. Luke himself...

New Testament scholars conclude that Luke, an elegant,
scholarly writer, wrote his account of the life and ministry of
Jesus a generation after the fact and started with Jesus as a
thirty-year-old man. My suggestion was and is that when Luke's
little book circulated within the early Christian community, when
Mary, Jesus' mother read it - and she alone still alive who was
there, who bore him, nursed him, raised him, nurtured him, par-
ented him through childhood and adolescence, young adulthood -
she, Mary, sat Luke down and told him stories he didn't know and
suggested that perhaps his account of her son's life might be
more accurate if it included the real beginning. So she told him
about her pregnancy, and how frightening and awesome it was. And
she told him about her dear old Aunt Elizabeth, and how they were
pregnant together and how the whole business left her Uncle
Zachariah speechless. And she told him about the trip to Bethle-
hem and the inn and the stable and the shepherds. She told about
taking the baby to the Temple for dedication and she told him
about an incident that happened when Jesus was twelve and the
family had traveled to Jerusalem for Passover. And Luke thought
about it, and wrote it down and inserted it, as a proper intro-
duction to the main story. And he included in the story of the
birth this single curious incident that happened twelve years
after Jesus was born and eighteen years before he began his
public ministry. (Please understand that no one knows how the
material came to be written down and that my suggestion about
Mary's role is based only on speculation. )}

The whole family - uncles, aunts, cousins, brothers and
sisters - traveled to Jerusalem for Passover. It was a festive,
happy occasion, a kind of mobile family reunion. When they
headed home, after a day's travel, Mary and Joseph notice that
Jesus is not there. So they head back, another day's journey, to
find him in the Temple conversing with the leaders and teachers
of the law. Parents will understand how happy they were and then
quickly, how angry. Children rather enjoy the fact that: he is
holding his own with adults. Adolescents are delighted that
Jesus challenged his parents! authority and was strong enough to
assert his own individuality.

It is a wonderfully human story.
The definitive scholarly study of Luke's nativity account is
by Raymond E. Brown of Union Theological Seminary. Professor

Brown asks this basic question: What is the story doing in the
nativity section? Why did Luke include it? His answer puts St.

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Luke in close company with Dr. Seuss. Luke wants to make sure
his readers understand what the real Christmas issue is. From
Start to finish Luke wants his readers to ask about the identity
of this person - this Christ. "What Child is this?" is Luke's
defining question. Who is this who answers the barren longing
of poor people? Who is this who humble shepherds recognize?
Brown concludes that the story of Jesus in the Temple is there to
amplify and to keep that question alive.

He is one who will come to the Temple. That Temple, by the
way, was not like going to church. Rather - in Jerusalem - a
visit to the Temple was like a pilgrimage to the Capitol Build-
ing, Congress, the Supreme Court, White House. It was the polit-
ical, economic, moral as well as spiritual heart of the nation.
In fact, that's the way Jesus and his people thought. When you
are at the political and economic heart of things, you are deal-
ing with the spirit.

So Luke, at the outset, is defining this Christ and follow-
ing this Christ, as a demanding, exhilarating, often complicated
encounter with human life at its most human. The story of his
birth, so tender, so lovely, so meek and mild, is not complete,
Luke is saying, until you understand that the baby will come into
the center of life. As a matter of fact, Letty Russell [The
Christian Century, 12/4/91] observes that this story looks for-
ward to another time when he will come to the Temple and confront
the religious leaders again, and this time he will overturn
tables and physically throw them out, and in the process, seal
his own death warrant. So, it seems to me, if you simply stay
with Luke's Christmas story long enough, you will have something
of your holiday sentimentality at least corrected and your theol-
ogy challenged.

The temptation, of course, is to go to Bethlehem and never
leave. In a wonderful commentary on classic Christmas art,
Frederick Buechner looks at a picture of the flight into Egypt
and observes that it appears for all the world like a pleasant
family outing instead of a frightening escape from death in the
nick of time. "As long as he stays the babe in the manger,"
Buechner says, "he asks nothing harder than to love hin and
accept his love, and the temptation is thus to keep him a babe

forever, for our sakes and for his sake too." (The Faces of
Jesus, p. 67]

Well, you don't have to react violently against the way the
secular celebration really misses the point. You don't have to
be a Grinch. All you have to do is read the whole story or even
just the whole nativity, and you will make the connection between
the birth and the man, between the heart-warming sentiments of
Bethlehem and the heart-stirring story in Galilee and the heart-
breaking passion in Jerusalem. All you have to do is read the
whole story and you will begin, perhaps, to hear his claim on

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your life and to know his presence in places as political and
economic as.the Jerusalem Temple and your own life, your deci-
sions about what to do with it, for instance, and how to vote,
and how to use your resources, and how to conduct yourself sex-

ually, ethically,... that's what-.Jesus ~..twelve-year-old Jesus -
in the Temple means.

You know, when you strip away the cultural accouterments,
the whole commercial boondoggle which it has become, something
pure and good and holy is always there.

That is what happened in Who-ville, by the way. The Grinch
had pushed and pulled and shoved Christmas - all the decorations,
toys, trees - to the top of the mountain and just as he was about
to push it over the side, he stopped to listen to the sound
coming up the mountain from Who-ville.

"'They're just waking up. I know just what they'll] do!

Their mouths will hang open a minute or two.

Then the Whos down in Who-ville will all cry Boo-Hoo!
That's a noise,' grinned the Grinch,

‘That I simply Must hear!!

So he paused.

And the Grinch put his hand to his ear.

And he did hear a sound rising over the snow.

It started in low.

Then it started to grow...

But the sound wasn't sad!

Why, this sound sounded merry!

It couldn't be so!

But it WAS merry! VERY!

He stared down at Who-ville!

The Grinch popped his eyes!

Then he shook! What he saw was a shocking surprise!

Every Who down in Who-ville,

the tall and the small,

Was singing!

Without any presents at all!

He HADN'T stopped Christmas from coming!

IT CAME!

Somehow or other,

it came just the same!

And the Grinch,

with his grinch-feet ice-cold in the snow,

stood puzzling and puzzling:

'How could it be so?

It came without ribbons!

it came without tags!

It came without packages,

boxes or bags!!

And he puzzled three hours,

till his puzzler was sore.

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Then the Grinch thought of something

he hadn't before!

‘Maybe Christmas,' he thought,

‘doesn't come from a store,

'Maybe Christmas...perhaps...means.a little bit more!!!
And what happened then...?

Well...in Who-ville they say

that the Grinch's small heart

grew three sizes that day!"

There are perhaps more elegant ways of making the point, but
probably none more effective.

As the season begins to fade and the decorations come down,
and the tree is discarded, or packed away, hear the postscript,

which so many wise ones in the past know is the point of the
story.

The love which came in the child of Bethlehem became the
holy love of Jesus the Christ.

The sentiment it occasions in our hearts wants to become the

passionate discipleship of mature men and women to this Lord and
his kingdom on earth.

And the lovely singing which was carried to the top of the
mountain on the soft breeze of an early. Christmas morning
continues... that insistent lovely caroling that nothing seems
able finally to drown out, and which asks:

"What Child is this?"
"This, this is Christ the King."

Amen.

12/29/91