CHRISTMAS EVE

JOHN M. BUCHANAN, PASTOR
FOURTH PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
December 24, 1999

Every year when I sit down to write a sermon for Christmas Eve, I remember something
the great American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr said about Christmas sermons, He didn’t
like them. In fact, on Christmas Eve he intentionally looked for a church where the
service does not include a sermon. The reason, Niebuhr explained, is that the preacher is
not up to the task. The topic is too big. Better to leave it to the poets and musicians, who
have a way of expressing and celebrating truth without becoming so tedious—or boring.

My closest advisor tells me every year when she senses that I’m starting to fret about it,

“Stop worrying. They’re not coming to hear you. They want to hear the story, light a
candle, sing Silent Night and go home.”

And every year I consider not preparing and preaching a sermon and every year decide I
can’t do that either. I'm much too Presbyterian to worship without the preaching of the
word, and besides, there are all those folk out there, some maybe for the first time, or
maybe the only time ever—the ones my friend Barrie Shepherd, at the First Presbyterian
Church of New York City tells every Christmas Eve—“By the way, we do this every
Sunday at 11:00.”

But I do understand how music tells the story with more depth and power and clarity than
words alone ever could. And I do get out a few favorite poems, Dickens’ Christmas Carol,
Truman Capote’s, A Christmas Memory, Why the Chimes Rang—my favorite from
childhood—and W. H. Auden’s For the Time Being, A Christmas Oratorio.

At the end of the long drama, Auden concludes:

“Well, so that is that. Now we must
dismantle the tree,
Putting the decorations back into their
cardboard boxes.
The holly and mistletoe must be taken down
and burnt,
....There are enough
Leftovers to do, warmed up, for the rest of the week.
Not that we have much appetite, having
drunk such a lot,
Stayed up so late, attempted—quite unsuccessfully—
To love all our relatives, and in general
Grossly overestimated our powers.”

We do place a lot of demands on ourselves at Christmas time, don’t we? Cookies to bake,
special goodies which simply must be reproduced in the very same way year after year,
and cards to address from a list that grows every year and never gets any smaller, gifts to
purchase, wrap, deliver, parties to attend, dinners to prepare, trees to purchase and
decorate, and journeys to take, to be with loved ones.

I’m sure most of you heard or read—or received by e-mail, this year’s favorite story about
those first Christmas journeyers—the Three Wise Men. The assumption is that the wise
men botched the job—because they were three wise men and not women. Had the Magi
been women, they would have:

asked for directions
arrived on time
cleaned the stable
helped deliver the baby
brought a casserole
given practical gifts

We subject ourselves to high expectations and an enormous amount of stress to get to this
evening in one piece and sometimes something gets lost in the process: something of the
simplicity and goodness and unmistakable clarity of the event we celebrate tonight.

When we were very young parents we decided that in our home we would remember what
the event was really about. We would focus on the story of Jesus’ birth and not the
cultural icon which Santa Claus has become. No “You better be good, you better watch
out, you better not cry, you better not pout,” in our house. No reward punishment
dynamic, no pagan mythology. The real story would be quite enough.

We also decided that there would be no toy guns in our house.

We lost both battles—quickly and decisively. In the absence of real tey guns, they (and
even though it was not politically correct, I have to say it was the boys) simply turned
other objects into weapons of mass destruction. Hair brushes became pistols; rulers
became rifles, spatulas and wooden spoons became machine guns. It was a running shoot
out in the living room between a 6 and 4 year old armed with a spatula and wooden spoon
that did it. I surrendered. I made them turn in their weapons, took them to the basement,
and with a jig saw someone had given me, made them very simple, but proper rifles, so
that the battle could resume. Just a week ago, I was sitting with my three year old
grandson and we were eating reindeer cookies with wonderful white icing and red
noses—an annual gift from Ruthie, the Director of the Day School. So we were enjoying
our reindeer cookies when he took a bite, examined the cookie carefully, wrapped his
little fingers around the legs, pointed the antlers and said, “Bang, Bang,”—a reindeer
cookie pistol. It’s no wonder we lost!

We had no more luck with a Santa free Christmas. We really weren’t committed to it
anyhow, and it didn’t take long for our children to teach us that there is a lot to be said for
wonder and myth and imagination, that the line between what is real and what is unreal

truth, particularly if it is good and important truth. Finally, their immersion in the
notion, in spite of our ignoring it, taught us to reexamine and rediscover the original idea
of a saint who brings gifts for no other reason than he likes to give gifts. Our children
taught us that there is some serious theology there.

And so I was delighted this year to discover something G.K. Chesterton wrote about Santa
Claus. It’s in a collection, Spiritual Literacy—Reading the Sacred in Everyday Life
(Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, p. 267, see Daybook, Fall 1999)

“What has happened to me has been the very reverse of what appears to be the
experiences of most of my friends. Instead of dwindling to a point, Santa Claus has
grown larger and larger in my life. It happened in this way. As a child I was faced
with a phenomenon requiring explanation. I hung up at the end of my bed an
empty stocking, which in the morning became a full stocking. I had done nothing
to produce those things that filled it. I had not worked for them, or made them or
helped to make them. And the explanation was that a certain being people called
Santa Claus was favorably disposed toward me. What we believed was that a
certain benevolent agency did give us those toys for nothing. And, as I say, I
believe it still. I have merely extended the idea. Then I only wondered who put the
toys in the stocking. Now I wonder who put the stocking by the bed, and the bed in
the room and the room in the house, and the house on this planet, and the great
planet in the void.”

Chesterton went on to say that once he was grateful for a few dolls and crackers, but later
he was grateful for stars and street faces and wine and the great sea. Once he was grateful
for a gift too big to fit into a stocking. Later, he was grateful for “a present so big it takes
two stockings to hold it, and then leaves a great deal outside: it is the large and
preposterous present of myself.”

Christmas is about gifts we do not earn or work for or deserve. Christmas is about the
amazing grace of God—to give us this gift of ourselves, our lives, the time of our lives we
have already been privileged to live and the time we have left to live, whatever that is.
Christmas is about a God who wants us to know that we are loved, that our lives are
intended, that apart from anything we have done or not done, the creator wishes us well.
Christmas is about a God who came among us in the birth of an infant in Bethlehem te let
us know how profoundly we are loved.

And Christmas is about a God who wants all of us to be changed by that love, changed into
grateful children who suddenly find that they must love, must live in the love of God, by
loving and caring for one another.

Dan Doty, who works for a church in Rock Island, wrote an article recently about driving
an 11 year old boy to a penitentiary in a neighboring state, to see his older sister,
convicted of a violent crime, not eligible for parole until she is 58. Charles lives with his
grandmother—his mother lives in the same city and only agrees to see him occasionally.

All the way home in the car, Charles was sullen, didn’t say a word. At the outskirts of the
city, he suddenly asked Dan, “Would you take me to my Mom’s house?”

Mostly when he calls and asks to see her she has some excuse for not taking him for the
weekend. The visit with his sister had obviously stirred up longing for his mother. “If
you'll just take me, she’ll have to see me,” he explained.

Dan reflects:

“The lad’s hostile demeanor, the quiet, lonely suffering that had been so apparent
throughout our trip—was the aftermath of repeated rejection by one of the central figures
in his life. For Christmas, the eleven year old with me that day didn’t want money or the
latest fad in clothing or the newest high-tech game. He longed for his mom.”

Dan concludes:

“The best Christmas gift you can give your child—or anyone else for that matter, I might

add—your spouse, your dearly beloved, your parent, your brother or sister, your friends,
the best gift of all is the gift of yourself.

May God’s love for you, given in the birth of the baby in Bethlehem, stir up in you the
capacity—the willingness—the need—to love as you have been loved.

It is the best gift of all.
And so, W.H. Auden has the shepherds say:

“Let us run to learn
How to love and to run
Let us run to love.

All, All, All,

Run to Bethlehem.

Amen