Christmas Eve A, 2007
Luke 2:1-14
A DEFIANT CHRISTMAS IN A TIME OF...
This Christmas, as with every Christmas,
we are invited to hear again an age-old story
in new and creative ways.
That’s what makes preaching on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day
so challenging for ministers.
Because most of us have heard the story so often
it is almost impossible to experience any surprising novelty.
So it was with an amount of delight when I discovered
a few years back, Australian William Loader’s reflection:
“Christmas in a time of fiscal restraint”.
It has a somewhat ‘bureaucratic’ ring to it!
But as we are in Canberra - Australia's National Capital - perhaps you too
will be able to resonate with both its
humour and its indirect suggestiveness.
‘When Quirinius was governor of Syria, the administration of the empire was facing fiscal restraint
and urgent need for a strategic review of resources.
‘However the planned census failed to pass the committee stages of the senate
with the result that the census was confined to Judea in Palestine.
‘This would benefit the government by leading to the laying off of 85,000 staff,
many of whom would starve to death, leading, in turn, to significant savings in welfare payments.
‘The federal bureau of resource economics had proved beyond doubt that people who were either dead
or too infirm to make the trip to the sources of relief produced a negative impact on demand
resulting in the likelihood of an improved surplus...’ (Wm Loader Web site).
Any resemblance to well known government agencies is only accidental!
In similar creative vein is the imaginative suggestion by Jack Shea,
an American, priest, theologian and excellent storyteller.
Seven years ago in a radio talk, he said that if he was really game he would like to send out Christmas cards
which had, on the cover, three images.
A star brightly shining but surrounded by darkness.
An evergreen tree but surrounded by trees without leaves.
A child wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger, but surrounded by a ramshackle stable.
“(And) when you open the card, inside there will be in very bold print, ‘Have a defiant Christmas!’” (Shea 2000/30 Good Minutes Web site).
So let me stay with Jack’s christmas card for a few minutes
and briefly explore his suggested images.
1. A light shining, but shining in the darkness.
“Christmas isn't about light,” Jack reflected, “(i)t's about light in the darkness... There is a defiance to the light. It lives in the darkness but the darkness cannot overcome it” (Shea 2000/Web site).
2. An evergreen tree surrounded by trees without leaves.
Remembering Jack lives in the northern hemisphere, he says:
“In the seeming dead of winter when all the other trees lose their leaves, the evergreens stay green and stay awake. The evergreens are defiant. They defy the defoliage of winter. They live and they give us a sense of life” (Shea/Web site).
3. A child wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger.
Being wrapped in swaddling clothes means the child is loved.
The child is not abandoned, but taken care of.
But it happens in a place where there is no room for them at the inn.
Where there is no hospitality.
In the midst of a sense of belovedness,
there is also a sense of defiance.
Three images.
The light shines but it defies the darkness as it shines.
The bush is green, but it defies the loss of leaves in winters.
The child is beloved but it defies a sense of rejection and inhospitality.
Jack concluded his radio talk:
“But I suppose we really don't want a card like that. We want a card that is all light or all greenness or all love, but I do not think it is always the condition we are in when we celebrate Christmas” (Shea 2000/Web site).
Following the program the producer spoke with Jack and asked him
a series of questions based on his presentation.
He went on to explain:
“People would often [say]… Christmas is about hope. But then as soon as you say [that], and you look at your own life or the larger world and all the things that beset us, you wonder. Do you just look and do an estimate of situations and say, ‘Well, I can have a little hope but not a lot of hope?’ Or does hope come from a different dimension of us? So I began to ponder the Christmas story as a story of hope because it could defy the negative circumstances that afflict us individually and socially, too, and it proclaimed hope that way. So I took the path of hope to be a path of defiance of negative circumstances” (Shea 2000/web site).
Gee, that makes sense to me!
oo0oo
Tonight, you are I gather here, aware of our own lives
and aware of events in the larger world,
as much as we can experience it.
We don’t forget all we’ve seen on TV, or heard on radio,
or read in the newspapers, or personally experienced
over the past 12 months or so.
So how can we celebrate?
It seems to me Christmas eve is a challenge to celebrate the birth
of healing and new possibilities, defiantly!
“The season asks us to get inside of our experience” suggests Tari Lennon, “not just talk about it or interpret it - which alters it, but simply be inside our experience.
“To be inside our experience is to understand that merely repeating the stories of our spiritual ancestors, or rehearsing rituals in their honor, or clinging to our own traditions, how ever precious they might be, is not the same as living our experience. For me, this year, my living experience will be enlarged by two friends who are pressing through the bleak mid-winter of dire news [about cancer] to light advent candles trusting that their vulnerabilities and God’s meet in the birth of the infant Jesus” (Tari Lennon/P&F web site).
Merry Christmas.
Be blessed.
Be courageous.
And defiant!