Memorial Church of the Good Shepherd
Wednesday, September 08, 2010
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THE TWO WORLDS OF CHRISTMAS Each Christmas Eve, by gathering to hear and celebrate the birth of Jesus, we affirm the heart of our dreams for ourselves and our worlds—and the sure and certain hope that these dreams can be transformed—and transform us—into new life. I say our worlds, plural: there is the world outside ourselves—the world of wealth and poverty, peace and war, the world of astonishing natural beauty and horrific natural calamities. It is the world of Caesar Augustus and of Herod and all the kings and empires since, including our own democratic empire.
And there is the strongly self-created world of our inner lives, where we meet the world and shape our perception of it to our needs and purposes, the world of happiness and misery, love and isolation, gratitude and resentment, abundance and greed. It is the world of our needs and our will.
The Christmas story speaks to both worlds. We welcome and embrace the message to our personal world, but we sometimes resist and diminish what Luke says about the world of events, the world of history—the world that he pointedly invokes, after all, in the opening words of perhaps the most famous story in the world: “In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered.”
The political intent of the story of Jesus’ birth is hard to miss, but we manage. One of the main reasons we miss it, or make less of it, is that we have come—reflexively, automatically—to receive and deflect that story in the spirit of those who have plenty, of those who are in control, because in the history of the church they have been the ones to tell the story, in their own voices, from their own point of view.
Those who are much more often on the receiving end of life’s injustices, whether at the hand of royalty or ruling classes or those who now operate the levers of power in the great democracies, do tell their stories, but they are often cast by the dominant culture as discordant background music, and given labels such as “liberation theology” or “social activism.” But giving voice to the dispossessed is what Mary does in the Magnificat, and what the birth of Jesus in the stable, with shepherds in attendance raises high before our reluctant eyes, before the flight into Egypt and the slaughter of the innocents.
Jesus’ birth holds up before us the democratizing of compassion and human worth—truths that Jesus and the gospel writers will affirm again and again in their four stories of Jesus’ life and ministry. This proclamation of the worth—the divine presence, the divine spark—in every single life that comes into the world—this proclamation preaches the two great themes of Christmas: the social and the personal.
The social story of New Testament, which begins on Christmas morning, is the drama of making the lowest of humans in the social and economic scale the absolute equal of the highest.
But for most of us, the world of personal transformation beckons on Christmas Eve. The coming of the Christ child promises new life within each of us. It is there for us—it is here for us, now, this evening, in this place, with this music. We act out the certainty that we can be made new by telling and singing the story of the world made new. “Do not be afraid,” the angel says to the terrified shepherds. And we too are terrified of good news, although our fear may be the quiet, resisting kind. We could enjoy hearing the joyous news of the wild possibility of peace on earth, good will toward everyone, if only Jesus didn’t keep asking us to do something about it. There are those two worlds again: the inner world in which we are changed, and the social world that Christ calls us to remake in his image.
On Christmas Eve, though, we celebrate the beauty and power of the possibilities. We gather strength once again to see clearly how it might be for you and me and Jesus of Nazareth. Here is one of our best poet’s take on the same subject. Please listen for the strains of the two worlds moving through Richard Wilbur’s words.
The poem is called “A Christmas Hymn,” and it begins with this epigraph from the nineteenth chapter of Luke, when his disciples and followers are shouting and crying out with joy when he enters Jerusalem: “And some of the Pharisees from among the multitude said unto him, Master, rebuke thy disciples. And he answered and said unto them, I tell you that, if these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out.”
A Christmas Hymn
A stable-lamp is lighted
Whose glow shall wake the sky;
The stars shall bend their voices,
And every stone shall cry.
And every stone shall cry,
And straw like gold shall shine;
A barn shall harbor heaven,
A stall become a shrine.
This child through David’s city
Shall ride in triumph by;
The palm shall strew its branches,
And every stone shall cry.
And every stone shall cry,
Though heavy, dull, and dumb,
And lie within the roadway
To pave His kingdom come.
Yet He shall be forsaken,
And yielded up to die;
The sky shall groan and darken,
And every stone shall cry.
And every stone shall cry
For stony hearts of men:
God’s blood upon the spearhead,
God’s love refused again.
But now, as at the ending,
The low is lifted high;
The stars shall bend their voices,
And every stone shall cry.
And every stone shall cry
In praises of the child
By whose descent among us
The worlds are reconciled.
-- Richard Wilbur
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