Christmas Eve 2005
Text: Matthew 2: 1-10
A funny thing about Christmas–there isn’t a holiday like it for looking back through memory’s lens. The pictures on our cards and in our minds fetch up scenes from England or Germany in the nineteenth century, or even earlier. Television’s Christmas stories are often set back in the years of the Great Depression out on a mid-western farm. A Child’s Christmas in Wales caught the scents and sounds of a poet’s kindling memory of a world opened to him in youth. You too, no doubt, have some brilliant memories of your own childhood Christmases. Our carols are from olden days; who dares to write a new one?
Sadness grabs at not a few hearts in this season, too; the talons of its clutching are memories that the heart is holding. The other day, I was talking with a mother whose celebrations and gifts for the children this year are sparse, because the family’s affairs have taken a turn. She was distraught. Her account of what should be had been bound on her memory, year by year, like those thousands of threads with which the Lilliputians bound Gulliver while he slept. For memory and lack of presents, this parent could hardly move and rise with the Spirit of Christmas Presence.
As familiar and as normal as the happy-sad holiday memories are, there is a peculiar irony in them, for Christmas–what it’s really about–has no room in its inn for looking back. In these stories of shepherds and angels, of wise men and their stars, of parents expecting, no one is looking back. Not one. Their eyes are full of light and movement yet unseen. Their ears hearken to sounds so unheard-of they say it was angels speaking. Their hearts and hopes are fixed on a future utterly new, utterly unknown. This is the centerpiece . . . at the nostalgia-feast we call Christmas.
Well, there is one character in the stories who feared what was coming: King Herod, with his minions. He is certainly looking back–looking back over his shoulder to check rivals; asking his lawyers to look back over the records and report back what has been written of this threatening new king of the Jews; looking at the backs of the magi as they follow their star, he, afraid to follow lest the future swallow up all he holds dear; and later, spies like eyes on the back of his head go looking all through the land for the baby, not to worship, but to destroy. Herod is terrified of a future formed free of the last of the past. Are we? Are you?
Of course we are. Herod is you. Herod is me. We know what it is to maneuver secretly to keep everything the same; “safe and secure” we call it. We know what it is to put up resistance to a new way of doing things at work; to hold back some information from those closest to us, when we don’t know how they’ll react; to put secret taps on the phones of fellow citizens without telling anyone, to keep control as we see fit. Herod is in all of us. That’s why these stories are true even though they never happened. The ancient generations would not have bothered to tell them to their children if they didn’t go this deep. When we must have things the way they were, Herod is a good name for the shadow that blocks the Son. But in this darkness, a star’s light can be seen at last.
I was listening to a Christmas story on the radio yesterday. The recording was from 1974, a tale written and read by the late radio broadcaster John Henry Faulk. National Public Radio reports that this is one of its listeners’ all-time favorite stories. To me, it was new. The narrator describes himself driving a back road on the day after Christmas when he picks up a shoeless, twelve year-old boy, with bright blue eyes, carrying an orange. In his winsome Texan accents, Faulk opens this boy to the listener: “I’m a-goin’ down the road ’bout 2 miles to my cousin’s–I wanna show him my orange old Santa Claus brought me.”
Texts on Hearing these ideas, there flashed through my thoughts–my stuff, nothing special–a regret to have another Christmas story set in southern places, set for looking backward to a golden age of love. I thought, Another white man’s story for white people, set in a time, when anyone with eyes for Christ would have wept for the evil and injustice that bore down on this nation’s black people. Looking back, you see, is a kind of game we play, filtering out what does not fit the story we want to hold on to, or the power we want to keep. I wasn’t interested in this kind of story, but Faulk’s voice was a treasure, irresistible. The narrator continued:
“I wasn’t going to mention Christmas to him because I figured he came from a family — the kind that don’t — have Christmas . . . But he brought it up himself. He said, ‘Did old Santa Claus come to see you, Mister?’ And I said, ‘Yes. We had a real nice Christmas at our house, I hope you had the same.'” I kept listening. Faulk paints the scene of American poverty with the detail of a Dutch master. Deft and spare, not a word misses to portray the pathos of humanity living in harsh, rude lack, yet with fortitude. The boy recounts how “Mister, we had the wonderfulest Christmas in the United States down to our place. Lordy, it was the first one we ever had there.” And how a lady had come out from town some days before Christmas to say that all the families in the area were invited to bring a wagon into town, for Santa Claus had been through and left good things for the families.
A little voice in me kept up its low murmur about the tragic tale of race and division not being told here, but I kept listening. Skeptical of the lady’s news, the father hitches up his mule and wagon, and heads out. He comes back grinning with goods galore, crying “Merry Christmas!” The story’s twelve-year old boy, telling of this joy, is almost laughing through every sentence. Then comes what the poets call “swerve.” The thing I didn’t expect.
“And all of a sudden, we heared papa call out, ‘Merry Christmas to you, Sam Jackson.’ And we stopped and looked. And here comes Sam Jackson a-leading that old cripple-legged mule of his up the lane. And papa said, ‘Sam Jackson, did you get in town to get some Christmas this year?’ Sam Jackson, you know, he sharecrops over there across the creek from our place. And he shook his head and said, ‘Well, no, sir, Mister. Well, I didn’t go in town. I heared about that, but I didn’t know it was for colored folks, too. I thought it was just for you white families.’ All of a sudden, none of us children were saying nothing. Papa, he looked down at mama and mama looked up at him and they didn’t say nothing, like they don’t a heap of times, but they know what the other one’s a-thinking. They’re like that, you know. And all of a sudden, papa, he broke out in a big grin again. He said, ‘Dad-blame-it, Sam Jackson, it’s a sure good thing you come by here. Lord have mercy, I liked to forgot; old Santa Claus would have me in court if he heared about this. The last thing he asked me, if I lived out here near you, said he hadn’t seen you around and said he wanted me to bring part of this out here to you and your family, your woman and your children.'”
That was the thing I didn’t expect. The wonderful end of this wonderful tale, how Christmas is shared by two large families who hardly know each other, you can hear or read for yourself.(1) But right now, you can imagine that as I listened yesterday, my eyes were brimming with tears. For of course, I had walked into a sort of trap of authentic virtue and sentiment. For of course, there’s a reason that this story had gained such favor among the listeners of public radio. It is because it tells in the manner of a parable how just a few decades ago, America itself stopped looking back over its shoulder like Herod, or like any greedy owner of a cart full of goods, and began to open its table. In this one sense, at least, a nation began to wake up from its nightmare of black-and-white, separate and unequal, its evil of long memory, and began to look forward to something still unseen, still new. As a nation, we are still children wiping sand from our eyes at this business of making peace with those who were far off. But sometimes children, like the boy in John Henry Faulk’s story, if they are taught humanely and are not afraid, can feel the joy of oneness as Christmas plenty. Sometimes we can respond to the unknown as pure gift.
The birth of Jesus Christ, the son of God, is a story misleading and mistold every time it is told as only something wonderful that happened long ago. The birth of Jesus Christ is only true when it is the story of our waking up from a deep sleep into the present, ready to listen to an angel in the dark and follow into a future unwritten. In our lifetimes, millions of Americans have been touched by the angel pretty square, shaken pretty hard on the shoulder, to see Christ born anew in something like fellow-feeling for people they and their parents had hated, condemned, and feared. It’s only just begun, and we’re finding it hard to stay awake. It is always easier to go to war against some strange enemy, for Herod is always on the prowl, teaching secrecy and terror, looking backward at the old ways, calling them the good days, rocking us to sleep with lies and candy.
But though Herod is there, you are wise, too–wise women, wise men, wise children of God. You have seen the light that is coming into the world. You have experienced the awesome movement of a people toward justice and peace, just decades ago. You have opened your own treasures in honor of God’s son, the Living One. And now you are warned in a dream not to return to Herod. You will go to your own country by a different road. This is how you tell the Christmas story is true: when, seeing the fear in yourself, but feeding it not, no looking back, you welcome the future of God now, this very night. Christ is born. Merry Christmas.
1. Audio and text on the web: www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5028755
delivered at Central Presbyterian Church, Buffalo, New York
©Stephen H. Phelps, December 2005
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